Dangerous Talk Blog

2009-02-16T16:35:00.000-08:00

The Problem with William Norman Grigg

By writing "the problem with William Norman Grigg," I'm really talking about the problem with the American voting public. Because there's absolutely nothing wrong with my friend Will Grigg.

He's got a problem, though. You can read his phenomenal blog Pro Libertate and get the wrong idea if you don't understand the world and the way he goes about describing the problems in it.

Will Grigg's problem can be likened to an old high school gym class where everyone in the class is ordered by the phys-ed teacher to make three laps around the school track. After the second lap, the fastest runners are approaching the slowest, overweight runners (the latter was me in junior high, but not by high school).

A person just taking a first look at the track might mistake those fast athletes as being behind the fat, slow runners, and maybe even running slower.

That fast runner is Will Grigg. His blog is so far ahead of other blogs he sometimes looks like he's behind the times, or perhaps not even aware of the times.

What I mean by that is that he's writing about issues right now such as a possible draft, Republican fascism, and the increasing militarization and federalization of police. And most people have no idea what they have to do with their lives right now.

Most people are instead interested in reading about the current economic crisis, and how much worse it's going to get. That's what is impacting their lives right now.

But that's not the way Will Grigg's blog works. He was writing about the housing bubble back in 2004 (and his book America's Engineered Decline covered this subject back in 2004). And he called the shots right five years before anyone else did. In truth, he'd be the fast kid on the track that had already lapped the slow runners a couple of times.

So why, he reasons, should he cover this material again? After all, if the reader wasn't paying attention when they could have acted to prevent this calamity, what reason would he have to repeat what he had written five years earlier?

Right now, he's writing about other preventable calamities. Maybe we should all listen now, even if he's writing about subjects nobody else is concerned about.

2009-02-03T15:09:00.001-08:00

My Economic Predictions for 2009

With the economy in a spiral downward, here are a few of my predictions about what the financial picture will be like on February 1, 2010. That's about a year from this post.

Here are the basic economic indicators I predict for February 2009:

Unemployment: 11 percent or more
Budget deficit estimate for fiscal 2010: $1.5 trillion (less than 2009)
Inflation: 5 percent
Interest rates: Rising quickly
GDP growth: -2 percent or more (most of it in the first half of year)

Here's the Cliff's Notes' version of what's going to happen over the next year:

President Obama and his compliant Congress will skate along until about September/October with a "spend and deficit our way to prosperity" philosophy as the economy continues to spiral downward. It will actually prevent a recovery. The deficit for 2009 will top out at $1.8 trillion or so when all the final numbers are tabulated. The Federal Reserve will continue to keep the discount interest rates artificially low, but it won't stop the recession because the deficit will suck all of the financing out of the economy.

Unemployment will rise quickly the first half of the year and then trickle upward for the rest of the year. That'll be all the "recovery" we see, because we already prevented a recovery with deficit spending.

Just as the leaves start to fall next autumn, so will the international credit markets on the U.S. dollar. The Chinese will decide they've had enough of our bad debt. The Japanese will publicly step forward and declare they'll fill in the gap, but that'll only last a couple of weeks. Definitely not more than a month. Then, at about Thanksgiving (but after the elections) we'll have a financial meltdown and Congress will start to talk seriously about cutting spending. But only because there's no one is left to borrow from, and only after they rumble about increasing taxes. (But because it's an election year, it'll only be a rumbling rather than a serious attempt to raise taxes.)

By February next year the panic will be over and we'll have hit bottom. The economy's going to really suck. Some of the big spenders will have been thrown out in the November elections, though not enough of them. Nevertheless, we'll see some real budget cuts being made, including entitlement cuts.

And genuine growth, however small and gradual, will begin again.

... or I could just be all wrong.

2009-01-20T16:45:00.000-08:00

Unchanged, I'm now a "right-wing extremist"

Yeah, I used to be called a "middle-of-the-roader" or a "moderate" because I criticized the excesses of the Bush Administration. No longer.

Now, I'll be criticizing Obama. So people will see more of a Rambo than a hippie in me.

So what? It's not like I ever cared what people think.

2008-12-27T04:19:00.000-08:00

Blagojevich and the Real Corruption

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is in trouble for trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat for cash or a lucrative, high paying job. And people are aghast at the corruption of the Illinois governor.

Okay, it's corrupt.

But that's small potatoes. It's only a million or two million bucks.

The real corruption is manifested in the hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars. The real bribery is in the $750 billion Wall Street bailout and the trillions spent on welfare and other government handouts. They are bribing us for our votes ... with our own money!

Or a portion of it, anyway.

They've got to keep a portion of it for themselves and their friends in Washington.

Rod Blagojevich's real crime, according to the other politicians, was thinking too small.

