"Equality In The Ashes"

 

I remember Venezuela was a Jewel in South America Before Maduro got hold of it and trashed it and the only people that benefited from it was the inner circle and the Russians and cubans who got cheap oil. Everyone else got screwed to the wall.  Sure there was the pretty rhetoric from the universities, but the pretty rhetoric and banners didn't feed the kids so the people voted with their feet.  The ultimate condemnation.

Before the revolution hollowed it out, Venezuela was the jewel of South America. The nation stood as a powerhouse of free enterprise, fed by the richest oil reserves on earth and a flood of foreign capital, and its skyline rose as a testament to ambition.

Men built businesses. Families secured their futures. The rule of law furnished the scaffolding on which human flourishing is raised.

Income inequality existed. It always does in a dynamic society where free men are permitted to build, to risk, and to reap the reward of their labor. Disparities of wealth are the natural residue of an economy that actually produces value. But alongside that inequality stood something the Marxists can never abide: abundant opportunity.

The ladder of upward mobility was intact and load-bearing. A man could begin with nothing and forge a legacy. That was the reality of Venezuela before the ideologues arrived, promising to heal the imperfections of freedom with the guarantees of utopia.

---

The revolutionaries did precisely what they promised. They leveled the mountains of prosperity so that every man might dwell equally in the valley of despair. The dismantling of Venezuelan civilization was a systematic, bureaucratic, and deliberate execution.

The cure began with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, who took the reins of the state the following February and turned his wrath upon the engine of the nation's wealth. Abolishing the power to create it.

Under socialist stewardship, oil production collapsed from roughly 3.5 million barrels a day to around 800,000 and in the depths of the regime's mismanagement it sank below half a million.

We must grant the regime its due. They accomplished what every Western environmentalist only dreams of, achieving a breathtaking reduction in carbon emissions by simply crippling their own energy sector entirely.

Progress, we are reminded, demands sacrifice.

Having "fixed" the energy market, the state turned its benevolent gaze toward the grocery aisle. In 2003 the government fixed prices on four hundred basic products.

The law of cause and effect is wholly immune to political rhetoric, and the result was immediate. Farmers and manufacturers discovered that producing food at a state-mandated loss was financial suicide, so they stopped.

The fields went fallow. The shelves went bare. The government outlawed high prices and, in the same stroke, succeeded in outlawing food.

This triumph of central planning reached its apex in what Venezuelans came to call the Maduro Diet. In 2016, a survey conducted by three of Caracas's largest universities found that nearly three-quarters of the population had lost weight over the preceding year at an average of nineteen pounds per person for lack of food.

Western wellness gurus charge thousands for the privilege of a fasting retreat; the socialist state administers starvation free of charge, the ultimate weight-loss program, results guaranteed.

And by 2025, Venezuela had performed a geopolitical miracle. While the United States strained under an unprecedented influx across its southern border, Venezuela boasted virtually no illegal immigration whatsoever.

No one was sneaking in to partake of the socialist paradise.

The catch, of course, is that roughly twenty-three percent of its own population, nearly eight million souls, had fled the other way, abandoning their homes and walking hundreds of miles to escape the utopia they had been promised.

The lesson is written in the direction they were walking. No one breaks into a prison.

---

The deepest wound Venezuela suffered was a spiritual one. Socialism is a Christian heresy. It steals the Christian vocabulary of compassion, deposes God and enthrones the State, then exchanges charity for coercion.

The socialist lie promises a top-down, material equality secured through the brutal confiscation of property. It strips the individual of his free will and demands that he surrender his agency to a secular leviathan.

A power that claims the authority of heaven while operating with the malice of hell.

The inevitable result is that everyone shares in the same misery. Everyone, that is, except the ruling elite, who dine on imported steak while the people fight over scraps in the ash.

Set this demonic parody against the Christian concept of sobornost, the spiritual harmony and organic unity of believers, the communion of free men who, in love and faith, choose to bear one another's burdens.

Saint John Chrysostom fiercely thundered against greed and warned the rich of the spiritual peril of hoarded wealth, yet he never once commanded the Roman emperor to seize the grain and redistribute it at sword-point.

