There are some very disturbing reports coming in about the Oregon shooting.

First off, it was clear within minutes that the shooter targeted Christians.  How many people in our political system have been outraged that Christians were targeted for execution while others were either shot in the leg or not shot at all?  I have heard exactly nothing from Obama or anyone else in political power in that regard.  Why not?

Second, you've heard my screeds over the years about The Second Amendment.  If you cannot argue facts and logic then get the hell off my lawn -- you're unwelcome around me.  In matters of life and death there is exactly zero room for any sort of "squishy", "touchy-feely" or "feel good emotionalism."

Let me be clear: If you resort to emotion when life or death are on the line you are going to die.

If you wish to entertain the debate here on firearms, gun control or anything of the sort then you are going to argue logic and facts.  Here they are:

• The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  You call the police when there is an active shooter and they show up with guns.  They don't willy-wally around; they look for a tactical solution and if they get one that works they shoot at the bad guy.  That's exactly what happened here.
  
  
• We cannot have cops everywhere, all the time.  We are not only incapable of paying for it nobody would want to live in such a world.  Even if a cop is just one minute away from anywhere in the United States (an utterly fanciful expectation even in a big city) a person with a bolt action rifle or single-shot pistol can shoot a dozen people (or more!) in that one minute.  As a result the faster any good guy with a gun can engage the bad guy with a gun the lower the risk is of everyone in the vicinity winding up dead -- and the more good guys with guns and the closer they are to the situation the better the odds are for you and everyone else.
  
  
• Virtually all (something like all but three) mass-shootings in the last couple of decades have taken place in "gun-free zones."  To those who want to further restrict firearms -- since there are literally over 100 million peaceful Americans that never have and never will commit a crime with a firearm, and that is an overwhelming majority of the population that owns guns, why don't we ban gun-free zones since virtually every single mass-shooting has taken place in one?  There's an obvious reason that these homicidal maniacs don't shoot up a cop shop -- everyone there is armed and will shoot back!  If our President -- or anyone on the left -- gave a good damn about human life they would both take down the "Nobody here that obeys the law is able to defend themselves, commit mass-murder here" signs.
  
  
• You have an unalienable right to life.  The Constitution does not grant you that right because the government never possessed it in the first place and you cannot grant that which you do not first possess. The Founders understood this and we know that because they declared it to be so in the Declaration of Independence; that's why such a right is not in the Constitution, but the recognition of same, in the gravest extreme, is found in the Second Amendment.
  
  
• You are free to decide at any time to give up.  You are not free to demand that others give up, including giving up their right to protect their own lives.  Any infringement on the Second Amendment is a declaration of your disrespect for someone else's life and an indirect assault upon same.  The only means by which that is legitimate is if and when you are willing to die in the place of those who you demand be disarmed.  If you are not willing to take a bullet intended for me then you have no right to demand that I, in any situation that I find myself, be debarred the ability to effectively fight back against such an assault.
  
  
• A right cannot be conditioned upon a permit.  By definition a permit or license gives you the ability to do something otherwise prohibited.  If I have a right to defend my own life I need no permit to do so. 
  
  
• For the above reasons people at large have the right to own, possess and carry upon their person arms suitable for defensive use without any damn permits.  Period.

If you cannot argue these points from a perspective of logic then you have no basis to be here as a member with the privilege of commenting and having your state (e.g. what you've read, etc) between sessions.  In point of fact this is a perfect illustration of the difference between rights and privileges -- you have no right to be on this site on the Internet at all as it is private property, and therefore I may deny you entry as I wish.

Now let me leave you with one more thing to contemplate.

There are reports that the shooter reloaded during his rampage.  If these reports are true and he was in the room with a bunch of people who were about to become deceased then you need to hear this very clearly and must read this next sentence over and over until it sinks in:

Stop watching the damn movies and become educated now about firearms.

