elbertcounty.net

"Just the facts M'am, Just the facts." -- Sgt. Joe Friday

You are here: Home / Archives for Brooks

Potemkin Village

By

Please, commissioner candidates, don’t do us any favors. Don’t promise to make plans for us, be they masterful or otherwise. Your predecessors have made too much mess with plans for us already. Don’t promise to make Elbert County more effective so it can collect more taxes and haul in more revenue from the citizens. We citizens already think government hauls in too much from us. Don’t promise to get along with each other so that the commission can agree on doing more to the citizens of Elbert County. We don’t want you to do more. We want you to do less to us. Don’t promise us more government. We want less government – the exact opposite of what most of you were promising.

As true today as in 1849 when first penned, “That government is best which governs least…”, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.

After viewing the Youtube vids from the multi-party commissioner candidate forum the other night, with all of the promises, plans, accusations, and elucidations, you’re all courting power, evidently imagining yourselves qualified to dictate to other people indistinguishable from yourselves.

I can imagine who told you this is what Elbert County needs and wants – the usual pro-planning, pro-government, country-in-county, NIMBY, something-for-nothing, folks who publish our local fishwraps, who think grant money is the route to profitability, who work daily to keep Elbert County stuck in the last century.

Elbert County is beautiful. But it’s also a wasteland with no viable economy and no affordable means for people to make a contribution to the modern world. That’s the legacy I heard most of you promise to uphold the other night.

Surely Elbert County could do more for the modern world than be a bedroom community for public employees, retired and punching coupons, or still employed by a public agency of some sort. In most other parts of the world, people actually have to make a contribution to society to survive.

I’m waiting for one of you commissioner candidates to promise to not sustain the Potemkin Village of Elbert County.

…in the name of compassion, of course.

By

“Often contradictory in his views on atheism and religion, Rousseau nevertheless was certain of one thing: that the State should be the final arbiter of the human condition, in the name of something he called the General Will. Only the State, he thought, could make postlapsarian man well again. One can practically smell the fascism coming off his pages, all in the name of compassion, of course. No wonder his more perceptive contemporaries, including Voltaire, considered him a monster.

Many others, however, were greatly influenced by him, including most of the great monsters of the twentieth century. Without Rousseau, Marx is unthinkable; without Marx, Lenin is unthinkable; without Lenin, Stalin is unthinkable, without Stalin, Mao is unthinkable; without Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot are unthinkable.”

Michael Walsh, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” 2015, p. 137-8.

hoping and hopping

By

I don’t see the malice in Trump that so many on both the Right and Left keep spinning up. Can Trump undo some of the damage to America that Obama committed? That’s the hope, though it’s probably too much to expect from one man. But meanwhile, the Left continue to promote malice to some under the excuse of favoritism to others. Sure, higher standards exist for choosing a President, but if frogs could fly they wouldn’t bump their asses hopping on the ground.

back slapping public officials

By

“Its pretensions to “comprehensitivity” destroyed, we can now see this “system” as a form of intellectual charlatanism, a studied fascination with process and minutiae that bespeaks the true soul of the born bureaucrat–the man who does nothing in particular, and to no societal good, but who by his own lights does it very well.”

The context of the above writing is not county politics, political appointments, school boards, citizen committees, or similar local governing bodies that folks–so eerily described above–zealously seek out and set aside for themselves each year in Elbert County.

How many times have you heard one of them hold forth on how hard they, or one in their cohort, works in the power role they’ve secured?

Do they expect us to believe that obsessive protection of their local offices somehow disproves the corrupting influence of power?

unacknowledged wars

By

“The context and subtext contain the real message. This is true on both sides of today’s political battles. On the one side, we have the remnants–scratched and bleeding, but still partially cohesive–of the old American Christian cultures, largely Protestant but with a strong admixture of Catholics; on the other is the far less numerous but culturally potent Unholy Left, adhering to its own secular religion, although it professes atheism. As with the battle between radical Islam and the West, one side has explicitly avowed war on the other, while the other, more powerful, refuses to acknowledge it or even conceive of it. Which side, under these circumstances, is more likely to be successful?”

Michael Walsh, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” 2015, p. 115.

Election Insights

By

Election_Insights May 4

Cool tool: http://electioninsights.mybluemix.net/#/

Graph adjustable from 1 to 250 subjects (bottom slider), and 1 minute to 1 week (top slider). Note how much better Trump is doing this past week than Hillary.