A little note on the side: I was asked at a Christmas Party who I voted for President, and I said that in Massachusetts there was no hope of swaying the electoral votes away from the Democrat, so I voted for someone I liked. I wrote in Ron Paul. But then I was asked, "But didn't you find McCain a little more palatable than Obama?" My reply: "That's a bit like sifting through a sewer and asking if one turd is a bit more palatable than another."

2008-11-22T16:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm Hooked on Facebook

I delayed for what seemed like decades to get one of those social networking sites, and last month I finally broke down and got a facebook and myspace account. I never really did anything with myspace, but at facebook I was barraged right away with friend requests.

And these weren't friend requests from creepy stalkers or serial killer-types, but rather from prominent college professors and writers that I know of (but don't actually know). I still don't know how they keep finding me, but I keep wondering why they bother to associate with little ol' me. I almost feel that I don't deserve to be included in such company.

... almost!

2008-10-08T14:24:00.001-07:00

How Bad is the Economy?

It sounds like a joke, but I sold seven one dollar bills on eBay for $15.50 earlier this week.

As Dave Barry would say, I'm not kidding.

Even our paper money is now inflated. True, these one dollar bills did say "Silver Certificate" on them, but the silver backing guarantee had long since been dishonored by our inflationary government.

It says something when the mere memory of silver backing for our currency raises its value. And it doesn't say something good.

2008-09-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

The Financial Crisis in a Nutshell

Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's a synopsis of the financial crisis before us:

1. The crisis was created from the Federal Reserve Bank inflating the currency by loaning too much money on easy terms, so the solution proposed by the Bush Administration is to inflate the currency further by loaning more money on easy terms.

2. Government caused the problem, so the only solution is to give government more power.

3. The particular people who are the only solution to the crisis are the same government officials who made it come about in the first place.

3. The bailout is not just for rich Wall Street speculators, but for Main Street investors with their 401Ks, IRAs and pensions. These people simply cannot bail themselves out because they don't have the money. But the tax burden for the $700 billion plus bailout will not fall on the tips of waitresses and cab drivers, even though these are the only other people in the country with an income to tax.

4. If we don't follow the Bush Administration's exact proposal, there will be a greater financial crisis than the Great Depression. We must believe this because the Bush Administration said it, even though just a couple of weeks ago the same Bush people were repeatedly assuring us the economy was on solid ground.

This, it seems, is a plan designed to work!

2008-08-07T17:44:00.000-07:00

Judge for Yourself!

Judge William G. Young has issued a 43-page court Memorandum condemning me as a “rogue.” Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care about such name-calling. But there are a number of factual falsehoods in his little memo about me, and I want to set the set the record straight here:

Falsehood #1:“The Court …[asked jurors] … 1) whether he or she believed he or she could faithfully apply the law as instructed to the facts of the case; and 2) whether he or she could begin their deliberations afresh if a juror had to be removed and replaced by an alternate…. All the jurors, save Juror No. 2, answered both questions in the affirmative.”

False. I answered both questions in the affirmative. Only after answering both of his questions in the affirmative did I volunteer that I was the one about whom all the fuss was being made. Earlier in the Memorandum, the judge reports that I “immediately informed the Court that he was the juror who had asked the first juror question and who was the subject of the second and third questions.” That’s not quite true, because I answered both questions in the affirmative before volunteering the latter information. The court transcript, which to this date I haven’t seen, should bear my side out.

Falsehood #2:“Juror No. 2 [Tom Eddlem]'s express representation that he would not follow the law as instructed constituted good cause for removal.”

False. I never said I wouldn’t follow the law. To the contrary, I repeatedly stated that I was bound by my oath to judge the “according to the facts and the law as the judge presents.” Some people might argue that I was defying the judge in this case, but a careful examination of the oath would reveal that the oath requires me to follow the law. The oath presumes that there is some real, tangible and independent thing called the law that exists independent of what the judge may or may not say. I’ve detailed this for an upcoming column on LewRockwell.com here. In fact, in this case the judge did a fair job explaining the law. Only when he began making political arguments – as opposed to legal ones – did I resist.

Falsehoods #3 and #4:“The Court spent several minutes attempting to explain how Congress had the authority to ban drug possession but continued to receive evasive responses.”

False, and again false.

First, the judge made no attempt to explain that Congress had the legal authority to legislate on drug possession, other than a mere statement that it was included under the commerce clause. In effect, it was a “because I said so” statement. If my understanding of the commerce clause of the Constitution was mistaken, then the judge never expended any effort whatsoever to convince me that I was mistaken. The only genuine effort he made was to try to make me swear an oath to ignore the clear wording of the Constitution. Specifically, the oath I was required to swear (and was removed from the jury for refusing to swear), was: “Would you be able to set aside your own reading of the Constitution, the judge’s past instructions and judge the facts based solely upon the judge’s explanation of the law?”

