Here’s more intrusion, and some advice. BE REALLY CAREFUL IF YOU OWN A COLOR LASER PRINTER. Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents.
It seems that there are invisible coded dots on your pages that contain enough information that you can be tracked. Which is hint #1. If you’re going to do something unlawful with that printer, don’t send in the warranty registration card.
You may think that it’s just the counterfeiters that need to be worried. If you print ANYTHING that worries the government, and soon that could be anything, they can trace it back to you just like a license plate.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For all of the people who tout Canada as Health Care Heaven, they ignore the little grotesque man behind the curtain. The reality behind the big shiny that everyone sees.
The Government of Canada is the sole purveyor of health care in Canada. Every doctor works for the government and cannot accept payment from anybody else but the government.
That day is coming soon for us as well. When You Won’t Be Able to Find a Physician documents what will happen when you hit 65.

That day is coming. The closer you are to age 65, the sooner it is coming.
You have to begin planning for this now. The care that you will receive is going to resemble the Post Office.
When you are over 65, a physician who accepts any Medicare patients is not allowed to accept payment from you if you are under Medicare. It’s a felony if he does. The only exception is if you’re covered by your employers’ policy.
Because hospitals charge high prices to uninsured people, but accept Medicare payments or insurance company payments for 20 cents on the dollar, if you aren’t under Medicaid, you can get ruined. Why does the government allow this dual pricing practice? Simple: the bureaucrats know that this forces everyone under Medicare/Medicaid at age 65.
Insuring yourself against a catastrophic illness with a high-deductible ($5,000) coverage would be affordable, but it’s not possible. Private insurance companies do not cover people older than age 64.

It also comes up with a interesting fact that I knew about, but I was a little off.

The fact is, the largest single medical expense of your life will be your last six months of life. About two-thirds of everything you will spend on hospital and physicians’ care will be spent in those final six months. (This, according to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield man in our congregation.) So, Medicare will bust the fiscal system as more old people start dying. The expenses have only just begun.

I thought it was only half.
Read the rest of the article, and do everything in your control to stay healthy. You may not be able to afford being sick tomorrow.

I found this, The High Value Of Economic Freedom and I thought it was interesting.
It says 24 of the top 26 states in the matter of economic freedom are red. While the bottom 7 are all blue.
Economic freedom is measured by how much the state and local government interferes in a businesses’ business. From onerous taxes, to burdensome regulations, it is the blue states that restrict the American dream by and large.

But per capita income is higher in Colorado, the second-ranked state, than it is California. And Virginia, third on the list, has a per capita income almost identical to that of the Golden State.
It’s more than dollars, though. Regulation, taxation, the size of government, spending on public programs — all part of how economic freedom is defined — do have an impact on prosperity. Large incomes are offset, for instance, by high taxes.
California is a high-tax state where income is lost to the diminished economic freedom. The authors call this the “oppression tax” and it hits Rhode Island (ranked 47th) the hardest. No. 50 New York is also hit hard, which negatively affects its high per capita income.
What this study of the states is teaching is the same lesson we learned at the international level: The more a government interferes in the economy, the more difficult it is for the economy to prosper.
This lesson is unfortunately lost on too many policy-makers across the world and in state capitals in this country. That’s why Rhode Islanders can lose $3,607 (13.17%) of their incomes every year to the oppression tax, Hawaiians $2,963 (11.36%) and New Yorkers $2,441 (7.45%). Somebody just doesn’t understand — or, for political reasons (think blue states) simply refuses to.
We, of course, generalize. A few do get it and as a result, government is trimmed in some places, which brings economic freedom that in turn promotes prosperity. What could be wrong with that?

Nothing is wrong with getting out of the way and letting businesses prosper. Of course, regulation of industries to make sure they are not negatively impacting the environment and such is not being onerous. That is taking care of the environment. But being repressive in regulations to obtain a “pristine” environment is.
As with all things, a balance must be reached.

This is an interesting article, The Myth of the Working Poor.
I discovered an interesting fact about a year ago. If you want to be successful, there are three things you must do:

• Finish High School.
• Don’t have a child before you get married.
• Don’t have a child before you are 20.

