"On the Current State of Labor" or "How to be a Twinkie in a Ding Dong World"

The Twinkie is dead. At least for now.
Many on the right are placing the blame squarely on organized labor and I'm inclined to agree. Of course, there is some poor management to blame as well. But, to paraphrase one labor organizer, "they kept telling us that they were going out of business and they needed more and more money from us!" Well, buddy, I guess they were right.

To truly understand the downfall of Hostess and the current demonization of business generally, let's break business down into its most basic form: you.

Now, you may or may not run a business; don't be confused. Even if you are employed by a company (in fact, even if you are unemployed), you are your own business. You want something from your employer: a paycheck. Your employer wants something from you: your labor (physical, intellectual, or both). It's as simple a business transaction as they come.

To keep your business going, you have certain expenses such as food, clothing, shelter, etc, which are other business transactions you enter into.

Unfortunately, when we think of "doing business,"images of setting up shop, complicated paperwork, and selling products arrise. But that's not business at all. Business is simply two parties entering into an agreement of their own free will (i.e. "if you do "X," I'll do "Y").

So consider this: your employer is actually your customer. They are purchasing your product. As such, this adversarial system that we find in place today makes absolutely no sense. That's not how you treat a customer.

You give your customer good service and, if you are willing to barter on your price, you can always turn down a customer's offer.

In fact, that's what no one seems to accept: you don't have to work for anyone you don't want to work for! You can go someplace where you, as a "business" can demand a higher price for your product. And if you can't (i.e. your product isn't worth any more than what you're currently getting), that's not the businesses' fault. It's yours. Perhaps you should look to expanding what you have to offer through education. Or maybe you should even look to actually starting a business of your own.

I'm not being caviler about this. I understand how hard that can be. But this is America. The American Spirit isn't one of looking to the government or a union and asking for help. It's one of blazing your own trail and, through hard work, making it all on your own.


Further Reading:
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

H/T to Tim Hawkins for the second half of the title.

Maybe We're the RINOs

A thought occurred to me today. Conservatives often use the term "RINOs" (Republican In Name Only) to refer to members of the Republican party who don't share the values of the party's base. People like the "establishment" types, those who run as Republicans simply because the Democrat spot on the ticket was full, and so forth.

But, after the crap that was pulled at the Convention, I'm starting to wonder. Maybe, just maybe, we're the RINOs. Maybe the Republican party has left its base so far in the dust that we conservatives just aren't Republicans anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not calling for any third-party nonsense. Trust me. As a Canadian, I know how badly this works. But I just don't know if we can take back what once was our party.

#Occupy 2012

Later today (I really need to go to bed), I'm going to be heading to a rally celebrating the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests. When it comes to news, I often find myself thinking "wow, that was a year ago already?" However, with #Occupy, my thought is closer to "wow, it's only been a year?"

The fact is, #Occupy dropped off the map so quickly, it became a distant memory almost instantly. Truly, this was no Tea Party.

You can expect loads of photos later. I can only imagine what stories I'll have.

The Left's War on Women

With all this talk going on about the supposed “War on Women,” I wanted to take a moment to call attention to the true attackers of womanhood: the left.

The left, you see, hates conservative women, particularly those who choose traditionally “womanly” pursuits.  Stay-at-home mothers, for example, are ridiculed by the left. To be a “strong  woman,” a woman must get a degree and a career. Homemaking can only be a sign of a weak, repressed woman; a girl, really, forced to “make me a sammich” at the hand of her repressive, abusive husband.

Perhaps this is merely anecdotal evidence, but I love conservative women so much that I found one for myself and married her. And let me tell you, my wife is anything but weak.

But you know what she wants more than anything? To be a mother. In fact, she even wants to homeschool! Yet another favorite target of liberal attacks.

The funny thing is, when a woman actually does go out and get a career, liberals will still attack them with pathetic ad homonym name-calling. On Twitter, I watch as Dana Loesch (@DLoesch), among others, is constantly pelted with disgusting names which I will refrain from repeating (but rest assured that a good many of them are gender-specific).  Dana is a conservative woman with a job - and one she is excellent at. However, the left seems to think that a woman can only be of any use when she has also converted her thinking to liberalism.

Yet, for all the left’s talk of promoting women, what do their actions show? The liberals in Hollywood use their films to promote the objectification of women. So to do the “enlightened” Washington elite by creating policies that encourage sexual promiscuity (particularly among young people) that can only serve to nurture broken, shallow relationships.

Women are made to believe that if they’re not attractive enough, if they don’t show enough skin, or if their personality doesn’t suggest that they’re a potential sex partner, that they’re not good enough. It’s disgusting and damaging to our society how Hollywood keeps pushing body image and sex in the faces of our girls and young women.

