Tag Archives: morality

New Publications

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I’m pleased to announce two new pamphlets, A Conservative’s Thoughts on Rights and Duties, their Duality, and some Implications and A 21st Century American Crisis.

In Rights and Duties I talk about our inalienable rights and our inalienable duties and their attributes as endowments from and by our Creator, as well as how they and the fact that they’re duals of each other, are a part of the fabric of our existence—both as those individual rights and duties and in the capacity of those duals.

Further, and just as importantly, our inalienable rights and our inalienable duties are in each of us as individuals; they are not in groups of us, they are not in the whole of us as a nation. Each one of us is possessed of them entirely in ourselves.

This, of course, has implications for the role our government, and especially the roles of “civil law” and “civil rights,” have in our lives.

American Crisis is a call to arms for all of us to become active and to rescue our Republic from its dangerous drift away from our founding principles of small, limited government; individual liberties; personal responsibilities.

From the pamphlet:

In the era of our War of Independence, governments, said the Conservatives of the time—those monarchists, forerunners of today’s Big Government Progressive disciples—exist first and above the people, and the rights of the people are those granted by these governments.

“The time’s Liberals, though—the men and women of our War, of our Founding, and of our earlier history—had a different view. A man, they held, has rights that are indivisible from him because they are inherent in his humanity, in his very existence, as endowments from his Creator. Government, they held, exists to protect these rights and for no other purpose.

And

The blows we struck in 2010 were a worthy start, but they were only a start. The progress we added in 2012 has been inadequate to our cause. But we are not finished. Wisdom is not the purchase of a day.

See the links to the right or my Books page for information about how to get them in either Kindle or epub (Nook-compatible) format.

I hope you get as much out of them as I enjoyed putting into them.

Mendacity, and the Color of Money

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According to The Daily Caller,

Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) expects to have more money for medical care than it can spend for the fifth fiscal year in a row.

In fact,

[The] VA carried over $1.449 billion in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2010 to 2011, $1.163 billion from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2012, $637 million from fiscal year 2012 to 2013, and $543 million from fiscal year 2013 to 2014.

[The] VA expects to carry over $450 million in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2015. VA received its full requested medical care appropriation of $54.6 billion this fiscal year, which is more than $10 billion more than it received four years ago.

Yet the AFGE, a Federal employee union, says that the VA is underfunded in the areas about which it cares. We’ve also seen this underfunding bit presented as an excuse for the failure of the VA to provide access to medical care—those secret waiting lists, for instance: the VA doesn’t have the funding to man the facilities to shorten/eliminate those waits.

But this isn’t contradictory. The VA is short of money here, and has an excess there, but it can’t just transfer the excess from there (the medical side for instance) to here (the AFGE’s identified shortfall side)—that’s a color of money problem: Federal funding that’s appropriated for a purpose requires Congressional approval to transfer the money to another purpose, even within Departments. It’s on Congress to stop overfunding one purpose and to stop underfunding another purpose.

And there’s this:

The Daily Caller reported that VA spent more than $3.5 million on furniture the night before the government shutdown on the last day of fiscal year 2013 so as not to lose that money in the department’s budget the next fiscal year.

This certainly looks shameful and shady—and it is, at bottom—but that’s not entirely the VA’s fault. Here it’s the case that, the VA’s medical care funding notwithstanding, in general Federal budgeting is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition: Departments cannot carry forward unused appropriated funds; they must spend the money in the fiscal year for which it was appropriated, or they lose the unspent funds.

These things are what come of a Byzantine budget process—it’s Congress’ failure of budgeting.

This does not, though, absolve the VA personnel of their mendacity in their failure to take care of our veterans as they’re charged to do. No amount of confusion from a labyrinthine budgeting process can excuse falsifying wait lists or simply not bothering, leaving our veterans without prompt care when it’s needed.

It’s For Your Own Good

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…if you know what I mean.

Thailand’s General Prayuth Chan-ocha, the man in charge of his military’s overthrow of the Thai government,

has ordered dozens of outspoken activists, academics, and journalists to surrender themselves to military authorities….

The military, which is already holding most of the Cabinet ousted in a coup Thursday in secret locations, said it would keep former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and others in custody for up to a week to give them “time to think….”

In other words, to give time for Prayuth’s reeducation rehabilitation to take effect (Shinawatra was released from “custody” Monday).

