The FCC Takes Another Run At Net Neutering

Since telephone deregulation, Lily Tomlin's Ernestine
from the phone company sketch isn't funny anymore. The.
phone company now has competition and can no longer
bully customers like Ernestine did in the comedy sketches.

The FCC is at it again after they lost a lawsuit that threw out an attempts to create so-called Net Neutrality regulations. They're back with a 1930s style regulatory scheme that makes the Internet a public utility regulated heavily by the government - coming in February. Net Neutrality they're calling it. I call it Net Neutering.

In essence it gives us locked in rates, locked in connection speeds and ties the hands of Internet providers to regulate the delivery of Internet service as they see fit. If you grew up before the de-regulation of the telephone industry, you'll know what that means.

Prior to deregulation it cost you hundreds of dollars a month and a six to 12 month wait to get a car phone. After deregulation, within a few short years we were carrying cell phones in our pockets for a fraction of the cost. If you'd like an idea what pre-deregulation phone service was like (back when the government "regulated" phone service), get hold of one of Lily Tomlin's old skits about the phone company and you'll get an idea of where the Internet will be headed.  It's rather like communism - everyone equally misereable as government regulation suppresses the quality of Internet access for everyone. It's the old shared misery of communism/socialism all over again.

Think slowing down your streaming video on Hulu and Netflix to where it jerks and jumps so that Joe Blow can publish cat videos that jerk and jump in high def on his blog, just like the big guys. I can guarantee a major degradation across the board since competition between carriers will be virtually eliminated. So where will the motivation be to provide faster service? 

It's the old idea that if everyone is forced to be the same, suddenly, out of the goodness of our collective hearts, we all will strive to make everything better. It's kind of like thinking that if the boat sinks, the way to save lives is to have all the drowning people and all the swimming people clump together into one big mass and hope everyone decides to swim equally hard, only better because they have drowning people clinging to them and trying to climb on their heads.

One thing though: Internet customer service will probably be better - you'll be told they can't do anything about your probably because of government regulation in half the time it takes them to fix your problem now.

© Daily Tech

Won't it be a brave new world once the government controls the last free market on the planet? 

Yeah, right.

© 2015 by Tom King

Is it a Christian's Duty to Help Expand Government Charity?

Add caption

Jimmy Carter is probably quite honest in his opinion (left), although he seems frighteningly deficient in his understanding of the American system of government and the Scriptures' advice on the subject.  Scripture does say, "Render unto Caesar, the things that are Caesar's and even did a miracle to help Peter pay his taxes. The moneylenders were the crony capitalists of Jesus' day and He did not approve of their activities at all. Jesus said if the government asks you to carry a burden one mile carry it two. Jesus was talking about a government ruled by kings and emperors. He was not talking about a government of the people, by the people and for the people. If He were He would have very likely had some things to say about our responsibility not to let our government drag people out of their beds and make them carry heavy loads for the Army.

Because our American government derives its power and its mission from the people, we are charged with responsibility for what it does. That is why we vote - to guide our leaders and to tell them what we want them to do.  And in that process, yes, we may have to pay our taxes to support things we do not like, but that enough of our citizens voted to do anyway. Thanks, however, to our constitution, we are not required to shut up and give tacit approval to those things the government does that we think are wrong or even misguided by our silence. It is our responsibility in a democratic republic to provide guidance to our government's representatives as to how we want to run things.

If we see that government doesn't do a thing very well, it ought to be our responsibility to require that our government representatives step aside and stop interfering with those who do perform those tasks well. After all, it is our government. Our congress, senate, judiciary and administration were not seen by our founders as infinite law generating machines. At some point, if you keep adding laws and systems to a government, eventually it collapses of its own weight. I do believe that, unless we can get a few congresses that abolish more laws than they make, we are not far from that collapse now.

Jesus never said we could buy freedom from guilt or our responsibility to the poor at a discount by making our neighbors pay "their share". Charity by taxation is a way for wealthy people to not have to pay as much to fulfill our Christian duty to the poor. That's one powerful reason for some wealthy people to favor charity through government taxation. It costs them less and they don't have to feel guilty because they can tell themselves, "It's the government's responsibility, not mine."

