No matter how large the failure of official Communist policy, there was no turning back. In the United States, when a policy fails, we simply throw more money at it as that is obviously why the failure. In the Soviet system, increased demands came to be the obvious answer to a failed policy.

Years ago, I learned that the Soviet Union built more tons of machines in a certain category than any other nation in the world. They built so many of them that they had warehouses of those machines, all locked up and rusting as they could not sell them. Why? Well, the order had come done to build so many tons of those machines so the plant executives, all good Communists, simply made their machines heavier; so heavy that in fact a standard factory floor would crack and collapse under their weight. No one wanted those heavy machines. But it gets better as after the good Communist managers had delivered their required tonnage of machines, they built a few more useless, heavy machines and for their efforts they all received medals for a job well done. The same games were played in agriculture (dampen the wheat so it is heavier, and you exceeded your quota) and other industries as the glories of centralized planning spread throughout the entire Communist system.

As a graduate student, I had a professor who was from the Ukraine. He was a teen during the Soviet then German then Soviet occupations. During our discussions, he mentioned the “steps on the porch” and how everyone would stop breathing if, during the evening, steps were heard. Why? Because most likely, those steps were from the Soviet secret police (NKVD) or the Nazis, either SS, Field Police, or collaborators. A “visit” from any of those forces seldom turned out well as someone was either taken away for questioning which meant torture, or it was a raid for hidden food, or simply an exhibit of power, meant to keep that household or the village living in fear. In the least, one had to learn how to answer questions that played to the mind set of the occupier.
At the end of WWII, over seven percent of the Hungarian population was held in Soviet controlled camps, either in Hungary or in the Soviet Union. Throughout the Soviet era, estimates as high as thirty per cent of Hungarians were at some point arrested, deported, tortured, or seriously questioned by the secret police. A true example of the “workers’ paradise”!

By 1945, the Communist had developed the restructuring of a nation to a fine art. Why not? They had broken the peoples of the Ukraine, the Baltic nations, the Poles, and others who lived as far away as the Pacific Ocean. The formula is easy; denounce and arrest the leaders of any society. Priests and nuns? Of course, as they preach adherence to a power other than the State. Teachers? Definitely as who knows what anti-Communist thoughts they would offer to students. Former politicians, civic leaders, police officials and university professors? Why not as who will stop the new government?

But what to do with them? After nearly thirty years of practical experience, plus having watched the policies of the Nazis for a decade and a half, the answer was simple; degrade them, push them down, down, down and break their spirits. They could never be resurrected as a new, Soviet man, but they could be a living example of what happens to those who oppose the power of the new Communist regime.

During a recent trip which included Budapest, Hungary, I visited the House of Terror which was originally called the House of Loyalty by the fascist Arrow Cross party until the end of the Second World War, and then the House of Terror when it was taken over by the newly installed Communist regime. This was not the first visit to the building, but it is so stark that it merits multiple visits to begin to understand the horrors that Communism has foisted on individuals around the world.
Many years ago, my first Political Science professor was a Hungarian immigrant. He had a “life”; he was in the Hungarian army during World War II, was critical of the Germans, was arrested and thrown into a camp. When the Soviets “liberated” Hungary, they put him into the new communist government since the Nazis had arrested him. He survived the purge of Laszlo Rajk and was designated to be the Minister of the Interior by during the Hungarian revolution in 1956. When the revolution failed, he fled Hungary and ended up in Detroit in the Hungarian neighborhood. Given his background, he had an honored place in the community, but as he said, “I would be a big fish in a little pond”. He learned English, went to university in the U.S. and moved into the big pond (all of the U.S.) where he became a professor and real estate developer: a real capitalist!
He brought his real-world experiences to the class and was instrumental in making his students realize that those who believe in Socialism or Communism are not open to rational thought. Because of their religious like belief in their dogmas, compromise is not an option,
At various points in the House of Terror are excellent handouts explaining various sections and actions of the prison. I shall forward one each week so that you may better understand what the reality of life under a Communist system offers.

“The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law”
Grant Gilmore

Recently the governor of California signed nine hundred new laws into being. Each law will carry various civil and/or criminal penalties and will be further clarified by various rules as determined by the various agencies which will enforce the new laws and rules. Do you know how these new laws will impact you, your life, your family, or business? How many of them will make your life better or easier? Yet, you will be expected to abide by these laws; ignorance of the law is no longer a defense.
In this excellent book, Justice Gorsuch gives numerous examples of how federal laws and rules can be abused by the authorities and how naked we stand before the power of the State. An example is the fisherman who was charged with violating the Sarbanes-Osley Act (instituted after the housing crash of 2007 and aimed at financial institutions) when two federal officials miscounted how many fish he had caught with the result that he lost his business, home, and retirement savings. In the end, the Supreme Court found that he was innocent, but he lived a twenty-year nightmare and received no restitution.
That ex-fisherman was fortunate for he had the nerve and outside help to fight the system, while others often charged with multiple “crimes” from multiple agencies simply plead down their “crimes” in order to try to get on with their lives. And what chance does the average person have when you take the example of new laws in California, multiply it by fifty states and then add on and average of fifty-six new federal crimes every year. In reality, no one knows exactly how many federal laws and regulations carry a criminal punishment, but it is at least three-hundred thousand and growing.

