MY OPINIONS

When we look at the picture of how our society operates in broad terms, several common facts appear: special-interest and big business lobbying our congressional leaders, and an attitude that favors the streamlining of the justice system to favor convenience to the system over justice for the individual.

Examples of corporate lobbying of Congress resulting in legislation which restricts the freedoms of individuals to choose lifestyles, medical treatments, and livelihoods, are prevalent today: the food and drug administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the banking commission, trade and industry laws requiring individuals who are self-employed to have licenses, and the list goes on.

In the course of daily life, we are witness to a shift in what is considered lawful and unlawful behavior. In the earlier days of this nation, proactive acts of mis-deeds were considered unlawful. If you went out and robbed someone, or if you assaulted someone, you were a criminal. If you sat at home and did nothing, you were a "good citizen". Today, that is no longer true. In today's America, the failure to perform is a crime. Today's government makes demands upon you that exclude the option of sitting home and doing nothing if you please. Today's government demands you pay taxes and maintain insurance on your motor vehicles, and respond to demands made by local ordinances. The failure to acknowledge the government's demands on any of these counts results in violations of our fourth amendment rights to various degrees. The folks at Waco, Texas stand out as one of the more extreme examples of what happens when a citizen fails to perform on the government's behalf. A failure to file a tax return can have dire consequences. A failure to allow a building inspector into your home can result in a very sudden inrush of law enforcement. A failure to do the whim and will and every capricious wish of the government ruling party can result in various forms of unpleasant reprisals, all of which are funded by your tax money.

A very dangerous problem in our society today is what I call knee-jerk journalism and its attendant public response. One clear case of the situation is the recent increase in the number of reported school shootings and other public acts of violence by lone gunmen. Such media has worked wonders for the anti-gun lobby. With each new report of a shooting, we hear ever louder calls to action for increased legislation and laws against gun ownership, for more legal action taken against gun manufacturers, and more justification for giving up our constitutional rights as Americans. The part that is never mentioned is the causes for these acts of violence. It is easy to blame gun owners or manufacturers of guns for these problems but guns have been around for a long time and the height of violence we're now seeing is unlike anything we've seen in the past. We need to look beyond the symptoms of the problem to see what is causing this dramatic change in behavior. When we do, we'll see an alarming fact: the increase in the misguided use of antidepressant drugs to combat the symptoms of hypothyroidism and a parallel alarming increase in violent behavior. The public could easily accept this fact if we're talking about illegal drugs. But government approved, legally prescribed drugs are totally different situation. No one contributes more campaign money or has more political influence than the pharmaceutical industry, and you can bet that the drug companies don't want this information going public. Once again, we have a situation where extreme greed and lust for profit at any expense without regard for moral implications has led us on a one-way path to disaster. In each of the cases were there has been a school shooting or other public outbreak of violence by an individual, it has been discovered that the perpetrator was under medical care and receiving the drug Prozac. Antidepressant drugs work on the same mechanism in the human brain to elevate one's sense of well-being, as the portions of the brain which control violent tendencies. It is a known fact in the medical community that such drugs remove the barriers to violent behavior, when consumed. And how ironic it is that we defend the war on drugs, while we prescribe Ritalin to our children in school such that it is now so prevalent that 1 in every 5 students is on this drug.

While I'm on the topic of children and their behavior, it needs to be said that government interference with parental discipline is a formula for disaster. When a parent cannot spank a child who will not respond to reason, there is no alternative left by which to effect a correction of the child's defective thinking patterns. To add insult to injury, when children know they are "protected" from the consequences of their mis-deeds, they will act out these behavior patterns even more blatently, with an "in your face" attitude to spite their elders. These kids know they are protected from punishment, and hence have a free hand to commit all the evil they want, without fear of the consequences that kept older generations in line. As a good friend of mine once pointed out about the terrible behaviour of our youth today, one line in particular is so appropriate, "the problem with this world is the fact that we now have an entire generation of kids that have never been spanked." How utterly true. And when these kids grow up and try their shenanigans in the real world, reality will have a harsh blow to deal them.