If he was of a mind to, and there was legal evidence I was wrong, he could easily have convinced me that my reading of the “commerce” clause of the U.S. Constitution was wrong. He could have simply picked up a dictionary – any dictionary – and shown me that my understanding of the word “among” in the commerce clause was mistaken and that “among” really is a synonym for “within.” Or, he could made an historical argument by quoting James Madison or one of the authors of the Constitution to the effect that they intended to regulate commerce within, rather than merely commerce crossing a state line. I would have given him the benefit of any doubt, but the judge did not take the trouble to do any of these things. Therefore, I suspect he didn’t make the legal argument because there was no legal argument to be made.

Secondly, I never offered even a single evasive response. This is a blatantly untrue and provocative charge, and anyone who reads the court transcript will instantly detect Young’s statement as nothing more than rubbish.

I voluntarily answered every question fully. I even offered more explanation than he wanted, and it’s worth noting that just a few paragraphs earlier Judge Young said I had “pontificated” during the voir dire.

Even if I had indeed been “evasive” (and again, I was NOT), it would have been intellectually sloppy for Young not at least have documented such an extraordinary charge against a juror in his memorandum. Clearly, the fact that he didn't document such a charge is evidence that there's nothing to document and the statement is nothing more than a baseless smear.

Falsehood #5: “Juror No. 2's nullification effort strikes at the heart of the delicate division of labor between judge and jury that has been critical to their survival.”

False. I engaged in no nullification actions. I stuck to the law. Again, if my understanding of the commerce clause of the Constitution was mistaken, then the judge never expended any effort whatsoever to convince me that I was mistaken.

The only argument he made was to try to make me swear an oath to ignore the clear wording of the Constitution. And explicitly making jurors swear oaths to ignore the Constitution is something that clearly "strikes at the heart" of our legal system.

2008-07-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Massachusetts, the Pedophiles' Paradise

The news in this morning's newspaper has created a progressively rising rage inside me.

The story, in today's Taunton Gazette, reports that a four-year-old child going to the bathroom in a supermarket bathroom in a neighboring town was molested by a 71-year-old employee. That's not what's got me mad, though I suppose it should be enough.

The story goes on: Seeing the employee's hand rising higher and higher on his child's leg, the father stepped in, broke into the employee's stall, and punched him out.

Hooray for the father, right? Wrong, if you are the Raynham, Mass. police department. They charged the father with a crime, and didn't even arrest the pedophile (like the father, he was given a "summons" to court so that he wouldn't have to be arrested).

In sum, here's what happened in my neighboring town:

A child was molested
The child molester was set free to molest others
The father who stopped the molestation is being charged with a crime.

Welcome to Massachusetts, the Pedophile's Paradise, where no good deed goes unpunished.

Ordinarily, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a different way of dealing with pedophiles. Cops arrest the criminals, give them a bed in the county lockup for the night and a breakfast in the morning before the court hearing. Then the judges set them free.

That's what happened with former Taunton, Mass. police officer David W. Smith, who confessed in 2005 to raping his nine-year-old nightly for a year. He was arrested, spent a few months in prison awaiting trial, and then was set free in a plea bargain that gave him no prison time, protected his pension and guaranteed he'll never have to register as a sex offender.

I've long been an advocate for the police by noting that it's not the police's fault they can't do anything but serve as an overnight stay for pedophiles in Massachusetts. It's the corrupt combination of judges and prosecutors that have caused the Pedophiles' Paradise, helped in part by the idiotic rantings of state representatives like James Fagan (D-Taunton).

But the Raynham Police Department in this case didn't even make the pedophile go through the inconvenience of spending a night in jail. Now, I recognize that it's possible that this "alleged" molester is innocent and that I'm interpreting this story wrong because the Taunton Gazette got their facts wrong. I've been a newspaper reporter, and I've reported on events where two other reporters from two other papers were reporting on the same event as me. Often it looked like we had attended three separate meetings. But there's no way the police would charge this guy with a crime if they thought he was innocent. So there's no excuse for setting him free to prey on other children ... even if it is for a single night.

And then they charged the only one in this case did something to stop the pedophile, a parent who was doing nothing more than protecting his kid. That was also inexcusable.

But it's just another step toward what passes for "progress" in Massachusetts. Massachusetts doesn't punish molesters; it punishes people who stop molesters.

It makes me long for vigilantes to rise up. It makes me hate what passes for "law" here. It even makes me sympathize with violent revolutionaries, something I've never done in my life.

But we don't need vengeance in Massachusetts.

We need something far more radical.

We need a day of reckoning.

2008-03-24T03:29:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Jury “Nullification”

I’ve gotten a great response to my article on LewRockwell.com about my jury service, where I discovered that Joe Sobran was right in saying that “The U.S. Constitution is no threat to our current system of government.” A number of people (a minority) responding were drug legalization activists who are pushing the “jury nullification” theory that jurors should just vote “not guilty” against laws they don’t like.

