In my web-site journey of values I have explored the essential difference between conservatives and liberals, the urgency of maintaining our values in difficult times, what a code of conduct might look like, and whose fault all this political heartache might be.

     Now I'd like to address what we have to do and whom we have to be to do these things. My target audience here is conservative Americans. Liberals who can recall the past two centuries in America and remain liberals aren't going to be convinced because I wrote a few clever paragraphs on a web page. Maybe the last two centuries in America, and the last two millennia in Europe, are because we tried to convince the unconvincible. The parts of the brain that allow people to do what liberal progressives have done to people is more reptilian than primate, and I have no intention of trying to win an argument with a limbic, crocodile brain. We tried doing that and we got where we are now. I want the future to be better.

     My usual routine is starting from basic principles and working my way up to my conclusion. I'm not going to tax my reader's patience this time, so I'll state my conclusions and have other documents explaining how I got there. (It's like the show "Law & Order" where the judge says, "subject to connection.")

     There are two large sides in American politics. The Democrat side started supporting slavery, moved to being the racism of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and expanded their role into so-called "progressive" politics that created socialist governments that killed 262 million of their own citizens. I hold today's Democrats utterly responsible, not only for all of this, but also for the rising, divisive tide of hate and economic destruction, including a scary wave of anti-semitism. Today's Democrats joined a club with a two-hundred-year heritage of hate for those same reasons and priorities, so, yes, I hold them responsible for that club's misdeeds.

     The Republican side has a proud history fighting slavery and racism, getting American blacks and women voting privileges, and fighting for civil rights of all Americans, white, black, brown, red, and yellow. For my purpose in this essay, I'll put libertarians with conservative Republicans.

     More recently the Republican side can claim they didn't own slaves, didn't burn crosses, didn't promote socialism in Russia, Germany, Cuba, and China, and didn't kill 262 million people. In case you were thinking these are strong positives, I'll point out my cats also didn't own slaves, didn't burn crosses, didn't promote socialism in Russia, Germany, Cuba, and China, and didn't kill 262 million people.

     We need a higher standard of commitment to America to win this terribly-difficult battle.

     We're going to have to restore our values, we're going to have to restore our country, we're going to have to restore our expectations, we're going to have to restore our goals, we're going to have to restore our treatment of others, and we're going to have to restore ourselves. Then we're going to have to act accordingly with appropriate first steps, second steps, and third steps.

     But first, we have to get mad.

     From the movie "Network": I don't have to tell you things are bad, everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the streets. There's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad, they're crazy. Everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and the world we're living in is getting smaller and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV, and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone!" Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest, to riot. Don't write to your congressmen. I wouldn't know what to tell you. I don't know what to do about the depression and the Russians, and the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddamn it. My life has value." So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!" I want you to get up right now, get up go to your windows, open them, and stick your head out and yell: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" - Things have got to change "We're not going to take this!" Then we'll figure out the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis, but first get up out of your chairs open the window, stick your head out and yell and say it! "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!" But first you've got to get mad. You've gotta say: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Get up, get up out of your chairs. Stick your head out of the window, stick your head out. And keep yelling and yell: "I'm as mad as hell. I'm not gonna take this anymore!" Just get up from your chairs, right now, go to the window! Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, and keep yelling I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore! I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore! I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore! I'm as mad as hell. I'm not gonna take it anymore! I'm mad as hell! I'm not gonna take this anymore.

     So I'm going to tell my readers what I'm mad as hell about for a few paragraphs.

     I'm mad as hell that those who eventually became our Democratic Party in the United States have gotten away with supporting slavery and racial hate for a century and then the same racial hate for another century along with progressivism. Their support for progressives including Wilson, Lenin, Stalin, FDR, Mussolini, Hitler, Castro, LBJ, and Carter costs hundreds of millions their lives and thousands of millions their liberty, livelihood, and property.

     I'm mad as hell that these so-called-progressive atrocities are taking away our freedom for "the greater good." Freedom is the greater good.

     I take pride that the Jews have outlasted so many who worked so hard to destroy us. I'm mad as hell that the Jews had to pay such a terrible price for it. While the rest of the world's population multiplied fourfold, there are still fewer Jews in 2023 than there were in 1933. I tell the same jokes about Jewish foreplay being four hours of begging, but we're still not healed from Hitler's Holocaust that killed six million of us.

     I'm mad as hell that for every Jew Hitler killed forty others died in other similar socialist-genocidal killings.

I'm as mad as hell that the pseudo-science that was eugenics morphed through phases of impending global ice age, acid rain, mercury in tuna fish, the ozone layer, and global warming and no matter how often climate and CO2 are obviously uncorrelated, the masses still believe the hype. (Check out how the warming data from 1998 through 2017 changed from the 2017 pictures to the 2018 picture.) I'm mad as hell that these "warmists" continue to promote the eco-disasters of wind farms, photovoltaic solar, and hydro without ever mentioning the obvious virtues of nuclear-fission power.

     I'm mad as hell that the proponents of the vicious, marginalizing, racist discrimination of Affirmative Action have the gall to suggest their moral superiority over those of us who feel people should be judged by what they do and not what color they are.

     I'm mad as hell that people pretending to be anti-racist are destroying the institutions that have made western culture something to admire. I'm mad as hell that they're promoting their message by deliberately destroying the existing good rather than promoting addition of their own contributions.

     I'm mad as hell that the world's governments turned a relatively minor pandamic into a worldwide emergency with tyranny that killed many more than the disease itself. I'm embarrassed to share my genetic heritage with the people still driving around with their windows closed and their COVID masks on.

     I'm mad as hell that two out of three American voters could vote for one candidate for all the right reasons, the other guy could be declared the winner, for eleven weeks nobody did anything about it, and we have suffered crushing consequences for three-plus years.

     I'm mad as hell that people believe in government health care like it's going to make people healthier for less expense. The only reason I can think of why liberals want the government involved in health care is that conservatives are a good population of forced organ donors. I'm still mad as hell that people keep the illusion that the government makes health care better or cheaper.

     I'm mad as hell that liberals seem to think mixing up men's and women's bathrooms, men's and women's sports divisions, and men's and women's biological roles has a place in decent society.

     I'm mad as hell that hatred for Jews and the quest for "final solutions" to the Jewish problem, including support for Hamas, have been at the forefront of liberal, progressive politics for so long and with so little retribution or apology.

     I'm mad as hell that the ethnic groups responsible for most crime are whining the loudest about too much crime and law enforcement profiling them as criminals.

