Reflections From a Murky Pond

Bat Dynasty?

A multimillionaire who’s on a crusade to save the land from itself. By night he does good works but scares many who see or hear of him. Hmmmmm…Is it Bruce Wayne or Phil Robertson?

A photo by George Roelofson of WTHN showing a long line of Connecticut residents waiting to register their guns and ammunition to avoid the state from declaring their legally purchased property illegal contraband has gone viral and is rightly sending chills down the backs of some gun owners.

It Has A Familiar Look

The unhappy shades of Weimar Germany seems to be haunting Connecticut, warning any and all who can remember that sad period in history of just what such registrations can lead to. Given America’s current economic straits, which also bear some resemblance to the Weimar Republic, and the current Regime’s vilification of certain propertied classes and groups, such warnings may well be such as to be heeded by the wise.

History has already given us a stark lesson in how one sort of government mandated queue can easily lead another, worse sort. First it’s the registration and restriction of citizens’ firearms; later it’s possibly the registration of “undesirable” citizens.

The Consequence Of Unchecked Authority

Even if one chooses to deny that “it could happen in America,” it’s very hard to deny that a disarmed and cowed citizenry consolidates power in the form of force in the hands of the State and its enforcers. We certainly don’t need to run afoul of Godwin to warn of where that can lead. US and world history as well as both domestic and international news and currents events should be enough to make it clear that the police, when left unchecked, are as dangerous to society as the criminals they are meant to deal with.

So yes! There’s plenty of reason for Roelofson’s photo to both “go viral” and to strike a chord of fear and worry in the hearts and minds of freedom-loving Americans.

Since America is now in yet another election year, one can expect various cries for campaign finance reform to resound across our divided land. Most of the screaming will come from Liberals and Progressives who will chant, “Koch Brothers! Koch Brothers! Koch Brothers!” while wondering where they left their torches and pitchforks.

The unruly and largely ineffective mobs of Leftists truly hate the Koch Brothers and stridently declaim about how they’ve bought and paid for so many politicians.

Yet, as corporations go, the Koch Brothers’ campaign contributions pale in comparison to others’.

Over the 23 year span between 1989 and 2012 Koch Industries donated just under $10,000,000 to political campaigns. That’s a fairly significant amount. Yet it is only a fraction of what the larger labor unions contributed to political campaigns during the same time period.

• The American Federation of Teachers  paid 3.19 times as much;
• The Laborers Union paid 3.22 times as much;
• The Int. Brotherhood of Electrical Workers paid 3.44 times as much;
• The National Education Association paid 3.70 times as much;
• The SEIU paid 3.78 times as much and;
• The AFSCME paid 4.66 times as much.

Indeed, the largest class of expenditures by labor unions is political spending, both direct campaign contributions and other forms of a political backing such as television commercials. Yet, of course, Americans will never hear the Liberals and Progressives bemoan that. Quite the contrary, those are corporations that they laud for “purchasing” politicians.

What even more sad than the by now utterly expected hypocrisy of the Left is the fact that Americans allow them to get away with it. Instead of allow them to shape the conversation as they please, Americans should be in their faces hammering them mercilessly with the truth about campaign contributions.

The topic of overpopulation comes up fairly often, often in conjunction with Global Warming and/or any one of the many forms of resource depletion and deprivation. Interestingly, the topic of overpopulation is normally limited to the Third World even though the First World is truly beginning to feel the effects of its own form of overpopulation.

True, the First World, especially America, doesn’t have any particular real shortage of any natural resources. The resource, as it were, that our population is too large for is jobs.

Oh Ye Idled Masses

This isn’t even a matter of unrestrained population growth. By and large the First World nations’ organic populations are either stable or in decline. Growth is almost solely through immigration. It’s a matter of a shrinking employment market.

As far I can see and predict we already have too many people for the number of jobs available and it isn’t going to get better because it’s not a recession or depression, it’s progress. A concerted effort to increase efficiency and productivity, combined with ever increasing and accelerating technological advancements make it so that less and less people are needed as employees as time moves forward.

It being past the Solstice or not, we’re in the depths of winter her in America’s Northeast. It’s fairly damn cold out and it’s going to get colder.

Katalina Gorskikh Warming Up The Winter

Happily, there’s more than one way to get and keep warm. Russian model Katalina Gorskikh and photographer Natalia Bezrukova have teamed up to show us all one very fine way of doing so.