This is progressive? This is good for women? How can the Democrats keep claiming to be the party of women when they serve only to destroy things like faith, family, and friendship: all things that, at the core of our beings, we all long for. It is these things, not sex, not some airbrushed, unattainable body that women should be pointed towards as a goal in life.

But the left keeps pandering and promoting the basest of human desires in a bid not to promote women but to promote themselves.

It will remain the Conservative who truly stands for the rights of the female.  The conservative believes that all were created equal and a woman has all the say on the subject of her own destiny.

Liberalism and the Ad Homonym

Someone other than Winston Churchill once said that “if you’re 20 and aren’t a liberal, you haven’t a heart and if you’re 40 and aren’t a conservative, you haven’t a brain.” The prophet Jermiah wrote in Jeremiah 17:9 that "the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Put simply, my point is that liberalism hinges on emotional arguments, that is to say fallacious logic. Chief among these is the Ad Homonym.

Literally meaning “against the man,” the ad homonym is a logical fallacy based upon an attack on an arguer rather than his or her argument. To illustrate this cartoonishly,  an absurdly illogical argument against Barack Obama’s economic policy would be “he’s wrong because he has big ears.”

As true as the statement about his ears may be, it has absolutely no bearing on his grasp of economics.

While I cannot account for every self-professed conservative on every forum in every dark corner of the internet, conservatives generally fall back to this base rhetorical bludgeon far less often.

I still remember attempting to have logical conversations with liberals during the Bush presidency. I would, for example, attempt to explain the Iraq war and would more often than not be confronted with a position that roughly boiled down to “Bush is a Nazi!” (See Reductio ad Hitlerum or Goodwin's Law.)

Never mind the fact that Nazis were socialists; Bush’s ideology was irrelevant in a debate about the merits of a particular war.

Now, if Mr. Bush were again running for political office and there was actually reasonable suspicion that he were indeed a Nazi, then that might mean something.

Liberalism is a logic-free hodgepodge of feelings and imagination run amok. John Lenon can "imagine" all he likes, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a world populated by human beings and true conservatives seek to overcome this obstacle by employing our greatest asset: the mind.

To clarify, I don't believe that liberals are devoid of a mind, nor are conservatives missing their hearts. Rather, I believe that liberalism, and leftist ideologies generally, can only be advanced when logic is pushed aside and feelings are substituted.



I've attached an example after the jump. It contains adult language that I considered redacting but its target is the late great Andrew Breitbart. So in his honor: This is who they are, this is what they do. NSFW.

GOING DARK: Government Must Step Up to Protect Bloggers

Today many blogs are going dark to raise awareness of so-called "SWATting" attacks.
Read more here.

Gay Christians

This blog is intended to mostly be about conservative politics. However, for a conservative Christian like myself, I find that politics and my faith are quite interrelated. The following blog post takes the basis for its logic from the Christian faith. I don't plan on doing this often but every so often, religious items will need to be addressed and I will address them from the standpoint of the Christian faith.

It’s becoming increasingly acceptable, even in the Christian community for someone to label themselves a “gay Christian.”

Is this possible? Certainly: the same way it’s possible to be a “liar Christian,” a “thief Christian,” or an “adulterous Christian.” The reality is the Bible makes quite clear that homosexuality is a sin (1 Cor. 6:9). And to be clear on our terms, I reject on its face the idea that one is a homosexual but rather, I cleave to the idea that one practices homosexuality.

The Bible also makes another important thing very clear: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Frankly, every Christian (and every human, for that matter) struggles with sin. For some, it’s sins of the mind. For others, it’s sexual sins. For still others, perhaps they steal or defraud.

Jesus said that the most important of all the Commandments is the one where God requires that “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me (Matt. 22:36-40).” We might not realize it, but this is also the Commandment most often broken.

That Commandment generally spurs images of idols in our minds but when we commit a sin — any sin — we have put that “god” before Him.  All too often, however, rather than seeking forgiveness and reconciling with our Father, we attempt instead to rationalize the sin and ignore God because we can’t live in sin and have a good relationship with Him simultaneously.

If you wronged your friend and refused to apologize, would you expect that relationship to continue as though nothing happened? Particularly if you kept doing whatever action hurt them in the first place? Certainly not.

How then, could a Christian living in sin — any sin — expect to not only maintain but further their relationship with God? It doesn’t make sense. So can a person who engages in homosexual activity be a Christian? Yes. But no church should ever make the mistake of doing anything except pointing that person to the only person that can help them: Jesus Christ.

