Thursday, March 23, 2017

Early Genesis: The Revealed Cosmology

If anybody has wondered why my blogging pace has slowed down, it is because my book-writing pace was picking up! The result is the most important book I have ever written, or could ever hope to write. The two books on localism as a political philosophy only have the potential to change the world. Genesis, the Revealed Cosmology has the potential to change people's view of God.


Print Version.

E-book

Friday, March 17, 2017

Kal El Finds "Superman" at Crater of Diamonds

Nine year old from Centerton finds large diamond.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

HB1222 and Doing Well by Doing Good

I don't have time to connect the dots, but the dots themselves are very interesting. The Arkansas Legislature is debating whether or not they should pass a bill which would allow corporations (like Wal-Mart for example) to get a tax credit for up to 65% of what they give to "non-profit" organizations which will administer a scholarship program with the money. It starts with a small total possible contribution level at first, but the sky is the limit in coming years. Combine the tax credit with tax deductions possible on the federal level and basically the company would re-direct almost all of their state tax dollars into the scholarship program or potential federal tax breaks.

So far no real injustice done. Sure the public schools will grouse about losing the money, but if they are not educating the children, if the children are in a private school funded with this scholarship money, then why should the public school get the money for that child? That said, I would rather rebuild strong public schools which were really locally controlled than have vouchers where as a practical matter the "choices" offered were not locally controlled. Does your "choice" of health insurance company do you any good in an environment where central government micromanages your "choices"? Well it won't be any better when they do it in education.

I think kids and parents are better off when they are not just consumers of a limited array of products but rather participants and stakeholders with real say in what their children's education looks like.  But I digress, let me show you something else...

That is a org chart put together by some folks in Colorado who noted uncomfortable ties between Wal-Mart heir James Walton and some proposed charter schools. It seems like they were mixing profit and non-profit schools in the same facility- leading to a situation where the non-profit could be expending funds in a way that could bolster the profit side, and they proposed to have a landlord which turned out to not be a non-profit at all but rather an LLC run by a board with connections to the school board. IOW, all the profits could be hidden as rent payments.

Taxpayers spend an enormous amount of money on schools. Some of them are doing well, but others are not. I think that corporate America has been looking for places where there is money to take and they noticed schools had a lot of money. I see a situation here where Wal-Mart gets tax credits for its donations to a "non-profit" which is funded by the Walton Foundation  who then steers scholarship recipients into schools which are owned by other Walton interests. I.E. Wal-Mart's tax dollars don't go into the general treasury, they get "donated" to a fund which then largely spends it on schools owned by some of Wal-Mart's biggest stockholders. It would be like you being able to direct most of your tax money into a fund to buy things from your own business! I wish I had time to fill in more of the blanks. Any full time journalists out there want to take this one on?

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Certificate of Need Laws - In Health Care Government Is the Problem

As our political leaders stand in front of us and build up one interventionist health care idea after another let's remind ourselves that government intervention in health care helped produce our high-costs. IOW, their prior intervention has caused problems that they now propose to fix with even more intervention. Here is a study from the Mercatus Center and George Mason University about certificate of need laws and their huge negative effects on health care in Arkansas.

Sunday, March 05, 2017

Vaccine - Autism Link Explained

Short version, if you are pregnant, don't get vaccinated. Don't give the MMR, or Chickenpox virus to your child before the age of three. Many details from solid studies are put together in this article.

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Rappert Gets Two Dangerous Feel Goods Out of Senate

Don't underestimate Senator Jason Rappert. He just got two resolutions which petition Congress to call an article V convention out of the senate. One was calling for a convention to pass an amendment defining marriage and the other was to do the same with the subject being defend unborn life.

They have not passed the house yet, but I would not be surprised if they did. Rappert very cunningly positioned himself as a champion of a traditional marriage and the unborn in a way that puts his colleagues on the spot. Much in the same way leftists are unable to distinguish between objections based on propriety on things like health care and education, many on the right are unable or unwilling to make any distinctions on these issues.

That is, just because someone is against Obamacare does not mean that they want poor people to die early. Just because someone opposes giving the state the power to take children from a home based on an anonymous tip does not mean that they don't care about abused children. An increasingly numbed-down electorate (numbed-down to the potential of abuse of power because of how regularly government power is abused) only cheers win its side wins one by any means possible and wails when the other side wins one by any means possible. Only a few of us also consider the legitimacy of the means, and that needs to change.

In this case, the legislators don't want people to think that they are opposed to traditional marriage or in favor of the ghoulish practice of abortion, so they will vote for it. Not that they expect it to do any actual good besides polishing their bona-fides on a couple of issues that most voters support but their out of control and non-representative government will refuse to let them do. They figure that if 38 states don't pass petitions with identical language then Congress will never call a convention for it anyway, and the odds of that happening are close to zero.

It is a common belief that states passing identical language initiates some mandatory trigger, and it may be true, but it is also true that there is nothing preventing Congress from calling such a convention based on differing language from the 38 states. That is, article V does not require the language to be identical, but does specifically say that the convention called would be for the purpose of proposing "amendments", note the plural. That is to say, there is no legal way to limit the subject matter of the convention to a single issue, as Rappert's resolution imply. Hence article V is a poor tool for any one issue concern. Those one issues though, are excellent tools to manipulate people into supporting a convention which turns out to be mostly or totally about other things they may not have considered.

This is an appeal for a concern about the legitimacy of the process which is every bit as great as our concern for the policy to be put in place by the process. No people who fail to do this can sustain, nor deserve to sustain, self-government. It will be stolen from them by demagogues who use policies they favor to implement processes which are in the present environment a threat to freedom.