I don’t agree with that philosophy, though I admit that is a power the jury possesses. There’s really nothing to stop a juror who would – as a couple writers advised me – “just shut your mouth and vote not guilty.” Who’d know? Nobody would know.

I just don’t think it’s an appropriate strategy under an elected government. I volunteered to the judge under interrogation that I was familiar with this philosophy and that I disagreed with it. My disagreement is one of tactics, not one of basic principles, however. If this were a tyranny, then it would be a different story.

On my jury service, I upheld the law, in this case the U.S. Constitution. I didn’t try to cancel out any laws. I believe bad laws ought to be rigorously enforced, because that’s the best case that can be made for their repeal. I told several people who had written me that if it had been a state case, I’d have voted to convict the defendant. Likewise, if the defendant had moved – or orchestrated the move – of the drugs across state lines I’d have voted to convict. I would have voted to convict even though I think drug laws are a waste of time.

There’s a real risk in this jury nullification philosophy. If juries were to regularly discard laws they didn’t like, they could just as easily get in the habit of finding people guilty of laws that didn’t exist. They could find unpopular defendants and declare them guilty of crimes on flimsy evidence just because they didn’t like something else about them: their skin color, religion, or even the way they part their hair. Jury nullification is not a strategy I’d embrace lightly.

There’s really no need to go out and cancel bad laws if we want to disrupt the emerging federal police state. All we need to do is ensure that a couple of jurors on each jury will support the law that already in force, the U.S. Constitution, and that will bring down the system. It won’t accomplish the legalization of drugs, but that should be pretty low down on peoples’ priority list. (It is on mine.) But using the razor of the Constitution against federal prosecutions will shred the pompous, overgrown federal police state. Once that happens, then the U.S. Constitution will really be a threat to our current system of government!

2008-01-26T21:12:00.000-08:00

Unfrozen Caveman Ideology

Thoughts About Martin Luther King and Other People

I meant to write this more than a week ago, as Martin Luther King Day approached. But as so often happens, life intervened. So here it is, anyway….

As the Cold War came to a close, some of us – me in particular -- were pretty darned slow to concede the Soviet empire was indeed collapsing. I kept looking for some Anitoly Golitsyn-style conspiracy theory trap to be sprung on the West, but it never came. I realized the truth probably eight or nine years after the rest of the world because I was stuck in the Cold War ideological ice age. I refused to jettison my long-held assumptions about the Soviet state.

Coming to this belated conclusion, I began examining other assumptions I had made about government under the Cold War. Most remained true, but I realized a few of my assumptions were false.

For example, during the 1980s and 1990s I thought Anitoly Golitsyn and James Angleton (former CIA counterintelligence director) were heroes struggling heroically against a KGB-compromised CIA; I later came to know that Angleton was a paranoid monster who inhumanely treated the brave Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko with years of torture.

Another guy I assumed was almost all bad during the Cold War was Martin Luther King. This was pretty easy because King had openly allied himself with a couple of Communist Party members, had personal adultery issues, and his political agenda was to federalize a lot of things that shouldn’t be federalized. This is not to say I ever took any effort to criticize anything MLK ever did. He was so far down on the list of important issues for me that he didn’t even register. I really didn’t care, in part because I was three when he was killed. Like the Kennedy assassination, tales of King always give me MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over). I’ve written thousands of articles for publication since I became a professional journalist after graduating from college in 1987, and don’t recall writing anything about him. But I did have this vaguely negative overall view of him.

In the 1960s – long before my age of majority – it was gospel among John Birch Society members that Martin Luther King was a bad guy. The Birchers rightly pointed out that if the federal government can go into a private restaurant and tell them how to treat certain customers (i.e., not to segregate blacks and whites), then they would eventually be able to go into that restaurant and tell them what kind of food to serve. The proliferation of “transfat” bans among state and local governments and smoking bans ignited by federal lawsuits against tobacco companies are sufficient to prove the truth of the Birchers’ fears. Private property isn’t private any more.

Just about every thing has been federalized, and it all began in the name of racial justice. Probably some of the blame can be laid upon the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Despite his considerable shortcomings, I have still come to believe Martin Luther King was mostly on the side of personal liberties. He was mostly a good guy. King fought primarily against state discrimination: Jim Crow laws against blacks voting, intimidation, sham “back of the bus” state transportation laws, and the like. Other than George Wallace, who could or would argue with that?

King was anti-war in Vietnam, even if he made some impolitic remarks about U.S. troops and their behavior in Vietnam. That’s good.

I get the feeling that if he were alive today, he’d be protesting in favor of those detainees who are being unconstitutionally denied a trial that our 6^th amendment guarantees them. I get the feeling he’d be opposing NSA wiretapping, and not just because J. Edgar Hoover tapped his phone. Even if not on every issue, we’d be allies on the most important issues.