If you do these three things, you have a 96% chance of escaping poverty.
If you break any one of these rules, you have an 80% chance of ending up in poverty.
A 4% chance if you obey the rules, an 80% chance if you break the rules. Pretty impressive difference, eh?
The American “underclass” is by and large people who broke these rules and condemned themselves to poverty.
But it is more than that. It is a lack of motivation to succeed. Without this fire, a want to do better and move up in the world, nothing external will help.
Government assistance is a negative reward. It gives you free money to do the wrong thing. A 16 year old mother of two quickly learns that the more kids she has, the more money she gets.
You can’t government program people out of poverty. You could just pay them $50k a year in assistance and it wouldn’t help in the least bit. These people would still live in the worst part of town, fouling their own nests, getting drunk and high every day. I see these people every day I drive my routes through Memphis. I see litter in the streets, boarded up houses and apartment complexes, people with nothing to do but sit on the porch all day and drink 40′s.
I also see the clean neighborhoods as well, where the grass is cut, the streets are clean, all the houses are lived in and so on. These are the people who work hard.
We will never run out of poor people. That is a fact. There will always be a group of people who do not perform. You can’t have a right side of a bell curve without a left side. Short of some kind of Utopia it will always be there.
I am not saying we should not care for those in need. But I am not in favor of blindly supporting the lazy. They should be introduced to the same freedom most of us face, the freedom to starve. It is that very incentive that makes us perform and do better.

Well, it seems that free speech, appropriately held in high regard in our universities, isn’t so free after all. Rutgers Forces Students to Protest Against the First Amendment.
Like an earlier entry of mine that talked about students defacing SUV’s as part of a class project, this one also involves a radical teacher forcing the students through a “class project” to infringe upon the free speech of others.
This is why I’m glad I never went to college. My Conservative views would have put me into the minority and would have frustrated me to no end. Faced with professors who force their views on you and expect you to toe the party line in order to pass, my non-conformist streak would have come out wider than the Mississippi.
I don’t take on views just because someone else wants me to. My views are reached by a steady process of thought and consideration. I instantly shy away from ideas that sound good right off the bat. Perhaps it’s my cynical nature. In any case, I don’t take on views without a lot of thought.
Do you?

If you read one article this year, this is it: Addiction to porn destroying lives, Senate told.
Pornography is a soul killer. It not only degrades the women who are depicted into objects instead of people, it destroys the soul of the person who looks at it.

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, said pornography’s effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine. She told of one patient, a business executive, who arrived at his office at 9 a.m. each day, logged onto Internet porn sites, and didn’t log off until 5 p.m.

Porn is the biggest money maker in the business. It outranks every other money making business on the Internet and even outranks all the income of all the professional sports combined.
It is sickening, both in its production and it’s usage.
I must admit, when I was younger I, too, had a significant problem with this stuff. I still fight the temptation every day. You, me and our children are only a couple of clicks away from a porn site. And even a lot of the most innocent URLs are porn sites.
A couple of years ago, I was trying to find the website of a local museum and typed in the obvious URL. I certainly got an eyeful with that website! Even the front page was pretty graphic.
Don’t get involved with porn. Please.

I found a long letter today, from one of our troopers in Iraq. It’s a little too long to post, but I thought this one part was important.

Daily I am experiencing what Marines do when Marines deploy. We work hard.
We train hard. We eat. We sleep. We rollout on missions. We laugh when we see how what we said is misquoted or taken so far out of context by some members of the media that our thoughts are no longer resemble any facsimile to the truth. We rollout on missions.
Several of the Marines in our detachment are huge Eagles fans. Of course, since my roots are in Detroit, I had to place a bet on the Lions’ game. The evidence of the loss was inscribed on my hand and kept there for a week. We read. We watch DVDs. We e-mail home when we can. We try to do physical training. We look forward to care packages. We miss our loved ones, desperately, desperately. We rollout on missions. We follow the news as we can. (There was a fair representation of the Red Sox faithful in the chow hall in the wee hours of the morning watching the last game and the riddance of
“the curse.”) We listen closely for mortar fire. We seek shelter from it. We rollout on missions. We plan missions. We take sniper fire. We attend briefings. We attend meetings. We clean weapons. We rollout on missions and we miss our loved ones.

I wanted to bring this up because we are asking our troops to move mountains. It is important to know that they are working 24/7 to create something that is worth the blood of their buddies.
I, for one, wish I was young again. I would enlist in the Navy again in a heartbeat and serve again and again. I miss the military life every day. You don’t get the kind of camaraderie in an office setting than you do when you’re confined to your office for six months and unable to see your family. You don’t have to depend on every shipmate to pull their load to keep everybody alive.
Godspeed, our troops.