The instant that jackass dropped his magazine and thus announced he was out at the close range that exists in a classroom (30-50' or so maximum, right?) there was absolutely no reason on God's Green Earth why the persons there should not have immediately grabbed something (e.g. a chair!) and threw it at him and/or bum-rushed the shooter.

He was empty and thus at that point he was a thug with a club until he could reload.

Everyone reading this needs to spend some time in the deep, dark recesses of their mind and drill this singular fact far, far into your consciousness:

If you find yourself in a situation like this you must assume you are dead.  

Therefore, logic says that anything you do from that instant forward can only change things for the better.  Yes, you may fail.  One ex-military member reportedly did try to rush the shooter and was shot several times.  It is reported he is expected to survive.  His doing so likely prevented some number of other people from being shot as the shooter was occupied with shooting at him.  He is a hero but the point here is not to urge people to be heros -- it is to point out that once your life is under assault in this sort of fashion nothing you can do will make the situation worse; you can only improve your odds.

You won't hear this from the mainslime media nor from the so-called "pundits" and "experts" but it is true.  You do not know how many rounds or what other weapons the person threatening you has.  You only know that that person's very presence and presentation means that from an objective point of view you must assume you are dead and thus if you get any tactical advantage, no matter how small, you must take advantage of it immediately and without a second thought.

On United Flight 93 the passengers did exactly this, collectively.  They saved a tremendous number of lives by doing so.  They correctly surmised that they were all dead at the moment they learned the plane had been hijacked and was intended to be used as a bomb.  There was, for this reason, no downside to any action they might take -- they could only improve their odds and those of others, and decided to do so.

This was the correct decision.  It is the only logical decision and the only logical set of actions in a circumstance such as this.

Folks, firearms do not shoot themselves.  They do run out of ammunition. If they are not aimed, but rather wildly fired, they either miss or if they hit someone it is much less likely to cause serious injury or death than if they are deliberately aimed.  Bullets do not have a GPS embedded in them as you see in the movies and without deliberate, concentrated action most of the time they will miss. There is an infamous Youtube video of a bar fight in Toledo a number of years back in which many shots were fired at close range typical of the distance you'd find in a classroom.  Watch the video folks, and then realize this: Not one of those rounds hit anyone.

Therefore anything you can do that detracts from an active shooter's concentration and deliberation who is targeting you increases your odds of survival and that of everyone in the area with you.

If you are scared of firearms then do something about that.  Take a shooting lesson from an instructor or someone you trust that owns firearms.  Learn how they work and how to handle them safely without quivering in fear.  A gun is just a mechanical device and simpler than most that you use every day; it is vastly less-complex than a bicycle, lawn-mower or car.  Safe use and handling of firearms is not difficult to learn at all and every gun works essentially the same way.  Understanding this and having at least a passing level of comfort with it means that if you find yourself in a situation such as what occurred the other day and you are given a tactical break no matter how small you will have a clean opportunity to save not only your own life but that of everyone in the vicinity.

It's very hard for me to give a fuck these days.

In fact, it's becoming nearly impossible.  The reasons are many, with the most-serious being your refusal to give a fuck.

You don't give a fuck that the entire medical industry rips everyone off to the tune of 200, 300, 400, 500% or more of what virtually everything should cost.  This is why you "need" health insurance.  It is why we "need" Medicare.  The practices of this "industry" in virtually every other line of business would result in the people involved going to prison for decades, yet you tolerate this daily despite the fact that it is the largest cause of bankruptcy in the United States.  You cannot take your car in for an oil change or have the furnace guy come and fix your heating system in your home without being quoted a price before work begins, and were two gas stations to collude on prices the owners of both would be charged with felonies.