     I'm mad as hell that the high-school diploma that used to represent a well-educated person a century ago in 1924 is worth "jack-shit" today and even most college degrees are silly. I'm mad as hell that government has commandeered higher education for its own purposes so it's next to impossible to get clean, correct, unbiased schooling. The higher-education world is becoming divided into two sides, worthless, government-generated tripe and Hillsdale College. I'm also mad as hell that Hillsdale College, a nominally Christian institution, may be the only safe sancturary for Jewish Americans to go to college.

     I'm mad as hell that people who read a social-medium meme with no concept of consequence feel their viewpoint is as valid or valuable as mine when I have spent decades of my considerable intellect thinking about it and its consequences. No, we are not the same and your sound byte is not the same as my understanding.

     I'm mad as hell that people think a halfway solution is the right one, "we should learn to compromise." Should we have liberated half the slaves or half the concentration-camp victims in Europe? Should half our population share the values of decency? Are life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract only for half of us?

     I'm mad as hell that the cessation of benefits wrongfully taken from one group and given to another is presented as taking those benefits away from the recipients.

     I'm mad as hell that my liberal friends say it's important to have government pay for the arts so they can tax some lower-middle-income family who has never been near a concert hall rather than pay the full cost for their own opera tickets. I consider private patronage in the arts an absolute responsibility for those who can afford it.

     I'm mad as hell that liberal rhetoric is barely-human spitting of hate-mongering verbiage with self-righteous moral sanctimony over conservative rheteric about American values of liberty and property and opportunity, all of which were clearly delivered during the Trump years 2017-2019. I'm as mad as hell that I should "anthropomorphize" liberal so-called thought, to treat it as human, in the face of its horrors.

     I'm mad as hell that a community of conservative Christians are imposing their personal-religious views on the rest of us, including right-to-life abortion, when the record of religion in politics, known as theocracy, has been horrible for thousands of years. There is no indication that religious people, Christian or otherwise, are better citizens or better people than atheists.

     I'm as mad as hell that people who still believe in gods or government to solve our political problems, especially after the past twenty centuries on this planet and the past two centuries in the United States, have the nerve to pretend they should have a voice in determining our future when there are smart people like me who have thought about these problems for decades without believing in fairy tales.

     Our Declaration of Independence says life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and our Fourteenth Amendment more-specifically establishes life, liberty, and property.

     Note that economic fairness and freedom from discrimination aren't on that list. I put them on the nice-to-have list and I believe we can cater to these preferences, but only so far as they do not impact life, liberty, and property rights. The failure of progressivism, what allowed left-wing, progressive, liberal Democrats to be responsible for 262 million deaths at the hands of their own socialist governments and most of the 109 million to die in wars in the last century is the subjugation of the primary rights of life, liberty, and property to ideals like economic fairness in 1912 and freedom from discrimination in 1970. I will also point out that, not only did socialism and race-equality programs do a great deal of harm, neither improved their primary goals. Socialist countries have no less wealth inequality and racial inequality and injustice have not diminished with Affirmative-Action programs.

     Our rights come from somewhere other than government. Maybe it's some diety, maybe it's some greater political principle, maybe it's just first principles, but the one overarching, important thing to believe is our rights do not come from the government and they are not for the government to take away, not yesterday, not now, not ever.

     While privacy is not mentioned in American's foundating documents, I believe it is an important part of our freedom. Any structure of values including and promoting some kind of economic, social, or racial fairness should put privacy above those fairness preferences and below life, liberty, and property.

     I will add one legal-moral-social construct, also not mentioned in American's foundation, that might solve, or at least relieve, much of the racial-social unfairness in our country. One of the tactics of racists is not to pass specific laws against their targets, but rather to have an agreement to exclude them. I picture discrimination against non-whites before Dr. Martin Luther King starred in a civil-rights movement. It was routine for institutions just not to admit black people. The liberal remedy was all kinds of laws and programs to require blacks to participate.

     I have a different answer, one consistent with life, liberty, and property that also makes overt discrimination far more difficult, the kind of discrimination that was so offensive prior to Dr. King.

     Consider the notion of "public space" like roads and parks. We have government-provided roads that are open to the public. (Whether government should be building and funding these places in a dicussion for another day.) If your business or institution faces the public, then it must serve the public. There can be rules of decorum or dress, there can be price tags that some people can't pay, but the door from the street can't be closed just because somebody is the wrong color, nationality, or creed.

     If it uses public facilities, if it takes public funds, if it has public access, then it should be open to all of the public. If it's a private space behind a locked door not facing the road, then they can discriminate as much as they want.

     Think of it this way: Everybody can shop here and what I sell to one I sell to all. Using the current trendy example, in my public-access bakery I can refuse to sell a gay wedding cake with two men on top, but I can't refuse to sell my merchandise to gay customers.

     On the property side, what's mine is mine, what's yours is yours, and we have no claim on each other's property except for mutually-agreed-upon contract. The jealousy aspect that rich people should have to pay for their success has to go away. Even if you believe the economic falsehood that making rich people poorer makes poor people richer, their wealth is not ours to take.

     My simple test is, "What is the fair tax burden of the wealthiest five percent?" If your answer isn't an immediate "Five percent, of course," then you're missing the point of our basic values here in the United States of America.

     We need two big changes to get back to the kind of economic growth and personal liberty we had from 1800 to 1900. We should recognize that, however better off we are today than a century ago in 1923, the growth has been less and less. I believe our peak was around 1965 and, since then, government growth has reduced wealth more than technology has increased wealth. We now have an entrenched underclass, far better off than in India perhaps, but with less upward mobility than before.

     First, obviously, we need to reduce government. It's not things have gotten out of hand, things have been out of hand since 1933 and the beginning of the New Deal. The Constitutional government that got us from 1789 to 1912 is enormously smaller than anything we can envision today, about three percent of the national economy. We have to work to getting back there, step by step, inch by inch.

     Second, only a little less obviously, we have to lower the center of gravity of government from federal to state and from state to local. Whatever we may think of having public schools, they were better when locally run with less state intervention and the federal contribution is only making it worse. The encroachment of higher levels of government is a bad kind of magic, it levels the peaks without raising the valleys.

     The changes we need are drastic. A century ago conservatives lamented the expansion of government to three percent (3%) of our total economy and now it's well over half with tentacles of regulation controlling most of the other half. Almost all Americans have some programs they want to keep and so many of us depend on government cheques for something or other.

     A particular nuisance is the old-age programs of Social Security and Medicare. I hear conservative voices crying they're not welfare "entitlements" but repayment of a specific debt. As much as people depend on these programs (myself included), there was never a trust-fund savings account, money went in from young people and out to old people with nothing in between. What could help is to turn them over to the individual states so they're separated from the massive federal bureaucracy.

