Thoughts on D'Souza's film, Hillary's America

Hillary's America: 

the Secret History of the Democratic Party

Thoughts on Dinesh D'Souza's New Film

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Last night we saw Dinesh D'Souza's Hillary's America: the Secret History of the Democratic Party.

Don't miss this film, no matter what your politics.

In this circus of a presidential election, a little perspective from history might bring a measure of sanity.

If you don't know Dinesh D'Souza's work, it might help to place him as an author and film producer who has been called the Michael Moore of the right.

Now, in 2012, D'Souza produced 2016: Obama's America, which was, among other things, a biography of Obama's communist and Muslim family, roots, and mentors. In this film, D'Souza condemned Obama for his penchant for rule by edict and his cavalier disregard for the constitution. The film greatly angered Obama and his circle.

Recently, D'Souza observed that if one attacks the empire, one can expect "the empire to strike back." Knowing the habits of the thin-skinned Obama and his friends at the IRS, one might not be surprised to learn that in the wake of D'Souza's donating a few thousand dollars to the political campaign of a friend, he was indicted for some commonly practiced irregularity in this campaign contribution and was sentenced to eight months in jail. He was further compelled to give community service for another period, and, get this!-- he was compelled to undergo a course of psycho-therapy, as if he needed to be psychologically brought back from the road to perdition! To my nose, this punishment smells like the view that only the mentally ill could oppose Obama, and has the whiff of a Soviet-style practice of justice. To my eye, D'Souza's "crime" has the appearance of the recent and infamous IRS attacks on political groups that were known to oppose the ruling party's policies, and it was only those groups that were thus assaulted.

D'Souza's new film reveals the Democratic Party from the early days of the republic as a trail of tears and tyranny (as the term was used to describe Democratic president Andrew Jackson's murderous policy of relocating Indians to reservations out west.) The Democratic Party grew out of shameful roots as the party of slavery, broken treaties, oppression and murder of the Indians. In addition, they were the party of the KKK, the Jim Crow south, and they were the righteous defenders of negro lynchings. I knew that Woodrow Wilson had shamefully maneuvered the US into World War I, but I did not know of Wilson's approval of the KKK and other racist sentiments (which I just looked up and is corroborated by among other sources, a PBS episode of The American Experience.)

Since FDR, the Democratic party has been the more statist party (notice that I don't give the Republicans a pass on this matter of collectivism and statism.) But the Democrats have done far more than the Republicans in dragging us ever farther down Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom by savaging the rights of individuals to their own lives, liberty, and property. The Republicans in recent decades may have been rather toothless in their defense of the liberty and other rights of individuals, but they have not been such active crusaders against these rights as the Democrats.

D'Souza's new film is dramatically told with stunning, big-screen production values (sometimes a little over-the top, I must say...), guided by the artistic eye of Gerald Molen, famous for the films, Schindler's List and Jurassic Park.

The New York Times' review of this film is so snarky and sarcastic that any intellectually honest viewer should feel irresistibly drawn to see it!

It is shameful that this year the Republicans have failed to offer an inspiring alternative to the criminal, lying, corrupt party of Hillary. But see the film anyway!

http://hillarysamericathemovie.com/

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2016.0722

End War!--Put the Old Geezers in the Trenches! Or Not?

End War!—Put the Old Geezers in the Trenches! Or Not?

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Recently, we were sitting around the fire pit after dinner at a friend’s house when our host, a retired doctor and a passionately avowed leftie, offered his opinion that the way to decrease the likelihood of war is to impose a universal draft, on the assumption that if we can conscript the old geezers who now pull the levers of power, and send them out into the trenches to die, fighting our crazy wars, then surely the country would be less inclined to engage in the kind of blockheaded, cockamamie wars we now know only too well.

This is a provocative idea—threatening to make the old farts pay for their stupid wars by making them have to loft a rifle in the trenches and thereby put themselves in the line of fire! 

It is superficially plausible, as a means to reduce the likelihood of war, if we  make the old guys put their asses in the line of fire, instead of allowing them glibly to issue orders sending our treasured laddies and lassies out into the awful pit of death. 