There is no doubt in my mind that another major source of the problems we are now experiencing with our kids is due to the lack of parental supervision, caused by both parents having to work to support the family. By eliminating income taxes, we are no longer faced with this problem.

Even more unsettling are the lengths that the medical, pharmaceutical and government agencies are willing to go through to suppress the truth. One such case is that of Dr. Stanislow Burzynski. Here is individual who has come with a cure for a certain type of cancer which affects mainly young children. Due to the fact that his treatment works, word-of-mouth has spread quickly, resulting in an influx of parents from other parts of the United States bringing their children to his treatment center. Unfortunately, his success has also drawn the wrath of the medical industry. This has resulted in a long chain of harassment by the FDA, and even the Justice Department. Dr. Burzynski has endured multiple raids upon his office, physical arrests, lawsuits, and just about every known form of harassment the government can come up with. It was only through the tremendous outpouring of thousands of parents whose children's lives depend upon the treatment that only this particular doctor was providing, that the government has recently dropped their charges and allowed him to continue practicing.

Here again, we see that public opinion is influential on the government.

What controls public opinion? When we consider that the vast majority of information we as citizens receive comes from media like newspapers and television and radio, those of us who have given this issue deep thought realize the extreme danger in central control of such media. Yet, as in every rising dictatorship or tyranny, government control of the media overall, was the first step. The more dictatorial the government, the harsher the punishment of those who attempt to create their own media outlets containing independent views not approved by the big corporations, the few influencial and powerful individuals who drive the opinion of the nation, and the government.

As the government relies on the nation's schoolteachers to mislead children right in their own classrooms, so too does the government rely on and utilize the nation's media--converting it into a virtual monolithic government propaganda agency. This vast media network is harnessed to work the American public into a virtual income tax filing frenzy around April 15th, little realizing that it has been actually duped into duping the public in like manner.

We are now at the stage where we are beginning to see some of the exact situations happening as were described in Ayn Rand's famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. We see examples of government dictating personal decisions everywhere. And we will soon see a form of poetic justice as the subjects of these Draconian government rules begin to disappear from society. For example, we have the mayor of New York City mandating, by law, that cab drivers should have to pick up passengers in any neighborhood, no matter how dangerous or how much of a threat the cab driver feels to his own personal safety. The logical outcome of this is that eventually cab drivers will not accept this law and will find some other line of work. The practical outcome will be that one day the New Yorker will be unable to find a cab and will have to rely on other forms of transportation. Here again we see politicians chasing after the symptoms of a problem, rather than dealing with the root of the problem.

The U.S. government's war on drugs has been a major boon for the law-enforcement business. Here again, through the manipulation of public opinion by the government-controlled media, we have taken what could have been a relatively harmless situation and turned into an excuse to wage warfare right on our own city streets. The mere act of prohibition of controlled substances creates market demand. Cold and calculating drug cartel industry figures regularly weigh the cost of human lives against the higher profit motive and have decided that lives are expendable because the profit is so large. As long as the profit motive exists, marketing efforts for spreading drug usage among our young population have a reason to exist. Thus we have the impetus for perpetuating the production and sale of narcotics.

If the government wanted to end the war on drugs, then simply de-criminalizing them and making them widely available through multiple outlets would put the drug cartels out of business almost overnight. Once you put the drug cartels out of business, their vast network of marketing agents have no purpose and will no longer have reason to interest future generations in the purchase of controlled narcotics. I think the public at-large is, for the most part, aware of the negative effects that narcotics have upon people. Public opinion is moving away from favoring the behavior of the drug culture. There is little need for government to dictate moral code in this matter.

A shocking fact is that legal prescription drugs cause more illness and death than illegal controlled substances. That is, if you don't count the deaths caused as a direct result of government agents acting in the war on drugs. Another shocking fact is that there are more deaths due to automobile accidents than from these illicit drugs. But why don't they ban automobiles? It is a matter of economics: government has learned that a populous with mobility earns a higher taxable income than a populous without mobility.