You don't give a fuck that pharmaceutical companies literally price drugs at a half-million dollars a year -- and if you need it, you'll need it effectively forever.  There are so few people who have that sort of money that this kind of pricing is by definition theft, as the only way to "afford' such a drug is to steal the money from someone else (through legal means or otherwise.)  What's worse is that you let them get away with having most of the development cost of these "wonder drugs" be born through publicly-funded research; it's not even their money at risk (for the most part) when such a new drug is tested, it's yours and mine.  We then wonder why so-called "health insurance" is as expensive as it is and why the stock of firms in that business such as Aetna (NYSE: AET) are up more than 500% since 2009, roughly doubling in the two years since the Obamacare "mandates, er, taxes" kicked in and stock in company that makes the drug in this example (ALXN) is up 1,000% since 2009.  You, on the other hand, will be flirting with bankruptcy (if not rendered penniless, insurance or no) if you get sick.

You don't give a fuck that the US Supreme Court in two separate decisions on the same underlying issue re-wrote Obamacare in ways that severely implicate your fundamental and Constitutional Rights.  When Obamacare was found "Constitutional" originally it occurred through re-writing the law to find that the "penalty" was actually a tax, but in doing so it was re-written as a direct tax that is not apportioned nor is it a tax on income, which means it is explicitly unconstitutional. You didn't care enough about that to demand that this crap stop, and thus opened the door to the second and more-recent decision which simply cemented the first: Words (and the Constitution) don't matter if they fail to meet a desired political outcome! (Roberts actually said in that opinion that to uphold the law as written "would destabilize the individual insurance market"; in other words the federal spending must flow irrespective of what Congress actually did and Congress cannot be left to fix it, IF it was a mistake.)  The result of this second decision was that people cheered the screwing that the aforementioned medical industry has been dishing out for the last four decades instead of immediately taking to the streets and demanding the arrest and prosecution of everyone involved in that part of the so-called "economy" and both blatantly unconstitutional acts of the court.

You don't give a fuck that over the last year $790 billion was literally stolen from you in value due to deficit spending (6/30/2014 to 6/29/2015) and that over the last fiscal year (September 30 2013 -> September 30 2014) an approximate trillion (that is, $1,000 billion) was similarly stolen.  To put a number on this that is 4.5% of the economy over the last 12 months and approximately 6% over the previous fiscal year.  From the first of 2008 to today that theft has totaled $8,924 billion dollars and is the reason that actual economic expansion over the last four years in real terms has not run about 3.5% a year, it's approximately 1.1%!  Anyone who steals that much damn well ought to be in prison no matter how many people conspire together to do it.  Yet not only are you unwilling to demand that the people involved go to prison you keep ratifying and approving their theft by returning them to office and cheering them on at political rallies!

You don't give a fuck about the fact that all of the above mean that on a compounded basis roughly half of your purchasing power has been robbed from you since 2000 and this will, inevitably, collapse the very programs you claim a right to such as Social Security and Medicare (say much less private pensions.) Were the medical situation, in particular, to be resolved it would (1) eliminate federal deficit spending, (2) resolve most if not all of the state and city government budgetary problems and (3) remove close to 1/5th of the spending you currently do from your personal budget.  That's the math, folks.  In other words your willful and intentional refusal to give a fuck on a collective basis means that you are intentionally allowing a course of conduct by our governments and certain private actors that mathematically must cause the collapse of the very programs you claim to have a right to.  You can make all the claims you want but you can't make the impossible occur, and what's worse is that you're intentionally destroying the economic future of your children -- not just your own future.

You don't give a fuck that arithmetic says that the debt and GDP accumulation path this nation is on must end in disaster; it cannot be otherwise, and further we are beyond the point where accumulating more debt provides even a temporary gain; it instead comes with immediate pain.  Yet you continue to permit, even insist on continued deficit spending by our government despite the fact that you cannot bargain with math nor is it subject to political will.  You are not only screwing yourself you are screwing every young person in this country -- including your own children who will live long enough to have to deal with the collapse you are actively causing, even if you're in your 80s and will probably die before it gets you.