He summoned men to give, because a gift compelled is no gift at all, and a virtue extracted by force is no real virtue.

The whole socialist project rests on a single lie: that man can be made good by decree. But goodness is the fruit of grace freely received, and what must be freely received can never be imposed at gunpoint.

This is the chasm the ideologues will never see. Collectivism commands compliance through terror; sobornost invites communion at the foot of the Cross.

"For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another" (Galatians 5:13).

One road ends in the gulag. The other ends at the Kingdom.

---

We are now watching the progressive clerics of our own nation peddle the same poison that reduced Caracas to a beggar's colony. They wield the same rhetoric. They stoke the same envy. They promise the same impossible utopia, and they grow indignant when a man points to the ruins and asks them to account for the bodies.

So look upon the wreckage and ask the only question that matters. Why would a free people surrender their liberty, their prosperity, and their faith for a system that has produced nothing in its entire history but breadlines and mass graves?

Why would we trade the inheritance of Western civilization, built upon the bedrock of Christian moral order and the natural law, for the promise of equality in the ashes?

The ruins of Venezuela stand as a monument to the arrogance of men who imagined they could build heaven on earth without God. Let them serve as our warning. We will not be the next casualties of this tired old lie.

Deus Vult.

- Marcus Sterling

Monday Music "Cats In the Cradle" By Harry Chafin"

 

Yeah I went rummaging through my record collection.....And since it is kinda a Fathers Day kinda thing.

This song I heard back in the 70's and it was on one of my "K'tel" (I still have it, as you can see, looks kinda beat up, LOL)I had in the late 70's and I remembered it because of the story it told of a father that was always "too busy".  I saw similarities between this and the relationship between me and my Dad.  I know it was a different time and my dad had to work.  he was a CID agent with the U.S Army and his job kept him hopping so he wasn't around much.  My dad did try to play catch with me and my brother a few times and do other things like go fishing as "the guys" but he wasn't around much as I would have hoped.  We took a back burner to his career and I don't hate him for it,  It was the way it was.  His devotion to duty is where I got mine and my brother got his so we did learn a lot from our Dad, and even though he reported to Fiddlers Green, I still miss him  But also because this song I make sure that I am available for my son and his activities and I spend a lot of time with my son because he is my son and he is a good kid and he turned into a good man.  I take pride in that, funny that people say that certain songs make a real impression on them and it follows them through their life.  This song reminded me of that time can move quickly and before you know it, you will be attending graduation and wondering "what the hell happened".  I try to balance my work and home life as the best I can.  My son is my legacy and I tried to "do right" by him.       I will play another "Cats" song for next week...y'all can guess on it, LOL

"Cat's in the Cradle" is a 1974 folk rock song by Harry Chapin from the album Verities & Balderdash. The single topped the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1974. As Chapin's only No. 1 hit song, it became the best known of his work and a staple for folk rock music. Chapin's recording of the song was nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011.

The song's lyrics began as a poem written by Harry's wife, Sandra "Sandy" Gaston; the poem itself was inspired by the awkward relationship between her first husband, James Cashmore, and his father, John, a politician who served as Brooklyn Borough President. She was also inspired by a country music song she had heard on the radio.  Harry also said the song was about his own relationship with his son, Josh, admitting, "Frankly, this song scares me to death."

The song is told in the first-person by a father who is too busy with work to spend time with his son. Each time the son asks him to join in childhood activities, the father issues vague promises of spending time together in the future. While disappointed, the son accepts his excuses and yearns to "be like you, Dad." The first verse tells of his absence at his son's birth and walking, as "there were planes to catch and bills to pay"; the second verse relates the father buying the son a baseball as a birthday present but likewise declining to play catch.
The final two verses reverse the roles. In the third verse, the son returns home from college and his father finally has some time to spend with him. Instead, the son just wants to go out and asks the father for the car keys. The fourth verse advances the story quite some time, when the father is long retired and his son has started his own family some distance away. The father makes a phone call to his son and invites him for a visit, but the son has his own issues with his job and his children are sick with the flu. He tells his father he will visit him if he "can find the time" and says "it's been sure nice talking to you" before he says goodbye. The final two lines of the song reflect the father's observation of what has happened:

“

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he'd grown up just like me. My boy was just like me.

