Freedom of Speech has Died in America

 

Give me your children and I’ll change society in ten years. Please assist us, as despite most of us remember hearing this phrase or one very close, none of us could even venture a guess to who, what, when or where. Suffice it to say that something similar to this was said by somebody notable enough for us to remember having read, heard or dreamt it. In the United States, the children in question are school age and especially university age children where in all too many of these institutes of higher education there are safe spaces and speech codes where to even be accused of transgression is a guilty verdict. Where you have speech codes, you lack free speech, and it is that simple. The actual basis of the concept behind free speech is the guarantee that everybody, and it means everybody, can say what is on their mind about anything free of fear that saying so will result in criminal charges and the only possible repercussion would be possible loss of friends and a tainted reputation. That is free speech. It is not free speech if all you ever need hear are opinions with which you agree, or worse, you only get to hear what others have defined as acceptable speech, especially if these are also the same people who hold your future in their hands and within their gradebooks. Unfortunately, for all too many of American university students, the entirety of the above sentence is their reality day in and day out. Numerous of the leading and most prestigious universities such as many of the California University System, all too many Ivy League Colleges and too many other all too well known and sought after universities, there are speech codes, safe spaces and other politically stifling inventions which are being used by the leftist administrators and professors to control the environment while programming the minds of mush sent them presumably to be educated to think, not programmed what to think. The combination of speech codes, safe spaces and unipolar faculty all supporting a singular political bend and the end result is so easily predictable.

 

When speech codes are designed to support such concepts as global climate change (global warming) is fact, Palestinian Arabs dispossession, anti-capitalism, racism in American society, transgender rights, sexism and other leftist viewpoints and suppress any counter viewpoints combined with reinforcement from curriculum and safe spaces to turn to to escape any transgressions of the speech code or anything which might upset a student’s sensitive psyche and you end up with a host of programmed leftist social justice warriors turned loose each year on society and eventually they will change their world. And just in case you might be wondering, that is exactly the intent of the combination of programming tools being implemented at too many American universities. They take a variety of inexperienced, young students whose minds have yet to experience the realities of life in the real world and place them in an environment where everything is arranged such that only leftist, socialist, progressive political concepts are permitted and provided as accepted truth without allowing for any opposing viewpoints and after four to ten years of such programming send out little leftist, Marxist mind-numb robots all set to correct the world and repair all inequities using the knowledge given them.

 

Amongst the forty-five declared goals for the Communist takeover of America is to, “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.” They can check this one off their list as the leftists have all but taken complete control of the textbook industry and the teaching institutions and teaching curriculum. The only viewpoint which, in the United States, is challenging the pure leftist agenda has been the Arabist Islamist viewpoint with an intensified curriculum of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and soon to follow on, anti-Semitic viewpoint. On many campuses, the leftist and anti-Israel, anti-Zionist viewpoint and instruction have merged so seamlessly that in politics as a whole, the two have become partners in trade for numerous leftist groups to adopt anti-Israel, anti-Zionist views as a natural extension of their political viewpoints. In order to make such an environment and assure that the little mushballs entrusted to them in many universities, they have implemented the concept of speech codes which completely support the curriculum such that none ever have to hear a discouraging, or contradictory, phrase. In the classroom, the students quickly learn that to disagree with a professor’s political views risks failure or more critical grading at the least making receiving honor level grades a student adopts the professor’s political views as their default thought process. After a number of years, the higher the degree, the longer the years and the deeper the indoctrination and the longer a student adopts the leftist viewpoint, the more rote repetition of the specific political points held within, the higher the likelihood that the student adopts these views as their own out of habit and repetition. Of course, that is the intended result the professors are seeking from these general soft-sciences and social sciences curriculum as the textbooks and teaching staffs bear witness.

