Peter Schweizer’s Congressional Reforms

1. Ban the solicitation or receipt of campaign contributions while Congress is in session in Washington.
2. Place an outright ban on contributions and solicitations involving lobbyists or governmental contractors.
3. Restrict the ability of the Permanent Political Class (PPC) to convert campaign money into a lifestyle subsidy. Loaning money to your campaign is fine as long as you don’t collect interest.
4. Ban leadership PACs.
5. Restrict the ability of the PPC to extort money for their families through political power. We need to ban immediate family members (spouses and children) from registering as lobbyists. Period. We also need to prevent members of Congress from putting family members on the payroll.

Source: Extortion. How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets (2013) by Peter Schweizer.

Good ideas but I wonder how many in Congress will actually embrace these reforms. Probably not a whole lot since most are addicted to the money. And the power.

The Six Preservations of Men

If a ruler doesn’t select men around him who doesn’t’ have six preservations then he will lose his power. The six preservations are: Benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, trust (good faith), courage, and last planning.

Here’s how to select men with these qualities:

Make men rich and observe whether they do not commit offenses. Give them rank and observe whether they do not become arrogant. Entrust them with responsibilities and see whether they will not change. Employ them and see whether they will not conceal anything. Endanger them and see whether they are not afraid. Give them the management of affairs and see whether they are not perplexed. 

If you make them rich but they do not commit offenses, they are benevolent. If you give them rank and they do not grow arrogant, they are righteous. If you entrust them with office and they do not change, they are loyal. If you employ them and they do not conceal anything, they are trustworthy. If you put them in danger and they are not afraid, they are courageous. If you give them management of affairs and they are not perplexed, they are capable of making plans.

Source: The Six Secret Teaching on the Way of Strategy. A Manual from Ancient China in the Tradition of The Art of War (1993) translated by Ralph D. Sawyer.

In the same chapter, The T’ai Kung talks about the “three treasures” rulers should never loan to other men otherwise the ruler will lose his awesomeness as Kung puts. The treasures are great agriculture, great industry, and great commerce.

The American Founding: Revolutionary or Conservative? lecture notes

Three National Crises:

1. The American Revolution. When the Democrat-Republican party won the election over the Federalists party it was the first time a different type of gov’t came into power without crises.
2. The Civil War. The first time in American history that slavery was declared a good practice. Before that the Founders and people at that time condemned it. The human being is a product of time and circumstances. Not of nature or God’s providence. Time and circumstances made slaves inferior and slave owners get to own them.
3. Progressivism. Human beings are evolving. Societies are evolving.

What caused America? See Aristotle’s Four Causes.

1. The material cause- the land and the people.
2. The efficient cause- the Founders.
3. The formal cause- the Constitution.
4. The final cause- the principles in the Declaration of Independence.

Is the Constitution a revolutionary or a conservative document? It’s both. It’s conservative because of God’s law doesn’t change and is eternal. Also, the Founders talked about reason controlling the passions of men. The Constitution is revolutionary because it said nobody is born to be king. No-one can own another person. We are responsible for ourselves.

Source: The American Founding: Revolutionary or Conservative? from Hillsdale.edu.

Spooky Restaurant Object Manipulation

Spooky

This video originally came from The Blaze.com (March 21). Their video is a little longer.

What’s interesting is the glass just flew off the counter while nothing around the glass was disturbed. So, if this was wind or vibrations you would think those items would be disturbed too. Also, notice how the object seems to curve when it reaches the end of the counter. It didn’t follow a straight trajectory. If this is a fake it is a pretty good one.

It sure took a while for the store employee to pick up the broken glass.

Jay Carney deflects question about Russian commentator’s threat to ‘vaporize’ America

From Glenn Beck.com (March 18):

During a press briefing yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney brushed off a question from ABC News’ chief White House correspondent Jon Karl about Russian state television anchor Dmitry Kiselyov’s comments that “Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash.”

Below is a transcript of the back and forth between Karl and Carney:

KARL: And let me ask you just something on — it was on Russian television, state-controlled television, the main state-controlled channel. Dmitry Kiselyov, a prominent Russian television anchor, posed in front of a mushroom cloud and warned that Russia is the only country in the world capable of turning the U.S. into “radioactive dust.” I mention this because this is state-controlled Russian television, which, as we know, doesn’t generally broadcast stuff that is not signed off by the government of Russia. What is your sense when you hear something like that?

CARNEY: I mean, that people say crazy things on TV all the time.

