Playing Around
Posted By Guy Smith on November 14, 2011
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If you don’t play with yourself, you never learn to play well with others.
Welcome ... and beware
Welcome to the virtual home of Guy Smith, a San Francisco based writer, songwriter and political provocateur. Herein are essays – collecting like literary dust bunnies – covering topics, ranging wide, from macro economics to sex in San Francisco streets to shameless self-promotion of my books and speaking engagements. Strap in tiger … this blog can be a bumpy ride (so is his Twitter feed @guyshomenet).
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Unconcealed Uneasiness
Posted By Guy Smith on October 28, 2011
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Fear is effective and entertaining. If you don’t believe people are amused by fear, just watch any Hollywood horror film or a presidential primary.
In my book Shooting The Bull, a handy guide on propaganda analysis, of the 71 forms of fibs, lies, canards, casuistry, flummery, tergiversation, artifice and tarradiddle, the Lie of Fear was foremost. Candidates rely on scaring people into polling booths – to cast with trembling hands votes for candidates that panicked them the most about the other candidates. Pundits, politicos and other disreputable sorts do the same, as witnessed by entirely entertaining attempts from the entrenched left to argue against the ascendancy of a conservative black republican.
In 1988 the state of Florida (a.k.a. America’s Retirement Home) dared to dismiss an ongoing fear campaign orchestrated by Barack Obama’s own Joyce Foundation, wherein they portrayed guns as evil and gun owners as lunatics. In an era where only 10 states permitted people to carry firearms concealed, Florida decided to expand that cluster by one. Professional fear mongers descended upon the state like a flock of ugly and voracious Turkey Vultures (which, come to think upon it, would be a good nickname for lobbyists). Yet the “Gunshine State” elected to permit packing, which ignited a chain reaction throughout most of the other states. Today, 42 states allow some form of concealed carrying without discrimination aside from disallowing felons the option.
Barack Obama’s Illinois is the only state that denies any form of concealed carry.
Interestingly, the progressive notion of citizens concealing cannons caused many folks to fear … for a while. Once a state enacted concealed carry legislation and carnage failed to come, fear subsided. A recent Gallup Poll indicates that the number of people favoring stricter gun control is at an all time low while gun ownership is at an all time high (and I’ll note most working criminologists believe that strangers calling people’s homes and asking if they own a gun produces artificially low response rates). The chart (click to beef up) illustrates that as states converted to the controversial condition of condoning concealed carry, it slowly quit being controversial because nobody feared their fellow residents.
Well, criminals did.
One counter argument posed to fear mongering Joyce Foundation flunkies was that the uncertainty principle of people packing pistols would cause common criminals to think twice. In no-carry states such as Illinois, any garden variety thug can mug ATM patrons without fear of catching a bullet. That class of criminal is much rarer in Texas or the 41 other states that do not deny concealed carry to commoners. Indeed, criminologists expected violent crime to start rising in 2001 as the percentage of the population composed of young males (who typically are the ones prone to violent stupidity) grew. This failed to occur because by that time citizens in more than 31 states kept cons second guessing.
Fear is rapidly becoming a weak tool. When the citizens’ media took over the national conversation from the mainstream variety, fear’s short shelf life shrank. With luck, fear mongering will be useless in our life time.
Culling Country
Posted By Guy Smith on October 21, 2011
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Government is enjoying the fruits of your labor.
In a nation that produces lots of lucre, The People seem to have little of the stuff. The Occupy Wall Street crowd and other oddballs blame banks, though any honest reading of recent economic insanity insists that government is the culprit (as always). Our Feds bailed out buddies in banking instead of letting those who took risks take haircuts. Yet this masks the major underlying source of our fiscal flailing.
In bygone days when government performed only essential services and before the Supreme Court devolved America into a mere democracy, government at all levels ate a respectable 9% of national income, with the bulk being spent at the state and local levels (which is a smart system because local politicians are easier to tar and feather, and thus tend to be more obedient). Today your public “servants” suck 45% of America’s life blood, mainly at the federal level, leaving the people paupers. Women’s liberation allowed women to leave the home and find jobs, which they had to do because no one-income family could survive the newly engorged tax burden (click the chart to engorge it).