 

So, what does this hold for the United States and the future? Well, presuming that nothing is going to change, then the United States will continue sliding further and further left until some future President Obama will be the conservative candidate. Before somebody screams that, there will be a corrective slide which would prevent such, let us say that we can only hope that they are correct. The problem we have is after over a half-century of observing the world political stage, and the United States in particular, since the mid-Twentieth Century, there has been a steady and continuous with an occasional lurching back to the right which was all but immediately erased by the next leftist to be elected. As so many have attempted to point out, President John F. Kennedy in the 2000 elections would have run as a Republican with his agenda of lower taxes and building the military. Of course, what these exclamations ignore is that from the 1960 election to 2000, candidate John F. Kennedy would have endured forty years of the Washington Post, New York Times, mainstream broadcast television and all too many other leftist pressures that he very well might have been an entirely different President elected at the turn of the century and would not have run a campaign the equivalence of George W. Bush in 2000, he would have been a more electable version of Al Gore. But fear not, if social media and the uproar caused by the election of President Trump, no true history of conservatism, by an overwhelming number of youthful political enthusiasts, the educational programming is working efficiently and producing an enthusiastic force within American society. What will the future hold? That will not be difficult to tell.

 

United States National Debt 1940 to 2007

 

One quick measure might be the above graph of the national debt by year. Up until 1960, the debt grows very slowly and then takes off with a short respite in the late 1990’s before continuing upward. This has been due to ever increased social spending brought on by both main parties with the sole respite coming when the Republican Congress forced a government shutdown under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America where the budget was briefly balanced. Still, even then, it was but a brief respite brought on by a conservative correction, something that was not managed even under President Reagan. The ever-increased debt has resulted not only from the initial Great Society initiated by President Johnson but the ever-added amounts and increased numbers of programs which have pushed the debt ever higher. The final number in 2007 was around nine-trillion and now a mere ten years later at the end or 2017 and the debt is now at twenty-one trillion dollars, a doubling and then some in a mere decade. Should the United States debt continue to climb as such and it will clear one-hundred-trillion by mid century assuming things are not brought under control and the ever-continuous slide towards socialism turned back. Does it appear that this might be the case? Well, in all honesty we fear the United States will spend itself into oblivion before it learns its lesson as every other attempt at socialism has resulted in the same end. That is a truly frightful realization and one can only hope that the United States is scared from failing while it might still be possible to produce their way back to solvency. It will take an extended effort and the electorate changing direction aiming to bring government under control, spending back within limits and fiscal discipline which has not been seen in over half a century. What the United States needs is four or five President Andrew Jacksons in a row as he was the last President to ever pay off the national debt completely, and he only managed to do so for a few months.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

So Trump Took a Call from a Woman, Big Deal

 

President Elect Trump has been being roasted for taking a phone call from a woman, a Chinese woman, an important Chinese Woman, an Important Chinese woman who happens to be Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. The Mainland Chinese (some still refer to them as Red China, imagine that) Dictator’s underlings Foreign Minister Wang Yi and another Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang went on the record demanding that President elect Trump recommit to the One-China Policy. Wow, are they overly-sensitive or just really insecure and jumpy? He exchanged congratulations with another recently elected President of a nation which the United States forsook in exchange for their one-billion-three-hundred-eighty-one-million give-or-take a few million potential customers and inexpensive workers over the paltry twenty-three-and-a-half-million potential customers and more expensive workers. Red China (see above, we’re troglodytes and use old terms) need not worry, their place as the main supplier for WalMart is secure. Some people really get bent out of shape jealous if you talk to their rival suspecting you don’t love them anymore. Don’t worry Red China, or with their new capitalism is it now Pink China, America never really loved you in the first place, it just made economic sense to pretend America threw our friends in Taiwan overboard. Wait until America sends them more arms and you really go bat-crazy on us for selling arms to one of your claimed provinces. What, you don’t want your provinces armed or just this province? Get serious and maybe America will as well.

