Unlimited government, affirmed

The Supreme Court today affirmed that the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a "Obamacare," doesn't violate the Constitution -- not because it's permissible under the Commerce Clause to compel citizens to purchase a product or service, but because Congress has the power under the General Welfare Clause to levy taxes.

What was sold to the People as a penalty, not a tax, has been upheld as a tax, not a penalty. It's a distinction without a difference, either way, and now it's settled law.

Chief Justice John Roberts, whose siding with the 5-4 majority confounds me, concluded the Court's opinion with this:

"The Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcing those limits. The Court does so today. But the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people."

Limited powers? My ass -- not any more.

This landmark decision fundamentally transforms our nation. It unleashes a government of virtually limitless reach.

It's dark day for the People, a very dark day for Liberty.

Let's not show this to Glenn Beck, ok?

Now that I have your attention (or Catholics' attention, at least)...

In 1947, as the Cold War dawned, the Catechetical Guild of St. Paul, Minnesota published Is this Tomorrow: America Under Communism! It's a graphic snapshot of the paranoia that marked those years.

The Roman Catholic church in the U.S. was most concerned about religious persecution, of course, but the Catechetical Guild used the comic's plot to weave a tapestry of fear -- racial strife, confiscation of guns, indoctrination in the schools, dictatorial rule and more.

Fundamentally, Is This Tomorrow collected everything that Liberty-loving post-war Americans were afraid of -- rightly so -- and ascribed it all to a bogeyman called "Communism."

If the Catholic guild's extremist strategy sounds familiar, it should.

In our own time, Liberty is under siege. Yes, the threats are real. Our challenge is to think critically about what we face, to separate facts from fears and to act in the best interest of the country we love.

[By the way, Pappy's Golden Age Blogzine has posted scans of all 52 pages of Is This Tomorrow -- click here.]

Looking back: 'The preparedness mindset'

This post, admittedly a re-hash, follows naturally from yesterday's nod to the Scout Motto. It's also timely, I think, in light of today's news out of Cleveland, and the May Day push by Occupy, and the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden's demise, and much more that percolates beneath the surface of our fractured society.

Over the last four years I've invoked the term "preparedness mindset" a number of times. I humbly offer these posts for further reading:

Cold, cold water (June 16, 2008)

Been there? Done that? (June 22, 2009)

Back fifty-two to 'Fifty-nine (February 11, 2011)

EDC vs. EWC (August 19, 2011)

On channeling Glenn (November 1, 2011)

The Scout Motto: 'Be Prepared' (April 30, 2012)

I hope that my thoughts provoke yours. Better yet, maybe my words will kick-start a dinner-table conversation or two.

Was this really necessary?

KintlaLake's favorite Super Bowl commercials

Breaking it down

I'm not fond of mass e-mails. I don't encourage folks to send them to me, and it's rare that I pass them along.

Today I'll make an exception.

Maybe you've seen this already -- lopping eight zeroes from U.S. federal financials to illustrate what annual household finances would look like in proportion. To wit, I present the mythical "Jones" family:

Income (net): $21,700
Expenditures: $38,200
Borrowing: $16,500
Debt (total): $142,710

Obviously, any household with a balance sheet like that is living irresponsibly beyond its means. The Joneses, recognizing this, decide to cut this year's spending:

Reduction in expenditures: $385

That's absurd, of course -- but it's precisely what our elected officials are doing.

I've read commentary suggesting that the Jones analogy demonstrates the need to increase household income dramatically (that is, the U.S. government must impose onerous taxes). That misses the point by a country mile.

What the Obama administration calls "a balanced approach" -- reducing spending while increasing revenue -- truly is, in my view, the only intellectually honest solution to the debt-and-deficit problem. Still, a simplistic household analogy makes it clear that it's our spending that needs change -- revolutionary change -- and I have absolutely zero confidence that'll happen.