One of Prayuth’s spokesmen, Colonel Weerachon Sukondhapatipak, added that

all those held have had their cellphones confiscated because “we don’t want them communicating with other people. We want them to be themselves and think on their own…,” adding that they need to “calm down and have time to think.”

Can’t have distractions interfering with their reeducation, after all.

Another of Prayuth’s spokesmen, Colonel Winthai Suvaree, is saying that Prayuth

urged every group of citizens to avoid joining the anti-coup protests because at the moment, the democratic principles cannot be executed normally.

Because the people screwed up and didn’t democratically govern themselves in accordance with the military’s approved principles or outcomes.

Later in the week, Prayuth finally spoke for himself:

I’m not here to argue with anyone. I want to bring everything out in the open and fix it.

Everyone must help me. Do not criticize, do not create new problems. It’s no use.

Indeed. He’s just had Education Minister Chaturon Chaisang arrested—in mid-news conference, yet—for the heinous crime of criticizing Prayuth’s takeover and pushing instead for a return of Thailand to civilian rule.

Because shut up. Because reeducation. Because your Betters…Know Better.

Progressive Racism, Part…Another

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Senator Jay Rockefeller (D, WV) had this to say, while in a carefully nearly empty Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee hearing and with (equally carefully) only a single Republican present:

I think it’s very important to take a long view at what’s going on here. I’ll be able to dig up some e-mails that make part of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t look good, especially from people who’ve made up their mind that they don’t want it to work, because they don’t like the president—maybe he’s the wrong color, something of that sort.

I’ve seen a lot of that, and I know a lot of that to be true….

Of course, Rockefeller, with equal care, has chosen not to produce any of those emails, and he has chosen, again with equal care, to produce none of what he claims to have seen.

In the end, only a racist will manufacture a racist complaint where there is no racism involved. Especially when he knows there is no racism is involved, but merely is desperate to change the subject away from the myriad Progressive failures in the Senate.

Disband the VA

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In A Conservative’s Treatise on American Government, I wrote about the Veterans Administration’s active and deliberate assault on religious freedom, using our veterans as pawns in that effort. In summary form, here’s what I wrote about the VA’s misbehavior in that arena.

At funeral ceremonies in our National Cemeteries, VA management attempted to dictate the permissible content of prayer, presuming to censor a Pastor’s prayer. Following this—on the heels of a Federal judge’s ruling that the government may not and can not determine the content of prayer—a widow was barred altogether from burying her husband in a national cemetery because the honors and ceremonies associated included prayers and actual references to God.

These scandals have been forgotten by an NLMSM that’s also afflicted with AADD.

My recommendation at the time was to remove the National Cemetary System from the VA and place it directly within the DoD for administration by military personnel.

After the revelations of the inexcusably…shoddy…treatment of our veterans by the VA, including (but not at all limited to) 40 or more of our veterans dying while being held on VA waiting lists to get medical treatment, those waiting lists being cynically manipulated so as to make the VA bureaucrats look good (at the direct expense of those veterans they’re charged with supporting), whistle blowers being suppressed and/or reassigned for being too pushy with their concerns; all of that coupled with President Barack Obama’s decision to do nothing about any of that beyond his formulaic chit-chat about being upset over it, this is no longer enough.

The VA must be disbanded altogether, and all of its personnel returned to the private economy.

The VA has a budget including some $61 billion dedicated to “supporting” veterans and their families, $12.6 billion for education benefits, and a total budget of some $140 billion in FY13 for things like VA payroll, building new medical facilities, R&D for veteran-needed prosthetics development, and the like. There are some 21.5 million veterans in the US, currently.

Those $61 billion should be continued as budget items, and paid to our veterans as vouchers. Our veterans and their families are fully capable of determining for themselves what doctors they should see and at what medical facility they should see them. Their treatment régimes are matters to be determined by the veteran and his doctor; the VA has forfeited its…authority…to have input into this. The $12.6 billion should be continued as budget items, and paid to our veterans as vouchers, also. This is, largely, what happens today; it should be continued.

The remainder of the $140 billion should be continued as budget items, and used to plus up the vouchers paid to our injured veterans.

The VA’s current 170 medical centers and 350 clinics should be returned to the private sector, where competent management will improve these facilities’ ability to serve our veterans—and which increase in the supply of such medical facilities also will have the salutary effect of holding down the cost growth rates of services provided to all Americans by the increased number of medical centers and clinics, if not actually reducing those costs.