Welcome to my attempt to keep a weblog, a running sort-of diary on my own web page. I don't like to put political posts on social media like Facebook or Twitter. I feel there are political points I want to communicate to my community of followers that aren't up to the level of writing a full page. So here it is.

     Link to the most-recent entry at the bottom.

     Anyhow, let's see how it goes.

     When my friend had cancer I like to think his first thought was that he wanted to get better rather than he was angry that there were other people who didn't have cancer. I also like to think that he didn't think that somehow more people having cancer makes the world a better place.

     A friend of mine pays income taxes. He should no more pay income taxes to the federal government than he should have cancer and it does the world no more good to have one more taxpayer than to have one more person with cancer.

     Then my income-tax-riddled friend found out that Donald Trump managed to avoid the cancer of income tax for several years. He didn't take a salary as President of the United States and I would imagine he lost a lot of money on his investments during the economic death spiral of the Obama years while my friend was still paid his salary. So it is well within the letter and spirit of the law that my friend paid tax and Donald Trump didn't. But my friend was angry, "Why should a rich person like Donald Trump not pay tax?" It's the same as bemoaning the cancer-free status of healthy people when one is cancer-ridden himself.

     In short, the tax code neither my friend nor Donald Trump had anything to do with writing spared Donald and afflicted my friend.

     Still, my friend was inconsolable in his rage.

     A conservative-Republican buddy of mine, call him Sam, insists that stolen elections, national in 2020 and Arizona in 2022, are somehow yesterday's news. People don't want to hear it anymore. Donald Trump has spent his popularity raising awareness of that and, my friend says, would not win in 2024 as he did in 2020 by a landslide.

     Sam may be right. There is only so much energy and enthusiasm people have, even when they feel as strongly as they do now, even when we're so divided as we are now. The tactic of stealing the election and playing dumb works as Americans I meet today have as little interest in the election scandals as they do of the Reichstag burning by the National Socialists in 1933.

     Given how bleak the future is likely to be with Democrats in complete control, and I have to figure they gave up the House of Representatives as part of a larger plan, methinks it's important to have an election process. The alternative is guns and shooting and revolution, not usually a useful way of getting good things done. Joe Biden pointed out the liberal Democrats have fighter 'planes and all the other stuff from the United States military while the conservative Republicans have about one hundred million armed and angry Americans.

     We'll see how it goes, but it's not looking pretty.

A friend of mine pointed this out to me. Doesn't it look like the pianist Stephen Scott (on my 1994 Verve-jazz calendar) is Nazi-saluting the swastika on my wall?

     I have a swastika on my wall. It's not because I'm a Nazi or a sympathizer or a socialist. When I spent a couple of weeks in India during 2007 September I was given two gifts, a door knocker and a twisted-cross symbol of good luck and prosperity, and both of these are displayed proudly in my home today. I recognize the meaning and the sentiment, not that somebody else thousands of miles away used the same symbol to mean something terrible.

     I'll point out a friend of mine did display the Nazi swastika deliberately just a few years ago. I was visiting his hangar and he was restoring a German airplane from the second World War. The markings on the original airplane were Nazi markings and he was faithful to its original condition, not to the political climate it came from. When he asked if I were concerned or offended by it I said, "absolutely not," as I understood he was rebuilding an object and not promoting a political point of view.

     So now I turn to a liberal-left friend Dawn who promoted Black Lives Matter (BLM) in spite of their racist, violent, anti-Jewish attitudes. She insisted that Black lives do matter and that's what was important to her. When I pointed out that names don't always represent the thing itself, that point was clearly lost on her.

     I didn't even try to explain that Universal Health Care doesn't give health care universally, that a Troubled Assets Recovery Act (TARP) might not bring recovery to troubled assets, and the Economic Development Administration (EDA) might not develop the economy. "They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty." In our time we have the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) responsible for introducing deliberate bias and discrimination into the labor marketplace. I call the EEOC the "Ministry of Fairness" which would be Minifair in Newspeak.

     Now isn't that interesting?

     I'm increasingly concerned about the intrusion of religion into politics, more particularly Christianity into America's conservative movement. I believe my increase in concern is mostly because the threat of religion in politics is increasing. The pro-life movement is entirely a Christian movement, there's precedent in neither America's foundation nor more-recent science for it. (Even God's word in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7, is on the pro-choice side of the abortion controversy.) More and more I'm hearing people representing our American-foundation conservative position confusing it with their Christian religion.

     In 1215 the Magna Carta was written to remove the sole authority from the King and, in broader terms, to weaken the Devine Right of Kings. The intellectual-political community through Thomas Jefferson to today's libertarians have worked to keep the authoritarian attitude out of politics. Until the 1900s that authority was Christianity, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the treatment of the so-called witches in Salem, et cetera.

     The retreat to religion is a response to the increasing threat of Karl Marx, Communism, and socialism. It is much like the folks sympathetic to the Siren Song of National Socialism with the comfort that Herr Hitler would take care of Comrade Stalin and then, "we'll take care of Hitler." For some irrational reason these people were less afraid of Hitler than they were of Stalin and, for the life of me, I can't figure out why. For the same reasons, and with the same slack-jaw, open-mouth amazement, I see today's conservatives retreating to religion in the hope that, first, the religion will keep Communism at bay and, second, that we can deal with the horrors of the resulting theocracy later on. Maybe, as Christians themselves, they're actually sympathetic to the notion of their church running our country.