Even King’s association with Stalinist Communists wouldn’t count much against him in our brave new world, so dominated by Republican Trotskyites running the White House. The out-of-power Stalinists are on “our” side these days, even if it is only because they want to be the ones torturing and bombing and oppressing people.

Somewhere in hell right now, Leon Trotsky has a sneering smile that he has won his final victory over Josef Stalin.

And, maybe, King is looking down from heaven, glad that he got the big life-and-death issues right, even if he didn’t get some of the other issues quite right.

The lesson I’ve taken from this is a personal resolution not to get taken into the unfrozen caveman ideology trap again.

One of those traps I’ve seen other people around me fall into is that there’s a difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, that the Democrats will always be worse for freedom. That hasn’t been proven true with recent administrations.

I’m not going to assume Republicans are better than Democrats because they want smaller government, when the truth is that quite often they don’t want smaller government. More often than not, they want bigger government than the Democrats. One of my younger brothers likes to say that “the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the Republicans talk about smaller government,” putting the emphasis on the word “talk.” He’s right. Talk is the only difference. Democrats “talk” about ending the war. Those are the only differences.

Let the ice melt.

2008-01-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

Slouching Toward

Libertarianism

I had a talk with a friend and colleague of mine a couple of days ago, and he confidently told me that I was a libertarian. That's not new for me, and it's been a long time since it constituted any sort of an insult to me. I've long ago learned that libertarianism is far more than the phony "5P" stereotype of libertarianism (Pro-abortion, a Pimp, a Prostitute, a Pornographer or a Pothead).

I've never viewed myself as a libertarian, but I can easily forgive my friend for the mistake. Heck, I was invited to speak before a libertarian group a couple of weeks ago. If the professional organizers of the conference were confused, why wouldn't this amateur?

But what my friend said next really struck me. He said that in an ideal world libertarianism would be a good idea, but it's not a practical philosophy in our world today.

As someone who doesn't even lean philosophically libertarian, I have to disagree. I think he's got it backwards. Libertarian theory has at it's bottom a sort of indifferentism to right and wrong beyond force and fraud. Many libertarians have a sort of "Your view of right and wrong is just as valid as my view of right and wrong." And that's complete nonsense. Right is right, and wrong is wrong. Those who support legalized abortion and those who oppose it as killing of innocents cannot both be right. It's one or the other.

There are probably a few libertarians out there shouting "NO!! You're wrong!", and God bless you for it. But that's been my experience of reading libertartian writers (Lew Rockwell, Ludwig von Mises, and a few others notwithstanding).

On the other hand, libertarianism is far more practical than any other ideology, and that's why the Founding Fathers of this country resorted to it so often. The practicality of libertarianism is rooted in the belief that government is dumb. Government is incompetent to solve most of our cultural ailments. And that's why -- even though I don't lean libertarian -- I slouch toward libertarianism.

I'm sure it's wrong to take PCP or most other illegal drugs, but I also realize giving the federal government power to control them (which, unlike Prohibition in the 1920s, didn't bother to amend the Constitution to take that power) is a big mistake. The federal war on drugs is about as likely to succeed as a war on the Periodic Table of the Elements.

But acknowleging that, I remain unconvinced drugs ought not to be regulated on the state level. Libertarians would argue that we'd have a ridiculous patchwork of 50 state laws, and evasion of them by crossing state borders.

Yep, we would. And I would look forward to making those states who completely legalized them -- as well as those who kept draconian penalties on the books -- look ridiculous. I don't see anything wrong with that.

So I'm not a libertarian in theory, but I'm pretty close to one in practice. I'm not sure what exactly that means. Maybe it means I'm like most of the Ron Paul supporters I met up in New Hampshire on the weekend before the primary.

2008-01-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

William Norman Grigg's Book Now

Available

William Norman Grigg's latest book, and his magnum opus, is now available on eBay. The book is titled Liberty in Eclipse, and I'm selling it (but I'm not taking any money from the sales of the book). You can purchase it by following this obscenely long hyperlink:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Liberty-in-Eclipse_W0QQitemZ120207772385QQihZ002QQcategoryZ378QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

The book is a wake-up call for all freedom-loving Americans in a way that no book has ever done so.

This book will change your life ... if you read it.

By the way, I acted as the editor for it and wrote the foreword. But all the greatness of this invaluable volume is attributable to Mr. Grigg.

This book should be a companion for every member of the Ron Paul Revolution.

2007-12-26T20:37:00.000-08:00

I'll Be Speaking at the

NH Liberty Forum on Jan 3rd

Like it says above, I'll be speaking at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum on January 3rd. I'm slated to start at 4 p.m.

2007-03-03T04:57:00.001-08:00

I’ve Been "Perna-ed"!

… and that’s not a bad thing

I’ve received several letters from loyal John Birch Society members criticizing me for “attacking” the John Birch Society with my last post.