How did this type of system develop? The Founding Fathers were very fearful of a powerful centralized state for they knew from their life experiences the helplessness of the individual. Thus, they created a system of checks and balances in order to limit the power of the central government. They believed that if laws were made, it would be better to have them created at the state level where there was a better opportunity for the average citizen to see, understand and give voice to their concerns.
The system began to change under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson who believed that what was needed was a “science of administration” where “experts” could “straighten the paths of government.” What this meant was that far too much time was spent thinking about the relationship between government and the constitution, and not enough time spent looking for government “efficiency.” And what better model than the Prussian bureaucracy? The Constitution stood in the way of “efficient” government with all of those annoying checks and balances. Better to let expert bureaucrats take the reins of government so that a living, breathing constitution could be created. Despite the failure of “expert” government from the times of Plato and Aristotle, Wilson believed that this time it would be different.

The result is a system where Americans spend 9.78 billion hours to complete federal (not counting state and local) paperwork. To put it another way, “Suppose that we assembled every resident of Chicago and insisted that for the entirety of 2019, each one must work forty house a week engaged in just one task; fill out federal forms. By the end of 2019, the 2.7 million citizens of Chicago will not have come within four billion houses of the annual paperwork burden placed on Americans.”
How do we change a system where the average citizen is lost in a maze of laws and rules drawn up by bureaucrats who are not judged on their service, but rather who have a vested interest in creating new rules in order to expand the bureaucracy? The answer is not simple and must come in large measure from the average American. Justice Gorsuch points out the woefully inadequate amount of time and money spent in educating children on civics. In fact, while the federal government spends about $.54/student on education for STEM, it only spends about $0.05 on civics. The result is that only about thirty-two percent of millennials believe that it is “absolutely essential” that “civil rights protect people’s liberty.”

A more encouraging step is Proposition 315 in Arizona. Under that law, any new rule from the bureaucracy which would cost $500,000 over a five-year period would have to be examined and agreed to by the state assembly. In other words, the law makers would have to realize the impact of their laws (which unfortunately Congress gave up years ago). This proposition is strongly opposed by the League of Women Voters as it would give lawmakers a tool to block rules with which they do not agree!

In the end, we face a lopsided battle; the bureaucracy which cannot be fired nor held to account vs. the average citizen who has no idea what laws and rules they face every day. We can only thank those few strong individuals and those who support them for showing us with their struggles the leviathan we face every day.

The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal contains an article named, “Western Spy Agencies Sound Alarms on Chinese Espionage,” as if the lights suddenly went on in spy agencies around the world. The spying has been at all levels of our business and governments; remember the Chinese spy who was Senator Diane Feinstein’s driver (and office manager) for twenty years? Or how about Mayor Adams of New York City whose “Asian Affairs Advisor” is being investigated for close ties to the CCP? Or how about that illegal biolab in California or the illegal CCP “police offices” in NYC and in at least fifty countries around the world.

But there is more than spying that is a danger to the rest of the world. The deeper danger is when our politicians and business leaders fall into a corrupt and traitorous relationship with the CCP. Peter Schweizer’s excellent book Blood Money tells of several U.S. “leaders” who have worked hand in hand with the CCP at the expense of the United States. The final threat to our freedom and political system is the dark money from the CCP which has been flowing into our political system for decades. Just as the Soviets poured money into the student movement during the seventies and later, the CCP has been working on numerous fronts such as the Rainbow Coalition.

The link below will take you to a long interview with Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand author, speaker, blogger, and researcher. Although it starts out focusing on the Communist ties to Kamala Harris’ parents, at about the sixteen minute mark we begin to find those on the monied Left who have aided, funded and supported various groups whose goal is to corrupt the U.S. political system and turn us away from a free Republic toward a weaken Socialist state where our rights are limited and destroyed.

Paranoia? It is all a coincidence? It is up to you to decide, but we live in a time when a former First Lady says that the Federal government should jail those who spread “propaganda” without defining just what qualifies as “propaganda.”  We have a Vice-Presidential candidate who says there is no guarantee of First Amendment rights for those who say hate speech, again without defining who determines what is and what is not “hate speech” and who makes that determination. Remember the short lived “Disinformation Governance Board” set up in 2022?

Isn’t you and your children’s freedom worth an hour or so of information?

https://www.bing.com/search?q=trevor+loudon+kamala+harris&form=ANNTH1&refig=067982e5cda64458a93df928b33dbd0a&pc=HCTS&pq=trevor+louden+kamela+&pqlth=21&assgl=27&sgcn=trevor+loudon+kamala+harris&qs=SC&smvpcn=0&swbcn=2&sc=2-21&sp=1&ghc=0&cvid=067982e5cda64458a93df928b33dbd0a&clckatsg=1&hsmssg=0

Bjorn Lomborg does not have to take a back seat to any environmentalist. He has a long and reputable CV of environmental achievements and believes that for a much smaller price tag, we could do more to enhance the lives of millions of people around the world, instead of going after grandiose projects that somehow never seem to quite work out.