Memo to #nevertrumpsters: If conservative principles are so precious that they provide justification to subject the country to openly Leftist government, I should think those principles need more context and perspective.

consigned

By

“What evidence is there that there is an arc of history and that it bends in any particular direction? One would think that the Unholy Left would be the last to assert such a grand pattern, given their disbelief in the Deity. Whence comes this “arc”? Who created it? Where did its moral impulse toward “justice” come from? What is “justice” anyway, and who decides? And if the word “justice” bears a bien-pensant modifier (as in “environmental justice”), the only “justice” is likely to be the “justice” of revenge. The word “justice,” in the hands of the Left, has come to mean pretty much any policy goal they desire.

None of this matters, however, when the purpose of the assertion is not to offer an argument but to shut down the opposition via the timely employment of unimpeachable buzzwords and to advance a political agenda that has little or nothing to do with the terms employed for its advancement. Indeed, martial metaphors, not moralistic catchphrases, are the key to understanding the modern Left and its “scientific” dogma of Critical Theory: Theirs is a Hobbesian war of all against all (bellum omnum contra omnes), of every man’s hand against every other man’s. As Orwell, who knew a thing or two about the intellectual fascism of the Left, wrote in 1984: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” These three aphorisms are the official slogans of the Ministry of Truth in 1984, and the truth is whatever the Ministry says it is. Truth is malleable and fungible, a function of day and date. The Devil will say what he has to say and will quote such scripture as he requires in order to achieve the sole objective remaining to him: the ruination of Man and his consignment to Hell.”

Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, 2015, pp. 52-53.

still undecided

By

It was passing strange when Ken Buck represented the 1% of Colorado citizens who attend Republican caucuses as 40% of all voters yesterday (4/11/16) on the Mark Levin show. Stranger still that Levin went right along with the charade that unelected caucus attendees represent the voters. I lost count of the number of times he echoed the 40% of all voters myth.

I have to separate my respect for Levin’s constitutional analysis from my disgust over his knee jerk support for the non-representative caucus system.

When will the Colorado GOP figure out that they cannot claim legitimacy because a minuscule minority of them show up at a meeting once every two years? Legitimacy comes from the consent of all the voters, not a self-selected few.

The hypocrisy of upholding the values of accountability and personal responsibility when talking about the failings of other people, but practicing an unrepresentative form of politics by local-loud-mouth, completely undermines their cause.

  • I’m waiting for the politician who doesn’t promise me, or anyone else, anything.
  • I’m waiting for the politician who doesn’t use my idealism to advance them self.
  • I’m waiting for the politician who doesn’t try to pull an emotional response from me.
  • I’m waiting for the politician who is known for the laws they repealed.
  • I’m waiting for the politician who has no pitch, and who is not a salesman.
  • I’m waiting for the politician who does not seek political office.
  • I’m waiting for the politician who takes no satisfaction from governance.
  • I’m waiting for the politician who admits the evil nature of power in them self.

SOSDD

By

Same old stuff, different day – and you thought I was going to use the more accurate word.

Click on ’em, resize ’em to your browser, read ’em ‘n weep.

40Final 63Final 75Final 78Final

To summarize, in the name of the inalienable rights of liberty and property, the laudable purposes of safety and general welfare, and the myth of mother Gaia, the Left would lard up the Colorado constitution with collectivist abrogations of the inalienable rights of liberty and property, would decrease safety and general welfare, and would empower local Leftist apparatchiks to dominate their subjects – us – with impunity.

I don’t like being a subject. I suggest that Colorado citizens vote against becoming subjects by rejecting these Leftist initiatives. Don’t we have too much totalitarianism already?

One more thing…

Microsoft Outlook - Memo StyleMemo to the above decision makers:

The best thing for the citizens of Elbert County that you could do with the referenced grant money would be to dismantle and destroy the regulatory planning law and its appurtenant bodies that have caused so much harm to Elbert County in the form of foregone economic activity and the elimination of economic potential.

what works

By


Faced with overwhelming evidence that markets “work,” Obama’s advice is to go on searching for “what works.” => Denial on stilts.

what’s on the ballot

By

On the one hand we have an ongoing food-fight egged on by the media who only ask questions about the food-fight, and never follow any thread about substantive solutions to the worlds problems.

On the other hand, a serene and respectful candidate discussion about fantasy subjects that have never worked is encouraged, with a reality reduced to simplistic emotions for the least common denominator of voter, and a fawning media who never follow up on any problem in the world remotely connected to their simplisticism.

The real adversary in this election is television media; CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS & FOX.

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”