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
The cost of inappropriate regulation simply amplifies our situation into an elaborate form of slavery.
Reversing the process is problematic because of the motivations of people involved (and by “people” I do not mean politicians, who lack standing in the human community). Three primary packs of profiteers pilfer via government. First and least worrisome are government workers, who like the rest of us, want good jobs that pay well. The problem is that government employees help elect their bosses, and thus fight harder than wounded wolverine when budget cuts are proposed. Have a look at recent Wisconsin wars whereby teachers skipped class to scream in television camera lenses in failed attempts to forestall reduced job profitability.
If I could elect my supervisors, I would have never quit my day job.
So-called capitalist are the next band of bandits. Most insane legislation – such as the prohibition against interstate selling of health insurance – is designed to benefit large corporations. Most inane spending programs – such as the everlasting Osprey aircraft, forced upon an unwilling military in order to enrich one Senator’s state – benefits corporations who otherwise would be forced to produce something of real value. Like public employees campaigning for candidates who will protect their jobs, corporations and trade groups solicit specie and create free income.
Which explain why World War II mohair subsidies live longer than vampires (and both classify as blood suckers).
Bank bailouts and similar stunts are outright theft, as is welfare, performing arts grants and congressional pensions. No need for me to elaborate on the nature of theft except to say that horse thieves are normally dangled from tall trees, which makes for good public policy and should be expanded beyond equine misappropriation.
With so many groups effectively encouraging corrupt government, reversing the trend seems Sisyphean. Yet any cowboy with multiple saddle sores can attest that one good way to thin herds is to first split them. Separating one steer from the pack creates a smaller and less defensible herd. Penning one cow at a time eventually assures all get slaughtered. The process starts by targeting the weakest first, who the rest of the pack sacrifices to save themselves. Once thinned, the others become easy picking, or willingly walk into the coral out of herd instinct.
Thieves may be the best initial target. Aside from thieves themselves, everybody resents theft. Though we all have different ideas about whom the biggest thieves are, it is easier to unify various ideological factions to cut the cancer of blatant theft from the body politic. Defining theft as drawing from public coffers without providing necessary products and services, and including all such forms of theft therein, sets the stage for popular (and I hate to say it, populist) force. Adding corporate profiteers, subsidized farmers and welfare recipients into the same pen sets the stage for thinning the three headed herd by one.
If managed well, savings reenter the economy and start growing private sector jobs, which will be necessary because the next cows to be culled are public employees. Government pays a lot of people to do unnecessary and damaging work. The Energy Department – whose original mission was to make America energy independent, and in which it has utterly failed – employs about 109,000 people (including contractors) to mismanage America’s primary tool of economic growth. The Agriculture Department – charged with helping farmers do what they have for several thousand years – pays nearly 106,000 head, including administrators who subsidize goat herders to maintain their flocks in case we need to make wool overcoats for soldiers.
All told, Uncle Sugar salaries 1,430,000 people outside of the military and the postal service (and given how many postal workers go gun crazy, perhaps we should shift them from one branch of government to another). Lopping off the first million would suffice.
Capping capitalists suckling at your financial teat then becomes an automatic action. Eliminating entire federal departments and their bulging staffs also eliminates their spendthrift authority. It also becomes easier to identify and eliminate unauthorized expenditures that do not address departmental tasks. Yes, Congress might devise more direct ways to propel pork to constituent corporations, but it won’t be easy as the machinery of government becomes more narrowly defined, perhaps back to its original enumerated list of responsibilities.
Repeat at the State level.
Split the herd and eat the weakest first … at a dinning table next to the barbed wire fence. This way all the other cattle accept their eventual fate.
Destructive Designers
Posted By Guy Smith on October 14, 2011
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The Taliban had a blast blowing up non-Islamic icons.