But now what else happens if such a policy is imposed?  As usual, the lefties are deaf and blind to the consequences of their well-intentioned dictates.

Henry Hazlitt’s marvelous primer, Economics in One Lesson, shows us that the essence of clear thinking about any policy requires us not merely to ask what happens in the short term to the first group of people affected by a policy, but to look at how that policy affects everybody from the moment it is imposed until it plays out in the far future, and not only on the first group of people affected by that policy, but on all groups so affected.

I’m always impressed how left liberals seem to be oblivious to the actual results of their policies—that what truly matters to them is not the effects of their policies, but how well-intended their policies are. How their prescriptions play out in the future doesn’t seem to show up in the calculus of evaluating their policies. But it matters crucially whether one’s policies work in reality or not! Lefties, however, tend not even to notice what actually follows the passage of their piously motivated legislation. Self-congratulation for their lovely intentions is everything, as anybody can see from reading anything that Thomas Sowell has written.

What comes immediately to mind here are the well-known, unintended and perverse effects of policies like the minimum wage and rent control. 

Because it sounds plausible, at first blush, we believe that if only we raise the minimum wage, salutary effects must inevitably follow. But the reality is that when higher minimum wages are legislated, it causes unemployment to rise among the very workers the law is intended to help, and it hurts them more than any other group. 

If it’s a good idea to raise the minimum wage to $15, why not set it at $150? Or $1,500? The consequences are said not to be a problem, because, for one thing, wages are presumed to be extracted from the hides of greedy employers.

According to both Marx and Adam Smith—from whom Marx got his Labor Theory of Value—employers are parasites living on the backs of labor!

Now, when we piously pass legislation for rent control, to staunch the flow of blood going from renters to greedy landlords, we find that suddenly affordable housing is retreating into short supply. Sober economists tell us that if we actually want to destroy the housing stock, the only policy more effective than rent control is outright aerial carpet bombing. Think of the south Bronx, circa 1978, which looked like bombed-out Berlin in 1945--thanks to panicked landlords trying to wriggle free of their own destruction at the hands of New York City’s draconian rent control laws. Landlords were condemned by the City's rent control laws to losing money, so these property owners couldn’t hope even to sell their buildings because no sane investor would be stupid enough to buy properties that by law were condemned to losing money. In huge numbers, the landlords finally rebelled and burned the buildings to the ground. 

One could also point to the effects of almost any government regulation and note the similarly unintended and destructive consequences of these policies. 1.)

Now, back to the conversation with my friend and his argument for a universal draft that would make the powerful old guys go fight our wars. There are several ineluctable problems here.

For the sake of argument, if I grant that the rulers would be less inclined to start wars if it were they, instead of the sons of their poor constituents of color, who would be vulnerable to death in the trenches, this does not address the most terrible problem with this policy.

The essence of the problem here is that there is no acknowledgment of human rights! Every individual's rights!  

The doctor would appear not to care about the little matter of rights.

Apart from the revolution itself that followed its issuance, we have never institutionalized Jefferson’s formulation of human rights, in the words he formulated it in the Declaration of Independence. This crucial value never showed up explicitly written into the Constitution. Our Constitution does not embody this core value of the Declaration!

This arresting thought deserves a book, a movement, a political party that does not exist today! Our Constitution never explicitly embodied this ideal, unprecedented before John Locke, and so memorably captured by Jefferson’s formulation of it, that our rights are rooted in our nature as human beings, not as a gift from government, and are therefore unalienable.  

It has been a century since this idea was rejected by those who embraced the notion, promulgated by the likes of Oliver Wendall Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and Woodrow Wilson, that we have in our constitution, not a timeless North Star in our founding document, but instead a “living constitution,” in which the changing circumstances of history are said to allow us to rewrite the original document. By this intellectual sleight of hand, our country abandoned any unyielding idea that individuals possess rights to their own life, liberty, and property which are inalienable. Instead, rights are now seen merely to be conventional, merely the arbitrary gifts granted by the opinions of one's tribe. Rights, therefore, are the coincidental and generous blessings granted to us by the largesse of governments—which can be changed, added to, or revoked altogether, according to the whims of whichever gang has its hands on the levers of power, in this election cycle or the next.