     Most of us like most of what government does for us. The problem isn't the service, it's having it forced upon us. Not having protection from crime, enforcement of contract, schools, charity, mail delivery, advice about product purchase, certification and oversight of professionals, and safe working conditions is anarchy and chaos. Having these things done privately is anarchy without chaos. We can do these things without legitimized coersion of government and, in fact, we did these things that way two hundred years ago.

     If this country turns around to be more like its Constitution tells us, then I suspect I'll pay a bill every month much like my current taxes and get services from a collection of agencies as I do now. The difference is that I get to choose among several providers.

     A liberal friend felt the opera was important and, therefore, it needed government support. I pointed out this position ends up insisting on taxing lower-class people who never go to the opera so our own ticket prices are lower. I further pointed out that I feel ballet is important and, therefore, I donate my own money to the two ballet companies I subscribe to.

     The American federal government envisioned in 1789 is one that protects us from invasion, arbitrates interstate commerce, and controls our borders and taxes equally all those eligible to vote. There are state and local functions to be provided, some are long term and some are stepping stones to private solutions.

     As for those who use corrupt power of government for their own ends or who thwart the due process of elections and regulation, there are laws, including laws against treason.

     The United States of America is also an experiment in capitalism. Everybody knows what capitalism is, it's the opposite of communism, it's the monstrosity of unregulated industry trampling on our faces. Well, just as there's more than liberal understanding of a lot of other things, there's a new-to-liberals insight to be had here. Property is more than ownership of things. Patent law makes inventions property, mineral and air rights extend property beyond the surface, and capitalism is ownership of enterprise.

     Capitalism is the notion that somebody can own a corporation or a venture or business process, a seriously-exciting concept. America has been especially successful in making it easy for "the little people" to own small businesses and some of those small businesses, voilà, become large corporations producing big benefits to themselves and to others. "The American Dream" isn't about a huge salary, a fast car, and a mansion. Okay, a huge salary, a fast car, and a mansion are clearly part of it, but, in my ever-so-humble opinion, the real American dream is owning a successful company.

     Sure, it starts in an otherwise-unused den or a garage or a small, two-person office with assemble-by-number desks, there's some business, then some more, then some kind of a break where somebody big enough to matter buys what we're selling. A few contractors get hired, then employees, then a lease for company space, and the sky's the limit.

     That's capitalism, that's America, that's what we're all about.

     There is a community within America, part of a worldwide community, that rejects our founding principles of decency. Life, liberty, and property are to be subjugated to some greater good. That community formed the Democratic Party, officially in 1854, more fundamentally going back to Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Even their name subverted the important American message that we are not a democracy but a republic.

     Let me take a step back once to point out that a human being is (at least) two people, our yang side of rationality and our yin side of raw emotion. For many of us the yang is intellect and decency and integrity, respect for values and adherence to a moral code while the yin is passion without reason. Jack the Ripper is portrayed as a consumate, esteemed gentleman in elite, polite, social company and a relentless, brutal killer in the dark, foggy streets of London. In more recent fiction, Hannibal Lechter is similarly embraced by high society and still finds time to eat his victims. We can spend afternoon into the evening trying to persuade a pedophile pervert the evils of his ways, he'll even agree in the light of day, but that all escapes him in the moment of thrust and passion.

     Let me also point out that my standard for responsibility and blame in politics extends beyond the legal standard of intent following the bullet. My analogy is a group of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds with rifles atop a highway overpass taking pot shots at the traffic below. They hit and kill drivers often enough to be harmful but, in this story example, nobody seems to be able to get rid of them over many years of them doing this. Clara has been with this group for a long time and says she never hurt anyone herself while Derrick joined the group very recently with full knowledge of the group's history. I hold both Clara and Derrick responsible for the full terrible history and not just damage done by their own bullets. Mob mentality is dangerous and destructive and the mob yesterday and today must be held accountable for what the mob did yesterday and is still doing today and tomorrow.

     So the Democrats formed to preserve slavery became a national-scale club of racists in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865. Around 1912 they discovered progressivism, the notion that values, human rights, and decency are owned by the government and may be taken away for some greater good. In the early twentieth century that greater good was fairness and Karl Marx's communism became the noble cause du jour.

     Our nation was founded on a different theme. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The important message is not where these rights come from, only that they come from somewhere beyond and above government and "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," and, furthermore, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." Wherever our basic human rights come from, be it nature or God or just basic first principles, it is not within the scope of government to take them away. This theme in the form of our Constitution was deemed outdated and obsolete by progressive President Wilson.

     The role-model example of our American history of expansion of wealth and liberty was replaced with a new, worldwide vision of socialism "a boot stamping on a human face—forever." Conservative Americans saw the inevitable, horrible consequence of this change from rights-from-nature to rights-controlled-by-government while progressives, now called liberals, were comfortable in their greater good even as hundreds of millions died horrible deaths including the six million Jews of Herr Hitler's Holocaust. The Holocaust was a horrible moment in human history, but it was by no means singular or unique, just a small part (2½%) of the Democrat, progressive, left-wing, liberal vision.

     Here's my summary point of the last several paragraphs: One who joins the Democrat, progressive, left-wing, liberal community today is just as responsible for its horrors as those who actually executed those horrors over the last century. That means, for most of us, half or more of our friends get their political kicks not only planning the deaths of innocent people but causing the deaths of innocent people.

     In the movie "Forbidden Planet" this ugly side of our psyches was called "monsters from the Id," where the Id was Sigmund Freud's name for the part of our minds in which innate instinctive impulses are manifest, the darker yin side of us.

     Another part of that Id/yin/Mr-Hyde/Jack-the-Ripper dark side is mob rule. Groups of people will do things far more horrible than a single individual would even consider. I've seen manipulative speakers whip a group into a frenzy over funding of their organizations to the point where they were truly angry. They didn't just want their problems solved, they wanted revenge. That they had no idea what was actually happening and who was responsible didn't matter, they just wanted revenge. After seeing that microcosm of mob mentality, I have no trouble seeing how Hitler's Nazis or the Democrat-Party Klan could do what they did. There's a dark side of the human soul that any good plan for the future has to take into account.

     This realization hasn't made me more tolerant of foibles closer to home, others or my own. I still grumble when other drivers don't signal their turns and I still feel I should remember to put the toilet seat down. I still invite liberal friends to parties and genuinely wish them and their families well. On the positive side I can appreciate good deeds like holding the door open for strangers or helping change a tire at night.

     If two hundred years of trying to change them has failed, then I don't feel giving liberal friends grief at tonight's dinner party has much chance of success. It makes it easier to forgive my guests if their children spill grape juice on my carpet if I recognize the median level of human decency includes shoveling screaming victims into a fiery furnace.