I’m following up on yesterday’s post on the American Communist Liberation Union. Pentagon Recruiting Could Suffer After Boy Scout Decision.
Read it, it’s important. But I’m in the middle of an attack and can’t comment on it. It’s taken all I have just to sit here and complete this post. Sorry.

In a followup to this post, Blake Douglass is continuing to stick firm to what he believes in and all I can say is, “Good for him!”
Yearbook Shots.

Blake Douglass, a 17-year-old student at Londonderry High School, is about to take his high school to court over their refusal to allow him to wear a shooting vest and hold an open shotgun over his shoulder in his senior picture. Douglass, a longtime hunter and skeet shooter, said he simply wanted to honor his hobby. It’s seems reasonable enough, especially in light of the fact that the school has allowed every other manner of prop to be displayed in other students’ senior portraits, from musical instruments to cars.

If you look at my previous post, you will see that it is a tasteful picture, certainly nothing offensive about it. But like the article says, the principal has watched Bowling for Columbine one too many times.
The kid is sticking to his gun and I am proud to see him do it. Keep the good fight up Blake, and I hope you win.

Well, either the Canadian government is very good with its fiscal policy, or the citizens are just paying too much taxes. Budget surplus swells to $8.9B
Me, I’m inclined to think that Canadians are overtaxed and the greedy government doesn’t want to give it back. Anyway, this is what you get when you have a socially Liberal government, dedicated to “womb to the tomb” kind of socialized care. Overtaxed and underserviced.

If you’re one of those people who get out of bed early on Sunday mornings to watch systematic acts of destruction, have I got a website for you.
Implosion World shows you buildings and other structures imploded by controlled explosions. It’s Bart Simpsons profession when he grows up, so it can’t be all bad!

The American Communist Liberation Union (Known as the American Civil Liberties Union) has struck another great blow against America.
They have gotten the US military to stop sponsoring the Boy Scouts and their gatherings on military land.
I can’t say it any better than this:

If you take the ACLU and other extremists supporting its agenda at their word, you have to believe this fight is about “tolerance.”
They maintain they oppose the Boy Scouts because of their “intolerance” for people who don’t embrace their values. And, in the name of “tolerance,” the ACLU and those who consider the Boy Scouts “subversive,” have no tolerance for the Boy Scouts – or anyone else who disagrees with them.
The ACLU is never going to change. It is an anti-American organization. It is a group that seeks to destroy all that makes America a unique experiment in freedom. It is an organization in league with all of America’s enemies. It is an organization that hates God, hates what is right, decent and morally upright. It is an organization in league with the Devil, as far as I am concerned.
And the ACLU is an organization that needs to be isolated, exposed for what it is, recognized for what it is and destroyed if necessary.

They call the Scouts “subversive,” but what does a scout swear to do?

A Boy Scout pledges to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
A Boy Scout vows to keep himself physically strong, morally straight and mentally alert.

It’s that kind of moral standards that make this country great. I believe it was Hamilton in the Federalist Papers that said words to the effect, “This Constitution is for a moral and religious People. It will not work otherwise.” And you can look at Liberia to prove it is the people that makes the document work, not the other way around.
The ACLU is a threat to the way of life that has made this country into what it is today. If they can destroy the foundation of what makes us a good and morally-based people, then they will have destroyed everything that means to be an American.

I, for one, am taking a public stand in favor of the Boy Scouts. I like what they stand for. Even though I have never been a Scout or involved with the organization (as a father of five girls), I consider their goals and objectives beyond reproach.
I guess it’s time to add me to the enemies list. I support the Boy Scouts – unequivocally, unabashedly, unashamedly. The Boy Scouts personify the kind of world in which I would like to live and raise my family.
If this is the new dividing line in our society, let the barricades be erected. I’m not retreating – not another inch.
Who’s with me?

I am. Are you?

You and I have discussed this point before. WW II Flashback: ‘Terrorists’ Kill 1,000 Americans in Postwar Germany.
The article start off thusly:

The president declared victory over a year ago, but terrorists continue to pick off U.S. troops and even American civilians at the rate of three per day.
The maniacal dictator may be long gone, but his hard-core followers continue to wreak havoc across the land, with the interim government seemingly powerless to stop the mayhem.
Back home, the press takes an increasingly pessimistic tone, with some of the most prominent news organs pronouncing the U.S.’s postwar strategy an abject failure.
Iraq 2004? Not exactly.
Try Germany 1946, in the first year after World War II.