KARL: Yes, but this is Russian state-controlled TV. I take your point entirely, but — (laughter) — but this is –

CARNEY: We’re focused on the actions of the Russian government. We’re focused on the support we’re providing to the Ukrainian government. We’re focused on marshaling a strategy with our partners around the world, especially in Europe, for how to deal with this challenge posed by Russia. And we are making sure that Russia is incurring costs for the provocations it has engaged in and the actions that it’s taken. That’s what we’re focused on right now, and those costs are real and they will increase if Russia continues down this path.

[read more]

What Jay Carney and the rest of the lame stream press doesn’t get is that Russia’s press, like most state owned presses, are the gov’ts press secretary. The press doesn’t say anything that the State in this case Putin doesn’t agree with. Or else the press goes to jail or worse.

Also, the Russia’s press is saying what Putin is thinking. That he doesn’t fear Obama. Hence, he doesn’t fear America. That’s what that “radioactive dust” remark means. Not that Putin would actually start a nuclear war with America.

In contrast with Obama, is Ronald Reagan. The enemies feared America and our allies respected America when he was president. Not so with Obama. When Reagan made that off-the-cuff remark that bombing would begin in 5 minutes—meaning bombing the USSR—the Soviet leaders crapped in their pants. Well, not literally of course. But I bet you their hearts skipped a beat momentarily.

Why Capitalism Works video

Source: Why Capitalism Works course from Prager University.com.

The Age of Envy

Here are excerpts from a 1952 article that free-market journalist (you don’t hear those three words together very often anymore)  Henry Hazlitt wrote:

…Envy has been an attribute of human nature from the dawn of history. But it has always hitherto been regarded as a sin. Ovid thought it “the meanest of the vices.” The Bible calls it a “rottenness of the bones.” “From envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,” says the Book of Common Prayer, “Good Lord deliver us.”

Yet today envy is glorified as a virtue. Politicians advocate measures, not because they will bring any material benefit to anyone, but on the ground that they may assuage the public envy which they themselves have helped to inflame. Hitler promised that nobody would be permitted to have an income of more than 1,000 marks a month or be allowed to live on the income from investments. Franklin D. Roosevelt once proposed a limit of $25,000 a year on incomes.

People sometimes become Socialists or Communists through a desire to abolish poverty, but when their ill-conceived schemes fail to bring this result, their feeling too often degenerates into mere hatred and envy of the rich. The success of Marx sprang from his contemptuous dismissal as “utopianism” of all peaceable or constructive attempts to relieve poverty, and from his naked appeal to hatred, envy, and class warfare against the well-to-do and successful.

The prevailing ideology today is a diluted form of Marxism, even on the part of many of those who think themselves anti-Marxist or anti-Communist. The emphasis of most “welfare state” proposals today is on hurting or impoverishing the rich rather than on helping or enriching the poor. Most of these measures surely accomplish the former, and usually the opposite of the latter. They level down, not up. [read more]

His words are as true today as they are back then.

Hazlitt wrote a book called Economics in One Lesson which is really good intro to economics. One of the better ones.

Savagisms

Here is a partial list of Michael Save terms and definitions I think are clever:

Briefcase Mafia- trial lawyers.

Brown Shorts- radical gay activists.

Caesars of Hollywood- actors and actresses who move among us as if they were gods.

Christophobia- the loathing and hatred of Christianity by bigoted, intolerant, secular leftists.

Condo Commies- wealthy socialists.

Corned-beef Commies- unhealthy, wealthy, socialists.

Demicans- Republicans who act like Democrats.

Demoncrats- a euphemistic term for godless Democrats.

EPA- Environmental Propaganda Agency.

The Grim Reefer Gang- advocates for medical marijuana.

Government-Media Complex- unholy alliance between big government and media elites.

Headcutters in Headscarfs- evangelists who spread the religion of peace by cutting people to pieces.

Houses of Porn and Scorn- today’s “liberal” colleges.

Institutes of Lower Living- colleges where junior sheeple can get the finest illiberal education that taxpayer money can buy.

Kneejerk Conservatism- reflexive right-wingers who never ask “Why?” when conservative leaders say “Drink the Kool-Aid.”

Lexus Liberals- Kerry-brand liberals who despise the nation that made their wealth.

Pot in Every Chicken- legalization of marijuana.

Republicrats- turncoat Republicans.

Red Diaper Doper Babies (RDDBs)- psychotic sixties leftovers who mixed too much Marx with their marijuana.

Sheeples- the unthinking, gullible masses.

She-ocracy- the reigning rule of radical feminism that emasculated America’s men.

Socialism- organized crime with an army.

Spawning like Shrimp- the swarming of illegal aliens at our southern border.

Stand-up Stalins- anti-American comedians.

Source: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder. Savage Solutions (2005) by Michael Savage.

The Left love sheeples because they usually vote for their candidates. 

