We recently celebrated the January 27 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It reminded me of Bernie Sanders, proud proclaimant as democratic socialist.

Here we are, 2016, as a country that sacrificed 58,000 vital Americans (not to mention 1,000,000 Vietnamese) in a struggle to stop socialist dominoes from falling on the United States. Not that I believe it was anything but a deadly economic development project with monstrous collateral damage.

Anyway, we’ve arrived at a place where a candidate for president can proudly proclaim to represent everything that would prevent the USA from the greatness that we achieved in a country less than 200 years old. I use that number because that achievement is quickly eroding. The glory days are behind us. Now, a majority believes wealth comes as a result of a vote, not productive work. Those who believe that way haven’t ever seen capitalism so they don’t know the connection between that and our luxurious lives.

The utter stupidity of free college for all is mind boggling. The same goes for healthcare as a right as stated in a Bernie ad on the radio.

Most disturbing is the Republicans’ complicity in this nonsense. Ted Cruz, who is widely believed to be the most free market candidate for president is hated in Washington for his rejection of established order, yet he has said he will strongly enforce antitrust law to prevent “big oil” from stifling ethanol sales.

I ask, what is not socialistic about antitrust law? Remember Marx’s definition of capitalism being private ownership of the means of production. If you own it, you control it. If you don’t control it, you don’t own it. Cruz, being a very intelligent man has to be a bald faced (especially compared to me) liar to say he supports free markets and antitrust at the same time.

I would never discount the Nazi holocaust. But we watch tons of movies and Dawn keeps asking me if the next one is about the Nazis too. It was a terrible thing to plan to exterminate an entire religion. And the portfolio of anti-Nazi films since that time is awesome.

Maybe it shouldn’t, but it puzzles me that the extermination of capitalists that came with the rise of world communism creates no excitement in the film industry. The numbers indicate the Nazis had a long way to go to equal the horror perpetrated by the communists. Could it be that people actually have come to believe the 100,000,000 deaths at the hands of the “democratic socialists” are justified because those victims unfairly took more than their fair share.

Go ahead all you democratic socialists, proudly stand and be counted. The real capitalists will not commit genocide in an effort to hold the dominoes erect because they know your system will fail on its own as it did in the USSR, despite the big lie that Reagan’s arms race trounced the commies.

The photo at the top of this page depicts starved Ukrainians. Starved in spite of the promise of equal incomes for all in the socialist system. Socialism might be voluntary in a family or even community setting but the reality is socialism can’t exist without totalitarianism. And it won’t go away easily, evidence the rapidl growth with no pullback of government that we’ve seen since we were babies.

Here is a film showing our allies in world War II that my dad said was as worthy a target as the Nazis:  https://vimeo.com/73284941

Well sure. Call it what you want but we gotta keep up with the Joneses or the Japs (not meant to offend, just poetic). Japan lowered their interest rate to negative territory today. In anticipation of The Fed doing the same the Dow rose almost 400 points today.

So what’s up? Central banks lower rates by giving free money to banks (more money, less value). Less valuable money means higher stock prices because it takes more money of lower value to buy the same shares. Ultimately you and I are handing the banks free money because our dollars lose value while they have a larger number of cheaper dollars.

http://in.reuters.com/article/global-markets-idINKCN0V71JD

Oh well. Who cares, as long as homosexuals can’t sign a government form saying they are married. Doesn’t it seem like somebody has their priorities screwed up?

I was listening to All Things Considered and there was a gal featured who was having trouble with women’s health issues. Apparently Planned Parenthood is under attack in Midland, Texas. This girl had “met a boy.” And she had decided to become “sexually active for the first time.” But there was a problem. “Family planning” was hard to come by. She had to travel (can’t remember how far but the spark had time to cool at such a distance) for her sex tools. Wow. so the story was about the great hardship she suffered because I’m not furnishing the tools for her to get laid without consequence. Oh jeeze. Hey! If you don’t want an unplanned pregnancy figure it out.

The weird thing about this is the condemnation this person would, undoubtedly receive from people who favor wiping out multitudes of innocent bystanders to get a few deranged jihadists… thereby recruiting more jihadists, BTW.

Haven’t heard the term, “values voters” bandied about so much this time around. Have we given up?

from Rage Comics

I think I’ll write a column on the people Ronnie chose to advise him but I noticed three of them have articles on Lew Rockwell today. When our kid, Hans was a trumpet player in high school we took him and Ryan Kampman to see Dizzy Gillespie in Iowa City. Dizzie was getting some age on him so the band he attracted was the best part of the show (not to ignore those bagpipes he called cheeks). Check out Lew’s page and see if you can tell me who the three best things about Reagan are:  https://www.lewrockwell.com/

Any arguments about that are welcome anytime. I had to have a title to this post but I really wanted to share this from Rage comics:

Bob Dorr played this on his Beatles Medley show Sunday night and it really caught my ear. BTW, if you are free Sundays at 6:30, It’s IPR in Iowa. You won’t regret it.