You don't give a fuck that the fundamental right found by the Supreme Court to marriage was in the same breath turned into a mere privilege subject to license, so long as everyone is similarly constrained by said license.  The breathtaking breadth of that decision, the turning of your fundamental right to choose who you are intimate with into a licensed privilege so long as everyone has to pay the same tax and subject themselves to the same terms, for anyone with more than two firing neurons in their head, should have led to immediate protests and a full-on strike by every producing American.  Instead people turned their Facebook profile picture "rainbow colored" in support of it.  In short you cheered the single largest arrogation of power by the government in American history.

You don't give a fuck about the fact that Ross Perot warned during the 1996 Presidential campaign that NAFTA and related "free trade" bills would eviscerate American employment, costing literal millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs.  He was later proved right; you could certainly be excused for not believing his prediction (after all, he was just a rich bastard shooting off his mouth, right?) but there is no excuse for refusing to believe proved facts over the next three decades.  The fact is that our trade deficit has grown with every nation we've entered into one of these "agreements" with; that is, every one of them has cost more than than it has benefited the United States. Yet we're still allowing not only NAFTA to continue but we then granted China "most-favored nation" status and a tariff-free environment for them while China demands local content and tariffs on goods and services we export back their direction, they steal anything not nailed down (and much that is) and, to top it off, we are now "debating" extending the same abusive trade deals to over a dozen other nations, nearly all of which are poor "emerging markets" much like China was when we gave that status to them.  ARE YOU NUTS?

You don't give a fuck that those who are not citizens can and do vote and the Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot put a stop to it.  The single most-important asset a citizen of a nation has is to determine the political path of the nation; we express that through ballots and our representatives.  If those who are not citizens can cast ballots, given that many elections are narrowly-decided, we have ceded the right of political decision-making to non-citizens.  Since the citizens of this nation have sat for this crap up until now and continue to do so we have collectively decided that we no longer live in a Constitutional Republic.  Why in the hell would you expect anyone else give a fuck about anything if you won't do whatever is necessary to prevent non-citizens from determining the political path this nation takes?

You don't give a fuck about the outrageous armed robbery practiced daily by our so-called "law enforcement" agencies. Ferguson is hardly the only place this has become a national pasttime; the entire State of California is another example where a simple and routine $25 traffic ticket is instantly turned into a $300 citation through "assessments" and "surcharges."  Of course if you don't have $300 it then becomes a suspended license, loss of your job (when you can't get to work) or an arrest (if you drive anyway so you don't starve.)  For those who claim it's not "armed robbery" exactly what do you think that gun is doing on the cop's hip?  This is tolerated nationally and can quite-literally begin with nothing more-serious than a parking violation -- oh, and that citation might be trumped up too (and frequently is with "meter maids" that will write on a meter that is not yet expired.)  Four million residents (17% of the state's adult population!) in California have a suspended license for this reason right now; that's nearly one in five!  Exactly why is this sort of literal and outrageous armed robbery not cause for an immediate cessation of all work by Californians complete with picketing around the state house and senate, never mind the governor's mansion, until it is stopped and these outrageous "surcharges" and penalties canceled?  I've not even bothered with the "pull people over and steal their money" games yet; that's just another of many additional examples of the very same act of armed robbery.

You don't give a fuck about false oaths, particularly those to "Defend and preserve The Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic."  The list of persons who have taken such oaths and then acted directly in contravention of them is too long to list.  No, this is not advocating war or civil unrest but it sure does include advocating not associating with or helping people who have shot off their mouth in public in this regard that they have such a duty, or who currently hold public office, yet directly violate said claimed duty whether actively or simply by sitting on their ass.  Or, as I've put it many times to such folks (earning many dirty looks in the process): "If you have a duty to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, when do you intend to start doing so?"

So here's my question to you: If you refuse to give a fuck about any of the above why should I?

... you're likely to either be eating out of a dumpster in your old age or be (literally) eaten.