”

The song's chorus references several childhood things: The Cat's in the Cradle string game, silver spoons that are given to babies as christening gifts, and the nursery rhymes Little Boy Blue and Man in the Moon.

Am at camp

 I am at camp, was asked to run a couple of ranges, and stay with the Troop overnight for 2 deep leadership coverage. 

Couple things, I believe in the motto of the Boy Scouts " Be Prepared ", well I brought 3 flashlights, put new Duracell batteries in all 3 and tested all three before packing them. Got to camp, tested them whem I got there,  tested good. Made sure they were off. Next day I went to grab a light, you betcha deader then a democrats soul....same with the other 2...the hell?  Luckily my brother from another mother hooked me up with a couple of spares. What are the odds?

One of my shotgun pics

The view right now for me 😁

Im using my kinda smart phone to post this. 

"The Trillion Dollar Question"

 

As soon as it was announced that Elon Musk was going to be the world's first Trillionaire, the usual suspects were immediately calling for the government to seize his money in the name of "fairness" because it wasn't "fair" that he had all this money and the "poor, downtrodden,teachers, starving children" or whatever cause de jour the left wanted to insert to score points with the sheep of their base as they bleet" not fair" and demand that the government "do something" as they stamp their feet, not realizing the dangers they are setting or the precedents that will be set, but they don't care. they will have forgotten all about it by the time the damage has taken affect when the confiscation starts, with the California style "assumed value tax" that will be used to target the billionaires and millionaires in the name of fairness, but the tax goes after the assumed value of your house, your 401K, your 65 Mustang in the garage, the signed Jersey from "Larry Csonka" in your mancave and you go broke having to pay the tax that basically breaks the middle class and the people that are bleeting earlier, most of them are on some kind of government assistance anyway and will not be affected in anyway.  WHat is being proposed is illegal for the moment via "Eisner V. Macomber", until the donks pack the courts and get it overturned...

Every time Elon Musk’s net worth climbs to some new astronomical figure, the same chorus appears on cue. “No one should have that much money.” “Tax him.” “Seize it.” “Make him pay his fair share.” Now that Musk is officially the world’s first trillionaire, the volume has only increased. On the Bernie Scale of political bitching, this is clearly an 11.5 on a scale of 0-10.

To many on the political left, his fortune is treated as self-evident proof of a broken system. Their conclusion is not merely that Musk has too much money. Their conclusion is that government should take it.

What strikes me is how few people stop to ask a simple question: as compared to what? Compared to what institution? Compared to what steward? Compared to what demonstrated record of competence? The argument assumes that government would somehow produce more value with that money than Musk does. That assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it is getting.

I understand the immediate objection. Government and private enterprise have different missions. SpaceX is not running a military. Tesla does not maintain interstate highways. Starlink is not administering Medicare. Fair enough. Yet all organizations consume resources and produce outcomes, and whether public or private they can still be evaluated on efficiency, innovation, responsiveness, and the value they create for the people they serve.

On that basis, the comparison becomes uncomfortable for the advocates of confiscation.

SpaceX lowered launch costs so dramatically that it effectively rewrote the economics of access to space. The company routinely lands and reuses rockets that government agencies once treated as disposable and accomplished what many experts declared impossible. Tesla drove an entire global automotive industry to accelerate electric vehicle development years ahead of schedule. Starlink has brought high-speed internet to remote areas where traditional providers either could not or would not go while keeping communications operating in disaster zones and war zones. Meanwhile, the Biden administration spent billions on rural broadband initiatives and produced bupkis to show for it and with his purchase of Twitter, he singlehandedly saved free speech while government tried to censor it.

One can dislike Musk personally and criticize his politics, his social media habits, his management style, or his ego. The question remains whether the value created by those enterprises exceeds the value that would have been created had the money remained in government hands.

At this point, critics usually raise what they believe is a devastating counterargument: Musk benefited from government contracts, subsidies, and tax incentives.

That is true. SpaceX has received NASA contracts. Tesla benefited from electric vehicle incentives. Various Musk companies have done business with government agencies.

The interesting thing is that this objection strengthens the pro-Elon argument.