 

Let’s get honest here. If you asked the man on the street in any major city which nation the United States recognizes and has relations with and made them choose between Taiwan (and you explained that was also called Formosa and was often called free China) or Mainland China (and informed them it was also Communist China and previously called Red China) the total would overwhelmingly choose Taiwan. That is who the American people desire as their friend, until they would find out things in WalMart would have their prices rise, then they would pick Red China, oops, sorry, Mainland China. The Americans know who their real friends are and who assists North Korea with their nuclear program and thus assist Iran with their nuclear program. They are not the ignorant rubes you have been told they are; they just are mostly hard working and need to worry more about feeding their families, clothing their families and keeping a roof over the heads of their families and do not really have tons of time to keep up on foreign affairs. Anyway, if they know any history, then they know that should a war break out, then one really decides who they side with and who is required to put down the infinitely worst enemy which may or may not require siding with a lesser current enemy. When that war is over, we can go back to disliking whomever we choose and this applies to all nations. Israel would even side with Saudi Arabia and Egypt against Iran and there is nobody we can think of at the moment which would have us ally with Iran, they count as worst enemy. Not to worry, that was not exactly a secret.

 

Back to Mainland China and getting serious. The United States remade their bed in the Far East all the way back in 1979 and tossed Taiwan to the seven winds of fate and allied officially with Mainland China in order to actually recognize them in the Security Council of the United Nations and allow for formal trade relations and a billion other things; they are called potential customers and the makings of a very large military force if necessary, also called the Chinese people. Still, every decade or so the United States takes a risk and modernizes the Taiwanese military with a large weapons deal and Mainland China goes ballistic and whoever is the President grovels for a while promising that he will never allow such a deal again. That President keeps his word but that word does not apply to the following Presidents. We suspect that there will probably be one of these explosions should Donald Trump be reelected as such deals are most often executed during second terms so as to minimize the damage to reelection chances. It looks bad when your opponent can label you a treaty breaker and unreliable and all those nasty things and actually have proof in the form of Mainland China. Then again, Donald Trump has not exactly been a by the book kind of guy though many of his cabinet picks have been from the right wing conservative branch of the Republican Party, that might be a twig that far out on the right wing when you get to Retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis for your Secretary of Defense, a choice we heartily love and approve.

 

The flap over the phone call was very similar in the mainstream media as it was to the choice of General James “Mad Dog” Mattis for your Secretary of Defense. Retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor will likely continue to ruffle the feathers of the snowflakes reporting for NPR and the self-proclaimed objective media. I mean two former military men, what is Trump planning for, a war, an invasion, against whom? Well, the far left would be our guess as it appears they are gearing up for the long war, may it last twenty years as that is what is required to restore from the damage done since the assuming of the Presidency by Lyndon Baines Johnson after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Reagan checked the damage temporarily but with a Republican Congress, if the leadership can get their acts together, Trump can make real gains in restoring sanity and deregulating small businesses which get caught in the regulations battle the government claims to be using to check the “Big Guys.” The aims of these regulations almost always are skirted by the “Big Guys” and squarely smack the small businessman when he tries to progress and build his business. For far too long the government has actually been in the business of making sure the wealthy remain wealthy with no taxes or levies against wealth but with tons of taxes and other fees and regulations to prevent anybody else becoming wealthy and challenging the existing moneyed interests. Sure there are exceptions, but that is the problem, there are exceptions and it is not the normal flow for the little guy to make it big. We can hope Trump is different but that remains to be seen.

 

 

Reince Priebus is one choice which should be about as milquetoast and scrambled eggs as one can get. He will make the smallest ripples but does know how the Republican machine works, though many might claim the machine malfunctions more than running smoothly. Reince Priebus is one person who could quietly still get what Trump needs going and is far less controversial than say Newt Gingrich who would have been another good choice to get results but at what costs. Stephen Bannon is another choice which the media will blast as being bigoted and troublesome but he is no paleo-conservative and is more the middle of the road conservative with good monitoring for the mood of Congress and world affairs and should be an asset. The claims against Jeff Sessions and the regurgitating of his lynching by a Democrat Congress which also gave us the expression of somebody being Borked after the treatment which culminated on the rejection of Judge Robert Bork for a Supreme Court nomination where innuendo and snide commentary proved enough to slur the good name of a competent and righteous juror who would have been an asset and great Supreme Court Judge and would likely have been nominated to be Chief Justice instead of Roberts had he been on the court. His loss and the lynching of Jeff Sessions will be recorded as stains on the reputation of the members of that Congress who performed their positions in the Senate as more a lynch mob than an approval and validating body.