If you currently have counted more than 65 revolutions around the sun in your life then you may avoid this, but only through the most-macabre of means: you'll die of something else first.

Let me explain: If you're between 40 - 65 you have somewhere between 20 and 45 years remaining on this planet, statistically speaking.  Oh sure, some of you will do better, some worse, but those are the numbers.

This means you must manage at least 20 years without things going to hell if you're on the older end, and 45 years if you're on the younger.  What are the odds?

Well, the US Government (backed by the Fed) in what has been and continues to be described as a "recovery" destroyed about 6.3% of the value of the currency last year alone.  That is the value of every dollar that exists in currency and credit (that's a stunning $59 trillion dollars folks!) was impaired by 6.3%.

To put this in perspective and real dollar terms that is $3.7 trillion dollars of value destruction or approximately every penny the federal government spent.

Looked at another way the Federal Government emitted $1.08 trillion to cause that currency destruction but the reality of arithmetic turned the harm done from $1.08 trillion to $3.7 trillion, a multiplication of 3.43x!

Now let's look out 20 years.  Let's presume that this year, which the CBO and other policy people say will in time be considered a good year, is equaled every year for the next 20.  That is, we have no more bad years (of which the CBO says we will have many, starting in another 2 or 3 and continuing thereon forever!)

I'm being very optimistic in this projection, in other words.

That $59 trillion is going to have a real value of $17.3 trillion in today's dollars 20 years from now; it will have had roughly 70% of its real value literally burned to ash.

With the remaining value we will try to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits, just to name two, without which about half of the population is literally without funds -- or medical care.

Do I need to tell you how much is left in 45 years?  Ok, I will: $3.78 trillion.

Yeah.

If you want to know why the American consumer (that is, the common man) has watched everything go "poof" in front of them since roughly 1980, this is the reason.  Contrary to the protests raised by various people in government that "we're not really in deficit trouble" and similar nonsense this is the arithmetic that cannot be evaded; math isn't a topic of debate, it just is.

Will I be ok when this happens personally?  Maybe.  But if not that's all right; I had a pretty decent run, and if the reality of the situation is that between my attempts over the last number of years to get people to wake the fuck up and put a stop to this crap fail and I also fail to find a way to remain in reasonable comfort as my time on this planet (probably another 35 years, more or less) draws to a close I have no quarrel with the fact that I've had a good run and due to that failure to change trajectory my time has expired.

How do you feel about this?  More the point, whether you're rich, poor or somewhere in the middle unless you're ridiculously rich (as in, "have billions") having six percent of your wealth today in real terms left 45 years out means you will be eating out of a dumpster and living under a freeway overpass -- which will likely be crumbling around you in a vista something akin to "Fury Road"!

Oh, I know, you'll call me a "downer" and say that "we've always found a way", "technology will save us" or "the markets will go up monstrously and thus you'll outrun it."

Uh huh.  The markets have not outrun it from 1980 to today.  They have papered over it with more and more debt, but eventually that debt has to be paid and in the meantime it has to be serviced.  That servicing cost eats more and more of the productive output of society until it exceeds income at which point all of that hidden value destruction is revealed.

2000 and 2007 were a small piece of the overall economy and market detonating in this fashion.

Small!

Yeah, I know, housing was a big deal.  No argument.  It was much larger than the tech wreck as a percentage of the economy.

But as a percentage of the whole neither was all that large.  Fixed residential investment in 2007, that is housing, the year before it all went to hell totaled $688 billion out of $14.478 billion in GDP or 4.8% of the total.

Got that folks?  Less than 5% of the entire economy blew up everything, threatened to destroy the entire US economy and every large bank (according to Bernanke, Paulson .et.al.), caused the S&P 500 collapsing from 1576 to 660 (a loss of about 60%) and was only "arrested" by a literal doubling of federal debt and allowing banks to lie about the value of what they held, a lie that continues today.