I fervently deny the charge.

I joined the JBS for one reason. I wanted to stop communism, where nations were swallowed up into an all-powerful, militarily aggressive, governmental empire that spied on its citizens as often as possible, "disappeared" them at will -- and without trial -- to secret prison camps, where they could be tortured, housed like animals, or killed. That kind of world frightened me. And I joined the JBS because it was the most active and effective organization arrayed against the Soviet gulag state. Today, George Bush has brought all of those qualities to America: the surveillance, the torture, no trials, the empire, the military aggression, and the "disappeared" non-persons in those secret prisons. And in the five years The New American has been writing about these emerging problems, none of the above (except surveillance) has made it onto the action agenda of the John Birch Society. So if the JBS will not lift a finger to stop the Bush gulag, I’ve got to find an organization that will if I want to stop the Bush gulag.

It’s that simple. The above does not constitute an “attack” or “condemnation,” these are a simple and sober assessment of obvious facts. Anyone could find this out by picking up a copy of the JBS Bulletin or browsing the JBS website. Facts are not attacks, unless you are a cultist.

And while I’m on the subject of cultists, I did receive at least one letter from the party of Vance Smith after my last post, which apparently did take my last post as an attack. I received an anonymous postal letter purporting to come from Appleton JBS staffers who are just pining for a return to the glory reign of Smith Il-Son/Smith Son-Il and asking me to contact Mike Armstrong to help return the le regime ancien to the throne. But I doubt the risible letter represented the views of anyone on staff at the JBS.

I’d like to be able to quip that only MOAB-ing Westhill Boulevard would destroy the JBS faster than returning Vance Smith to the CEO position, but that would be too gratuitous a slap and a patent falsehood. The John Birch Society was designed with staff leadership spread out throughout the country in the form of talented coordinators like Hal Shurtleff, Dale Pierce and Jim Capo. Most of the talent at the national headquarters today emerged from the field staff. Clearly, the JBS would recover much more quickly from a MOAB-ing of Westhill Boulevard than it would from a second rule of Vance Smith or his acolytes. So I guess I can’t make that quip about MOAB. I don't think a gratuitous slap at the JBS field staff is worth the laughs.

I would close ranks with the JBS headquarters over this issue faster than Ted Kennedy closes ranks with his hotel minibar. Vance Smith’s “management” decreased the circulation of The New American by 2/3, cutting circulation from about 60,000 to a mere 20,000, and in the process managed to alienate all of the talented staff in Appleton. That’s not the kind of management I’d ever want to see imposed on my worst enemy. I haven’t resigned my membership in the JBS, and I wonder if the cultist letters to me would cease if I reassert that the JBS does exclusively good work. Probably not.

By now, you'll know I’m no Vance Smith fan though I once defended him. And that brings me to having been “Perna-ed” and finding an organization that will fight the Bush gulag. One of the letters I received after my post was from JBS chapter leader John Perna. Perna is a giant in the freedom movement, despite the fact that his words were reminiscent of my own words in criticizing Alan Stang just seven years ago. Here’s the key part of what John wrote:

“It takes more time, money and effort to BUILD a ship than it takes to SINK a ship…. Now there are apparently those who would like to sink that ship. I ask them this: Do you have another ship? Do you even have a life boat? Here is my challenge to those who claim that there is anything that The John Birch Society could do, that is better than what they are now doing: PLEASE demonstrate what would be better by YOUR OWN example.”

As he always does, John has issued a perfectly reasonable challenge. I don’t know if he had me in mind when he wrote the challenge, and I suppose it doesn’t matter because I took it to heart anyway. And all the while, I was thinking about how I had written essentially the same thing seven years earlier to Alan Stang.

And that got me to thinking about how I had been such a fool all of those years. Say what you will about Alan Stang, but he was right and I was wrong about Vance Smith.

He wasn’t the only one who had better insight than me. A group of field staff people, led by former California Coordinator Kevin Bearly, saw through Vance Smith a decade before anyone in Appleton had a clue (and 11 years before I did). After being cast out of the JBS by the Smith clique, they formed their own Welch Foundation (now The Right Source) and quietly went about the task of building a better boat, to use John Perna’s language. They recently picked up William Norman Grigg, the former Senior Editor for The New American, and added him to their staff and have just launched their own e-zine, Pro Libertate. They have local “Committees of Correspondence” that are roughly analogous to JBS Chapters, and are a growing organization. They have a nationally syndicated radio show called “The Right Source,” which you can listen to on the internet live 6-7 weekdays Eastern Time from a link at the Right Source website.

Most importantly, they are intensely interested in fighting the Bush gulag.

I had already planned to write for Pro Libertate as often as I could spare the time.