For those of us that have accepted Christ as our savior, we have done so in spite of ourselves. To those who seek to excuse behavior due to genetic predisposition, I say that we were, indeed, "born that way" — as sinners. We are all broken but Jesus wants to make us new.

But we simply cannot ignore scripture in an attempt to spare people's feelings. That being said, we must remember the words of Jesus: "do not judge lest ye be judged (Matt 7:1)." We know that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23)." All of us.

So I do not condem homosexuals on an individual basis (I do condem homosexuality itself). In fact, I am good friends with several people who openly practice homosexuality. They know that I believe they are wrong but they also know that I love them none the less. If I didn't love them, how could I expect to point them to Christ?

To cite an overused expression, "love the sinner, hate the sin" and the conservative Christian does just that.

Liberty: Where it Ends

America is founded on the basic beliefs in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These rights, “endowed by our creator,” are vast. However, so many of the debates roiling in this country today can ultimately be traced to one question: where do our rights end?

I won’t make you wait to the end of this post for an answer to the question.

Your rights end where someone else’s begin.

It is on this basis that conservatives oppose something such as abortion. The fact of the matter is, it’s the right-wing that defends freedom will but we oppose abortion because we believe that abortion robs the right of life from another human; abortion infringes on that person’s rights.

To use an example we can all agree on, you do not have the right to rob someone’s house because you are infringing on their right to own private property. You cannot murder someone based on the same logic.

Yet, the liberal would have you believe that it is up to the government to create arbitrary limits on your rights and liberties based on what is “fair.” Who gets to define “fair?” They do. This is because the liberal rejects the idea of God-given rights and instead submits that you have only the rights granted to you by your government. You see, they know what’s best. (Mostly based on the current public opinion polls.)

The fact is that with God-given rights (or “natural law,” for those not inclined toward faith) have natural, logical boundaries. And if you think about it, why wouldn’t they? The universe has rules that govern seemingly every aspect of its existence: physics, logic, etc. The Civil Society simply seeks to codify these natural boundaries in an effort to universalize their enforcement across the Society, not to create (or eliminate) boundaries based on popular opinion or political expediency.

The liberal, however makes every choice with political expediency in mind so as to further his or her personal viewpoint. They way they trample the Constitution, the very basis by which we codify Natural Law, is clearly indicative of a desire to shape our country and society in their image: an artificial, unnatural image. Yet, given what we are taught in school, how is the average student to know that not all opinions are equally valid? The liberal, and all those to the left of them, ignore completely the nature of humankind.

They ignore nature (except, of course, to use it as a propaganda tool), and logic and above all, they ignore nature’s God.

If your rights do not end where the next person’s begin, there can only be two things: overlap, which can only cause conflict, and space.

Overlap occurs when two “rights” interfere with each other. For example, we all know that we have the right to private property. However, the government has created a “right” to welfare.  Uh oh! You have money and these other people don’t! Yoink! Thank goodness the government was there to fix that problem (that it itself created). (I’ll write at a later time about welfare. I’m not against it but it’s in desperate need of reform.)

Ok, that seems clear enough but what about this “space?”

When there’s space between where one person’s rights end and another’s begin, do you really think that the government will be satisfied to leave it be? Of course not! Where there is space, the government will find a way to occupy it.

The first example that springs to my mind is government regulation of speech. The leftist often argues that speech that he labels as “hate speech” should be banned (of course the speech that he argues as hateful is always speech from the right and never the poison spewed from the likes of Jeremiah Wright).

The Conservative, on the other hand, argues that all speech is protected up to the point where an individual’s speech creates both an “imminent” and “probable” threat to the rule of law. A true conservative would fight to the death to protect all speech: even speech he or she disagrees with.

But the leftist would seek to inject government into that contrived space between individuals. Using the false imagery of itself as a shield between the speaker and someone who might have their feelings hurt by his speech, the government stretches its tentacles into still more of our daily lives. Then how do we know where our liberty ends?

You’d better be a legal scholar or something to know what you can or can’t do because common sense just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Bloomberg, Soda, and the Nanny State

The "nanny state." Some have referred to this as the "wussification" of America: the idea the the government needs to be there at every twist and turn to protect you from yourself. Falling down and scraping your knee, you see, is the ultimate trauma and the government must ignore whatever liberty necessary to make sure you don't get a boo-boo.

Daddy—I mean Mayor Bloomberg has set his sights on yet another pointy corner that is the nursery we call New York City. Bloomberg is banning all sugary drinks over 16oz. Why? Because you might get fat and we're too dumb to know that. We're also too dumb, apparently, to figure out how to buy two drinks at the same time.

This coming after Bloomberg's salt and smoking bans.