     "The Devil Next Door" evokes our astonishment that the nice guy we've known for decades did horrific things back home during the war, but I'm suggesting we shouldn't be astonished. Our yang and yin sides coexist in the same body without being the same person.

     The good news is that the twenty-first century afford us the luxury of virtual reality where we can torture realistic-looking human characters without inflicting actual pain. What pornography did for the would-be rapist virtual reality can do for the would-be torturer. The mix of sex and torture is quite complex and I'll leave this discussion on the note that torture, pain, and genocide, from religion and then from government, have been part of the human condition "since forever." If we want that to be different in the future, then we're going to have to change something more fundamental than discussing politics sipping tea at parties or flaming on social media.

     I believe we should enter political discourse with clear statement of the fact that we conservatives really are the good guys and liberals really are the bad guys. Hundreds of millions dead and thousands of millions of people deprived of freedom and the luxuries of civilization are as terrible as they sound. Lashings and lynchings in the nineteenth century, gulags and gas chambers in the twentieth century, and a river of hate with lack of any respect for decency really are worse than people vying for life, liberty, and property rights. These really are the left and right wings of America's politics.

     So why aren't I trying to find better ways to convert liberals to conservative values? Because we've been using rationality and reason to do that for two centuries and they have failed utterly. To use Michael Crichton's metaphor from The Terminal Man, liberalism, progressivism, and left-wing thinking aren't functions of higher, primate, human brain functions but a function of the limbic, crocodile, reptile brain, mating and aggression, jealousy and hate, joy in another's pain, that isn't going to respond to persuasion any more than I can train an alligator to be a tame pet. In the case of our yang-yin, split-brain, rational-political Democrats it's like discussing and persuading Dr. Jekyll to change Mr. Hyde's behavior. Maybe we can get the rational side to curtail the beast within, or maybe those afflicted with such a lack of personal control must be confined, or worse. Even if people try to keep their primate brains dominating their alligator brains, when liberal-minded people get together in a larger group mob rule becomes the mindset of the day.

     When we were children we were going to save the world, especially the starving, suppressed masses of Africa. How did that go? Have you been to Africa? When Apartheid and Gaddafi are the Good Old Days we're doing something wrong. Maybe we should put our efforts elsewhere.

     The rest of the world is set in their ways. Those that aren't happy with their ways can leave. It's up to us not to fix their home countries but to give them someplace to go. There's a story of a Cuban defector from 1956 saying he was luckier than American freedom lovers today. "I had someplace to go." I believe it's up to us to make sure there's someplace to go.

     Just fixing the United States is more than we're able to do. Sometimes we have to rely on forces bigger than we are. Maybe only God can make a tree, but we can plant seeds. Maybe restoring the vision and values of a nation is beyond us, but we can plant right ideas in good places and reject wrong ideas when they appear. We have reached the point where there's going to be violence and some good, innocent people are going to die. Let's make sure each time we exercise our swords that we have thought through what we're trying to accomplish and confirming that this thrust of our weapons is working to accomplish those goals.

     It is imperative that we act wisely, but it also imperative that we act. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     Recently Hamas made a severe attack on Israel and killed thousands of innocent people as part of their systematic program to destroy the Jewish state. The right answer is likely to give the people there a week warning (so folks there have a chance to go somewhere else, maybe an Israeli prison camp) and for the Israelis to level all of Gaza as Hannibal did in Carthage. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, and I have all been sure religion is not part of that solution. Religion is a personal thing, one of many paths to righteousness, but we have all clearly seen that religion in politics is Tyranny Version One where socialism is Tyranny Version Two. We were "One Nation, Indivisible" when things were better and we should strive to be one nation, indivisible again, "E Pluribus Unum," one out of many.

     Better, stronger, smarter people have tried and we're not going to save the world. Africa is savage, Europe and Canada and Australia are bureaucratic socialism, Asia is authoritarian, and Latin America is corrupt. Our United States is losing its role as a beacon of hope and my goal is to get it on a path to recovery, not just incremental improvement but a clear path to its Constitutional roots. Africa will still be savage, Europe and Canada and Australia will remain bureaucratic socialism, Asia can stay authoritarian, and Latin America's corruption will continue. My scope is to restore my country as a haven of freedom and prosperity and pride through its values of human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract.

     If we cannot make our home look like home, then we should find a place that can be our home. (After all, we didn't try to fix England in 1776.) Maybe we can keep the Republic of Texas, maybe buy a chunk of nearly-unhabited Namibia, but we should find someplace where we can be free and prosperous and proud.

     I think it is more important to have a smaller true center of liberty and beacon of hope for the world than to have a larger country that is only a little bit better than where we are now.

     First of all we should treat others with respect and dignity until they give us reason to do otherwise. There's a short list of the principles of decency and a much-longer list of how to carry that out. The super-short version is, "Don't be a dick."

     Like it or not we set an example as responsible-parent conservatives in a world of child-brat liberals. An extreme example of that mindset was a sign a friend told me about in a corporate restroom, "WASH YOUR HANDS, SET AN EXAMPLE." We both got a chuckle, if nobody else is there is it okay to leave with shit on our hands? Still, there was something creepy about the notion that a primary purpose of good behavior isn't good outcome but setting an example for those less endowed with a sense of decency. However creepy that notion may be, there is something real about it. If we don't want THEM telling us what to do, whether THEY are church or state, then our own behavior has to be good enough that THEY shouldn't intervene.

     A corollary is being consistent, often foolishly consistent. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." In my mathematical-computer-programming profession I joke and twist it around that computers are the little minds whose hobgoblin is a foolish consistency. As we realize left-wing progressive liberal Democrats are children we similarly realize we have to be deliberately consistent with them. They aren't going to understand why one exception is reasonable and another is not, so best to avoid exceptions to rules. This need for consistency of code of conduct becomes more important as we realize the need for overarching rules determining what we can and cannot do and what we must and must not do.

     Judgment should be used with proper discretion. As believers in liberty we should be tolerant of pretty much anything that goes on "between consenting adults." As believers in decency we should be fiercely judgmental when one person's actions harm another, or gratuitously prevent others from their goals. One microcosmic example is I "busted my friend's chops" driving here in the United States when his waiting at a red light in the right of two lanes prevented others from making their right turns on a red light, which is allowed here.