How about the environment? Now here is another hotly debated issue. And, entire industries have been born on the junk science that supports public opinion on environmental issues. It is true that man's existence is detrimental to the natural state of the environment. There is only one real solution to that problem: reduce the population. However, this runs counter to the goal of any government. Since government power relies on having large populations to support it, then when the public becomes concerned over the environment, other scapegoat issues must be found. Inevitably, the solutions to these issues always result in the production of additional revenue streams for government and for industries that lobby government for favoritism. Most of us are familiar with motor vehicle emissions testing and its attendant fees and ever tightening standards. The vehicle repair shops make additional money off these unnecessary repairs to bring vehicles into compliance with emissions rules. In addition, sales of new vehicles are driven because the cost of repairing older vehicles is artificially set at high values.

Now here is one irony: the invention of the catalytic converter, a device which is supposed to burn off any partially unburned fuel residues in auto exhaust fumes. While it is effective at reducing solid particulates, it, like many prescription drugs, as untold side effects. One of these unpleasant side effects is the release the chemical gas H2SO4. This is a substance which rises up to our upper atmosphere and comes down in the form of acid rain. The acid rain effects the ability to plant life to absorb certain essential trace minerals. For instance, vegetables are recently in the past 20 years, showing a deficiency in selenium. Farmers were forced to figure this out recently when their cattle began to have an outbreak of cancer. Once again, due to the profit motive of the farming industry, it was necessary to accurately identify the cause of this cancer outbreak. The result was that farmers found it necessary to add selenium supplements to the cattle feed, since the corn alone no longer contained this trace mineral which is so essential in fighting off cancer.

Meanwhile, the public at-large is being kept in the dark about the recent rise in cancer in humans. Now we have the American Cancer Society, which takes in millions of dollars in donations every year, working on chasing after that elusive treatment for a problem that was partially created back in the 1970s by government mandate on behalf of the environmentalists.

Such foolhardy government intervention has cost the American public untold amounts of money, loss of time and health. I submit to you that it is a false brand of patriotism (and an insult to our Founding Fathers and our Constitution) to allow this situation to continue.

The latest new attack on individuals by the environmentalists in the Northeast is an attack on in-ground residential oil tanks. During a time when the oil industry manufactured a phony oil shortage as a direct form of poetic justice for President Nixon's wage and price controls, many homeowners acted wisely and installed large underground oil storage tanks and began to stockpile fuel oil. Recently, there is talk in state government about the passage of another law mandating that homeowners in possession of such tanks should be forced to remove them at the homeowner's expense. This cost would be on the average of 4000 to ten thousand dollars. The cost of disposing of any oil contained in tanks to be removed will be about 50 cents per gallon.

The alleged justification for this gross violation of private property rights? Environmentalists are now claiming that underground oil tanks can leak into the aquifer and pollute our water supply over great distances. There are two glaring flaws with this claim: one is they assume that all oil tanks leak. This is simply untrue. Metal, which is in contact with oil, does not rust or corrode. I have spoken with a number of individuals who are in the business of removing oil tanks from the ground. One such individual has told me that in 20 years of this type of work, he has only seen one oil tank that actually leaked. It was explained to me that if oil tank is properly installed, it can last without leaking nearly indefinitely. The one case where an oil tank actually did leak was a situation where the tank was improperly installed such that its side was gouged by jagged rocks. Proper installations involve lowering the tank into a bed of sand which protects the tank from damage which later results in corrosion and rust.

The second glaring flaw in the attack on in ground oil tanks is that, regardless of whether the tank leaks slightly or not, any small seepage from such a leak will not travel very far from the origin of the tank. Then here is the irony: when the town maintains the public roadways, what do they put down on the road surface in quantities of hundreds of thousands of gallons? Oil. Crude or re-claimed oil. While state government worries about a few ounces of oil per year leaching from homeowners' underground tanks, state and local road construction crews are dumping thousands of gallons of the substance onto the ground everywhere! To quote a recent pop song from the 1980s, "who's zoomin' who?"