Our President, who's showing us that inspiration isn't the same thing as leadership, doesn't have the juice to do it. Congress isn't capable of it, and neither is a bipartisan "super committee," which is nothing more than a dysfunctional Congress en micro.

In any case, the entitlement-hungry masses wouldn't allow it.

I can't see the status quo lasting longer than a few years more -- and since the problems won't be fixed, American life as we know it could crumble. I can imagine order beginning to break down within a year and civil unrest becoming widespread within two.

Pessimistic? Damned right.

SHIFT_down

As every thinking person expected, our government's credit rating got dinged by Standard & Poor's. Moody's and Fitch, each of which has expressed formal pessimism about U.S. debt, now contemplate downgrades of their own.

What happens next? No one knows, and anyone who claims to know is guessing. These are uncharted waters, nationally and globally. Any honest analysis admits as much.

S&P, in explaining its rationale for the downgrade, judged the U.S.'s debt-to-GDP ratio to be unsustainable. It was the current political climate, however -- read, ineptitude and ideological inertia  -- that caused the agency to pull the trigger.

It would've been reasonable to hope (if not predict), then, that the feuding factions -- Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as the Obama administration -- would start acting like Americans for a change. No such luck.

On the weekly talk shows yesterday, partisan finger-pointing ruled, with each side flaming the other. Republicans blamed Pres. Obama. (Natch.) Sen. John Kerry and others test-flew a new Democratic Party talking point, calling S&P's action the "Tea Party downgrade" -- which is idiotic, of course, but unfortunately it'll probably catch on.

Surrogates for the White House busied themselves pitching rocks at S&P, calling it "amateurish" (among other things). That prompted this reaction from Sen. John McCain on Meet the Press:

"On the S&P thing, don’t shoot the messenger. Is there anybody that believes that S&P is wrong in their assessment of the situation -- of the fiscal situation of this country?"

That's the truth, as succinct as it can be. And until

Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-
Congress-Bureaucracy Downgrade

fits easily on a bumper sticker, it'll have to do.

I spent ten years of my professional life in the corporate headquarters of two financial-services companies, the last four in the executive suite of a major player in the investment business, so I know something about the influence of agencies like S&P, Moody's, Fitch and Best.

I can say that in the private sector, a downgrade (or even a negative outlook) can suck the life out of a company. I also know that corporate instability -- the comings and goings of fund managers, for example -- can tip a ratings agency toward taking action. Finally, I can't recall a downgraded company that hasn't issued a press release saying that S&P (e.g.) is full of shit, abuses kittens, etc.

That's just the way it works.

After all that, the same question burns: So what's going to happen after this downgrade? The answer remains: We simply don't know. Common sense and convenient parallels, however, combine to offer us a few useful clues.

Interest rates are likely to rise for businesses and, consequently, for consumers. The recession is bound to deepen, and sharply. Depending on how bad things get, how long they stay that way and what cuts are announced in November, I envision civil unrest resembling what we've seen in the U.K. and Greece.

On the bright side, gas prices may come down -- maybe.

It's not the duty of citizens to save the nation's economy, but as much as possible, in my view, this is the time to renew our commitment to supporting domestic and local commerce. We should ignore the flailings of Wall Street and the wailings of its shills -- anyone who spews chestnuts like "historical performance" or exhorts us to "stay in the market" is a self-interested robot, not an expert and certainly not a friend.

And, of course, when Election Day rolls 'round, we must send incompetent incumbents packing.

Making wise choices now, deliberately, preparing for deteriorating economic and social conditions -- and I predict that they will deteriorate -- will give us the agility we'll need when the time comes to act in the interest of ourselves, our families and our communities.

First-of-the-month roundup, Part II

As promised in Part I, I have some observations about the back-and-forth over raising the federal debt ceiling.

After much mud-wrestling, Washington hatched a deal. The House bought the scheme on Monday; it cleared the Senate and President Obama signed it yesterday. Spending gets cut by a reported $917 billion (over ten years), while the debt ceiling goes up by a like amount (immediately).