Charity to the poor, the widows and orphans has always been a duty Christians are expected to perform regardless of what "everybody else" does. We are not relieved of that duty simply because the government demands we pay a high tax rate so it can give help to the poor. We can't shuffle off our responsibilities that way. It is not allowed. We are commanded to give real help to the poor, to set them on their feet and help them become strong and independent - to set them free. The type of help the government gives is not help at all, but a subtle enslavement of those it purports to help. It serves the interests of the wealthy and powerful because it creates a large dependent class who will reliably vote for those who pay them their pittance. That is all.

Christian charity as God would have it, sets free the poor, the disabled, the sick and the poor of spirit. True charity will always set people free, not just make them reliable political supporters.

© 20114 by Tom King

Throw the Bums Out - Why It Won't Work.

Every election that comes around we get mad and threaten to throw the bums out for the good of the nation. The problem is that we talk about it, but never do it and it wouldn't do any good if we did.

All this talk about throwing out the congress and replacing it as though that would do any good is little more than hot air. It wouldn't work. There's only one cure for the bloated, chronically ineffective government we've saddled ourselves with.

We'd have to fire literally millions of government bureaucrats to accomplish such a transformation and that isn't going to happen. Not ever! Bureaucrats are a persistent parasite on the backside of society. They accumulate like barnacles on the bottom of a ship. Over the course of years they become such a huge mass that the ship of state inevitably sinks under the dead weight of too many "officials". It's why even a benign government that starts our lean and effective, inevitably collapses under it's own weight. 

So why don't we do something about it? There's no effective way to rid a society of its bureaucrats. Even if the people realize what's going on and pressure their leaders to do something about it, the politicians will try to solve the problem by first appointing a commission to study the issue and then, "surprise", the commission hires more bureaucrats to study why there are too many bureaucrats.

And if the ship of state does sink, if it blows up or burns down, the bureaucrats will survive, like the proverbial cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust. They will rise from the ashes and seek out new masters to serve them.

Reminds me of what Tolkien said about "fighting the long defeat".

Just One Man's Opinion,

T.W. King

Top Five Reasons Obamacare Won't Save Us From Big Pharma

"It'll save money. Yeah, lot's of money. It'll save, uh
TRILLIONS of dollars. Yeah, that's the ticket!"

Obamacare is supposed to save us from evil corporate medical corporations, Big Insurance and Big Pharma!  Here's why it won't.

1. The Locus of Evil:  If big medical, big insurance and big pharmaceuticals are all evil, why is big government miraculously not evil.
2. Depantsing the Consumer:  In one stroke Obamacare turns the consumer from a customer into a commodity. By removing free market forces the government takes away the only tool consumers have to control prices (voting with their feet) and replaces free markets with top down price controls.  Historically that never works. Nixon tried it and nearly killed the economy. Carter tried it and did!
3. Empowering the Big Guys:  It is far easier to bribe government officials than it is to bribe 300 million consumers.  Now that we are being forced by the government to buy a product (medical insurance), the giant corporations that are supposed to be so evil don't have to do marketing studies or offer deals to attract customers.  They merely have to offer trips to Tahiti and all expense paid conferences in Las Vegas to the right government officials to get the price protections they want.
4. DeCapitalizing Healthcare:  By killing free market forces altogether, medical providers no longer have to make their customers happy.  Their customers have to make the medical providers and their government handlers happy in order to get services.  This was explained to me once by a public transit official as the difference between private and public transportation. The same principle applies to "public" healthcare.
5. A Falling Tide Sinks All Boats:  The idea that forcing everyone to pay for medical "insurance" will cover anecdotal problems like pre-existing conditions and unusual medical problems is simplistic and wrong.  Forcing everyone into the insurance market merely covers the cost of all that government supervision that will be added on to the cost of medical care.  The continued problem of unusual and expensive medical conditions will merely force reductions in the quality of care of all consumers.  Socialism's great strength is in its ability to share misery equally among everyone (except of course for the leaders who get a better deal because they are smarter and wiser and we couldn't get along without them or at least that's their story and they're sticking to it.

And like this post which promises ten reasons in the link, but delivers half what it promised, Obamacare is pretty well guaranteed to deliver far less than it promises too.