 

Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and David Patraeus have all been names floated for Secretary of State. David Patraeus should not be a viable choice despite his qualifications and proven work ethic but it is his ethics which failed as he shared classified information with a person not cleared to receive such privilege. That was just as wrong as Hillary Clinton’s transgressions even if to a much lesser degree and he served his time and lost his position and should remain that way at the very least at this time. Perhaps in a second term but not up front. As far as between Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani it comes down to what attitude does Donald Trump prefer to be the face of the United States? He has already made one choice in such a position with Nikki Haley as the United Nations Ambassador where her straight forward style will be refreshing and her professionalism a statement to the world that the United States takes reasoned and solid stances and represents exactly what they claim to be. Rudy Giuliani would be a similar, if not more vocal and sharply stated, style appointee and would make for a great compliment to Nikki Haley with both being out front kind of people and shy wallflowers. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a quiet, professional choice who would be a good negotiator though very unlikely to be brash or grating. His style is grace and competence will win the day as long as one remain steadfast and steady on the path and refuses quietly but still forcefully to stand their ground. The main problem with Mitt Romney is he screams Republican political tool and would offend many Trump supporters which is why he will be the media favorite.

 

Other choices, include Steven Mnuchin for Secretary of the Treasury who was chosen from the media film and Wall Street business world. Wilbur Ross for Commerce Secretary comes from a venture investment capitalist background where he rescued failing companies often making them profitable. Such work does not make one popular, especially if you are successful as often one is required to step on more than a few toes and restructure companies releasing sometimes most of a workforce. He will be interesting to monitor. Elaine Chao as Secretary of Transportation will make an excellent choice. Not only a woman but a minority woman with impeccable abilities and great loyalty to those she works with. She was Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush for eight years, making her the only cabinet member to serve his entire term. Mike Pompeo for Director of the CIA is an Army veteran who spent years as a businessman before entering politics, now in Congress, voted as a Tea Party candidate from Kansas, and sits on the House Intelligence Committee which gives him the necessary experience factor. Still to cover are Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education; both of which have the needed qualifications but are really lesser known Republican Party regulars and should prove efficient in calming any jitters from the Party elites. Will the elites of the Republican Party be mollified? Not likely, but they will have less than they expected to use as pry bars when speaking to the media, and that will be an asset in and of itself. In all too many ways, the detractors of Donald Trump and his performance as President are jumping the gun slightly as he has not taken office or even cleared the Elector College which meets to vote later this month. The actions of some Republican Party elites, many in the media and now Mainland (Red) China are all very similar in that they grab ahold of a single incident, a particular appointee or any other item even as small as a tweet and just sink their teeth in and, like a bulldog, refuse to release and will remain attached in attack mode even if it kills their credibility because they are serving the cause. What cause? Don’t ask us, ask them. They probably believe they are serving some purpose saving the party, nation, free world or even the planet, possibly the solar system; and this drives them right over the edge, we would say beyond the cusp, but whatever edge they are running off, it is not here.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Santorum Wins, Newt Soldiers On, Romney Still in the Lead

The first report I heard this morning on last night’s primaries in Alabama and Mississippi along with caucuses in Hawaii and American Samoa just had to mention Mitt Romney after referencing any of the other candidates. It went something like this; Santorum won both southern primaries in Mississippi and Alabama while Romney came in a competitive third also coming in behind Gingrich. Romney swept the caucuses in Hawaii and American Samoa. Santorum will pick up around forty delegates while Romney will garner fifty. Gingrich coming in second will add over thirty delegates to his count leaving Romney still comfortably in the lead.