Michael Savage has started the Paul Revere Society (PRS) whose mission statement is:

Assert the values inherent in these pillars of freedom. We will seek to educate the citizenry about our nation’s freedoms.

I think it is still active but I didn’t see it mention on his website. On the Free Republic website it talks about the PRS 8-point plan:

1. End Affirmative Action.
2. Close the Borders now.
3. Deport all illegal immigrants now.
4. Eliminate bilingual education in all states.
5. Require health tests for all recent foreign born immigrants.
6. Make tax cuts permanent.
7. Reduce the number of Federal Employees.
8. Tort Reform - Stop Class Action Lawyers.

All good points. Point 3 might be hard logistically. The gov’t has to find them first then deport them. Many of them don’t want to be US citizens. They just want jobs so they have money they can send back home. I think he is talking elementary bilingual education in point four. Learning another language in middle school on up is fine. But when you are younger it will confuse the mind when the mind is still trying to learn about reality.

The Information Theory of Capitalism

All information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. Information is the change between what we knew before the transmission and what we know after it.

Entropy is a measure of freedom of choice.

A entrepreneur needs a channel that in these critical respects (free trade, reasonable regulations, sound currencies, modest taxation, reliable protection of property rights) does not drastically change. A channel has to be low-entropic otherwise the signal won’t get transmitted.

A stable channel is the product of political leadership and sacrifice, prudence and forbearance, wisdom and courage. Sometimes it must be defended by military force.

If there is too much noise (acts of God, more powerful competitors) the signal will get lost. Also, if gov’t neglects its duties to keep the channel stable, or worse, tries to help by becoming a transmitter and turning up the power on certain favored signals, the noise can be deafening.

Interest rates are critical for information-theory economic analysis because they are an index of real economic conditions. If the gov’t manipulates them, they will issue false signals, breeding confusion that undermines entrepreneurial activity.

In information theory, it is in principle impossible to differentiate  random noise from a series of unrelated creative surprises. Both are gauged by their entropic or surprisal, and both seem random. Unless you have the code, they both look the same.

Creativity is always surprising. That is why it cannot be planned or demanded by gov’ts or even by customers.

The entrepreneur and his product create the market.

Detached from a capitalist, there is no capital. To create wealth, knowledge and power must be merged.

The low-entropy side of the economy is demand and predictability; the high-entropy side is supply and surprise. Gov’ts and law are on the low-entropic side; they favor and foster rules of order. On the high-entropy side are entrepreneurship and spontaneity, the domains of creativity and surprise.

The power in capitalism must not be mindless.  Unless it is combined with knowledge, more economic power or money is fruitless.  Enterprise involves memory of the past and anticipation of the future, and it is creative.  It is not a simple incentive system of rewards and punishments, of carrots and sticks.  It is an information system, and it is governed less by economic theory as we know it than by information theory. 

When faith dies, so does enterprise.  It is impossible to create a system of collective regulation, insurance, and safety that does not finally deaden the moral source of the willingness to face danger and fight, that does not dampen the spontaneous flow of gifts and experiments, that extends the dimensions of the world and the circles of human sympathy.

The ultimate strength and crucial weakness of both capitalism and democracy are their reliance on individual creation.  But there is no alternative except mediocrity and stagnation.  Demand-based systems can never flourish in a world where events are shaped by millions of human beings, acting unknowably, in fathomless interplay and complexity, in the darkness of time.

Profits are the measure of the high entropy of innovation and invention. Profits thus are the fruits of disequilibrium and disorder, of entropy and freedom.

The low-entropy carriers that conservatives uphold of law, property, family, and morality enable the high-entropy creations of science and entrepreneurship. Order is not spontaneous, information is not perfect; playing fields are not level; property rights and human rights are not automatic. They must be upheld by culture, religion, and politics. But information theory is also a mandate of liberty, enshrining freedom of choice as its deepest law of entropy and creativity.

Source: Knowledge and Power. The Information Theory of Capitalism and How It Is Revolutionizing Our World (2013) by George Gilder.

If some people don’t know if they are going to entrepreneurials or not  how the heck is gov’t going to know when an entrepreneurial is going to appear?

Stating that supply (entrepreneurials) creates the market is like saying the planets revolve around the sun in the middle ages. Gilder completely inverted the economic system.

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

From Nature.com (Feb. 24):

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper). [read more]

Even those these fake papers were from a electrical engineering magazine it begs the question could some of the papers on climate change be fakes too? Just wondering.

Here’s a tip: If you are reading a scientific paper and you see 2 or more graphs plot the exact same data for the same experiment being repeated--it’s a fake or at least part of the paper has been faked. You will get similar results for repeating the experiments, but not exactly the same results. Noise will always creep in and make the results fuzzy.