© 2013 by Tom King

There's Nothing More Dangerous Than a Panicked Bureaucrat

In times of crisis, government functionaries
excrete massive piles of paperwork

 Government Programs Are Immortal
© 2013 by Tom King

I received an email from the Social Security Administration last week advising me that it's easier than ever to draw a disability check when you're in your 50s. This week I saw a news story reporting a sudden surge in applications for disability.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

The same thing happened about 13 years ago in Texas when local efforts by food banks and churches to provide food to the hungry through church food pantries were blamed for an $800,000 budget cut in the federal appropriation for the Federal Food Stamp program. The Food Stamp office in Texas started a $300,000 "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform" advertising campaign and "Surprise!", food stamp apps went up again, wiping out what East Texas conservatives had seen as a tangible gain in the war on hunger.

Apparently, the SSDI folk have instructions to ramp up the number of Americans on disability.  Maybe all that Obamacare we haven't got yet has cured or prevented too much disability and the department was in danger or getting its appropriation cut.

This is why new government bureaucracies are forever. Once a government bureaucracy is created, I've yet to see one "Go gently into that good night" when it was no longer needed. And woe unto you if you threaten their existence in any way or do anything which might make them irrelevant. They will come after you.  It's not accident that people, who have made some government agency or functionary angry, will joke half-seriously about getting a vengeful tax audit. We've already learned just how likely that is with the recent IRS scandals.

We meddle... People don't like to be meddled with.
We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk.
We're in their homes and in their heads, and we haven't
the right. We're meddlesome..   - River Tam (from Firefly)

I still maintain that part of the reason the TV series Firefly was canceled was because it criticized big government's "meddling in people's lives".  Such a thing cannot be allowed, not even by a science fiction TV show.  Look how many socialist and totalitarian countries banned the release of the followup movie "Serenity".  Bureaucrats are danged touchy when you criticize them.

Voltaire said that "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." It's a thing Joss Whedon, an avowed "progressive" and the creator of the Firefly series, seems to have difficulty getting his head around. He believes in progressive-socialist principles, but he still manages to criticize them in his TV shows and movies and to draw down the wrath of the "true believers". Whedon even has the audacity to point out how very dangerous are the true believers, who wholly and without question embrace the power of government as the only means to change people, to make them good and to create a "better world".  The true believers do not like that sort of thing. I know, having been set upon by true believers during my advocacy career. Whedon has this kind of split personality about his own beliefs and the beliefs of his characters as he approaches the idea of personal liberty. It's why his work has so many fans on the right and critics on the left, despite the fact that he keeps telling the left, "Hey, I'm with you guys."

Finally, if you don't believe in the immortality of Earthly things or you're one of those true believers, who does believe in the inherent goodness of government, try and close down a government bureaucracy sometime. It's an eye-opening experience. Bureaucrats are a mighty vengeful lot when you threaten them and they hang on to life and power with a tenacity that is breath-taking.

The plague-like almost biological persistence of government in and of itself explains why God will have to one day burn the whole place down, if He is going to successfully clean the Earth up and establish a truly better world.  I personally think God won't have to so much as strike a match. I believe the whole rotten mess will soon spontaneously combust like a big pile of oily rags in a hot garage.

Tom King

Government Inherently Good? Are You Kidding Me?

Harry Reid says, "Government is inherently good."

Let's take a closer look at that claim.  Government is inherently good,huh?