So, at the end of the day, my friend’s suggestion that we send the old geezers to fight our wars is a chimera. Like almost everything else about contemporary politics, we are led to fascism—which means the nominal private ownership of the means of production, with Machiavellian control over every detail of that production, using others against their will for predatory advantage, and all of which is, in my humble opinion, the essence of evil. 

Think of the whole range of evil—genocide, murder, rape, slavery, robbery—every one of these evils is an example of a bad guy using other people against their will for predatory advantage. 

Where is Lady Liberty?  Where is the ideal of freedom? Far in the future, it would seem.

E  P  N

2016.0601

1.) for starters, think of Henry Hazlitt’s book I mentioned above, Economics in One Lesson; and for a more wide ranging, scholarly, and current account of these matters, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.
   

Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Yesterday, Memorial Day, I was brooding over the terrible situation that we Americans have created for ourselves with all our crazy wars abroad. I wrote nothing about it then. Today, a friend posted a picture of the grave stone of his grandfather, who was an Army veteran who bravely went ashore at Normandy in 1944. I wrote the following on my friend's post (and have since considerably elaborated on it below):

I honor our veterans, I treasure their service, as an aspect of the legitimate purpose of government, namely, the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

Now, I myself am an Army veteran of the Vietnam era. I was drafted--which hijacked my college career, because college deferments were abolished that year. I thought of immigrating to Canada as an expression of my loathing of the Vietnam War and what I deemed to be the immoral slavery of conscription, but I didn't go to Canada because, among other things, this would have meant that, as far as anybody could have known in 1972, I would never again have been able to see my friends and family unless they came to see me abroad.

I am increasingly troubled by how mindlessly our collectivist-altruist leaders squander the lives of our gallant young soldiers in crazy foreign military adventures that yield us worse than nothing--all guided by our leaders' insane, suicidal rules of engagement which are drawn from the marching orders they created for themselves in the doctrine of "Just War Theory.”

Nevertheless, let us honor Memorial Day. 

Let us honor those who gave their all to the unique, unprecedented, and crucial idea of America! 

Think of it!-- The idea of America: your life belongs to you! The good is to live it! Live and let live, and let those who can, voluntarily lend a helping hand to those who can’t! Let us deal with each other by mutual consent as traders, exchanging wonderful values for other wonderful values, all of it to our mutual benefit! 

This ethos never appeared anywhere else on Earth before America! These ideas certainly began here imperfectly, but for all their warts today, you have to conclude that they have nowhere played out any better anywhere on the planet, and nowhere do these ideas portend a more promising realization in the future! Heaven on Earth belongs to the future, but the idea of America is as close as we have come to it today! 

By the way, for those among you who "Feel the Bern," let the record show that Heaven on Earth is not to be found in Cuba or in Venezuela, or in the social science departments of American universities which lend themselves to these views. 

2016.0531

Limiting Government is Like Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism

A Properly Limited Government 

Seems as Likely as 

Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism 

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I am coming to believe that effectively and permanently limiting a government to its legitimate powers, namely, to the protection of individual rights, may be as likely as converting hyenas to vegetarianism.

But I am not prepared to give up this ideal of a proper government altogether! 

I agree that a proper government is required to sort out our disagreements and to restrain the predators and invaders, so long as its purpose is nailed down to the protection of every peaceful individual's right to life, liberty, and property.  And yet, in the blood red miasma of history, how can one not grow more pessimistic about the very possibility of restraining the government to such limits?  

In fact, history shows that in every attempt to create this vision of a properly limited government, this benevolent night watchman has always turned out to have hobnail boots and a swastika up his sleeve.  Well, sometimes it's a hammer and sickle in his pocket.

The specter of communism looms over the world's discussion of the social fabric--in spirit anyway, if not so much in this very term these days (outside of Italian and French politics, of course, where outright communist parties still exist in name.)  But few recognize this spirit in so many words, not as such anymore.  Even fewer people understand the moral problems inherent in socialism, in the way that Ayn Rand makes clear. 1.)  Few people even begin to understand the hopeless economics of socialism, as Ludwig von Mises so clearly analyzed it. 2.)  Fewer still know any antidotes to this ubiquitous socialist ethos.  