But John’s letter struck me to the core. The very night I received John Perna’s e-mail challenge I typed out a letter volunteering to help streamline The Right Source’s action agenda, putting to use my 10 years of experience designing the JBS Bulletin’s “Pending Legislation.” (I also volunteered to help coordinate the Antiwar League’s Boston area anti-torture initiative the next day.)

So I have thrown my lot in with The Right Source as a volunteer. I’ve been "Perna-ed," and that’s not a bad thing.

2007-02-15T19:50:00.000-08:00

No More Mr. Nice Guy

My thoughts on separation from The New American magazine

There are two kinds of insanity, and the second kind is worse – definitely crazier, and much more dangerous to your health and that of everyone around you.

The first kind of insanity is the Chicken Little syndrome. You know the tale of Chicken Little, who was always running around screaming that “the sky is falling!” when it most certainly wasn’t. The political left is definitely afflicted with this malady, most especially in the case of global warming (or the ozone hole, or whatever the pandemic of the month is). The Chicken Little scenario is one of a chaotic person in an orderly world.

The second, more dangerous type of insanity is the inverse of the Chicken Little scenario. That second kind of insanity is one of an orderly person in a chaotic world. Picture this: The sky really is falling, it’s obvious the sky is falling, and Chicken Little goes about his regular day as if nothing has happened.

In comedy, this second scenario is by far the more hilarious of the two kinds of comedic madness. I’ve seen variations of it in probably a hundred comedies, where a shopkeeper on a downtown city street dutifully tries to sweep his front stoop clear of rubble just after a bomb has leveled the place – oblivious to the flames and the fact that his business is history.

That’s the kind of insanity gripping the entire Republican “right” at this time.

The Bush Administration has on numerous occasions argued in open court that it possesses total dictatorial powers (specifically: the ability to imprison citizens without trial, deny them counsel, torture them and then send them away to foreign dungeons without a hearing).

And yet those “freedom organizations” – the ones that aren’t on board with the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror,” anyway – are working on their own petty little projects as if nothing were happening to their freedom. Some are ignorant of this total assault on our liberties (you don’t have the freedom of speech or religion while you are being tortured in an Iraqi or Afghan or Egyptian prison), while most of the rest are simply gun-shy. Either way, nobody is doing anything about it – except some people on the left, such as the ACLU. But hardly anybody on the right is lifting a finger.

The right, which is supposed to be protecting freedom, is doing nothing while each of the sine qua non of liberties is openly and brazenly stripped from the American people. Simply put, there are no freedom organizations remaining on the right.

This brings me to my separation from The New American magazine.

First, let me state that the John Birch Society – of which The New American is an affiliate -- is an organization of some of the best men and women in the world. While I’ve run into a lot of people who said they had a crazy uncle who claimed to have been a member of the John Birch Society, my experience was almost always the opposite. Active members really were the best people in America, and still are.

My separation from The New American comes from my expectation that it was something more than part of a fine organization, that it was instead an organization arrayed to protect freedom. I thought it was more than it really was. It’s a good group of people trying to do good, and for that the JBS deserves nothing but accolades.

The John Birch Society takes a number of positions on public issues, and although I’ve disagreed with some of them in the past, I can’t recall a single one at the moment.

I’ve separated from The New American because I have limited time, and can’t afford to waste any more of my nearly non-existent free time (I have three daughters who are very active) on an organization that is not devoted to the fight for freedom. Although The New American magazine has run some nice articles on freedom subjects over the years, the JBS side of the organization has been silent with regard to these crucial freedom issues.

One of the criticisms I had of people who left the JBS in the past – a criticism I still believe is valid – is that you shouldn’t criticize any organization unless you have a better alternative. But I’m not advocating that anybody leave the JBS, even though there are a few organizations out there that are better right now.

One of the bright spots on freedom is the new Antiwar League, which is conveniently (for me, anyway) headquartered in Boston. They are pursuing lots of actions on key freedom issues, so much that I can’t keep up with them. Other organizations that give the same – or better – perspective than the JBS on current events are the Welch Foundation, The American Conservative, AntiWar.com and LewRockwell.com. There are probably a few others, but those are the ones that come to my mind at this moment.

Part of my problem – and it’s my problem, not The New American’s – is that I took to heart some of the images its principal salesmen used to use to push the organization. I still remember Larry Waters (now the JBS V.P.) using an image of a tree as out-of-control government. He showed that some organizations – such as the NRA – do a good job trimming a single branch of out of control government on single issues such as gun control. He then persuasively argued that the John Birch Society struck at the root of the out-of-control government using programs such as the now-defunct TRIM program to cut the funding and starve big government to death.

“That was then, this is now,” as S. E. Hinton would have said. Now the JBS is principally dedicated to trimming the smaller of the branches, while the main shoots of the tree grow out of reach.

Or they are still sweeping up the rubble from the downtown sidewalk as the fire rages in what remains of the shopkeeper’s store. Use whatever imagery you choose.