Either way it does not speak well for science. Science is supposed to be about finding the truth.

Life Inside Russia

The Stasi had infiltrated all parts of life. It kept secret files on more than six million East Germanys; in Dresden alone, the files the secret police compiled would stretch almost seven miles. According to the regime’s own records, the East German government employed 97,000 people and had another 173,000 working as informants. Nearly one in every 60 citizens was somehow tied to the state’s security apparatus.

The ties that bound the Stasi and the KGB were plain to anyone. The East German officers referred to their Soviet counterparts has “the friends.” Indeed, the KGB station where Putin worked was across the street from the Stasi’s offices. After the Berlin Wall was breached, Putin and his colleagues set about covering their tracks. “We destroyed everything—all our communications, our lists of contacts, and our agents’ networks. I personally burned a huge amount of material,” Putin later recalled, “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.”

“Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable,” Putin later said, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I only regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They [the Soviet Union]  just dropped everything and went away.” Putin longed for the strong, sovereign Russia state that had once been. 

Although, he did not spell out how this stability would be achieved, Putin’s plan gradually revealed itself. If there is one defining characteristic of Putin’s brand of authoritarianism, it is the centralization of power. If Russian politics had become too noisy, divisive, and tumultuous, Putin set out to tame it. Among Russia’s political and economic institutions, the Kremlin would not settle for being first among equals; everything would be subordinate to it.

Putin began with Russian tycoon businessmen. Within two months of Putin’s inauguration, the Kremlin warned these businessmen that they would be either loyal or out of business. Those who challenged this advice quickly found themselves in exile or prison.

The country’s regional governors followed. In 2005, Putin did away with the direct election of Russia’s governors, opting instead to give himself power to appoint them. In addition, their finances would now be supervised by Kremlin loyalists, whose ranks were drawn from Putin’s friends in the KGB.

At the beginning of Putin’s presidency, only one of the top three television networks was state owned. Three years later, the Kremlin controlled all three. Kremlin cronies also began to buy up the largest-circulation newspapers and magazines. Today the Russian government controls roughly 93% of all media outlets.

Until recently, a senior Kremlin official met with the directors of the three major TV channels every Friday to plan the news coverage for the week to come. Television managers reportedly received a steady stream of phone calls throughout the week, honing how the coverage should be presented, even delving sometimes into how a particular news story should be edited.

From as far back as his Millennium Statement, Putin always stressed the need for political and social unity. But Putin and his team did not wish to crush all opposition with a single dominant ruling party. Rather, they engineered space for a small handful of opposition parties to exist and in some instances invented the parties out of whole cloth. These parties—typically referred to as the systemic opposition—ostensibly play the role of regime critics while never pushing their criticisms beyond the boundaries set by the Kremlin. In their ideological orientation, these opposition voices are intended to represent social interests—namely, nationalists, the poor, and older voters—who may feel neglected or dissatisfied with the ruling party, United Russia.

Source: The Dictator’s Learning Curve. Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (2012) by William J. Dobson.

What Putin did to Russia he is probably going to do Ukraine. Yea, one nice guy.

Science demonstrate first contagious airborne WiFi virus

From Science Blog.com (Feb. 25):

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have shown for the first time that WiFi networks can be infected with a virus that can move through densely populated areas as efficiently as the common cold spreads between humans.

The team designed and simulated an attack by a virus, called “Chameleon”, and found that not only could it spread quickly between homes and businesses, but it was able to avoid detection and identify the points at which WiFi access is least protected by encryption and passwords.

Researchers from the University’s School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and Electronics, simulated an attack on Belfast and London in a laboratory setting, and found that “Chameleon” behaved like an airborne virus, travelling across the WiFi network via Access Points (APs) that connect households and businesses to WiFi networks. [read more]

All the more reason to get an anti-virus program and keep it updated. Kind of scary.

The Supreme Court Has Given Police Another Way to Search Your Home Without a Warrant

From The Blaze.com (Feb. 28):

Make sure you’re on good terms with your roommate or spouse — the Supreme Court now says just one occupant of a home can give consent to searches without a warrant, even if an individual has previously objected.

The nation’s highest court ruled 6-3 in favor of law enforcement Tuesday in Fernandez v. California, which stemmed from a 2009 arrest and search in connection with a robbery in Los Angeles. Simply put, a girlfriend gave law enforcement access to her apartment after her boyfriend initially refused the search. But after the man was arrested and police returned to the apartment, the woman consented.

The decision gives authorities more leeway to search homes without obtaining a warrant, even when there is no emergency. [read more]

So, be nice to your spouse or roommate if you are doing any illegal activity. Or (s)he might get revenge on you otherwise.