My sweetie and her band do this song and Annie and Terri do it too. Ringo’s version is arranged by Elmer Bernstein, famous for so many movie soundtracks.

Besides this being a great version of the song it reminded me of a story.

Terry and brother Dawson were packing up after a gig with Dawnie (my sweetie). Dawson said to Dawn, “I’ve got a song we should learn.” Dawn says, “what?” Dawson says, “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

His mic was on. Heehee. Terry says, “Hey could you guys talk about this somewhere else?” (or something like that) Then it happened again. No kidding. Again.

Those open mic moments are precious, eh? Like the one that happened recently when, German leader, Angela Merkel, told Mark Zuckerberg to have Facebook censor comments that might portray Middle Eastern migrants in a bad light after the rapeugee New Years celebration in Cologne. Dawson’s open mic was more fun, but Merkel’s more revealing, er… damning.

At a loss to find real news. BTW, the video of Merkel telling Zuckerberg to censor “racist content has been taken down from YouTube.

Dear Readers,

My chief critic really liked this one. He says it echoes the feelings of the “silent majority.” Of all the media I see, I would have to admit this is the alternative because everything else is like a plague of BS. Contradictions abound, pandering accepted as the norm.

First in the Nation: Whoopee!

Caucus season is upon us and the second most frequent comment I hear is, “I can’t wait until it is over.”

I think one of the biggest mistakes of my life was waiting until after an election cycle to dump our land line phone. Believe me, you won’t regret it. But let’s put another angle on what has caused us to dig through the old record collection or even seek silence instead of radio or television.

I’ve often heard that voting is an essential part of our democracy. Those who know what democracy is, understand what terror that statement brings to a lover of freedom and prosperity. Democracy is mob rule. It favors the majority at the expense of the individual. It sorts out good men and promotes people whose chief attribute is electability.

Look at the presidential campaign in Iowa. In Iowa, we caucus. We don’t primary because we might lose “first in the nation status.” The robbers who get there first get the most loot. Iowans are a proud people.

I’m wearing out the “off” button on the tractor radio. Every few minutes there is this dialogue with a gal who just got a job in the wind energy industry. They question why some candidates are “against clean energy.” You’d think the voters were smart enough to see what a lie this is. Has a candidate promised to ban clean energy? No, they oppose subsidies. If subsidies are offered to one form of energy, that limits the opportunity of competing forms. It makes it impossible for the market to reward those who sell the best form of energy. Most importantly, it supposes that there is some taxpayer out there who doesn’t deserve to keep the fruits of his labor because the voters were tricked into thinking some bureaucrat knew better how his money should be spent. This sad situation has spread to all sectors of our economy.

State directed economies divert resources from the most efficient uses. The aggregate demand of real people will always be more real than schemes dreamed up by someone who has no stake in the game and has to convince voters rather than investors. Store shelves would be empty if the most capable people lacked opportunity or were penalized for their success.

Voting is only critical when the rule of law has been cast aside. It has. Every vote is a distortion of a market that could reflect true value. Every vote will create more waste and poverty than if the law had simply been followed and all our relationships left to be selfish decisions made by willing participants.

On the federal level, all actions of the government are enumerated (listed) in The Constitution. Nothing else is lawfully allowed. The president is not authorized to make policy decisions, declare war, or create regulatory agencies. He is only authorized to execute the laws made by Congress.

I started to write my opinion of some of the candidates and it just sounded mean, so out it went to what Thomas Sowell calls the author’s most valuable tool, the waste basket.

The bottom line is, as time passes you will find your vote makes little difference. Recent memory reveals that no principle will go unviolated, government will grow, foreign threats will be used to empower domestic ones, domestic threats will be used to punish success, and personal responsibility will be supplanted with faceless and unaccountable public ones.

Seeing as little will change with this most important election of our lifetime, we should consider which celebrity would make the best subject for jokes and caricatures. With every candidate promising to trash the document they pledge to “preserve, protect and defend,” I have nowhere to turn but to entertainment value. But at least we’ll be first in the nation.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/01/20/isis-destroys-iraqs-oldest-christian-monastery-satellite-photos-confirm.html

ISIS destroys Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery so of course we must, as the politicians in Iowa are saying from the comfort of their tour busses, “destroy ISIS.”

What the hell was that thing doing still standing yesterday? Well, using a deep thinking  process not available to those politicians and their devotees, it is because the man we slowly assassinated, Saddam Hussein, had a barbaric system of order that protected the rights of diverse cultures. Yes, it’s a foreign concept. It doesn’t play well on Fox or CNN. So it isn’t an option.

But if you take the time to think it through you will conclude that GW, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the rest of those monsters blew up that monastery.

I never really liked the idea of monasteries anyway. I dig chicks. That doesn’t mean I should blow them up, though.