A Nod To The Gods

I think educated, capable, experienced, honest, would be on my list well before the gender, race, or sexual preference.

……why don’t a majority of Americans?
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This is Canada ‘s Top Ten List of America ‘s Stupidity…

10. Only in America … Could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 a plate campaign fund-raising event.

9. Only in America … Could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black while only 14% of the population is black. 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans – 3X the rate that go
to whites, 5X the rate that go to Hispanics!

8. Only in America … Could they have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and
Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

7. Only in America … Can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

6. Only in America … Would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just ‘magically’ become American citizens.

5. Only in America … Could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country’s Constitution be thought of as “extremists.”

4. Only in America … Could you need to present a driver’s license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

3. Only in America … Could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas
went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. Oil company (Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

2. Only in America … Could the government collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year – for total spending of
$7Million PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn’t have nearly enough money.

1. Only in America … Could the rich people – who pay 86% of all income taxes – be accused of not paying their “fair share” by people who don’t pay any income tax at all.”

The cries for income equality by Obama and his peeps are making the rounds on all of the lame stream media networks. Obama is screeching about this issue because they need a shiny new object to distract from Obamacare and the upcoming 2014 elections and at the same time placing blame for the troubles of the poor/middle class/students.

Democrats have turned this into an art form, they very are good at it, and the uninformed suck it up like a sponge. They perceive this as another injustice done to them by the evil Republicans and bingo, the democrats get the votes, even though the uninformed voter is in reality, making his plight worse.

2004 essay by Paul Graham, it is long but worth the read.
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Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?

I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.

Read it all here

Amazing contrast from past to present to startling potential future. Go here now and read it in it’s entirety.
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I now live in Northern California, in the heart of the Bay Area, thousands of miles away from my homeland.
And yet the poison of Soviet propaganda seeps through college dorms just as it did in Soviet classrooms.

Living in the Soviet Union, being bombarded with similar nonsense, we had nothing to contradict it. When we walked outside the school, the everyday reality had no traces of the wealth afforded by capitalism. We lived in the grayness and that grayness was all there was.

Americans leave school to go home and they drop by a mall to buy something from an incredible selection of wealth and choice afforded by capitalism. They drop by a small corner store, which could probably feed a savvy Soviet village for a month (dog food is food, too, you know), and they pick up some “entertainment food” that did not exist in the USSR, in quantities that weren’t affordable for an average Soviet family.

Then they go home and write essays on their expensive iPads about how they don’t have the American Dream.

Now, most American news sources are no different than Pravda and Izvestia. Now, the government used the IRS to stifle political opposition. Now, ObamaCare is a wealth redistribution platform disguised as a common good. Now, Obama is being portrayed in academia and the media alike as a charismatic, messianic, “progressive” figure, fighting for the “underdog.” He would feel right at home as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Now, Obama Youths are me, from decades ago. Leninist academia has had its way with them. Now, just like Soviet leaders, American leaders give lip-service to “social justice” while stocking up on personal wealth for their families.

There’s nothing new under the sun. I’m hardly the only ex-Soviet to point out the parallels. But some things matter enough to bear repeating.

Dear beautiful America, please, stop moving Forward.