Today, one dollar in five, or four times that much in percentage terms is spent on health care throughout the United States in a monopolist, rigged system that is more unstable by several orders of magnitude and more dependent on federal intervention and tampering with the value of our currency and credit than the housing market was!  The solution to said problem is right in front of us yet nobody will even discuss it at the political level, say much less introduce a bill.  State governments, for their part, will (if pressed) tell you there is literally no agency that does or will take up even blatant behavior that ought to be considered a criminal violation of consumer protection statutes if it occurred in the medical sector.

Medicine isn't the only place this problem exists, but it's the most-critical to resolve simply due to its size as a percentage of the economy.

I don't know how much time we have before ordinary people -- or for that matter just traders -- figure this out at a critical mass level.  I have no idea if it will come before or after the majority of the nation is scavenging dumpsters for something to eat.

But I do know the math tells me a meltdown at a scale four to five times greater than any we've seen in this nation's economic history, including 1929 and 2008, is inevitable unless we stop this and with every day that passes the amount of accumulated damage that there is no way to evade grows at an ever-increasing, indeed exponential, rate.

From the View page we have this vomit:

Gay rights won't fade as a political issue. The Republican base won’t let it.

Utter and complete crap.

Prominent Republicans calculated that if the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutionally protected, the issue would become settled law and disappear politically. This would be welcome, they reasoned, as the party was on the wrong side of the politics and history.

Then Indiana enacted a Religious Freedom Restoration Act last month that critics said would allow private enterprises to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Arkansas followed with a similar measure.

After vehement opposition from businesses in both states, Republican governors forced modifications that make it more difficult to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

And what drove that "vehement opposition"? 

Let me point out what didn't drive it: A desire to evenly enforce equality of access to all goods and services irrespective of the provider of same and their personal beliefs .vs. those of the person doing the buying.

My evidence?  Right here.

Think that's an isolated incident?  Nope.  Not even close.  How about 13 gay bakeries asked to make explicitly Pro-Christian wedding cakes?

Where are the prosecutions?  And where is the screaming from the left on these bakeries, all of not only apparently talking about a hypothetical purchase but denied an actual attempt to buy, documented on video?

Now let me be clear -- none of these folks should be prosecuted for refusing something that grossly offends them in the case of artistic expression.  This is not public accommodation, it is artistry along with intimate involvement and actual, physical support of an event that is about to take place.  Absent the decoration and inscriptions nobody knows what the hell you want a cake for so it is you as the buyer who are explicitly demanding participation in your intimate event.

There is no legitimate reason for an individual who is about to undertake some sort of event to try to contract with another for the explicit purpose of assisting them in that specific event if that person has a serious ethical or moral problem with what is about to take place.  Such deeply personal events as weddings, funerals and the like are some of the most-intimate that we as humans engage in.  It is simply beyond reason to believe that such an individual about to undertake such an event would have a legitimate desire to have another individual that is personally convinced that the conduct about to take place is immoral or otherwise unacceptable be an intimate and innate participant in such an activity unless their motive is not to add to their own personal experience but to damage or destroy others.

That's what this comes down to when you evaluate it on the merits.  This garbage is part of the grievance industry -- the same sort of people who brought us the Duke LaCrosse "rape" case, the Tawana Brawley incident, the alleged gang rape at a frat house that never happened and more.  These people are not interested in justice, equality or anything of the sort.  They are very interested in destroying anyone with a contrary opinion or lifestyle and they seek not acceptance but rather forced cooperation with their most-intimate life choices while denying that same forced cooperation requirement to anyone else.

Step back a bit and think about the furor that arose among "corporate" entities with regard to Indiana, in particular Apple.  How do you square that position with manufacturing and sourcing of components from China, a nation that openly mocks what we call civil rights, say much less sales into nations that persecute and even murder gay people.

You can't, unless you step back and see that such force is only good when it benefits Apple and, specifically, Apple's Chairman (by increasing his net worth, of course.)