     I believe we should be similarly judgmental about stupidity. Silence is acceptable while bullshit is not. My catch phrase here is, "You know better," with, "You can't possible believe that," not far behind. In the political realm I find myself trying to be silent, lest every interpersonal encounter turn into a political argument, and I try to answer questions briefly and correctly. "Yes, I believe government is almost always the wrong answer," and, when pressed, "We have a Constitution that tells us when government is acceptable and I believe we should follow it." While the statement, "You killed over two hundred million people and I didn't," may be true, it's not going to win over would-be socialists any more than teaching a pig to sing. "It wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

     Golda Meir told us that the shame was the Arabs putting us in the position of having to kill their children. She's right and we must do what is right, no matter how sorry we feel about it. If the right thing to do about Hamas is to turn Gaza into a National Park "where we can walk from the east side to the sea in flip flops," and I believe it is, then we should do it. It's not nice, give them a week notice to vacate, and destroy the whole place. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     My particular pet peeve in all this is the whiny liberal Jews. Gosh, this is all so new, so sudden, so unexpected. Not only was there an attack, but there is a strong liberal-Democrat community supporting the Palestinians in general and Hamas in particular. The Democratic Party shifted its focus from slavery to race in 1865 when they became the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-semitism was a core component of this movement. For 158 years, through the White Knights, then the Black Panthers, and now Black Lives Matter, the hate for Jews has been a common thread. Wilson and Truman were Klan, FDR and LBJ wore their anti-semitism on their sleeves, and today we have ANITFA, BLM, BDS, and the "Mod Squad" all sharing their hatred for all things Israeli and Jewish. Duh!

     If there is a way out of the mess that started in 2020, COVID, George Floyd, the stolen election, repeated impeachments, multiple indictments et cetera, the mess that brought the 2017-2019 economic upswing and racism downswing to a crashing halt, I don't know what it is. If there was a way to do that without "collateral damage" (euphamism for killing some innocent people), I believe that option ended with a stolen election that stayed in place. Nice people in social settings aren't always nice on the political side and we need to be comfortable that there will be pain.

     The other thing people seem fixated on is the singularity of the 2020s as a bad time in political history. Other countries have put up with worse, with the support of the same progressive, left-wing, liberal, Democrats as this recent horror, but it hasn't been now and it hasn't been here. While Russia, Germany, Cuba, and China had Comrade Stalin, Herr Hitler, President Castro, and Chairman Mao we had comparative calm. While FDR and LBJ were racist left-wing liberals with terrible programs, living here in the United States was more of an increasingly-odious odor of creeping progressivism rather than the crashing catastrophe of the overt socialist regimes elsewhere. Our Constitution and its associated values protected us and that may be changing, not just bad for us but bad for the whole world.

     We're not fighting for peace. George Carlin said, "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity." If there ever was a peaceful path to the classic America we want, then it died with a stolen election in 2020. I don't know what the best path is, but I'm pretty sure some shooting will be involved, some incarceration of people who don't want to be kept, and some killing of people who don't want to die. I'm also pretty sure some of those people don't deserve it. I'm very sure the liberal Jews who are whining now when they let the Democratic Party openly represent the ugly face of anti-semitism since 1865 deserve whatever bad things happen to them. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     I feel sorry for Holocaust survivers until they support and vote for the people, processes, and progressive principles that put them in concentration camps. I won't say they deserved it, but I'm not sorry for them as they got precisely then what they're supporting now. If the connection between liberal progressivism and holocausts is too hard to understand, then believe smarter people who have given the matter a lot more thought. If that's too much, then just look at the history.

     Finally, don't get into too big a snit over how uncivilized western civilization is turning out to be. Staying a month in Africa, especially western Africa, is a true lesson in man's inhumanity to man. The "noble savage" is a big, fat lie. Savage people rape, kill, and eat each other. Civilized left-wing progressive people round them up and kill them in death camps or, if they're really genteel, they strap them down and sterize them without anesthesia. Organized religion was crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, and jihads, so we ran to socialism with its own tyranny and genocides. If you learn nothing else from my discussions, then understand how brutal history really is.

     What's frightening to some of my American friends is the horror is here and now. For as long as people can remember the scary stuff we're facing has been "just the way it is" in much of the world and our own country had slavery, Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, the New Deal, and the Great Society as horrible reminders that our own world isn't safe.

     Yes, we can do better. But we can't go soft on an enemy that has shown a comfort in serving our organs as paté with fine wine at their dinner tables.

     So who do we need to be and what do we need to become? As we grow up from snot-nose toddlers to supposedly grown-up adults, what moral, ethical, value, and behavioral changes must we embrace?

     First and foremost, we must realize we each and all have value. The Old Testament principles of loving thyself and loving thy neighbor as thyself are important. We should and must treat ourselves with dignity and treat other with dignity, at least until they're proven unworthy. They may be mostly idiots out there, but I'm not going to walk into a room, or out into the world, presuming that everybody I meet is a moron. Without getting too preachy here, I find that fellow with an IQ of 90 who has trouble pronouncing the word "constitution," often enough to be interesting, knows something about something that I didn't know that makes it worth engaging in conversation.

     Second, realize that there are many ways to excel. We pick a single corridor to the door of success and there are no other paths. I'm thinking of college, graduate-school, business-school, medical school, and an academic or professional career. (I had a friend a few decades ago who had both law and medical degrees and answered the what-do-you-do question, "I'm a doctor and a lawyer," The response was, "Your mother must be very proud.") I'm clearly a product of that world with Cheltenham High School, Princeton University A.B. cum laude, Stanford Ph.D., and Bell Telephone Laboratories on my résumé. Yes, I'm snooty enough to spell "résumé" with the accents, I know the Latin plurals of alumnus and alumna (and alumnum for the gender-neutral crowd), the Old-English plurals of axis and ox, and the Greek plurals for hippopotamus and octopus. I'm a math-whiz geek "genius" and it makes sense for me. Anybody who has watched me fix an appliance knows why I rely on people with trade-school education. Why are we sending two-thirds of our kids to college, taking their best years out of the productive work force, when most of them could be learning something useful instead? I don't hear anybody asking to forgive trade-school loans because those students earned their tuition and can pay back their loans. Let's show all well-educated people in all disciplines some fucking respect, okay?

     So much for platitudes about attitude.

     In normal social and political discourse I encourage inclusion. For example I get snippy with libertarians who tell me only those supporting their suggested programs are true libertarians. I have written essays imploring conservatives to reach beyond the vision of their own social or religious values to include a wider audience in our vision of freedom. I have said, "There are many paths to righteousness."