Iconic footage (pun intended) of pre 9/11 Taliban tanks blasting ancient and historically significant Buddha statues demonstrate the demonic desires of those who deign to design societies (a.k.a. politicians and terrorists, if I may be redundant). Their goal was to obliterate knowledge of competing religious beliefs, which pretty well summarizes jihadist ideology. There is nothing new in this tactic, for it has been tried by warriors and mighty empires for as long as humans carried clubs or Colts.
It always fails in the long run.
For destruction to work, it has to be complete. Leave any trace of a competing government, tribe or religion and the seeds for resentment and resistance are planted. People hold grudges against oppressors, to which anyone from Scotland or Atlanta will attest. Eradication is the only sure way of achieving dominance through destruction, and nothing short of planetary nuclear annihilation assures the destruction of an enemy (and this elaborate suicide has undesirable side effects, though I find oddly calming the thought of Ayman al-Zawahri offing himself).
One reason social engineering through destruction never works is that … continue reading …
Vista Advantage
Posted By Guy Smith on October 12, 2011
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Perspective poisons prejudice, which is why so many people avoid it.
Prejudices are comfortable blankets of selective ignorance. Though not necessarily evil (my prejudice against broccoli harms nobody) prejudice limits one to narrow insights and inflexibility. Gaining broad perspective is an elegant cure that has fallen into disuse.
Compare Naples and Naples, the Italian and Floridian varieties. Kindly stated, Naples Italy is at present a dirty town with dirty streets and dirtier politicians. The only reason for going to Naples is to leave while you still have your wallet (head for the ferry docks to take you to Capri). Gator State Naples, on your other hand, is a well-heeled, monied retirement Mecca, which does not mean it is littered with old Muslims. It is simply a clean little town with a government about as clean as any body infected with politicians can.
Perspective rarely comes into play where prejudice presides. Citizens in Los Angeles and New York are overly fond of referring to the center of America as “fly-over country”, though James McMurtry more poetically calls it “the middle”. Coastal corkheads chastise those in the middle for being ignorant since they lack the same set of references and understanding as urbanites (one Hollywood hick insisted that folks in the middle were ignorant for lack of foreign travel, though I suspect there are plenty of WWII, Korean, Viet Nam, Afghan and Iraqi vets in Kansas who would decline to agree). Yet take your average Hollywood Hillbilly to a typical Kansas farming town, and he’ll have difficulty holding his own in conversation concerning the fertilizer and water spread mechanics of wheat production, which is more valuable than all his international travel experience because you can eat wheat.
That being said, the eleven residents of Frederick, Kansas likely have little perspective on the nature of homosexuals (unless that is the cause behind their tiny population), which the man from Hollywood likely possesses, especially if he has a degree in theater. Frederick farmers and Tinsel Town Tinkerbelles are as ignorant as the other, but are ignorant on different subjects. Both can learn from the other if willing, though that is unlikely. Kansas kin are raised with their beliefs, know their neighbors, country and soil of their county. Melrose mavens prefer to believe in their self-appointed ‘superiority’ and likely would never deign to drive through fly-over country.
Prejudices preserved.
Yet once exposed to the other under convivial conditions, the two would soon discover what many well-traveled folk have. Stripped of ideology, theology and pretention, people everywhere basically want the same things. They want to live happy and fulfilled lives. They want their kids to have it better than they did. They want to be left alone, to peacefully pursue their passions. Only predilections for controlling one another, to rob select countrymen of their perogatives, cause meaningful differences and prevent pursuit of happiness, fulfillment and spoiled children. The San Francisco sadist who seeks disarming their Sylvan Grove sisters does so through failed perspective. Sinister Sylvan’s who find ways of keeping San Francisco’s Jims and Sams from wedding do likewise.
Stipulated that most everyone seeks the same things in life then puts into instant perspective the basic trouble in America. It isn’t liberals against conservatives, Yankees against Rebels, coastal citizens against midland members. It is us against politicians, the latter being the source of discontent, conflict and the tool for clubbing your fellow American in order to steal their liberties. If partisan prejudices were abated, then Mr. Hollywood and Mrs. Farmer would likely take pitchforks to their congress critters, then part in peaceful perspective.