A "super-committee" will decide by Thanksgiving what else to cut, to the tune of $1.5 trillion (over ten years), and if Congress doesn't salute by Christmas, that'll trigger mandatory cuts across the board (minus sacred cows). Either way, the debt ceiling will get bumped up by (you guessed it) another $1.5 trillion (immediately).

It doesn't take an economist to see that a deal isn't the same thing as a solution. By averting default now, our elected officials embraced the certainty of our nation's complete economic collapse.

Think about it -- the U.S. government borrows 41 cents of every dollar that it spends, and it just got the ok to borrow even more.

Let's look at a few facts. The national debt is over $14.3 trillion and climbing every second. The interest alone is approaching half-a-trillion dollars a year.

Each American household's share of the debt exceeds $125,000. Every American child born today begins life with a debt of $46,000.

Last year, the ratio of the national debt to our gross domestic product was a disturbing 93%. Because the U.S. economy is contracting (projected to fall behind China within five years) and the debt is certain to grow, this year our government will owe more than our nation produces.

And Washington acts as if it can sustain this madness.

Tea Party-backed Republicans, in a fit of redemption, pressed for passage of a Cut, Cap and Balance Act -- the right idea, in my opinion -- but such a sensible approach was bound to die in the Senate. Now, for some reason, the GOP seems buoyed by cutting a deal that's all cuts and no revenue, boasting that they "changed the conversation."

That's unfiltered bullshit, of course -- there's nothing to celebrate. A moral victory, even if there was one, won't get the job done.

I fear for my country.

Raise the roof, not the ceiling

I'll get right to the point: Congress should not raise the debt ceiling. All opposing arguments are grounded in short-sighted self-interest.

Our inability to live within our means is sabotaging our nation's future. The consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling, according to credible economists with no ideological axe to grind, would be catastrophic. No Congress and no President wants to be remembered for initiating a catastrophe, so our elected officials are dithering around the edges of the matter.

The only thing they're accomplishing is postponing the inevitable. Increasing the federal government's borrowing limit beyond the currently unfathomable $14.3 trillion only prevents a problem from becoming a crisis -- and to save our country, we need a crisis.

In other words, bring on the catastrophe.

I don't say that lightly. If the debt ceiling isn't raised within the next few weeks, American commerce will spasm and change quickly and, to be blunt about it, things will absolutely suck for the foreseeable future. Life, as this generation has known it, will end.

That, of course, would be a good thing.

This country is worth saving but its government is broken -- we must tear it down to build it up again. We'll decide what We, the People, truly need from a smaller government and what we're willing to pay for it. We'll learn what we can (and should) do for ourselves.

But for now, right now, we must contact our elected officials and demand that they vote against raising the debt ceiling.

Don't look now...

...but the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention is using tongue-in-cheek humor to educate a complacent public about preparedness.

Predictions that the world will end at 6pm tomorrow didn't deter the CDC from launching Zombie Apocalypse. (Ok, let's face it, those warnings of an imminent doomsday almost certainly played into the announcement.) The new campaign recycles familiar messages with a dose of fresh spin:

"You may laugh now, but when [a Zombie attack] happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency."

Think about it -- this is coming from the federal agency that virtually wrote the book on gravitas. While it isn't aimed at the masses -- that job belongs to the Ready America joint initiative -- Zombie Apocalypse has a shot at reaching more citizens about the need to prepare.

I mean, if comic books are good enough for the U.S. Army, raising the whimsical prospect of reckoning with the Living Dead might just wake a few civilians from contented slumber. If it does, that's a good thing.

And if it doesn't, hell, at least it's different.

Seven days to go...

Mark your calendars: Judgment Day begins one week from today.

According to Harold Camping -- a notoriously incorrect preacher, a guy I've called a "doddering nutjob" -- on May 21st,

"There's going to be a huge earthquake. It will be an earthquake far greater than any earthquake that has ever happened before."