     Here I'm going to do the opposite. The vision required to get to a free, productive, American society is fairly narrow. While there may be many paths to righteousness, there aren't many directions driving a dark road at night that get to a destination rather than ending up in a ditch. Right now our country has driven into a deep ditch, it's getting worse fast, and the rest of the world is like a truck convoy following us into this pit of despair. So I'm going to be insistent on a clear and correct vision of what my country was founded on and I'm going to be critical of those who impose different, conflicting visions claiming their right to speak. They may have the right to speak but, for the duration of this essay, I don't have to listen. The meanings of words are often precise and their misuse creates a frightening loss of communication and concensus. I had one liberal friend claim, amid his exhortation for massive government programs and subsidies, that he was basically a libertarian. No, he isn't a libertarian any more than he's an octopus. These are correct meanings of words and, given a clear objective of our social and political thought, correct ideas to getting there.

     Given that we're going to have some kind of public service, what is the fair share of tax burden for the richest five percent? The answer is "five percent" and should be offered without hesitation. A low tax burden for the wealthy isn't "welfare for the rich" any more than letting people keep their own organs is health-care inequity. People can give to charity, people should give to charity, people who don't give anything may be assholes, but we shouldn't and mustn't have any forceful claim on others for the purpose of redistribution of wealth.

     We are individuals who choose to belong to a society. The purpose of society is not to level the outcome but to encourage and to enable each member to achieve what he can. Comfort with unequal outcome is part of a fully-human, decent person.

     I'll go a step further and suggest that comfort with unequal opportunity is similarly proper. We should reach out to those with limited opportunity in a voluntary, sense of charity, but it's not going to be even-steven and that's okay. My father told me, "From those to whom much is given much is expected," and I knew few who were given as much as I was, not just in a material sense, but in acceptance and encouragement of my differences in ability and attitude. Maybe I'm a better person than those given less, maybe I deserve better opportunity than others, or maybe I'm just lucky, but it isn't up to some sort of society to take something from me to help somebody less fortunate. It is decent, right, and kind to find those less fortunate and to give of time and wealth to help those people. But fairness isn't going to happen and we have to be comfortable with that.

     In defense of my comfort with an unfair world, the people who make most of the difference are a small number of extraordinarily talented individuals. If we want to design a social and political structure to maximize some kind of overall human performance, it would be decidedly less fair than anything we have today. Societies have been built where governmental institutions seek out talented children for improved education opportunities, I'm thinking of Russia and China, but New York City's so-called "magnet" schools count along with our Ivy League universities. Some of those have been successful in creating greatness, and those that have been successful have been anything but fair.

     There are attitudes we must share in politics, kind of a meta-culture. Let me explain my own term "meta-culture" to a larger community. We go home and speak our own languages with our own family traditions and our own ways of organizing our lives, our own cultural values and behavior. When we go out in the world with others there are shared ways of doing things. We go on green and stop on red. Stateside we cross left shoulder to left shoulder as pedestrians and in our cars. In Australia I had a hard time out running because they're the other way there, their way of doing things, right shoulder to right shoulder. In the West we let people off trains and elevators before boarding and they don't do that in Asia, at least not when I was in Delhi. Hot water is left, cold is right, on is up, and off is down stateside, the opposite in my experience in India. Public rooms should follow the public expecatations, the meta-culture, you get the idea.

     In our own closed community we can do things our own way, my example is an Israeli kibbutz with its communistic culture, but when we are part of the big picture we act appropriately. In my other essays I write expansively of acceptance and inclusion while here I'm doing the opposite. There are certain meta-cultural political values that are essential to success on the American-conservative-traditional scale. We can be racist, religious, revolutionaries at home, but our political face must support human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract or we will certainly fail.

     I don't know that we'll make it if we do it right, but I believe we should try because, first, we'll certainly fail if we don't try and, second, the vision of America's Constitition is worth fighting for.

     What is the appropriate contribution burden of the richest, most-successful five percent of America? It's five percent, plain and simple. Our Constitution allows for taxation for a limited government and that burden is to be shared equally by all. My success or your failure should not, must not, require me to contribute more or allow you to contribute less. Redistribution is a voluntary thing, not 50%, not 90%, but 100%.

     Say after me, "one nation, indivisible." It's not "one nation under Allah" or "one nation under Buddha" or "one nation under God" or "one nation under Vishnu." Religion is the basis of most of our lives, not our politics. Say it again, "one nation, indivisible" like I said every day in primary school. If you don't understand the case against theocracy, then look at the history of crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, and jihads and all the evils that drove us to socialism in the first place. Yes, it is that easy, just keep church and state separate.

     What goes in Vegas stays in Vegas, "queers," fetishes, BDSM, kinks, and other sex "perversions" are fine with me in private settings. I don't want to hear about somebody's sexual encounter with a sheep, but, except for cruelty to animals, I see nothing wrong with it in our political discussions. As the pro-life position on abortion is a Christian position (even their Bible, Genesis 2:7, is pro-choice), the law should take no position against abortion.

     Just as a kibbutz can internally regulate private property, a close community can decide for themselves not to allow abortions. It is not the law's responsibility to impose Christian rules on the 5500 million of us who are not Christian.

     We all need to get used to a world where other people do things that bother us, upset us, and offend us.

     Institutions that preserve Western values should continue to do so. European-culture-oriented art museums, music, and dance are all fine. I embrace these while also embracing art, music, and dance from other cultures. The destruction of our existing arts-cultural institutions is a crime and should be thought of as a crime in every political setting. An emerging appreciation of things "foreign" to our old standards should never diminish our apprecation of our existing arts-culture.

     We must be skeptical of authority in general and government in particular. Almost all the things "THEY" were telling us decades ago comes across as rancid tripe today, shouldn't we expect today's messages to be similarly offensive in a few years? I still see people wearing their chain-link-mosquito-net, fishnet-condom, cloth COVID masks just like children hid under their desks to protect them from nuclear war. I believe what I, myself, observe and I have a circle of friends whose observations I trust. Pick your political poison. How many people do you really believe died of COVID between the time they went through their windshields and the time they hit the pavement? How believable is it that George Floyd is really dead inferred from a video where, I'm told, his hair changed from one viewpoint to the next like a badly-made movie? (Am I the only one who was a bit skeptical when a video of seventeen-year co-workers had one killing the other over racial enmity?) How likely is it that CO₂ causes global warming based on the latest round of western-European heat following the CO₂ reduction in 2020?

     "I have a dream that [we] will one day live live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Affirmative Action programs are the opposite of this. Whether people who supported those programs should be rounded up and punished (as I think they should), these programs should be regarded as the same stain on the face of humanity as Bolshevism, the New Deal, National Socialism, the Great Society, and the Cultural Revolution.

     Here's my final edict for who we should strive to be. We should seek, find, and build rules of political conduct that support our values of human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract, we should ensure they serve these values correctly and unswervingly, and then we should enforce them among ourselves and to others. We're the adults, we the responsible people, we're the ones who didn't do the evils of theocracy and socialism, now it's time to turn that virtue into authority, and now it's time to exercise that authority.

