William Thien

Debt is debt no matter how you package it.

Now rapidly approaching $22 Trillion ($22,000,000,000,000) the nation’s debt is substantial, and though I am not a historian apparently the last time anything similar occurred was following World War II due to the cost of the war.

The logic behind the current mountain of debt is that we are selling US Treasury bonds that other countries actually want to buy. The US agrees to pay a low interest rate on those bonds and countries are happy to buy our bonds because they feel our ability to repay the money is substantial enough that their money is secure.

The US is then getting the money by selling bonds at a much lower rate than would be available if the country were simply to borrow the money in the form of a loan.

Sounds pretty slick, doesn’t it? You can find all kinds of explanations about the process I have described on the internet made by lofty economists and Wall Street money movers.

The problem in my opinion is that the money is supposed to be used to improve the country’s infrastructure, run the government, and pay other bills. I don’t see that happening. Where I live we have the second worst roads in the country. Public schools are starving for funding. You name it. At the national level our fiscally conservative elected often threaten to shut the government down due to insufficient funds. In other words, our government is a massive mess.

You would think that having borrowed $22 Trillion the country would look like a shining city on a hill but for most it is quite the opposite.

Personally, I think the explanation that the country is selling US Treasury bonds in order to get a better interest rate on money is a good one. But the money obtained from selling the bonds is not being used effectively and so I would say the process of selling the bonds en masse should be limited or curtailed until the country can figure out how to efficiently use the borrowed funds.

Otherwise it just looks like someone running up the credit card to pay for things they can’t afford in the first place.

Debt is debt no matter how you package it.

Here is a link to The National Debt Clock: http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”

So a friend asks why it is so important that your privacy be protected on the internet?

Well, imagine this scenario.

After you post a for sale ad somewhere on the internet with your email included, people, corporations, whomever, will know your internet service provider because it is right there in your email address if you are using something other than a free email service.

Next day you get into a disagreement with someone, a manager representing a large corporation perhaps, someone sophisticated enough to know that they can now contact your internet service provider and request to purchase your internet browsing activity to see what you are looking at while browsing the internet.

They have a leg up on you if the situation escalates, don’t they?

Yes, they do.

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”

This is just an opinion but I believe the biggest mistake gun owners can make is to make the right to bear arms a single issue only and let the government hack away at all other rights and liberties.

In other words, it is a mistake to say, “you can take away my right to privacy, my right to assemble, whatever, as long as you don’t touch my guns.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a mistake.

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”

It may not have been said before but I believe that privacy is a form of liberty. When the majority of the Republican party voted in 2017 to give up your right to control your internet and cell phone browsing history and communications activities and let your internet providers and cell phone providers sell your information wholesale, all Republicans lost a substantial amount of my confidence. Why do I say “all Republicans?” Because almost all Republicans voted to let it happen.

Recently, I enjoined a discussion with several of my colleagues on the matter and all responded that it was necessary for national security. The problem is, that is not what this is about. My response to their misunderstanding of the matter was: as the Benjamin Franklin saying goes, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

But this isn’t really about safety. It is about letting corporations buy and sell your personal matters without your consent. The government is already monitoring your internet activity and has been doing so for quite some time.

This isn’t about the government monitoring your internet activity. This is about the government giving up one of your liberties, privacy, and I do not believe the government should be in the business of making it easier for anyone to sell any of my liberties, let alone massive media corporations. What is that? It is a crime against the people.

It is a poisonous betrayal of the public trust.

As someone who has voted pretty much Republican across the board for quite some time, or for the most conservative candidate on the ballot (which is often not a Republican if you would believe), I have to say that unless something is done by this next election to reverse what The Republican Party has done, not one single Republican will get my vote. Not one! It’s the only choice I have.

Abortion is a single issue for many voters. Guns are another single issue for voters as the right to bear arms is for me, I must admit. But there will be no trade of one for the other, guns for privacy in this case, as the Republican party with the help of the Democrats has arranged it, to be sure.

For me, in this next election, one of my liberties, that of privacy, will be a single issue. It just has to be that way.

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”

One of the latent side effects of a decades long strategy by the FED to stimulate the economy through perpetually low interest rates is that Americans were forced onto a “Made in China” economy as “Made in China” was notably less expensive and less susceptible to inflation due to Chinese monetary regulation regardless of whether or not quality was deficient while simultaneously retail margins were substantially higher and the consumer’s wallet didn’t lighten up as much when purchasing “Made in China.”

Americans didn’t stop checking the label (even though it was substantially more hidden). Americans simply couldn’t afford products made here in The US as much due to inflation and tax incentives were actually enacted for producers to offshore.

But it was the fact that The FED kept interest rates so low for so long that enabled the transformation to a “Made in China” produced consumer products economy.

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”

I am often the first to say that I believe the country is running more efficiently now than under some recent and previous administrations and this observation doesn’t necessarily refer to the current administration.

But one of the problems with hiring (electing) politicians who believe the country, county, local municipality, what have you should be run more like a business is that those politicians perceive the members of the country more like employees of a business rather than citizens of a country. More often than not they don’t run the government all that more efficiently, what they are saying is that the citizens need to be whipped in to shape.

Rarely does the politician know how to make the government run more efficiently. If they did, so many politicians have made that promise in order to get elected that by now at the very least our government would run more efficiently. Does it? Does it cost less? Is the government that much smaller? No. So that’s not what the politician means when they say they are going to make the country run more like a business, or even that the government will run more efficiently. Is there still a national debt of $21 Trillion? You don’t even hear about that anymore, do you, though the debt is larger than ever.