Moreover, even if one knows Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises down to the marrow, one should read the books of our most influential enemies, namely Marx, Kant, Plato, and perhaps their lesser acolytes... and throw in both the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, and the Koran too ... all in an effort to combat our own inevitable confirmation bias, to prevent us from being deafened by the echo chambers of our own minds.  If we don't read the work of those with whom we know we will disagree, we put ourselves in danger of remaining deaf and blind to any ideas we don't already know and approve of.

But we don't know Rand and Mises down to the marrow.  The common public discussion of Rand tends to be as sophomoric and ignorant as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's opinions of her.  Both Obama and Clinton have, in effect, dismissed any serious acceptance of Rand's ideas because, they say, while she may appeal to youthful naifs, one then grows up and gets over it.

Liberals tend to believe that there are no facts of human nature that might in any way limit their grandiose idealism in creating heaven on earth (hope and change for a fundamental transformation of the American system, as one of those recent presidential candidates put it...) with the result that when their uber-liberal soul mates, the socialists, get their hands on all the levers of power and completely substitute socialist central planning for capitalist markets, they create not a heaven on earth, but a stinking, slaughterhouse hell on earth.

And here is Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist supporter of communist causes from the time he was a wet young pup--Sanders does invoke a moral vision, but his vision is of the imposition of top down, holier-than-thou policies based on how government knows better than you how to run your life.  Sanders' socialism is a breast-beating policy of coercive, eat-the-rich collectivism and statism.  In a word, Marxism.  Righteous Marxism.  Morality as self-sacrifice for the lives of others, at least for those others who are smiled upon by the official, statist powers.  This is government by those who are eager to collect self-sacrifices from the polity, enforced at gunpoint by the police power.  Not to mention that this vision of government is run by people who have not the first clue about what material wealth is or how it is created--or even that it is indeed created, and not merely plucked from trees, like fruit, and that market freedom is a necessary precondition for the creation of wealth, or that menacing government edicts can never be the engine of creating real wealth. 

Republicans are no better, with respect to championing a secular, rights-respecting, life-serving morality for living on earth.  For example, take the comments of Ed Hudgins on the last Republican debate, in which he observes how none of the debaters argued for any of the foundational, crucial moral principles that should steer the ship of state on a proper course. 3.)

Conservatives tend to believe that there was some Halcyon past to which we should appeal, and all we need to do is to re-create this glorious past and model ourselves on that.  But the American founders' model was flawed from the start, as we can see in retrospect, in that it failed to recognize the rights of blacks or women, or the evil of slavery (not to mention the little Indian problem.)  And also not to mention that the founders' vision particularly failed to restrain the tyrannical growth of government.  Conservatives believe that wisdom and knowledge, including knowledge of right and wrong, come from God as revealed knowledge, and not as a consequence of secular, objective reason and observation of the facts of reality.  

Some libertarians understand that a proper defense of liberty must be based on foundational philosophy, but many others do not.  Ayn Rand despised libertarians because she mistakenly conflated all of them with anarcho-capitalists.  But you should read the luminous prose of Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, and then tell me how we should address this withering problem of limiting the government to its proper functions—to the protection of these rights to our own life, liberty, and property.  We are endowed with these rights by our nature, we are entitled to protect ourselves, and we are thereby entitled to delegate the defense of these rights to others, which delegation is the moral source of legitimate government.  

Alas, governments have always grown like Topsy.  

So how do we nail government down to size? —put it a short leash, chained to a thick wall based on objective principles that go all the way down to objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics?

I believe Rand was right in her belief that a proper government is necessary to secure our legitimate rights. I agree with her that without such a government, anarchy prevails, which must result in gang warfare, such as what they have recently enjoyed in Somalia.  Of course, Rand also rightly observed that having no government would be preferable to a totalitarian government, with its inevitable death camps for dissenters and its other perceived enemies.

So where does this leave us?

I believe the better day is yet to come, and must depend on the elevation of consciousness--on our coming explicitly and better to understand our situation in the universe.  The state of this global elevation of consciousness will be greatly enhanced when more people have come by their own lights to understand the life-serving and crucial work of Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and their extended circles.