Exactly five months later, Camping says,

"The whole world will be completely annihilated. It will completely disappear."

I have a question: If the world is gonna end in October, why the hell did I bother paying my income taxes?

Those of us who check "other" when asked to identify our religious affiliation aren't buying the snake oil Camping is selling, of course. It's amusingly fascinating nonetheless.


I wasn't surprised to learn that at least one enterprising atheist has turned Christian prophecy to his financial advantage. It's more than a little disturbing, however, that Eternal Earth-Bound Pets USA claims more than 250 customers on its books.

Unfortunately, it's a little late now to come up with my own Judgment Day money-making scheme. I'm just relieved that I didn't buy the extended warranty on this computer.

Bugging: Whatever the question is...

...this is not the answer:



For $50,000 (per adult), an outfit known as Vivos will save you a place in one of its self-contained survival shelters. The company claims to have a "network" of these underground complexes -- 20 in the U.S. and two in Europe -- to save your well-heeled ass in case of:When the shit hits the fan, all you have to do is get to your assigned TEOTWAWKI timeshare -- each of which houses up to a thousand "members" -- before Vivos locks the door. Now that's (you should pardon the expression) turn-key survival.

Naturally, sales of doomsday shelters are up between 20% and 1,000% (depending on who's doing the bragging) in the wake of Japan's earthquake-tsunami-radiation disaster.

Whenever I hear about this kind of "assurance of life" racket, I know that P.T. Barnum was right -- the whole thing strikes me as designed to separate naive people from their money. For the moment, though, let's suppose that it's the real deal, just as Vivos claims it is.

Fundamentally, the only difference between a big-bucks bunker and a community shelter is the price. Inhabiting the former will be the less fortunate and the ill-prepared; in the latter will be wealthy hamsters.

No guns. No knives. No smoking.

Both groups will become nothing more than refugees. One, we may presume, would be free to go if they so choose, while the other paid dearly for the privilege of being imprisoned -- if, that is, they can even get to their gilded gaol.

And that -- actually getting there -- is among the myriad flaws of bugging out in general and Vivos-type schemes in particular. Public panic will set in within an hour after a catastrophic event (or word of its imminence) and, as a result, order will start breaking down. Roads will clog with evacuees. Opportunistic crime will spike and carefully prepared BOVs will be stolen, stripped or otherwise rendered useless.

No, thanks.

My family and I have made very different choices. We cultivate a preparedness mindset, hone our skills and plan to shelter-in-place unless we have a damned good reason to leave -- 'cause in the end (again, please pardon the expression), there's no place like home.

(Oh, by the way -- if you're really into the "continuance of life" thing and want to throw money at preserving the human race instead of your own survival, Vivos offers a CryoVault deal, too. "Join us in the gene pool," they say. Talk about chilly...)

"...pole shift, super volcano eruptions, solar flares, earthquakes, tsunamis, and asteroids...nuclear bombs, bio terrorism, chemical warfare...the return of Planet X (known as Nibiru) and the massive solar system disturbances it will cause."

Japan: Begging the question

If someone were to ask me, "What happened in Japan?" I could default to simple explanation: a major earthquake off the northeast coast, the temblor triggering a tsunami, and so on.

Those would be the facts. Accurate as they are, however, they aren't terribly useful right now -- not to millions of survivors caught up in the catastrophe, and not to those of us striving to learn from it.


The "disaster" here isn't an earthquake or a tsunami. It's unchecked HazMats, both chemical and biological, and fires raging out of control. It's shortages of fuel and food, fouled water supplies and squashed commerce. Where the power grid isn't in shambles, rolling blackouts have been employed. Communications and transportation systems either are damaged or have been taken off-line.

It's tens of thousands of people living as refugees in their own land. It's an infrastructure overwhelmed by forces of nature and undermined by compromises in design. It's an already-ailing economy, the world's third-largest, dealt a crippling blow.