Of course, you say, salt and smoking are bad for you. And so are big, sugary drinks!

And you're right. But it's none of your business. The only time the government gets to get involved with what I put in my body is when it's a substance that can make me a potential threat to those around me (think Causeway Cannibal).

Bloomberg may very well believe that he is acting benevolently: "assisting," as it were, in our decisions. But in truth, he is foisting his will upon the people of New York City. I have to wonder how much more liberty New Yorkers are willing to loose.

To quote Ben Franklin,

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" 

And for every new cupboard requiring a plastic lock (they don't know any better than to drink the stuff under the sink), the people of New York City loose more liberty and more of who they are: independent people who know how to take care of themselves. It's just their tyrannical mayor who doesn't believe that.

The ball is in your court, people of New York. What are you going to do?

UPDATE: May 31, 2012 14:41CDT
Real Clear Politics: Bloomberg on Soda Ban: "We're Simply Forcing You to Understand."
I rest my case.

UPDATE 2: May 31, 2012 20:20CDT
Politicker: Bloomberg to Support 'National Donut Day' Tomorrow
For pity's sake.


UPDATE 3: June 4, 2012 19:57CDT
New York Times: Bloomberg Backs Plan to Limit Arrests for Marijuana
It all makes sense now.

Reflecting on Memorial Day 2012

Through the past weekend, I noticed a common theme through the conservative media: Memorial Day has become too much about barbecues and sales and the weekend itself.

And I agree...mostly.

But when I think about Memorial Day, in addition to the services and the remembrance of the terrible cost of freedom, the images that pop into my mind are those of small town Americana; the gatherings, the celebration, and yes, the barbecues are, in a way, a perfectly fitting memorial.

What better way to honor those who fell for our freedom then to exercise those very freedoms? And how many of those brave souls spent the final moments of their lives recalling these scenes of home?

That being said we must never, ever forget. For if we forget, we can only be doomed to loose this land and all that she stands for.

Please Leave.

I was reading Laura Ingraham’s book The Obama Diaries today over lunch. I read the following quote and wanted to expound upon it.

“[Textbooks and teachers] also teach young people that it’s perfectly acceptable to loathe America while taking full advantage of all the benefits of living here.”

This reminded me of a belief that I’ve never fully thought through and has always sat on the “back burner” of my mind, so to speak. But I’ve thought it through now and say, with confidence, that if you don’t like America, LEAVE.

Seriously.

If you don’t like it, go find some place else that will allow you all the freedoms and opportunities you have here while somehow also fitting into whatever world view you’ve concocted. And good luck.

The reason, I think, that I’ve subconsciously rejected the idea of actually speaking this out loud is that it’s really harsh. And, believe it or not, I’m not a mean person. Plus, isn’t America supposed to be a “melting pot” of people and culture and ideas?

Yes! My idea doesn’t run counter to that, even if it seems to on the surface. But look deeper.

Wanting America to advance, wanting to fix problems and improve even more on this great society is not only okay but laudable. It’s those who seek to transform our country, to make it something that it’s not, to subvert the very intuitions that made our country exceptional: it’s those people with whom I have a problem.

I’ve stayed in quite a few hotels. If I have a problem with the hotel I’m staying in, what do I do (well, first I talk to the manager…my metaphor isn’t perfect. Stick with me.)? Do I demand that the hotel fix its backwards, unprogressive ways? Do I lead the staff in a complimentary-toiletry-armed workers’ revolution? Do I eat as much food as I could possibly stomach at the continental breakfast to try to “hit them where it hurts?” No. I leave.

I go to the hotel across the street. Besides, they have a pool.

But the fact of the matter is, there is no place as good as America. You could go to Canada or Western Europe for your free healthcare but you’d better be ready to get taxed to death.

You could go to China for your wealth redistribution but you’d better get ready to give up any opinion that isn’t endorsed by the state…if you want to live, that is.

Perhaps you’d like to move to Cuba: the socialist “paradise” that people are risking their very lives to flee every day. The good news is, you wouldn’t have to worry about any other boat traffic in that direction. You might see a lot of people with empty oil barrels strapped to their ’58 Chevy heading back the other way.

There’s always the option of moving to Latin America. I know a good bulletproof vest manufacturer I’d be happy to recommend.

Finally, there’s the most difficult option of all: perhaps you could take a look around you and consider the idea the America isn’t such a bad place after all and that attempting to impose your will on your neighbors isn’t fair.

After all, Constitutional governance isn’t about the imposition of anyone’s will on anyone else. Rather, it is a system by which we maintain the Civil Society for our posterity.

Join with us to help build a stronger America for ourselves and our children.

Or don’t. And find some other place to screw up.