E   P   N

1.) See, for example, Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics" https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1961/01/01/the-objectivist-ethics/page6 

2.) See, for starters, Ludwig von Mises, Socialism,

http://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Sociological-Ludwig-von-Mises/dp/0913966630/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454210210&sr=8-1&keywords=Ludwig+von+Mises%2C+Socialism

3.) Edward Hudgins,  http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/5934-trump-less-gop-debate-still-missing-moral-principles

2016.0130

Irwin Schiff, RIP

Irwin Schiff,  R.I.P.

1928-2015

by

Eric Paul Nolte

When decent people hear some authority justify his bad actions by saying, "We were just following orders," they will probably feel at least a little stab of horror rippling through their guts, like an echo of those many Nazis who were just obeying their orders to carry out the Jewish Holocaust. But to be Jewish, and a victim of some horror today, and then to hear these terrible words as a justification, is even more unforgivable.

Irwin Schiff, the eighth and last child of a Polish Jew who immigrated to America in the early twentieth century, died on 16 October 2015, of skin cancer that had metastasized to his whole body.

He was 87 years old, barely able to breath, blind, totally incapacitated. Yet the authorities hand-cuffed him to his bed frame. For months the family had been requesting that he be granted a compassionate release from jail so that he could die at home with his family around him. In the very week he died, after multiple appeals, the authorities demanded still further proof that his health was grave enough to warrant a compassionate early release.

Irwin Schiff's "crime" was that he challenged the American tax code and published books that attacked the legitimacy of the income tax. Prosecuted by the IRS, Schiff was sentenced to 14 years in jail. Given his rapidly declining health and his scheduled release in July, 2017, this meant that he was condemned to serving a death sentence. This is a man of great personal and intellectual integrity who served his country as a soldier during the Korean War. 

One of his books, The Federal Mafia, was actually banned by a court in Nevada, as if it were 1963, and the volume in question were Lady Chatterley's Lover or Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, or, as in Germany after the war, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (which was then banned by the German censors.) The government authorities deemed Irwin Schiff's ideas a public threat requiring censorship. 

Now, the point should be made that censorship is an asinine belief. Why? In a free market of ideas, the craziest ideas are eventually self-exterminating because crazy ideas slam up against the wall of reality, like the belief that one can fly by jumping off a tall building and flapping one's arms. By contrast, the better ideas are viable because they must be consistent with reality. So I say to the worst bigots and bastards, go ahead and preach your vile, stupid nonsense openly and in public--because in a free market of ideas, the presence of these craziest notions will only make the better ideas shine even more brightly by comparison.

Here I shall not argue the merits of Irwin Schiff's case against the legitimacy of the income tax. If you have been following my blog, you will already know that I believe the IRS should be dismantled. I believe that they display the moral timbre, if not quite the ocean of blood, of the Nazi SS or the Soviet KGB. But none of this matters here. In my humble opinion, as I've written elsewhere, taxation is not the price of civilization. The price of civilization is the protection of the sacred rights of all individuals to their own life, liberty, and property. But none of this is exactly the issue here. 

The point here is that this poor man, Irwin Schiff, was essentially put away as a political prisoner for espousing and practicing an idea that offended the authorities, and he died, chained to his bed. The authorities could not be moved to release this blind, helpless man. 

The family continued to plead for his release in his last hours, but they were denied because, as the authorities explained, they were just following orders, and were forbidden to display a dram of humanity or moral autonomy. Think of Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority.

We can do better than this, we can make the world a better place. For starters, we could dismantle the IRS and stop this reprehensible tyranny.

E   P   N

2015.1123

Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

by 

Eric Paul Nolte

The New Yorker style cartoon says, "My desire to remain well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane."

Well, then, there is also the fact that the "news" would seem to be largely a matter of one's point of view. What is news?  And what shall we make of it? As it stands, the "news" is produced mostly by crony big businesses who comb the world high and low for every little thing that will arouse our fear, outrage, disgust, and our despair, while ignoring every evidence of the inspiring, the creative, and the amazing! 