What happened in Japan? A civilized, high-tech, First World nation has been sent careening madly toward collapse.

From a preparedness perspective, causes matter less than effects. Once we've catalogued our threats (surveyed "the lay of the land," if you will) and determined specific needs (like potassium iodide tablets), we prepare to be as self-sufficient as possible in the face of present difficulty, regardless of what caused the difficulty.

Circumstances will dictate whether we shelter-in-place or bug out, but the basics -- mindset, shelter, water, security, mobility, fire, food, health, communications and commerce -- apply in any case. The reason for executing our plan becomes virtually irrelevant.

And so we prepare primarily not for causes but for the aftermath, provided that we're lucky enough to have emerged from the original calamity -- and then we adapt to that aftermath, whatever form it takes. I'm sure that a survivor in Sendai today, for example, would agree with Jim Hanks, who escaped US Airways flight 1549 after it splashed into the Hudson River two years ago:Survival is complex and cumulative. Outcomes are the result of actions building on actions. We survive one moment at a time, standing on a foundation of choices we've made.

Much is made of Japan's "culture of preparedness." Given the seismic threat, it's true that the Japanese people and their government are more involved and aware than, say, their American counterparts. Still, as I've watched events unfold over the last several days, it's obvious that survival -- and therefore preparedness -- is an inarguably individual endeavor.

Another thing that's clear (like we didn't know this already) is that we can count on the authorities to soft-pedal the scope, severity and impact of catastrophic events. That's actually wise, in a way -- most people panic when delivered an awful truth, and panic kills. A strategy of placating and appeasement requires fewer body bags.

With that in mind, we should act from our own experience and trust our instincts.

Just two more observations before I close. First, any American naive enough to believe that "it couldn't happen here" is on notice -- it can.

Second, if I turn on CNN again and have the misfortune of seeing Ryan McDonald, an American teacher living in Japan, whine one more time about having only a bottle of water and a cup of rice noodles in 12 hours -- 12 hours! The agony! -- I swear I'm gonna hurl.

Mr. McDonald needs to pour himself a tall glass of shut the hell up and spend some time with this photo:

"One of the things I discovered is that in a situation like this, you have to survive more than once."

Back fifty-two to 'Fifty-nine

If you were alive and awake during the 1950s and early 1960s you remember Civil Defense shelters, "Duck & Cover" and other signs of those precarious times. Back then, TEOTWAWKI wasn't idle talk -- the prospect of a nuclear attack, followed by an invasion, was all too real.

The dangers confronting us today bear little resemblance to the ones we faced then -- nukes and nations have been supplanted in our collective consciousness by terrorism, shadowy cells and lone wolves. Still, I find it interesting (and arguably instructive) to revisit Americans' attitudes toward the threats of two generations ago.

To that end, I offer a pair of snapshots from 1959. These two articles were published in Guns Magazine just a few months apart, and both were received enthusiastically by readers.

I'll provide links to the entire magazines (in pdf format) at the end of this post, but to start with, here are the opening paragraphs of "Where are Tomorrow's Minutemen?" from the January 1959 issue:

"We like to think of ourselves as 'a nation of riflemen,' self-armed, ready and able to dash out any time and become an effective, fighting, guerrilla force in resisting any enemy who might attack our country.

"But is it true?

"Except for a very few widely scattered individuals -- and possibly small groups in certain also widely scattered areas -- no.

"We're not 'a nation of riflemen.' Hardly 5 per cent of the men inducted into the armed forces for World War Two knew how to shoot a rifle even passably well. A stunningly high percentage had never so much as fired a rifle or handgun. And it is highly doubtful that as many as one of 100 of the men who were familiar with weapons knew enough about woodscraft to live off the land and fight effectively as guerrillas.

"If this seems to you to be a pessimistic appraisal, ask yourself this question: If this country were hit tonight and you were a survivor, what would you do?