When the country is run “more like a business” constitutionally declared individual rights, the right to privacy for example, become more like employee benefits that can be curtailed through legislation or regulatory modification rather than something that has a legal foundation, and Congress and the rest of the elected body have no problems with tinkering with those constitutional rights because their significance is diminished by how our elected perceive those rights, and so too then the media do re-perceive those rights and then once the programming begins, so does the public.

Members of certain social groups are departmentalized much like employees in a corporation and they are given different forms of compensation such as specialized tax breaks and declared as “protected” or government programs are created to enhance their existence, in the sense of a corporate structure, their “performance.”

Our media are constantly cracking the whip, too. Statistics are quoted in the evening news that nobody really needs to know except the newly elected business-person politician.

Even while we are eating are evening meals we are made to think that we are not being efficient, cost effective employees of the nation-state corporation. Unemployment is down even though large areas of many cities are populated with the unemployed, but there are not enough workers we are told (you are not efficient enough to get all the work done that needs to be done). We must open our borders so that the nation-state corporation has more, cheaper labor that will undermine the current working classes, labor who will work for cash under the table, free practically, and not pay taxes, which will we foist upon you, the working stiff as you eat your cheese sandwich, watching us slap you in the face at the end of the day with the visual promenade of misery, telling you that your life isn’t so bad. Look at this, they say, we’ve gathered for you the worst.

Trade deals between countries are rather competitions between departments of the giant nation-state multinational corporation with citizen-employees being displaced when a country can be found where employees will work for pennies on the dollar and the corporation nation-state can profit substantially more.

The problems with electing (hiring) politicians who believe the country should be run more like a business are subtle but manifest themselves negatively and substantially in the quality of life of the citizen. We can see that today in the constant encroachment on The American Way of life, on your privacy, on your pocketbook. Electing politicians that believe that the country should be run more like a business rarely means they will run the departments of the government more efficiently, it is secret code speak for “we are going to get more out of the public.”

But the greatest transgression against the public when we elect politicians who believe the country should be run more like a business is that the citizen is viewed then more like an at-will employee of a business rather than the citizen of a country with a constitutional foundation to their existence.

Keep that in mind the next time you step in to the ballot box.

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

I’m not big on mass DNA testing. I see a danger to corporations and governments getting their hands on the genetic makeup of all mankind. It is only a matter of time before that information will be abused, misused, most likely against mankind.

But for the last decade, maybe longer, almost half of all babies born are born to single mothers, women having children out-of-wedlock. Those same women use an immense amount of social services at a massive cost to the American tax payer. Of course not all children born out-of-wedlock or their single mothers are beneficiaries of public services, but the majority are.

Often fathers father multiple babies to mothers having those children out-of-wedlock. It is not uncommon for those same fathers to father children with different mothers out-of-wedlock.

So far the social welfare system has been unable to curb the result of such promiscuity and the tax payer must carry the burden, a heavy one to be sure. Just look at your pay check.

In talking with an associate the other day we concluded that one way to at least track who is sleeping with whom and who is fathering whom would be DNA testing of the result of the promiscuity, the babies. When that information becomes available, the system could begin to track what is happening and could then begin to seek recompense for the cost to the tax payer of paying for the birth of and the raising of those children.

DNA from criminal data bases could be matched with DNA from the babies and when there is a match, that information could to be used in some capacity, to be determined.

It is a touchy issue in more ways than one, to be sure. But when fifty percent of the babies born on average are being born out-of-wedlock, something needs to be done.

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”

So a conservative friend asks me, “Bill,” she says. “Why are you so against socialism?

I am explaining my position on socialism more and more lately and I’m not so sure that is a good thing.

So I responded as plainly as I could.

“If,” I said, “politics” was a name for different types of plants, flowers were one political party or ideology, roses another, trees still another, socialism would be a flocking weed that in its flowering state was communism.”

Socialism would be stout and prickly, choking everything else out of the garden, robbing the nutrients from the soil where other plants have laid down roots (redistribution of wealth primarily from the middle classes and not the wealthy as is happening now) growing faster and more numerous than all of the other plants, eventually taking all of the light, until there was no room for the other plants.

Then, when conditions were ripe socialism would flower. It might have a pretty flower, but as you approach, it will also have sticky, irritating, translucent stickers that remain in your skin and clothing that are difficult to tweeze out and can become infected.

Soon, there would be no other plants in the garden, only the nasty communist plants. You could pull and pull at the weeds but it would be too late. All of the other plants would be gone, starved out, smothered and suffocated like history tells us.

That’s the thing about communism. Much like a stout weed invading the garden or tillable land, communism insists upon totality, forcing all others out. There must be only one god, the state, in communism, only one type of plant in the garden, a weed.

Then, when everyone realizes things aren’t so “rosy,” it is too late.

That is why I don’t like socialism. If socialism is left unchecked, either through democratic participation, educational measures, or other means, socialism eventually approaches communism. Lenin said “the goal of socialism is communism.”

Communism insists upon being the only plant in the garden.

So when I see so-called conservatives redistributing tax dollars as I have a lot lately, I see socialism at work. I see the weed in the garden.

Not all socialism is bad in its entirety if kept in check, but when conservative Republicans are foisting it about, that’s a bad sign if you ask me.

So there.

Copyright © William Thien 2018

Sign up to receive updates. It is easy and safe. We will never sell your contact information to anyone. Just go to the upper right hand corner of this page and add your email address in the “Email Subscription” box and click “Sign me up!”