SpaceX was not handed money to do nothing. It was paid to perform services that government had been purchasing for decades from traditional aerospace contractors. The relevant question is whether taxpayers received more value for those dollars. Looking at launch costs, launch frequency, technological innovation, and mission success, the answer appears to be yes. Musk’s companies demonstrate what can happen when private-sector incentives are applied to problems government has struggled to solve efficiently.

Imagine if the federal government had been given the capital that ultimately flowed into Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. Does anyone seriously believe Washington would have done better?

The government cannot even maintain a website without spending enough money to buy a small island nation. Remember the Obamacare portal launch? The federal government spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars creating Healthcare.gov only to unveil a spectacular failure. Cost overruns are so routine in federal projects that they barely qualify as news anymore. The Pentagon has failed repeated audits. California’s high-speed rail project has consumed billions while producing little beyond artist renderings, revised timelines, and fresh requests for funding. The federal government currently carries debt measured in tens of trillions of dollars and annual deficits that would have been considered catastrophic only a generation ago.

This is the institution that many people believe should take control of even more resources because Elon Musk has become too wealthy.

Again, compared to what?

The argument ultimately reveals a deeper philosophical divide. Many people view wealth as a fixed pie. If one person has more, someone else must necessarily have less. Wealth, in this framework, is not created but redistributed. The reality is that most modern wealth is generated through value creation.

Musk did not become wealthy because he loaded pallets of cash onto a truck and drove away with them. His wealth exists largely because investors believe his companies are worth enormous sums based on their future earnings and future contributions. If Tesla vanished tomorrow, humanity would still possess factories, vehicles, software, patents, engineering knowledge, and the infrastructure built around them. If SpaceX vanished tomorrow, humanity would still possess launch facilities, rockets, satellites, manufacturing capabilities, and decades of accumulated technical knowledge. The wealth represented by Musk’s fortune is largely a reflection of productive assets and productive capacity.

Government, by contrast, does not create wealth in the same manner. It acquires resources through taxation, borrowing, regulation, and monetary expansion. Some of those resources are used wisely. Many are not. A trillionaire is not necessarily evidence of economic failure. A government that spends trillions it does not have, borrows against future generations, loses track of enormous sums of money, fails audits, and routinely delivers projects years late and billions over budget may be a far better candidate for public concern.

None of this means government serves no purpose. A functioning civilization requires courts, law enforcement, national defense, infrastructure, and the rule of law. The question is not whether government should exist. The question is why so many people instinctively trust government with resources that it did not create while distrusting the entrepreneurs who did.

Since Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, critics have demanded that government take a larger share of his wealth. They call it fairness. To rational people, it looks like punishment.

Musk’s success is an embarrassment to the self-styled contemporary Soviets who insist government can outperform private enterprise if only it is given enough money, authority, and control. Decades of evidence suggest otherwise. Waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency are not accidental defects of large bureaucracies. They are recurring features of systems spending other people’s money with limited accountability. That is precisely why the Founders limited government through enumerated powers in the first place. They understood that the public treasury is a temptation that must be restrained.

Before attempting to confiscate Musk’s wealth—or anyone else’s—the advocates of such policies should first demonstrate that government can produce a trillion dollars worth of value with the resources it already controls.

That would be a persuasive place to start.

Monday Music "If Today Was Your Last Day" By Nickelback

 

I had wanted to post something yesterday, but between doing stuff around the house, some really minor repairs on the F150, and going to the range and cleaning rifles and Pistols yesterday, I didn't get an opportunity to take a picture of an album and build a "Monday Music" around it like I have been doing lately.  But I did hear this song on the way from the range, as I do take a long way home to see if I am being followed and to avoid more congested areas to prevent my getting pinned in especially with several "EBR"'s in the back of the truck, although I have my glock in the console, having to reach for an AR in the event of a gunfight is "difficult", yes I am slightly paranoid, the times are a bit spicy right now, and people following one from the range to "liberate" them from their assorted bullet launchers is a thing apparently.  and some people don't like Nickelback, but there are a few songs that I do like and this is one of them, and it made me think of "If this is was your last day, would you go to Fiddlers Green like a Hero going home" to paraphrase Chief Tecumseh