"Involved in that question are these questions: Where would you go? With whom? How would you get there? What would you take with you? And what would you do, or try to do, after you got there?

"Time was, you remember, when the American colonies helped defeat invaders by the more or less individual efforts of the 'Minute Men.' Armed with gun skills and woods skills gained in Indian fighting and in getting meat for their tables, these men were a formidable force against the world's finest soldiery. But times have changed, and men have changed with the times. How many men today could survive and fight under similar conditions?"

"The Rifleman in Civil Defense," which appeared in April, begins,

"You were somewhere else when it happened. Now you stand beside the smoking pile of rubble that an hour ago was your home -- in the debris-strewn area that was your city. The sights and sounds around you are horrible. Seventy miles away the big metropolis was Ground Zero -- one of 63 major U.S. cities defense authorities estimate would be vaporized in the first minutes of nuclear attack. Your car radio is chattering hysterically about enemy troops dropping from the sky -- they'll be here soon, you think.

"What do you do? Some fellow on television told you last fall, but you switched to the ball game. A magazine article had suggestions, but you were too busy to read it. Will a Civil Defense Rescue Unit come charging up the street to help you? You doubt it. Neither you nor your neighbors paid much attention to Civil Defense over the past few years, and it's too late now.

"So, what do you do? What are you going to do it with? You don't know...so you are chalked off along with seventy-five million other Americans in those 63 major cities who sat, fat and happy, and laughed at the people in Civil Defense who warned, and played cops-and-robbers with fire hoses and guns. Now you, too, would like to play the game, but there aren't enough "toys" to go around. You're out. You are dead...not because Civil Defense has failed to try to save you, but because you and your neighbors rejected their efforts.

"Can this picture be prevented? Not entirely, but your chances of survival can be increased many times by efficient, effective preparation. In your home, now, you can organize things to help yourself cope with disaster. Matters such as at least two weeks food supply for your household; containers of water tightly sealed; towels, bandages, blankets, and first aid supplies, could make a difference. And you can join your local Civil Defense unit now, and become an important member in the organized fight for survival."

If you consider those words to be anachronistic or alarmist... or if your ass catches at the mere mention of the word "militia"... or if you see our current government as "tyrannical" or "socialist" and you're itchin' to overthrow it... you've missed the point completely.

When you get right down to it, it's pretty simple. Here it is:

Threats come and go, technology advances and tactics evolve, but the preparedness mindset doesn't change.

Think about it -- and while you're at it, take a lesson from the 'Fifties.

(As I post this, both of those 1959 issues of Guns Magazine still are available in pdf format. You can view the complete original layout of "Where are Tomorrow's Minutemen?" here and "The Rifleman in Civil Defense" here. And if you enjoy those two, you also may appreciate ".22's for Survival?" from August of 1958 -- it's another intriguing piece, quite thought-provoking.)

But what if he's not an operator?

"When it's all over, there's going to be one guy standing there with a bolt Mauser on top of a hill, with no armor plating on, in short pants and tennis shoes with a hundred-year-old 1898 Mauser. He's going to be the last man standing. It's as simple as that." (Louis Awerbuck, Yavapai Firearms Academy)

Eyjafjallajökull

I can't pronounce it, either, but I don't need to speak Icelandic to take its lessons.
This sub-Arctic volcano began trembling its warnings in mid-2009, erupting briefly a month ago before quieting until April 14th, when it unleashed a plume of ash that's still disrupting air travel worldwide.

We know all that, of course. What's worth watching are the effects of this natural phenomenon -- or, to be more accurate, our responses to its effects.

There's volcanic activity across the globe and eruptions are inevitable. We're familiar with the behavior of jet streams and surface winds. It's common knowledge that aircraft must avoid flying through volcanic ash, lest engines seize and planes crash.

With only that basic information, then, we can predict that when a volcano erupts -- whether it's in Iceland, Chile, the Philippines or Wyoming -- its effects can spread well beyond the surrounding area and air travel could take a hit. Contingency plans are in order. The question is, where are those plans now?