In other words it's perfectly fine for the law to require a Christian photographer to shoot a gay Apple employee couple's wedding -- despite the fact that such an engagement is an inherently intimate thing that the photographer finds personally repulsive (and as a result, whether intentional or not, is likely to come with a sub-optimal outcome) even if the only reason to engage such a person is to attack their moral beliefs (at the possible expense of the quality of your pictures!)

But, the same sort of concern for civil rights turned toward environmental destruction that sickens and kills children near the factories making components going into Apple's products, or for those who work at Foxconn assembling same is illegitimate because that's aimed at Apple and its CEO rather than at those who are "lesser."  In other words we can't have tariffs that are intended to support wage and environmental parity between nations (thereby destroying the incentive to exploit people and the environment under the faux banner of "free trade") because that benefits those who are not as worthy.

It's the same with so-called Globull Warming.  Al Gore thinks you should drive a Volt or a Tesla -- or even better, not drive at all. However, he doesn't think he should give up his 40' yacht that burns diesel at a rate of about 2 gallons per mile, nor should he give up his private jet instead of traveling on commercial flights.  Nor, for that matter, should he give up his palatial estate that consumes 10x as much energy as my home likely does, and 20x as much as yours.  This, of course, is because you (and I) are "lesser" and he is "greater" and therefore those proscriptions he wishes to have ensconced in law are for you, not him.

Another example?  How about Liam Neelson; he has made millions portraying himself as a gun-using good guy and going after bad guys.  Ah, but you see that's for him, not you: he doesn't think ordinary people (like, for instance, if you had the misfortune of being the father of a kidnapped daughter) should have guns as he's for lots of gun control.  You are lesser, you see, and therefore that which he portrays on the silver screen doesn't apply to little you -- only to big him when it makes him millions of dollars.

How about Obama?  He recently obstructed a pair of military members about to get married so he could play a round of golf.  He couldn't go sit at the bar for an hour or two and then play after the ceremony was completed, or, if his schedule did not permit, decide to play tomorrow instead.  No, he had to play now and the couple-to-be had to move their wedding.  A golf game is not a necessity; as someone who has played many rounds of golf (poorly, I admit) it's a luxury and one that is often baked through with frustration.  Yeah, Obama "apologized" but the fact remains: Those who serve our nation and wished to profess their love and had booked the venue were lesser, he was greater and therefore just barged right in.  A man who had a bit of humility (not to mention humanity) would have chosen to have a beer or two, then play on.  But not our President; me me me mine mine mine damnit is the order of the day for him.

I can list literally dozens of other examples and so can you if you think about it for about 30 seconds.  And let me make this quite clear just in case you think you're one of the greater -- unless you're Obama, Elizabeth Warren or similar you're not -- you're one of the lesser and you are being used.

My personal view is that no wedding should have anything to do with the state; if you want to get married you should go see whatever religious adviser floats your boat and have at it and keep it between the two of you and said religion, if any.

In other words there should be no recognition of so-called "marriage" in the civil arena whatsoever; if anything the State should instead recognize and be willing to enforce privately-negotiated partnership agreements in the domestic realm just as it does for any other sort of business arrangement.  After all merging two lives into one at an economic and personal level has business-related constructs to it and that's a place where the government can legitimately arbitrate disputes.  Trying to arbitrate disputes of the heart in a courtroom is not only futile it is none of the government's damn business!

THAT would be equality and, I might add, it would put a permanent stop to the 40+ year practice of unilaterally changing the terms of a couple's deal at literal gunpoint 10, 20, 30 or 40 years later, often at the gross expense of one party or the other -- yet another act that the grievance industry has feasted on for decades at the expense, in the majority, of children.

If we did that it would also erase one of the biggest strangleholds the grievance industry has in America today.

Shall we, my fellow Americans?

I knew I'd get hate mail and lots of vehement push-back when I wrote my column The Truth About Your Consent; it's a topic I've raised privately with people in the past, and the reaction has always been the same -- anger, shock and usually a nasty response.