Of these inspiring and astonishing wonderments, there is so much of it that one can truly argue that we live in an age of unprecedented opportunity, even in the face of the government's dreadful drag of collectivist insanity!

What?! We have a hundred thousand pages of government regulations, issued by unelected bureaucrats who wield life and death control over our actions, dictating the details of damn near everything that anybody can hope to do in the world.  How can I say that ours remains a realm of unprecedented opportunity?  

Because this opinion is the result of my observation of the arithmetic of the matter.  I don't disagree with the idea that government is profoundly destructive, but follow the math here. 

Start with the addition of the amazing creativity of entrepreneurs and inventors.  Their passion to create new ideas infuses the world with their astonishing new stuff. Subtract from this sum the destruction created by the dead hand of government, whose terrible interventions of the righteous, socialist, egalitarian destroyers, greatly slow the stream of invention and creativity.  I won't attempt to document every step of the positive case here, but it should suffice to ask you to compare the worlds of 1980 and 2015.

Do I need to invoke anything more than the advent of the world wide web, the internet, cell phones, and email?  I didn't even try hard to name things that have led to this radical transformation of the quality of our lives.  The difference is dramatic and profound.  

Government produces nothing that is not financed by its coercive takings from the citizens.  Everything government does is made possible by the wealth they take from the citizens by force, through taxation.  

At best, government succeeds when it creates the stable atmosphere in which the creative elements can bring their products to market, restrains the predators in our midst, negotiates the disputes among the well-intentioned, and repels the attacks of foreign invaders.  These are the functions of a legitimate government, in essence: the protection of life, liberty, and property--the protection of the individual rights of all its citizens. The civil order, and ours is arguably the most generous population in the history of the world, should take care of that small percentage of the population that is truly hapless, helpless, and deserving of our charity.    

Now think of how dramatically greater all this progress since 1980 might have been, absent the dead foot of government control, as opposed to the "invisible hand" in Adam Smith's formulation of how the successful pursuit of selfish interest must necessarily benefit the greater good.

E   P  N

2015.1017

The Imperative of Praising Heroes Like Pamela Geller

The Imperative of Praising Heroes like Pamela Geller

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I continue to be appalled by the refusal of Americans, both liberals and conservatives, to name and condemn the naked evil that is sweeping much of the world in the name of Islam.

Much blame has been heaped upon Pamela Geller, Fleming Rose, and other heroes who publicly dare to condemn the Islamists who threaten anyone with death for the “crime” of drawing Mohammed or otherwise offending their, oh, so delicate feelings.  

The right to free speech is as fundamental and precious as the rights to life, liberty, and property, and to condemn those who draw the public's attention to the need for this most basic right is comparable to blaming the rape victim for being raped.

But there is something else that needs to be said to those cowards in the West who will not reprint the “offensive” cartoons, and who scorn brave idealists like Pamela Geller:

You who piously repeat the lie that Islam is “a great religion of peace,” you who fail to stand up and righteously condemn the absolute evil of Islamism, you are an accessary to the Islamist crimes of murdering innocents, you are guilty of aiding and abetting the evildoers of Islam, and you thereby make yourselves as loathsome and evil as the Islamists!  

This view derives from a crucial observation that Ayn Rand makes in her writings on ethics: that one who will not condemn an evil is an accessary to the crime, and is therefore morally little better than the perpetrator of that crime.

With all my talk about evil here, perhaps I should underscore, in a thumbnail sketch, this aspect of the ethics I believe: that the Good consists of everything that supports rational human life and flourishing, and the evil amounts to everything that threatens the well-being of such peaceful, rational people. 

All attempts to appease the Islamists are doomed.  There is no placating them.  In the end there is only outright surrender or principled opposition to them, backed by appropriately lethal force, in the name of self-defense.

To those who blame Pamela Geller, I say: shape up and recognize what is going on in the world, and realize that it is not yet too late to reclaim your moral virtue and stand up against this Islamist evil, this terrible threat to the great values that have created every wonder and comfort of the modern world!  It not yet too late to stand up in such an act of self-defense.  I’m not sure how much longer we have before it is indeed too late.  

E   P   N

2015.0731
rev. 2015.0801
and 2015.0828