By Nathan Barton

The Mexican government said on Monday it had caught a leader of the Knights Templar, one of the many violent drug cartels waging war against the Federales.  At the same time, Mexico City is co-opting the so-called vigilantes in the war against the drug cartels.  Why “so-called?”  Because most of them are NOT taking the law into their own hands:  vigilantes as in San Francisco in gold rush days acted as police, assault troops, judge and jury, and usually executioner.  These people are simply defending their communities and themselves against both the drug lords AND the thuggish state and federale police.  If they are co-opted (and if the Federales are telling the truth, I must add), that means that they have failed in their mission: now it is again Ciudad Mexico and Hermasillo or Monterrey or Ciudad Juarez calling the shots, not the local volunteers and their freely elected leaders.  Too bad.

The Pacific Research Institute point out what any real observer already knew: Health Insurance Was Not a Free Market Prior to ObummerCare. Comparing what we had in 2009 and what we have today is NOT comparing apples and oranges, but two different varieties (Jonathan and Delicious, maybe?) of rotten, stinking apples which have been pulled from the bottom of the dumpster after sitting in there the whole month of August.  Indeed, anyone who has studied the history of the decline of the medical profession and health care in this country can trace ALL of it back to government interference in the system, starting with the medical schools and licensing back in the early 1900s and continuing through the tax system messing with the insurance and all the rest, including ALL the parts of Medicare and Medicaid.  Which is WHY the Abominable Act is just causing the system to crash sooner than later: it is solving NONE of the problems, just making them worse.

Well, well, it seems 35.5% of disability beneficiaries Have ‘mental disorder’; 43.2% in D.C. and I would assume that many of them are ex-federal employees (and maybe not “ex” for that matter) or ex-elected officials.  No, it isn’t DC that drives them to distraction (I’m trying to be nice and not say “mad.”) but that they are ATTRACTED to it.  Like flies to… well, you get it. Which reminds me, did I tell you about that new “Bait-n-Blast” for coyotes?  It smells like long-dead cow, which is kinda what I figure the mental scent of DC is like.

The State of the Union (or is that “Stench of the Onion?”) speech last night once again featured the august, imperial presence and dominant personality of the “messiah” in a setting which is not quite as Romanesque as I am sure he would want, but which seems to have set all kinds of fireworks off on the GOP side of things, even the RINOS.  We have nasty things said by Cruz and King and Fleming, Gohmert and even McCain about the “messiah.”  Of course, we can always get a rise from reading what Ed Schultz (North Dakota’s revenge on the lower 47) has to say about how he worships the feet that the “messiah” walks on, and how he welcomes the dictatorship of The One.

You, like me, are hearing a lot about how evil “income inequality” is and how the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.  (It is really hard for the pollsters to pull the poor away from their cell phones and 50-inch wide televisions and monitors with their Tweets and latest downfeeds of Beiber’s latest piece of “musical” madness to tell the pollsters how bad off they are.)  But even the New York TImes admitted today that “upward mobility” has not declined in the past decade, when 20 percent of children born “middle income” found their way to the top.  I am not saying the poor are not “poor” in comparison to the rich and even what is left of the middle class, just that they are getting rich, too, just much slower than the rich are getting richer.  I suppose it IS harder to break into the upper class today, but people also have a much stronger incentive to do so, so it kinda balances out.  Thanks to a couple hundred years of limited government and relatively high individual personal and economic liberty, the United States advanced to prosperity that not only had never existed before (except maybe pre-Flood) but beyond that of the rest of the world.  Then we threw it away so we could “be like all the other nations.”  So today, even the poorest of the poor Americans are still living far FAR better than the average African or Asian – even in China.

Science Magazine is a brown-noser when it comes to government, and its latest story “Will Expanding Health Insurance Strain Emergency Rooms?” shows that they are just that, with a big “YES.”  Of course, I suppose it depends on what you consider “health insurance.”  Real people with real insurance are going to understand that their costs, out-of-pocket AND indirect, are going to go up if they run to the ER with a sniffle or a cut finger, and use urgent care clinics or their doctor’s office – or even just deal with it themselves. It is the government-faked insurance and especially that evil piece of stinky DC dripping “ObummerCare” that will keep the same number of people going to the ER, except that NOW they won’t be “uninsured” (maybe), just sucking off the taxpayer’s bottle.

Bill Janklow of South Dakota was famous for the sort of State Budget Gimmicks that one story reminds us of:  some of the most popular “tricks” used by legislators (and governors and state budget folks) to hide the true cost of government spending include underfunding pensions, inflating revenue projections, shifting funds and using one-time asset sales…  As it gets harder and harder to live in champagne style on a beer-drinker’s pocket lint after he’s been mugged, the legislators get more and more creative.  (A friend, not a libertarian even of the minarchist style, asked me a few days ago, how those we elect – who SEEM to be good and rational people – turn into tyrannical idiots?  ALL the time?  I didn’t and don’t have an answer, except to say that the only real solution is to take the power away from government.)

Common Core teaching/education standard have been around for five years now, but only in 2013 did the fight over them seem to heat up.  Some states (like South Dakota) adopted them in 2010 and 2011, but they didn’t become controversial until much later.  This controversy seems to be causing SOME changes: some states have dumped the Common Core Tests and take other actions.  Again, the fuss is NOT going to solve the problem, any more than the Common Core was going to solve the problems. Schools are poor at what they do because they are government controlled, and we know that government can do NOTHING well.  It has been proven for about 6,000 years, and we see more proof each day.