So I think you should go read it again -- and not because I'm trying to break my record for hate email (although it's already close in that regard.)

No, you should read it again because it's true, and in addition if we are to ever make progress in this country the people of this nation need to understand the principle in that column and accept responsibility for it.

The people in Ferguson need to accept responsibility for their consent to a police department and city government that manages to issue 3 arrest warrants per household per year, and imposes fines that amount to $130 per man, woman, child and infant.

That consent put in place an environment of distrust and hatred between the police department and citizens -- and irrespective of whether Mr. Brown was lawfully shot by an officer in the line of duty or was unlawfully killed by him, the reaction that followed was in large part if not exclusively caused by that environment.

The people in Jefferson County, Alabama need to accept responsibility for their consent to a so-called "justice system" that refused to hold to account the banksters that profited from and arranged the swap deals that were entered into in part due to bribery and led to their water bills doubling.  How do I know they consented and still do?  Do a search for "Chase Bank" locations in and around Birmingham; why is the number (much) greater than zero?

How is it that the Hospitals in California, or those in Arizona, that have bilked people out of $10,000 for a $100 test or $60,000 for two $100 vials of scorpion anti-venom are still open?  How about the hospital that charged a guy $9,000 to put a bandage on his finger?

The people didn't and don't consent?  They sure do, otherwise those institutions would be closed -- one way or another.

Or how about the cops pointing guns at peaceful protesters in Ferguson?  That's assault with a deadly weapon in virtually every jurisdiction if you or I do it.  Why do the people there and around the nation consent?  And yes, you do consent, because if you didn't then one way or another that would stop.

I am not saying, by the way, that you should burn the hospital to the ground or do harm to any particular person.  To the contrary; I fully understand that the means by which this sort of crap happens is that the persons and institutions get laws passed that make their conduct legal, either explicitly or by "wink-wink-nod-nod" willful indifference to what would otherwise be a criminal act.

That doesn't change whether or not it's right, just, and should be permitted to occur.

An alcoholic cannot stop drinking until he admits that he is an alcoholic and drinks because he voluntarily raises the glass to his lips and consumes the contents therein.  A drug abuser cannot stop abusing drugs until he admits he is an addict and that each and every "hit" he takes from the pipe, down his throat or up his arm occurs because he willingly consumes the drug.  

Likewise we will not stop being robbed and abused by the people involved in these outrages until you admit that the reason it happens is that you give your consent each and every day to every single one of those acts.

To effect a change you must first accept and admit to what is happening on an objective basis.  In this case you must accept and admit that you personally give your consent to all of those things I outlined in my article on consent and the thousands I have written over the last 7 years and more every single day of your life.

One of the arguments I've had thrown back in my face repeatedly when raising this is the old saw that goes "Well what are you saying, that I should go get my gun?"

I'm saying no such thing.  You don't see me standing out in my front yard with a gun, do you?

Yet I freely admit that I gave consent this morning to every one of the outrages I outlined and more, I gave consent yesterday, the day before, and every day back to when they first happened.  I can predict with a high degree of confidence that I will give consent tomorrow too.  I will do so because my evaluation today is that the risks and potential rewards stack up to giving consent being the logical thing to do.  That I am a law-abiding citizen weighs heavily in that evaluation, as it probably does for you as well.

But -- that doesn't change the essence of what happened this morning when I got out of bed.

I consented -- and so did you.

We will find solutions to the problems I outlined and more only when we have broad acceptance and recognition that we each, individually, give consent each and every day to every one of those outrages and more.

Open, public admission of our complicity and consent is the threshold, exactly as it is for the alcoholic.

Let me know when you're ready to stop being an alcoholic, a journey that begins only when you admit you are one and that you consent each and every day to your condition.

Until that day comes may you enjoy your drink and may the consequences of consuming that beverage be tolerable.