     We were told, "Pay to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." How well has that turned out? There was a movie "The Star Chamber" starring Michael Douglas where a bunch of judges form their own justice system unencumbered by technicalities in the penal law, which is especially intolerant of vigilantes operating outside its own circle of power.

     There is a joke where a rich man offers a million dollars for a beautiful women to spend the night. After she says she would do it, he offers her ten dollars for the same night. She says, "Do you think I'm a whore?" and he says we've already established that and now I'm just trying to find the price.

     People aren't pure, the results of trying to impose purity on them hasn't created peace in our time, quite the opposite. Government penal law has left holes and religion and socialism have filled those gaps with ugliness, hate, and violence. That we're going to need some combination of Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" and Charles Bronson's "Deathwish" is getting all too obvious. The last twenty centuries in the west and the last two centuries here in the United States have already established that. Now we have to search ourselves to find the price.

     Case One: There's a guy down the street that is 100% guilty, provable beyond a shadow of a doubt, of being a concentration-camp guard, "The Monster Next Door" scenario, but with total certainy. Is it okay to kill him? What about to punish him? What about to deliver him to a community of victims? What about to encarcerate him in some way? If you're not sure, then mull it over until you're sure that some kind of community action is appropriate. If you're not happy with the concentration-camp guard example, then maybe he raped a few daughters in your neighborhood, again with absolutely certainty, and there's some legal technicality so the courts can't do anything about him.

     We've seen "Law & Order" episodes where mob retaliation destroyed an innocent person's life, and I'll get to that later, but the first thing is to decide if we're okay with the guilty getting what they deserve without the benefit of police and law.

     I'm going to propose that there are people and actions deserving proportional retaliation for much smaller offenses. Let me give two examples from my own personal experience, which I doubt is worse than average. I left a job and the management kept my work phone turned on with my own-voice voicemail greeting but changed the voicemail password. Since changing the password proves they were thinking about it, and they didn't disable my own-voice greeting (which is the right thing to do), there is no explanation except malice. They wanted to intercept my messages. Another manager was trying to put me in an embarrassing situation by provoking a negative response from me on a meeting on July 10. The letter I got castigating my behavior was dated July 1, which means the plan to criticize me was in place nine days before there was anything to criticize. I believe any company that doesn't immediately march these managers out the door immediately is guilty. What they're guilty of is debatable, but intolerable behavior should have unbearable consequences and these managers should not have seen another paycheque from their respective companies. I would argue those companies should have gone further and ensured those people not get jobs from anybody, anywhere, ever again.

     For half a century the United States of America has cowered beneath a cloud of racial discrimination euphomistically called Affirmative Action. Any people participating in this program has to know they are guilty of the most evil discrimination. For fifty years we had a program where as many jobs as possible were open only to people of preferred race or sex. Anybody participating in this sort of discrimination owes a terrible debt to be paid in economic hardship if not in pain. If these people aren't going to be beaten daily for the number of years they supported Affirmative Action, at least we can make sure they don't get a job or any government assistance. Maybe a few decades of living outside eating whatever bugs they can find will help them understand how terrible they were. Even if not, it sure would make the rest of us feel better.

     A friend of mine stayed in touch with a teacher we shared who was in a concentration camp during Hitler's Holocuast. My friend asked me how I felt about that and I said, "My sympathy ran dry when he voted for the same left-wing, progressive political positions that put him in Buchenwald so many decades ago."

     Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences. We must mete justice and smite evil while keeping a clear vision and maintaining responsibility for our mistakes.

     Is every liberal an evil person who must be punished? I certainly don't plan to go through life carrying a weapon and torturing everybody who expresses a progressive, left-wing view or votes for a Democrat candidate. But it's important that we keep as steady a course as we can toward the principles of decency. Those that supported our Democrat Party over the past century should be held responsible for hundreds of millions of lost lives and thousands of millions losing their liberty and livelihood.

     We need to take our own offense at the racial hate and private property theft that characterize liberal progressivism. We must respect and admire those who do good works and promote good values. Finally, we must prepare for a future that isn't pretty lest we have the past thousands of years of ugliness thrust in our faces going forward.

     Let's take an easy first step. Half a century of Affirmative Action (AA), half a century of naked descrimination that minimized and marginalized minorities while deprecating decency deserves determined descipline. Those who inflicted this pain on our nation should learn that intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     It's time to go after people who supported AA. We should find them, we should identify them publicly, we should castigate them, and we should ensure their futures are limited and painful. Their cries that they were just following the law, "I was just following orders," should be made as mute as the same arguments at Nurenberg.

     Databases should be kept of those who supported AA and it should be made clear their only infraction on those lists is supporting half a century of bitter, marginalizing discrimination with full knowledge what they were doing was wrong and evil. People hiring or allowing tenants can decide if they want these people just as they can if they want to hire or lodge sex offenders.

     I extend this to DEI movement, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, where western culture is subjugated to some kind of thrust for specific alternatives rather than an effort to include all of it. People who go out of their way to reject legitimate and imporant culture in essential media like museums or performing arts should be rejected by the mainstream community of humanity. When all the decent people have good homes, enough to eat, education for their children, enough left over for entertainment and travel, and jobs to earn those things, then we maybe can include the people who worked for racial division and hate.

     The same goes for those who jumped aboard the COVID gravy train. Hospitals went nuts over it. Besides closing their admitting doors to legitimate medical needs like heart attacks and cancer, many hospitals were comfortable "fudging" their death certificates to get big, government COVID payouts. How many died of COVID between the time they went through their windshields and the time they hit the pavement? How many died of COVID as cancer took away their last breaths? People who went through the list of names in The New York Times found all kinds of causes of deaths for their so-called COVID victims that had nothing to do with COVID. The people who perpetrated these frauds should be fired without pensions and have any discretionary payment rescinded. They are as wrong and evil as those who did terrible things in Hitler's eugenics programs, maybe not as horrifying, but lives were lost, there was much human suffering from their efforts, and we should publicly recognize their behavior.

     Anybody who participated in riots from the George-Floyd video should never get a job again, nor any public assistance. It was a video, for heaven's sake! I'm told by people who watched it that Floyd's hair changed during the show. How many people have time to go to a barber during a beat-down? Bill Shatner never went to trial for all the Klingons he shot making episodes of "Star Trek." So Democrats in Minneapolis, Scottsdale, Portland, and wherever else looted stores, burned down buildings, blew up cars, and hurt and killed people in retaliation should face severe social and economic consequences. Doing violence in protest of violence is stupid, people who do this are stupid, and we should not make room for them. George Carlin said, "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity."