While we're on the issue of environmental regulations, how about recycling? Imagine this: in an increasing number of communities, it is now mandatory to wash thoroughly, your garbage before you dispose of it. The ludicrousness of this would have the average American laughing ten to twenty years ago, but it is taken seriously today. What happened to the days when the $30-$40 per month you pay for trash pickup actually resulted in the garbage collectors doing their job? Now we as citizens are to assist them in their work by pre-sorting and washing "recyclable" items that we dispose of. And we still pay outrageous monthly pickup fees. What's the matter with people? The average American spends at least 8 hours a day on the job, 2.5 hours commuting to and from that job, and several more hours fulfilling the various administrative, maintenance and family business issues involved in daily life. Short of time and energy, the citizen is now being asked to work for the garbage men. Absurd. And more absurd is the irony of increased energy wasted to wash all that garbage individually, instead of at some central plant where it could be done for a fraction of the cost. The electricity to pump the water that is used to wash out those bottles has a specific price in terms of pollution that is produced. So recycling and washing our garbage before throwing it in the garbage is all rather political "feel good" behavior for our self-agrandizement as a society.

Returning to the general issue of crime, it is not the fault of guns and gun manufacturers. We have too many gun laws already. We do not need additional gun laws. We simply need to enforce the laws that we do have. Hardly a day goes by when some wacky anti-gun nut doesn't come up with some new idea for an ordinance to prevent gun owners from exercising their duly recognized second amendment rights. Some municipalities have gone so far as to outlaw the discharge of firearms on one's own property! This is a roundabout way of outlawing guns without a direct technical attack on the second amendment. The notion here is that if you can't outlaw them, then you can outlaw the use of them. The effect is the same: a complete prohibition on deriving the benefits of gun ownership.

We live in a nation that is so bored with freedom that it continually engages in the sport of destroying that freedom in the public interest. Pragmatism is at work every day on this front. Any group of short-sighted people who don't like what another group or individual is doing can petition the government for action against those parties. This is what we're seeing with the case against Microsoft and with the case against gun manufacturers and even cigarette manufacturers. What they forget, is that the so-called victims of the these corporate enterprises willingly bought their products. The software buyers did so because of the open standard that Microsoft provided. The gun owners because of the safety and security and the need to hunt for food that the gun manufacturers provided a solution for. And the smokers who had an emotional need to take a drag on a cigarette, that the tobacco industry has filled. While I don't necessarily endorse the goals and purposes of these industries, I do believe that it is immoral to interfere with the personal choices of those who wish to utilize these products, whether it be to their personal benefit or to their destruction. Free persons have the right of personal choice, including the right to choose suicide.

A major underlying cause for the denial of human rights is the philosophical premise that the individual is not sovereign; that the state knows best and that the state owns the physical body of the individual. This is what socialism is about. You, your children, your property and even to some extent what you're allowed to think and believe are either the property of, or controlled by, the state.

It is the notion that every man is his brother's keeper, which justifies the act of taxation. As with every good intent turned bad, each new law, brought about under the guise of public good, knows no limits to its intrusive existence on the lives of the individuals which it affects. The mere principal of taxation opens the door to slavery. We may have abolished one form of slavery in the late 1800s, but we have brought about a broader more sinister form of economic slavery which affects every man, woman and child in America today: the system of taxation. Taxation, by its very nature, removes the citizen's right to say no. Herein lies the danger of taxation, a perilous condition where a government holds a gun to the very citizens that government is bound by Constitution to protect, and can extract, without limit, taxes from those individuals, resulting in property confiscation when the tax rate exceeds the individual's ability to pay.

A system of taxation is a self perpetuating vicious cycle where bureaucracy is needed to manage the tax collection, and more taxes need to be collected to support the bureaucracy. Such easy money promotes the frivolous use of tax funds on new, varying social projects which are foisted upon the public by using the news media as a tool for social engineering to convince the public they need the next wonderful new government program. Furthermore, our school systems have become the breeding ground for socialism. While the Constitution may be clearly written as to proscribe such collectivist as activities, the new left will go so far as to alter the definitions of words in human language so as to change the meaning of our Constitution without technically violating it.