• Tell that to the six million holocaust victims and six million German citizens exterminated by Adolph Hitler.
• Tell that to the 43 million plus victims of Joltin' Jo Stalin and the overall 62 million for the Soviet Union 1917-1987.
• Tell that to the 40-70 million executed, starved and worked to death by Chairman Mao.
• Tell that to the untold millions killed in the Hundred Years War, The 30 Years War, The War of the Roses, The Crusades, The uncountable jihads, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, the Gulf Wars, terrorist attacks and brush wars everywhere.
• Tell that to those who lived under Napoleon, who were slaughtered by Ghengis Khan and who died at the hands of twisted emperors like Nero, Caligula, Commodus, Domitian and Elagabalus. 
• The 75,000 Muslims massacred by Ferdinand Marcos
• The one million killed in Ethiopia by the Marxist Regime in the 80s.
• The 600,000 ethnic Chinese killed by the Indonesian government in the early 60s.
• The 2 million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot in the killing fields.
• The 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu "dissidents" slaughtered by Rwanda's Hutu government in the 90s.
• The 200,000 Muslims murdered by the Serbian government in the 90s.
• The 2 million Armenians exterminated by the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the 20th century.
• The 10,000 people who hurled themselves from cliffs as ordered by Japanese Emperor Hirohito because he was afraid US forces would treat the so well after the conquest that it would be bad PR and lessen the "fighting spirit" of Japanese mainlanders.
• The 300,00 Chinese men, women and children brutalized, raped and murdered by Japanese troops in Nanking China.
• The 40,000 Frenchmen who died on the orders of Maximilien Robespierre.
• The 30,000 Iranians executed for having incorrect political opinions by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
• The 500,000 killed by Idi Amin Dada, the lunatic that ran Uganda for many years.
• The 3 million Congolese killed, maimed and tortured by King Leopold II of Belgium at end of the 1800s and early 1900s.
• Oliver Cromwell's extermination of one fifth of the entire population of Ireland.
• The 10,000 Romanians that Vlad III, King of Romania impaled for his amusement on large pointed stakes round his castle.
• The one thousand citizens of Novgorod who were daily executed in front of the castle while Ivan the Terrible and his family watched the festivities.  The people were suspected of being about to run away from Russia.
• Saddam Hussein's gassing and mass murder of some 600,000 Iraqi citizens.
• Kim Il Sung's genocide which took 1.6 million victims.
• And that's the short list.....

Now, once again, Senator, tell me again how a big powerful government is inherently good.

Tom King (c) 2013

Sandy Hook "Conspiracies" - The Crazy People Are At It Again

And it's not just who you think...

(c) by Tom King

In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, the paranoid schizo-phrenics are hitting the Internet with increasingly bizarre government conspiracy theories.  But they aren't the only mentally unstable folk who are hovering around this story like so many pirahna.

The conspiracy guys will tell you that the story of Sandy Hook was inconsistent.  It kept changing throughout the day.  They pluck "facts" out of thin air and present them as evidence. They spin speculation and present it as solid reasoning. They harass witnesses, call them liars and even threaten them.  Sadly, it's one of the hazards that goes along with free speech.  Free speech applies to the mentally unstable as well as rational folks. I remember sitting in a Wendy's in Cleburne, Texas listening to a guy talking to himself about government conspiracies and Waco.  This was during the Branch Davidian hostage crisis and he was on his way to Waco to join the Davidians apparently.  I think he was the guy that tried to climb through the window to join them. And he wasn't the only mentally unstable individual drawn to the scene of that tragedy.  They came from everywhere like flies to crap.

The fact that the news reports at Sandy Hook changed throughout the day of the tragedy is better proof than anything that the story was developing just like a thousand instant news stories throughout the history of television.  The TV reporter's need to get in front of the camera earliest with any scrap of information works against them in the accuracy department.  I'd doubt the story more if the stories were consistent from network to network, from reporter to reporter or from moment to moment.  Reporters grab any confused report and throw it up on the chance it might be true.  A fabricated story would be more consistent.  I'm not saying the media wasn't trying to use the incident to tell a story. They obviously were, but they were making up that storyline as they went. You can bet, for instance, that virtually every reporter had a producer checking the NRA roles looking for Adam Lanza's name. They would have dearly loved to portray him as a card-carrying gun nut. They practically drooled over his mother's being a gun enthusiast. 

But don't the confuse mutual shared interest between media and the administration (in this case to promote gun control) with a conspiracy.  The 9/11 truthers did that and looked stupid for it  The birthers did and discredited other conservatives in the process and the, shall we call them, "Hookers?" are doing it as well.  I suppose there's a place for articulate paranoid schizophrenics on the web.  I remember well how they flocked to Waco, trying to get into the middle of that mess and prattled on for years about conspiracies there.  The Oklahoma City bombing was timed to "commemorate" the Waco disaster which should give you some clue as to the mental stability of conspiracy theorists.

Waco was a badly botched government operation, no doubt.  It was driven by the need to look good for the media and run by people who did not understand what a deranged person would do when they came after David Koresh and his people.  David, (aka Vernon Howell III) went to my church.  The church recognized him as a dangerous, deranged person and we booted him before he could damage the kind of emotionally fragile and mentally disturbed he burned alive in that compound along with him. Anyone who knew him, at least anyone who wasn't twisted all out of shape by his shared delusions, would have recognized that.