 

 

Dark Horse is the sixth studio album by the Canadian rock band Nickelback, released on November 17, 2008 in Europe and the next day elsewhere. It is the follow-up to their multi-platinum selling All the Right Reasons (2005). It was co-produced by the band and producer and songwriter Robert John "Mutt" Lange, known for working with such acts as Foreigner, AC/DC, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard and Shania Twain. Dark Horse sold 326,000 in its first week and debuted at number 2 in the US. More than a year after its release, the album did not leave the Top 100 on the Billboard 200. In its 91st week, the album peaked at number 46 for the week of August 28, 2010.  From 9 October, the album stayed at number 71 for 97 consecutive weeks  The album spent 125 consecutive weeks inside the Billboard 200.  On the week of November 29, 2014, Dark Horse re-entered the Billboard 200 at number 195, more than six years after the album's release.

It was ranked at number 191 on Billboard's 200 Albums of the Decade.  It is also the band's fourth straight Multi-Platinum selling album in the United States. As of 2010, the album has sold 3 million copies in the United States and 5 million copies worldwide. The album was originally going to be entitled Burn It To The Ground. 

 

"If Today Was Your Last Day" is the third single from Nickelback's sixth studio album Dark Horse. It was originally planned as the first single, to hit all U.S. radio formats September 30, 2008,but was scrapped as the first single in favour of "Gotta Be Somebody". Instead it was released on March 31, 2009. It was produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange, who produced the entire album. The song was released as a digital download in the U.S. on November 11. "If Today Was Your Last Day" was released in the UK on June 15. The song was performed live for the first time on May 22 at the Manchester Arena in Manchester, England.

In the US, the song has sold over 1,500,000 downloads, as of February 2010. According to Roadrunner Records UK, the song is "dynamically swelling our bank accounts". The song has also apparently been around with Nickelback for a while, but had never been finished. The song received Gold certification in Australia.

Lead vocalist/guitarist Chad Kroeger has mentioned the song as his personal favorite from Dark Horse. He had described the middle part of the song as "very motivational, and very positive".

The song was used for promotional videos in the Winter Olympics in 2010, and was used as the closing song during NHL Tonight's 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs coverage. 

 

The music video was shot with director Nigel Dick in March 2009. Performance portions of the video were shot at the Qwest Center in Omaha, Nebraska and in New York City. The other portion was shot in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The music video premiered on 23 April. In the beginning, two white teenage boys dressed in black seem to be up to some sort of shady business in Philadelphia. They record their journey on a camcorder. They carry mysterious black bags with them which seem to possibly be filled with illegal stuff. In the end, they stand on top of a bridge ready to carry out their plan. They open the bags, but only harmless colorful pieces of paper with quotes from the song such as "Forgive your Enemy," "It's Never Too Late," "Call a Friend and Reminisce" and "Fall in Love" fall over the people beneath them. This inspires two women to hand out coats with messages similar to those on the colored paper, a well-dressed man to hand money to everyone he meets, an arguing couple make up and a man arguing with presumably his boss to quit. All of the quotes refer to lines in the song "If Today Was Your Last Day". 

 I was looking for something else and ran across this and thought it was worthy of a repost.  This cuts to something that is a core to what makes us as honorable men, we fight for our country, for our family, and our comrades, and if necessary we will cash that blank check because to refuse will be an insult to what makes us men.  The phrase "A brave Man dies but once but a coward does a thousand times" is truth in those words.  We always know when the time comes we face it with steel in our spine and go as honorable men should.  Because all men die, it is the truth of our existence, how we die is the decision we make.

  I decided to repost it because it is a really good post.  

I had "borrowed"this from a fellow blogger, "Stormbringer" A.K.A. Sean Linnae.  His blog is still on my blogroll although he hasn't posted since 2020, I still leave him on my blog roll, hoping that he will return.

 

  or in the 13th warrior when the Norsemen recited this:

 
"Lo there do I see my father. Lo there do I see my mother and my sisters and my brothers. Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning. Lo, they do call to me, they bid me take my place among them, in the Halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever."

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.

Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”


~ Chief Tecumseh (Poem from Act of Valor)