Most, if not all history books do not cover the years of terrorist attacks that took place in post-war Germany. When former SS officers formed the ‘Werewolves’ and set off to bring back the Third Reich by throwing the invaders out of Germany.

On Monday North detailed the little-known truth about the post-World War II U.S. experience to ABC radio host Sean Hannity:
“From May 8, 1945 until June 1946, over a thousand Americans and their dependents were killed by German terrorists,” he explained, while discussing his new book, “War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific.”
So, how did the U.S. eventually quell the violence?
“General Eisenhower went to [interim German leader] Konrad Adenauer, the guy we hand-picked to run the new government,” said North. “And he told him, ‘You either stop this or we’ll get a new guy to run this country.’”
Adenauer promptly contacted the Wermacht and told them to take care of the problem at all costs, using former SS troops if necessary.
“It wasn’t pretty,” said North. “There were no trials – nobody was brought before tribunals or anything like that. The German army just went out and took care of it. And the killing stopped.”
Added North, “I think that’s probably what’s going to happen in Iraq.”

That is what must happen in Iraq. The American Army and Marines can only help, what is needed now are Iraqis that are willing to stand up and take control of their country and their lives, even if some have to make the ultimate sacrifice to do so.
The good news is, they are doing it. The bad news is we aren’t getting out of the way and letting the Iraqis kill terrorists. The average citizen must rise up and say ‘Enough!’ and dime out the intruders, and I ain’t talking Americans. The residents of Fallujah are learning the folly of following terrorists.

…Are just too stupid to draw breath correctly.
From Fox News:

A Pennsylvania woman who was struck by a train has sued the rail company — for failing to warn her that trains travel on railroad tracks.
Patricia M. Frankhouser filed suit on Nov. 4 seeking damages in excess of $30,000 from Norfolk Southern Corp. (search), according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Last January, Frankhouser was hit by a train as she walked along railroad tracks in her hometown of Jeannette, Pa., a southeastern suburb of Pittsburgh.
Amazingly, she came away from the encounter with only a broken finger, some cuts and, according to the lawsuit, “pain.”
Apparently, however, the incident was traumatic enough for her to hire a lawyer.
“Defendant’s failure to warn plaintiff of the potential dangers negligently provided plaintiff with the belief she was safe in walking near the train tracks,” Frankhouser’s suit asserts.
It goes on to state that Norfolk Southern, based in Norfolk, Va., should have posted signs warning passersby “of the dangers of walking near train tracks and that the tracks were actively in use.”
Nowhere in the filing does it say whether Frankhouser heard the train coming, why she failed to get out of the way or even whether she was walking alongside or in between the rails.

Either this woman is extremely stupid, and/or just looking for some quick cash. And the attorney isn’t that bright either, taking a case like this. He better have gotten cash up front.
This reminds me of a TV court case where this woman was suing for damages. She was in an automatic car wash when it stopped halfway through the cycle. She got out of her car, in the car wash, in high heels, and then was surprised when she slipped and fell on the wet and soapy floor. She was suing to for the owner to put up a sign to the effect that wet and soapy floors are slippery. The judge did a double take on this woman, just about called her an idiot and threw the case out.
There are things that you should know when you are six years old. You usually discover them the hard way (wet floors are slippery, etc.) and others are pointed out to you.
You forget them at your own peril.

I’ve been fighting suicidal ideation for a couple of weeks now and it’s pretty bad today. I might not even go into work.
I get strong impulses to stick a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. It’s not that I want to, there is no reason for me to do so. But still the images and impulses to hurt myself are there.
Locking me up in the hospital will do no good, as there is no medication that can do something about this. If they lock me up, they would have to keep me there permanently, and there is no facility like that anywhere near here to do that.
I have to will myself out of these thoughts, and some days that hill is steeper than others. Today it’s damn near vertical.
Don’t worry, I don’t have a gun, nor any other way to kill myself. About the only thing that I could do that is close is to walk in front of a bus, but I’ve done that before and survived. Several years ago I walked out into traffic while in the middle of a psychotic episode and got hit by a car. I broke my wrist, my leg and ended up with six stitches in my head. Not something I want to go through again.
So I guess I’ll whimper and scream for the next hour or so and see if I can go into work.
See you later.