     After two millennia of Christianity and the liberal-style, pro-life idiocy on Facebook, I have no such confidence that the Church is a better governing agency than the Progressive State.

     I got this issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly and there it is: "Last Call for the Princeton Conservative?" Maybe we can get rid of those anti-socialist, anti-Stalin, anti-Hitler, anti-racism, anti-woke, anti-propaganda, anti-hate conservatives once and for all, if not in the world or the United States, at least at our beloved Princeton.

     As I started reading the article I realized their view of conservatives is pretty-much the wacky stereotype I see on liberal television shows like "Law & Order." I love the show, but it's political viewpoint is decidedly liberal and conservative spokespeople portrayed are venomous and narrow and anti-gay and anti-abortion obsessed with "family values." The conservative movement that came from the Magna Carta through America's founders and Abraham Lincoln and Ayn Rand to today's Libertarians is not even a speck on their radar.

     But before we dismiss this phantom conservative movement as some kind of liberal fantasy image, are they totally wrong? Isn't there a community of people calling themselves conservatives, starting around 1953, who represent a religious reaction to the atheist communists? You know the sort, all in a huff about homosexuals marrying each other. (Are they afraid gay sex will produce gay offspring? Really?) They impose a religious view, usually a Christian view, on the political goals of the Republican Party and liberty is in the back seat if it's there at all.

     The last thing I want to do, or at least one of the last things I want to do, is to create a conservative movement that epitomizes the negative liberal view of conservatism. I would like to see America's right wing instead become the vision of Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand, all about liberty and choice rather than dictating church doctrine as a replacement for government doctrine.

     Just as it would be a shame to let the American left's racial hate and violence and its hurtful economic policies mask its support for socialism and tyranny, it would be a shame to let a Religious-Right community of zealots distract us from our own values of human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract.

     I realized we're not talking about the same values. As an traditional American conservative I put life, liberty, and property at the top of my list of values. (In my own essays on the subject, I make livelihood and contract explicit as well.) We can follow other, nice-to-have values only as far as they don't interfere with these main values. (Note that discrimination, fairness, and racism didn't make the list in America's founding documents.) What conservatives see clearly is that interference with life, liberty, and property oppresses a lot more people than racism or discrimination. (I can offer historical examples.)

     I realized Tami's view is different. She isn't interested in finding ways to reduce discrimination while respecting life, liberty, and property. I realized in Tami's world life, liberty, and property are to be subjugated to left-wing liberal values through Progressive government control. This is the Orwellian vision of the American liberal left.

     A century ago the issue was fairness and the proposed alternative to freedom was socialism, also known as communism. The price paid for socialism was hundreds of millions of lives plus huge costs in liberty and property with little sign of any regret from those who promoted socialism back then or those who promote socialism today. To a left-wing, liberal, Progressive Democrat these costs in life, liberty, and property seem to be clearly-acceptable damage in the Progressive quest for a fair society, then and now. I'm afraid of them and not the conservatives just as we were afraid of them in central Europe ninety years ago.

     The short version of Tami's position is, "In the early 1900s we felt being fair was more important than life, liberty, and property, we brought forth socialism, and we caused hundreds of millions of people to die horrible deaths from their own governments. Oops. That didn't work out so well, but you should believe me because we're going to get it right this time doing the same thing with racism and discrimination."

     The American-conservative view cherishes life, liberty, and property and our country flourished at all income levels for all races, religions, and sexes. Maybe that's why Tami chose and chooses to live here and to enjoy the fruits of our labor while she works to undermine the values that made it possible.

     It's important to understand people like Tami. In her professional and personal live she's a person I have admired for decades and in her political life she's comfortable promoting programs resulting in lashings, lynchings, gulags, and gas chambers. This is the liberal-Progressive quandry, they mean well, things go horribly badly, and they continue on their terrible course. It's up to us conservatives to keep their horrors from happening again.

     I saw a speech given by President Biden in response to the Hamas attack on Israel. It was a strong, pro-Jewish, pro-Israel message that made me proud, "We stand with Israel." Given some of the negative messages we have been hearing in England and the United States, especially the strong anti-Jewish messages, it was nice to see a Presidential speech against the Hamas attack.

     I'm not naive. The Democrats are still the party of ANTIFA and BLM devoted to their Final Solution to the Jewish problem in America and BDS with their appeal for the destruction of the State of Israel. This speech also, briefly, supported a "two-state solution" that didn't thrill me. Still, there are a lot of people that will see and hear this and feel encouraged in their outrage over this strong, anti-Jewish action.

     I have to wonder technically how this talk happened. We have seen "Sleepy Joe" since 2020 and there's no way the man in those videos could give a coherent and compelling call for action. Was it computer generating imagary (CGI)? Was it a Joe-Biden look-alike actor? I don't know which, actually I don't care which. It was good to hear a voice of my country's executive branch defending my people against hate.