Judging by the last seven days, it looks like commercial carriers were caught flat-footed. And since volcanoes don't play favorites, I find myself wondering how air forces based in Europe planned for this -- thousands of military aircraft are grounded, too.

I haven't heard that question asked, much less answered.

Eyjafjallajökull will keep erupting as long as it wants to -- nothing can be done about that. While the world watches the scenario play out, however, individuals can go to school on a matter having little to do with volcanology.

There's truly no excuse for airlines treating Eyjafjallajökull like a passing thunderstorm. And if they have no plan for dealing with hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded because a volcano is erupting in Iceland, it's reasonable to predict that they haven't planned for the effects of war, unrest, fuel shortages or much else.

That's disturbing, sure, but let's bring the lessons close to home.

All disasters ultimately are local, even personal. It's up to each of us to identify the threats, predict disruptions and prepare to survive in their wake.

As important as it is to catalog threats, causes matter less than our ability to execute individual plans. We can't rely on government, commercial interests, military or law enforcement to be our salvation -- or, for that matter, our backstop. If we're without water, a reliable food supply, shelter or the ability to travel, we must presume that we'll be on our own.

Waiting 'til after the SHTF to spot threats and hatch plans, like the airlines are doing, is a recipe for failure. Prepare now -- no excuses.

Quote of the day

"Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics." (Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, U.S. Army (retired), invoking an ages-old military truism in commenting on the humanitarian-aid mess in post-earthquake Haiti)

On notice: Haiti

Off the top here, I encourage all readers of KintlaLake Blog to donate $10 to earthquake-relief efforts in Haiti by sending the text message HAITI to 90999 -- if, that is, you're already involved in the life of your own community, and unless it's just a perfunctory feel-good thing for you.

I did, I am and it's not.

Pay attention to what's unfolded in Haiti over the last 36 hours. Notice how human nature expresses itself in the wake of disaster. See what happens when prison walls crumble and convicts roam the streets. Look at the way chaos establishes order and a brutal new hierarchy spreads over the land.

Try to look past the fact that Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Resist the arrogant temptation to assume that it "can't happen in America."

It can and, inevitably, it will. Watch, learn and prepare accordingly.

May thirty-first

Yesterday the Obamas jetted off to Broadway to take in a show, and this morning their critics are in full cry.

My wife and I, over our morning coffee, talked about why our new first family's R&R always seems to kick up such a fuss. Even though I know it's due largely to a loyal opposition that's fresh out of substance, I suggested that it also might be because we're coming off a president that basically hunkered in his bunkers for eight years.

On further reflection, however, and after hearing Mrs. KintlaLake observe that George W. Bush was no less cloistered than his predecessors, it occurred to me that it's been more than 40 years since an American President spent this much time, official or otherwise, in public.

The Kennedy assassination changed everything. Memories of American life before that November day in Dallas are outside the experience of most people, including my wife.

I remember.

Personally, I'm okay with Pres. Obama's high profile -- he's doing what a leader should do. Spending a few (or a few hundred thousand) taxpayer dollars on transportation and security to whisk the first couple to New York City for a date every now and then is bound to provoke criticism, but it doesn't bother me one bit.

Our government is the servant of The People. It can't truly serve unless it's visible and, in my view, it serves best when it walks among The People -- even when it must be accompanied by a security detail.

So goes the nation
Nine years ago, General Motors common stock was worth almost $95. It closed on Friday at seventy-five cents a share.

At one time the world's largest industrial corporation, GM could boast more than 600,000 workers in 1979 and now employs just 74,000. Dozens of its plants are silent and dark. Billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars have been thrown at GM, and the company has pumped much of that money into its overseas operations.