The important point to remember is that taxation removes the power of the people to control government and invert this so that government now has the power to control people. Once this happens, there is little hope for freedom in such a nation. That stage has come about some 60 years ago. So I am afraid, that without a bloody revolution, we Americans will not be able to enjoy freedom ever again. But, as with all governments and tyrannies throughout history, the rise and fall is cyclic and inevitable. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the process IS cyclic-- it seems that people do not learn from history because they continuously make the same poor choices over and over again.

My thoughts on the military draft: it is a gross contradiction in principal to take one's freedom away in the cause of freedom. Again, we have the doctrine of every man is his brothers keeper-- the doctrine of self sacrifice for the sake of others. This is a deadly contradiction. The ability to easily make war because of government has easy access to military personnel is a danger only paralleled by the similar principal behind taxation: control is removed from the people and placed in the hands of the government. When you have a military draft, there is little to stop governments from engaging in war to serve the interests of private groups, such as the oil industry. America has had a consistent policy of engaging in military skirmishes while publicly proclaiming that is our interest in protecting human rights abroad. What good as protecting human rights abroad when we're violating the human rights of our own citizens, whom it is our government's primary obligation to protect? Ultimately, several years down the road, the true intents of these small military engagements often surface, and they are often strategic economic wars intended to serve the economic needs of big corporations.

Readers of this WebSite can probably easily ascertain my views on radio communications and the right to exercise constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. So I'll say a few brief things about this topic: the notion of freedom of speech is meaningless when no one is able to hear that speech. No act should be illegal unless the carrying out of that at violates rights of other individuals. Therefore the act of exercising one's mind in the creation of a broadcast facility and the responsible use thereof, is not a crime. On the other hand, the willful violation of the right of expression by individuals, as guaranteed by our Constitution, is criminal. The federal government has engaged in this crime called the doctrine of prior restraint or prohibition. Prohibition, as I have witnessed all through the 1920s and early 1930's, did not result in sobriety or an improvement in the modesty of society as a whole. On the contrary, it resulted in the creation of an excuse for the government to engage on blatant violation of the fourth amendment by giving it an excuse to engage in acts of violence and wanton destruction of property of individuals. There was nothing inherently evil about the distillation of alcohol from fermenting grapes. Again, it was a case of knee-jerk reaction by a few politicians, at the occasional harmless display of drunkenness outside of saloons. The result, like the war on drugs, has been the creation of crime and many acts of violence on the part of taxpayer funded government agencies. And as taxes increase, isn't it interesting how the size and terrible power of government increases too?

Those who have read my words before, will realize that the only proper status of airwaves is like that of the discovery of a tangible natural resource, such as land. Ownership of an untapped natural resources is the right of those who applied the brain power to make that otherwise useless resource, in this case the spectrum, into a useful and valuable quantity. It becomes private property. The government has no business in regulating private property. Access to the airwaves becomes a matter of being first come first served. While some may argue that this is unfair, how is it any different than the current system we have today? The only difference today is that we have a system that is so financially bloated that it must support itself by prostitution to the lowest common denominator: the lust for maximum profit at the expense of morality and at the expense of the individual. There are scientific formulas for profit maximization, and these formulas have had consistent results, which we perceive as the homogenization of program content broadcast on the airwaves. Instead of becoming a medium for individualism and diverse ideas, thanks to the governments unconstitutional involvement in private affairs of business, such business is forced to maximize profits because of the artificially imposed high costs of running a radio station in our highly regulated economic environment.