The point of the matter is not to criticize the JBS and The New American; they are no different from just about anyone else out there. They are still doing some good, though it’s not the good that most urgently needs to be done.

The point – to me, anyway – is that I’ve only got limited time, and I can’t waste time sweeping up rubble while a fire rages. And just as Chicken Little was out of place when he screamed “the sky is falling!” when it wasn’t, I’ll be all the more out of place if I continue to act as if nothing is happening.

My separation from The New American was a long time in coming, but it was precipitated in part by an e-mail I sent last weekend that reflected America’s reality, and I am informed it was not well-received in Appleton. The proximate cause of the e-mail was an AP story on Yahoo that reported the Bush Administration’s nearly successful attempt to deport an American citizen and veteran to Iraq without a hearing or trial (and he would receive no jury trial in Iraq). I was ticked off!

I should have guessed that someone would be unhappy with an e-mail composed while I was listening to Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy.”

The John Birch Society was the only organization I mentioned by name in that e-mail last weekend, and I suppose it wasn’t fair to appear to hold them to a higher standard. Yes, I now see it wasn’t fair.

Too bad. I am neither sorry nor repentant.

One of the conclusions I’ve come to lately is that sometimes when the sky really is falling, if you want to get anything moving you are going to have to tick a few people off.

Chicken Little’s insanity wasn’t his reaction to the sky falling; had it really been falling his reaction would have been utterly reasonable. He just exercised poor judgment on the evidence for the sky falling.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather be notorious than be respected by the shopkeepers sweeping under the shredded awnings of their bombed-out stores. I’m going to start to piss a lot of people off, and I’m going to have fun doing it.

(Chumbawumba just started to play on my IPod. Hmmm.)

Say it with me:

No more mister nice guy.

2006-11-10T19:21:00.000-08:00

Gay State Legislators Take a Dive!

The Massachusetts legislature did what we all expected, and I predicted on the Marriage Amendment this week. Here's a copy of a letter I sent to "Vote On Marriage" after the legislature decided to postpone a vote in July. It's pretty self-explanatory:

From: Tom Eddlem [teddlem@verizon.net]
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 4:54 PM
To: 'info@voteonmarriage.org'
Subject: I'm with you but...

...are you delusional? Your e-mail today stressing:
We have much to
celebrate in that during the Constitutional Convention in 2002, only 53
legislators voted against an unconstitutional adjournment of the session. This
time around, 91 legislators voted against the recessing of the convention.
... is a serious detachment from reality. Celebrate!?! Are you serious?

This is the second time the legislature has done this to us.

You
geniuses who put up this year's petition declared the best course would be to
undertake the exact same strategy that failed spectacularly in 2002. "They
wouldn't dare," proponents told me as I signed the petition, "to deny the people
a vote this time."

"Yeah, right," I sarcastically replied as I signed
the petition anyway.

Yesterday proved there is one thing the
Massachusetts legislature does not lack: daring.

Why are conservatives
so retarded? Why do we so predictably beat our heads against a wall using
strategies that the average junior high school student knows can't succeed?

Yet the stupidity is so thick that I wonder if we'll have yet another
wasted multimillion dollar effort on an initiative petition. (I can hear it now:
"This time they really, really won't dare!")

When all else fails, follow
the directions. In this case, the directions are in the state constitution. If
the Supreme Judicial Courts are usurping the powers of the legislature (and they
did with the Goodridge decision), then get the legislature to use their
constitutional powers to remove the judges. If the legislature won't do that,
then vote out the legislators! Duh!

How about following the directions?

Best wishes,

Tom Eddlem

tom@dangeroustalk.com

Honestly, working in politics with conservatives is like being Yosemite Sam against Bugs Bunny, with Bugs drawing a line in the sand and daring Yosemite Sam "You wouldn't dare to step over this line!" again and again. And just like Bugs Bunny in the cartoon, today's political Bugs has a plan to win the battle.

Man, conservatives are so dumb!

It's time for a blog

2006-10-05T04:39:00.000-07:00

Well, it was about time for me to start a blog. I figure if my 13-year-old daughter is already pestering me for a blog, then I'm probably the last man on earth to have one.

My only thought for the day is that Boston's Big Dig is the best paradigm for what we can expect of government, especially if it is a federal-state "partnership." For those who have been living under a rock for the past few years, the "Big Dig" is a federally funded highway project to depress Boston's central artery and was originally slated to be completed for $2 billion. It has already cost more than $15 billion to date, and has already killed a motorist when a shoddily constructed concrete ceiling tile fell and crushed a woman a couple of months ago. Ironically, many liberals want to put the body responsible for the Big Dig's safety and cost controls in charge of our health care services. In our governor's case, Mitt Romney has already done this. Can cost overruns and poor health care be far behind?

If you want to pay the highest possible price and obtain the lowest possible quality for something, you simply have to get the government to do it.