     Anybody who participated in the massive election steal in 2020 should be arraigned and tried for their crimes and they should rot in jail for as long as possible. An election is a sacred trust and violating it is in the same class as people who protest religion by peeing on the alter. These people are evil and should be treated as such.

     A few years ago a well-meaning manager asked me about a colleague who screwed up a project as a result of rejecting my advice. I was more experienced, I knew better, I had demonstrated my superior skill and judgment, and I didn't keep my negative attitude a secret. "Well, Adam, how do you think he feels?" My answer was immediate and direct, I hope he feels terrible. He didn't listen to senior advice, things went wrong, and it was his fault. There are times for sympathy and this wasn't one of them.

     Similarly, liberals who promote racism and hate, people who destroy property and hurt people, and those who lie about 2020 January 6 where about a million people gathered in protest without hurting anybody or destroying any property should be treated as the scum they are now, tomorrow, the next day, and for the rest of their lives.

     Another more-recent example is 2023 October 7, Hamas. Attacking Israelis for any reason is a dumb idea, like that picture of a monkey with a stick about to hit a lion, sometimes it's just a dumb idea all around, but having the justification the notion that extermination of all Jews is a noble calling deserves anything bad that happens to them, or to anybody living around them knowing full well who their neighbors are. Those who defend kill-all-the-Jews exhortations as "freedom of speech" should find out what that same freedom of speech feels like when somebody is doing them bodily harm. At least those people should find themselves without homes, food, or jobs for the rest of their lives.

     It's a matter of perspective sometimes. A buddy was all in a snit that I'm a Pink-Floyd fan when band-member Roger Waters is anti-semitic. One third or more of Americans are voting for a political party embracing Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its essential message of hatred for Jews going back to the White Knights in 1865 and you're worried about one music star who doesn't like Jews?

     Mob mentality shouldn't rule the day. Just because somebody deserves retribution doesn't entitle an angry crowd to mete that justice. We must act as individuals with individual concern, individual justice, and individual mercy. We can work together without becoming a run-amok mob.

     We mustn't associate symbols with message. Black lives may matter, but, I can assure anybody, white or black, BLM doesn't care about their lives any more than mine, and my life is one of those they're working hard to end. I have a crooked-cross swastika hanging in my home, a gift from friends I worked with in Delhi, a symbol of peace, nothing to do with National Socialism in central Europe ninety years ago.

     I'm sure we can think of a dozen more groups of Americans, Europeans, or others who deserve our contempt now, tomorrow, the next day, and for the rest of their lives. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences. Until we get that far, things are going to suck.

     There are people who earn our respect and admiration. I'm not thinking so much of public heroes as young people who appreciate values like reaching out and caring (life), making sure people have opportunity to make choices (liberty), working hard and taking good care of their employees (livelihood), buying things they have earned and treating ownership as a responsibility (property), and keeping their word even when it is difficult (contract). These people are America's future. I have met such people and I don't keep my admiration a secret.

     Admire, respect, promote, and support small businesses that offer good product at good prices with professional attitude. Be a proud patron of these growing enterprises and share your enthusiasm with friends who might also become customers.

     We have to accept people whose personal path to righteous is not our own. The part of Bible they say God wrote says the sabbath is Saturday, but if somebody wants to set aside Sunday instead, then I'm okay with it. More seriously, things go on in other people's bedrooms you may not like, but shut up and look the other way if you're offended by it.

     Lead by example. I have a friend who recently said to me how he noticed the "outragious" tips I gave for those working through the COVID mess and how he followed my example. There are platitudes to follow. If you find something hard for somebody else easy for yourself, then do it gladly. Savor the positive parts of life. When my flight was three hours late I told the parking guy it took me nine hours instead of six hours to get from Philadelphia to Phoenix and that it sure beats walking. A little bit of positivity goes a long way.

     Specifically, be vocal in support of professionalism and integrity. Sure I pissed all over my local orchestra when they messed up a piece of music I waited a year to hear in the concert hall, but I'm repeatedly and aggressively vocal in my support, and that support extends to my bank account as well. (Where do you think I get a forum to express my views? At the donor affairs where they serve libations and victuals of course. You may know the American term "vittles.")

     Be proud. I don't mean some phony pride wearing rainbows because you do sex a different way from most people, I mean be proud of what you do and who you are. If you have reason not to be proud of those things, then it isn't too late to change to something and somebody you can be proud of. Stand tall among the good people, be one of them, and be proud of it.

     Our conservative values are human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract. Be open in your admiration of those who represent and defend them.

     The bad shit is coming. With a name that ends in "berg" or "stein," my only 2024 resolution is to be around long enough to have resolutions in 2025. Given what a mess so-called-election-year 2020 was, I can only imagine what horrors we're in for in 2024. Another Jewish holocaust ninety years later is definitely on that list of possibilities. I've had a good life, sixty-seven years so far, I'm likely to be around in 2025 to have more of it, but I'm more likely to die of something political in 2024 than anything else I can think of.

     Either get a gun and learn how to use it or keep friends who have guns and know how to use them. Be prepared to fight or, at least, be prepared to leave in a hurry.

     Be skeptical. All the "conspiracy theories" since 2020 have all been true. We want to trust the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO), and other government advisory agencies, but their agendas ensure they're not going to be there when we need them.

     Don't be a maverick for the sake of being a maverick, no matter how cool it seems. Follow the rules when you can, break them when it's right, but be prepared to take the consequences when you go outside the box.

     There's going to be hate, there's going to be destruction, there's going to be hurting and killing, and there's going to be pain. Get comfortable with it. You can be the sort of person who takes spiders outside rather than killing them and still be comfortable putting a bullet into somebody who tries to take your property.

     Remember that your liberal friends are animals while they're being liberals. Negotiating with Dr. Jekyll in the hope of curbing the behavior of Mr. Hyde isn't going to work. Liberalism, progressivism, racism, and tyranny come from animal, crocodile-brain part of us, not from the logical, reasoning side that spawned the Magna Carta through the Constitution of the United States of America. Just like some of those zombie movies, you may have to hurt or kill somebody, it may be somebody who was close and dear, and "agendum est, it must be done. (Remember your second periphrastic conjugation.)

     I'm not asking anybody to pray or even to ask for help. The changes that make the future more bearable than the past come from within us. If we want amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties from sea to shining sea, the beauty and strength must come from within ourselves, as conservatives, as Americans, as decent people doing what is right.

     Let's decide that the next two centuries will be better. There isn't a lot of time and every day we wait makes recovery ever so much harder.

     Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences. Remember that, live by it, and, if necessary, be prepared to kill for it or to die for it.