I have engaged in arguments time and again with people from the radio industry proclaiming that you cannot run a radio station for just a few hundred dollars a month. This is evidence that bureaucratic thinking is so heavily entrenched in these individuals that they cannot see the reality of the situation. A radio transmitter is an electronic appliance like any other electronic appliance: it uses a fixed amount of electricity, has a certain amount of required upkeep and maintenance, and has a certain purchase price or cost of construction. Yet, through government regulation, a falsely inflated market value can be attached to the physical facility of a radio station. While the physical facility might have 50,000 dollars worth of equipment, the "market" might have a value of 80 million dollars. Now I don't resent that people are able to make a lot of money with radio. There's nothing wrong with making a good honest living by providing service to others. What I object to it is that this system is run like a private club, something akin to organized crime clubs in which the entrants must conform to certain skewed policies, as well as be capable of paying astronomical amounts of money by which to gain membership. The whole system is a political shell game in which prospective entrants try to buy favor by kowtowing to the demands of the agency that dole's out the spectrum. This is not a healthy way to have laissez-fair capitalism.

When the government denies a natural right to the people, it sets up a condition by which crime can be invented. It seems however, that this is a desirable condition for the government, as it provides government with a sustainable reason for existence, at least so far as it can publicly claim in which many of the population accept.

I have been slowly reaching the conclusion that all crime is the result of society denying the natural needs both emotional and physical, of individuals. The few individuals who do not follow the conventions set forth by society are labeled as criminals and often physically separated from the rest of society and stored in buildings called prisons. It is no great secret that America has the greatest percentage of incarcerated citizens of any nation in the world. In fact, the prison industry has become big business of late. While we set back at home and complain about how we buy products built by Chinese slave laborers, here on the other side of the Pacific Ocean we are engaged in the worst form of hypocrisy. A growing percentage of our prison population is being used for slave labor. Does anyone remember of the "chain gangs"? Well today a more industrial form of slave labor is emerging in our prison system: that of commercial manufacturing. Prisoners are being forced to work for wages on the order of 50 cents a day so that products can be manufactured for use by the government. It used to be just the manufacture all of license plates but now it is expanding to furniture and other things that can be made with an un-educated prison slave labor.

The privatization of the prison system creates further economic encouragement to incarcerate increasing numbers of individuals regardless of their crimes. A large prison population translates into a large industrial manufacturing workforce-- a workforce that is cheaper than any workforce available on the free market. Meanwhile, the taxpayer is paying for all of this.

A similar parallel exists with the forfeiture laws. Sweeping changes to the law have enabled so-called law enforcement officials to freely confiscate private property under the guise of association with a criminal act. And due to the fact that the government now defines many harmless activities as criminal, that opens the doorway to the wholesale theft of millions of dollars worth of private property by government every month. This is a dreadfully dangerous trend, and if it is not stopped, will eventually lead to the destruction of traditional American values totally.

Have you noticed recently the sudden emergence of roadside motor vehicle stops without probable cause? While masquerading under the guise of checking for motor vehicle emissions stickers and seat belt usage (another case where we are being told that we are not responsible adults able to decide whether or not we wish to wear seat belts), these motor vehicle stops provide the police with an excuse to search the vehicle without a warrant or without any probable cause.

The symptoms are already very apparent. The rights of the individual have been subverted and we are rapidly becoming a police state. The harboring of an adversary relationship between citizens and government is probably intentional. This leads to social unrest eventually, the very condition and excuse that government looks for to justify further expansion and invasion into our privacy.

America has cancer. And that cancer has metastasized. Like the once strong and great oak tree, aged and glorious, but rotted from the inside slowly over the decades, the outward signs of decay have been well concealed for most of this time. At some point, in the slightest wind, that oak tree, undermined by the internal decay within its trunk, will collapse and fall to the earth. America, like that oak tree, is on the path to a similar fate. The people at-large are ignorant to this, and, being the good stimulus response creatures that they are, will only react when it is too late-- when the effects of this internal decay reach them on a daily and very personal level. By then it will be too late. I can only be thankful that I will not likely be around to witness the day when this ultimate collapse occurs. The rest of you will have to deal with this hell created by your own ambivalence-- your own unwillingness to believe in the existence of the problem and to take the effort to deal with the problem.