In his article, he points out some of the great fallacies which the left environmentalist movement has used to pry money from those who produce and give to those who claim to be following “science.”  Fallacies? Such as?

• Remember the great disappearing polar bear hoax? Somehow despite the wailing from the left, the polar bear has not disappeared, but rather the population has doubled.
• How about the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef? Oops, in 2024, the reef is setting yet another record for growth.
• The sinking islands: This was a special joy for the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who in 2019 went in his business suit to stand thigh deep in the Pacific behind a headline “Our Sinking Planet”. The only problem is that “Almost all the atoll islands are stable or increasing in size.”

If you read the entire article, you will wonder if the environmentalists are ever correct. “Well, anyone can make a mistake and what is the real harm?”  The harm is that each of these claims and others cost all of us trillions of dollars which could be better spent addressing problems that confront all of us, such as diseases, hunger, etc. Here are two examples of how your money is being wasted in the pursuit of ill-designed and often useless projects:

1. Electric School Buses: Three years ago, Vice President Harris was so happy to be able to announce a $5 Billion electric school bus program. How successful has it been? To date a total of sixty buses have been built. But they have created sixty new “green jobs.”  How? The same bus drivers who drove the old fossil fuel buses are now driving the green buses. Same drivers, new buses, counted as new green jobs. (www.climatedepot.com/20224/07/30 and Freebeacon.com)
2. EV Charging Stations: Three years ago, the Biden administration signed a bill authorizing $7.5 Billion for the installation of 500,000 EV charging stations. What has been accomplished? A total of seven charging stations have been installed. (NYPost.com, 2024/06/05)
3. You may ask, “Where has the money gone?” Straight into the pockets of bureaucrats (we always need more of them to “manage” new programs, consultants, community organizers, etc.

Someone, somewhere, should be brave enough to ask simple, logical questions and is willing to follow up on the promises made with your money. Or is that as silly as the claims of the environmental industry?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/polar-bears-dead-coral-and-other-climate-fictions-528b18ea?mod=opinion_feat2_commentary_pos2

If you are concerned about the value of your US citizenship,or if you are concerned about your son or daughters knowledge of the history of the US, please read the attached press release. This series based on a book by the noted historian, Victor Davis Hanson will educate and enthuse anyone who spends the time to listen. There is no charge and it makes an excellent companion if you are out walking, bicycling, etc.

If you are not a citizen of the U.S., I believe you will enjoy this free course and better understand my nation. I hope you will take the time to give it a try. Thank you.

https://www.hillsdale.edu/news-and-media/press-releases/hillsdale-college-to-launch-new-online-course-on-american-citizenship

Over the past forty years or so, the Frankfurt School has managed to infiltrate most of the key institutions of the west, specifically academia, the media (both news and entertainment), as well as many of the special interest groups (women’s, environmental, civil rights, etc.). Along the way it has managed to all but destroy any demand for self-discipline and responsibility and has offered in its place a mentality of victimhood and persecution. Who is to blame for the woes of the world? One group in particular, the white male.

The articles linked below begin to point out some of the fallacies of such thinking. They also point out the downside risk by looking at examples in the history of such a race-based ideology. In effect, such shallow thinking only leads to a never-ending cycle of new victims and new boogiemen.

Expropriation: The End Game of Anti-Whiteness – The American Mind

As Whites Go, So Goes the Nation – The American Mind

During the Covid pandemic, we often heard the chant, “follow the science!”  Unfortunately, there was very little real science to follow, and it was a time for political demagoguery, scientific intolerance and power abuse of our fundamental rights.  We all face another threat to our individual freedoms with the liberal legalization of marijuana by cities and states on a daily basis. Unfortunately, no one is chanting “follow the science” when actual science is available.

The article linked below provides information that has been known for years but which is being ignored by our elected officials and bad actors in their rush to legalize marijuana. Why is that?  Although the reasons are not spelled out, another chant comes to mind; “follow the money”.  It is no secret that governments in their never-ending quest for new sources of tax revenue have a vested interest in legalizing marijuana.  Indeed, politicians proudly forecast a wonderful new revenue stream coming from marijuana regardless of proven harm done to users, especially young users.

So, the politicians get their tax windfall and society gets increased schizophrenia, chronic psychosis, anti-social behavior, and other wonderful side effects. Do the politicians require today’s stronger marijuana to carry black-box warnings of the dangers involved by use? Of course, not as that just might impact sales and thus tax revenues. Gone are the idyllic days when we believed the government was there to protect us from the bad players of the world.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-you-arent-reading-about-marijuana-permanent-brain-damage-biden-schedule-iii-9660395e?page=1