 

The main themes of the news last night appeared to be that despite winning both primaries, Rick Santorum was still going to lose ground because of the delegates being assigned in the Pacific Islands. It was further pointed out that Rick Santorum can only win should Newt Gingrich leave the race and that possibility was hashed out until after Gingrich spoke showing all indications of continuing to the bitter end. This slid the conversation to how Mitt Romney winning the nomination was now guaranteed and an overly long string of attempts to rationalize the reasoning behind Newt Gingrich remaining in the race. I thought maybe I might share my insights on the rest of the Republican delegate race heading for the Convention.

 

I have a little difference of opinion with the so-called experts and pundits about Gingrich remaining in the race will solely work to thwart any chance for Rick Santorum to win the nomination outright. The reasoning for this line of thinking is based upon the primary belief that almost every vote won by Gingrich would have otherwise been a vote for Rick Santorum. I find this a difficult point to swallow. While I will grant that very likely three fourths of the Gingrich support is diverted from Santorum with fifteen to twenty percent are taken from Romney, the remainder very probably would have sat out the primaries. Some of my thinking has been due to the fact that in many states the numbers of votes being cast in the Republican Primaries have been higher than the average as the race is tighter and more competitive and thus stirring up increased participation. The real question is what is Newt Gingrich thinking which has him believing that he can actually win the nomination?

 

My theory has it that Newt Gingrich does not believe he is going to win the nomination any more than does Ron Paul. Newt also resembles Ron Paul in that he believes he is the only candidate representing his views which is a vitally necessary message which must be professed no matter what the consequences. I suspect Gingrich has another reason to remain to the bitter end, and that is because he believes that he and Santorum together can garner sufficient delegates to prevent a first round nomination of Mitt Romney thus leading to that mystical political state, a bartered convention. Should the Republican Convention end up unable to give any of the candidates over fifty percent of the vote, then the bartering and maneuvering begins. If the divide is such that Romney has less than fifty percent, say forty-five percent, with Santorum a close second at say thirty-nine percent and Gingrich holding fourteen percent with Ron Paul holding the remaining 2 percent, insufficient for Ron Paul to put anybody over the top. This places Newt Gingrich in the spot of king-maker as whoever he backs would easily win with their delegates added together. My suspicion is even more absurd as I can easily envision Newt Gingrich presenting himself to the Convention as the sole candidate not destroyed by the process as both Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney had focused their aim on each other leaving Newt safely on the sidelines away from the mud-slinging.

 

For those who claim that the only result that can come out of Newt Gingrich remaining in the race taking most, but not all, of his votes and delegates from supporting Rick Santorum thus keeping him from winning outright have overlooked a small matter. My thought is that when Mitt Romney falls short of the necessary delegate count we will find that this will be due to the small but still measurable number of votes and delegates stolen away by Newt Gingrich and simply having the votes he took away from Santorum being insufficient to have put him over the top anyways. So, it is possible that it will be better for Santorum to have Gingrich in the thick of things instead of dropping out of the race. Finally, should we end up with a brokered convention, actually a convention that goes past the first vote casting before reaching a nomination, it is more likely that Rick Santorum would be able to enlist the support from Newt Gingrich than would Mitt Romney. The drawback would be that after a certain number of ballots have been held, some states release their delegates from their elected obligations allowing them to vote for whoever they choose. This would very likely lead to the so-called Republican elites making the decision on who would be the candidate. Even if this was not the real reason for a Romney win, it would be suspected should he not have reached the magic number of delegates through the primary process and a perceived back-room deal appeared responsible for a Romney candidacy. Such a perception would weaken Mitt Romney’s campaign from the outset which might affect the outcome of the national election in November. The best result for the Republican Party is for one candidate, whichever one is less important than the manner, to win the nomination outright through the primary votes and not reliant on super delegates or other non-elected delegates being the deciders.

 

Beyond the Cusp