From "What if GM Did Go Bankrupt?" in Business Week:

"...investors are clearly starting to ponder the unthinkable. The price of GM's credit-default swaps, which are insurance in case the carmaker can't pay back its loans, have soared in the past month. They now cost a premium of 12 percentage points of the value of the debt that they insure, four times what they cost in January. Few people believe that Washington would help bail out GM, as it did with Chrysler [in 1979]. Investors, suppliers, and employees, meanwhile, are starting to imagine how a GM bankruptcy would unfold and taking steps to defend themselves if it should happen. Some suppliers, for example, are trying to get shorter payment terms from GM in exchange for lower prices."

That article, by the way, was published in December of 2005.

Tomorrow, at long last, reality will bite -- hard. An already disemboweled company is about to become leaner. The auto industry's supply chain will shrivel, and the fate of GM's 500,000-plus retirees is about to serve as an inescapable precursor of what can (and likely will) happen to Social Security and Medicare.

None of us has ever seen anything like this.

Prepare-by-numbers
I'm an occasional reader of Jim Rawles's SurvivalBlog. I don't adopt everything I read there, certainly, but there's no denying that it's among the most comprehensive repositories of citizen-survival information and opinions. It's worth a visit.

A recent guest article, "Creating a Crisis Decision Matrix," caught my attention. Basically, it takes a more structured, empirical approach to assessing one's personal preparedness, specifically what I called "The Lay of the Land" in a post last March.

This matrix is a useful tool. I recommend it.

By any other name
In and around our now-fallow garden plot, a handful of wild rose bushes are heavy with pink and crimson blooms. Yesterday afternoon my wife brought me a bouquet of the faintly fragrant flowers, gathered in a water glass she hadn't yet packed.

A few minutes later, she brought me a second bouquet, and then another. The third vase, which she placed lovingly on my desk, held a half-dozen tight pink buds.

When I stepped into my office early this morning and turned on the light, I saw that the buds had opened overnight -- in the dark.

On difficult days -- and these days surely are -- I'll make a point of remembering that.

Here we stand

Today, the sun rose on a different America. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on where one stands.

For the incurably simple-minded, this presidential election has ushered-in TEOTWAWKI. They insist that Obama-Biden will be the immediate ruination of our nation, labeling anyone who didn't vote for McCain-Palin stupid, un-American and worse.

My first reaction to that kind of ignorance is that I can't imagine anything so stupid and un-American as insulting the will of The People.

What's lost on these folks is that the fear-and-loathing tactic played a large part in costing McCain-Palin the election -- at the very least, it didn't work. It certainly didn't earn my vote yesterday, and it won't win my support now.

Passionate devotees of President-elect Barack Obama, on the other hand, see yesterday's victory as nothing short of complete salvation, the righting of everything that's wrong with America. They're being just as irrational as their glass-empty counterparts on the right, of course. The reality of presiding over an entire nation will set in soon enough.

No, the truth lies somewhere in between. Both at its best and at its worst, Obama-Biden is a mixed bag.

This morning, the Republican Party must begin to come to grips with the fundamental reason why it lost the presidency and considerable legislative ground: It got caught up in fighting the last political war. Now the party's challenge is to gain a foothold on the new American landscape and fight like hell on that ground, not in some conservative fantasy that no longer exists.

Of greatest concern to me is the threat that the next administration -- along with a like-minded Congress and two or more Supreme Court appointments -- poses to individual citizens' rights under the Second Amendment. The fractious RKBA community doesn't have a second to waste assembling its trademark circular firing squad. Obama-Biden won, in a walk, and it is what it is. We fight where we stand.

And fight we will. Μολὼν λαβέ.

In closing, two thoughts. Speaking as a gray-haired white guy who, as a child, saw firsthand racist evil in the segregated South of the 1960s, I share the pride and joy of every American who celebrates the historic nature of what Barack Obama has accomplished.

And finally, to every American voter who made independent, informed choices -- irrespective of what those choices were -- you have my respect. Sheep, be they red or blue, do not.

We, The People, go forward from here.