The problem is that the Government does a poor job of "handling" people with mental illness. For the same reason that people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder should never become psycho-therapists, government does a poor job of dealing with mental illness.  It either boxes them all up, destroys them or turns the all loose.  This is because government service attracts people with OCD; people who like to put stuff in little boxes (including people). Not everybody in government is OCD, but I'd be willing to bet it's the most common mental illness among government workers. I maintain this tendency toward compulsivity is the reason government has virtually no ability to prevent things like Sandy Hook from happening however many laws they decide to pass. People look to an institution that waltzes on the edge of insanity to fix the problem of people with mental disorders.

I've observed at close range how government agencies run. There are good people there trying to do the right thing, but the government, because of its very nature, has become so obsessed with control and data collection that the system itself has confused order with compassion; control with freedom.  It's not merely a case of the blind leading the blind or the lunatics running the asylum.  It's worse.

It's asylum itself that's deranged.

I'm just saying,

Tom

If NASA Would Do for Space Travel, What the Military Did for the Internet

Space-X's Falcon/Dragon launch vehicle blasts off
on the way to a successful 2 orbit mission and recovery.

Back in the beginning the Internet started out as an experiment by some academics to find a way to build a durable, communication system the military could use in the event of a major war. They came up with a nifty little plan using existing communications systems, deep redundancies, easy expansion capacity and a financial incentive for the private sector to invest their own money and, voila' - the Internet rose from nothing in less than two decades to rival television, radio and every other form of communication, not by replacing them by government fiat, but by offering those media a new way to promote what they were already doing pretty well.

It's a model for effective government participation in economic development. The feds did try to "improve" the Internet a couple of times, but in every case, their "better" systems were always outdated before they could get them deployed. They were consistently out-innovated by private sector scientists and entrepeneurs working quickly, efficiently and using their own dime.

We just retired the space shuttle after more than 3 decades of service and far more than that if you count the development time. The shuttle systems were so primitive, even by the time they launched the thing the first time that soon, astronauts were taking laptops into orbit with them to supplement the stone-age technology built into the spacecraft. The shuttle flew far longer than it should have and cost lives of astronauts, arguably because NASA lacked the flexibility and systems agility to address problems. The zero-defects approach of the Apollo program soon ossified into a zero-flexibility program that ignored individual innovation and even warnings from its people about problems because the leadership came to focus on mission objectives and began to dismiss anything that got in the way.

The new systems development process became so hidebound that the agency couldn't get a replacement launch system up and running before it had to shut down the shuttle program.

Don't get me wrong.  I think the space program needed the kick start it got from NASA to get rolling. That said, I actually think we're going to do better now that they more or less have to work with the private sector.

Some writer the other day commented on private space travel saying he "...was never a big fan of the private sector." I love when people say that sort of ignorant thing. The guy's a fan of nice clothes, good food, high quality entertainment, stylish cars and the Internet, but not of the "private sector" that makes those things possible. The government has its function in doing big things that are of national interest like interstate highways, space travel and making order out of the potential chaos on the airwaves as the communications industry sprang up. The Internet is a good example of how the government did something right. They kicked off the whole thing and then got out of the way and let the free market run with it. It's a good idea for the space exploration business too.

Space-X, Elon Musk's outfit, took just four years to put together a viable cargo and manned space launch system that costs about half what the government contracted systems cost for a single launch and they are doing cargo launches this year and could do a manned launch in another year if NASA can resist the urge to get in the way. And had NASA refrained from diddling with the process and playing Kingmaker back in the 90s when they first looked at allowing private sector spacecraft development, we'd already have a system that costs half of that rate per launch.

Ironically, I believe that the more they cut NASA's budget, the faster we're going to have privately owned and funded moon bases, Mars missions, asteroid harvesting and collision protection programs. It'll actually be nice to have the capability to send some roughnecks into space to redirect an asteroid should one decide to take aim at us someday. The movie "Armageddon" while reassuring, was total fantasy. Right now, if we saw an asteroid coming there wouldn't be anything we could do about it with the hardware we have.

The Book of Revelation describes a large object falling from the sky and crashing to Earth in the sea at the end of time. I 'spect Bruce and the boys ain't gonna make it to space in time to do anything about it. Thank you NASA (and I'm being sarcastic here) for dragging your feet and helping insure that the apocalypse arrives right on time!

Tom King