Principles are more important than politics

This might be my last blog page for awhile, maybe my last one ever.  Ever since the Chinese Virus was released from a bio-weapons lab in the city of Wuhan, various governments around the world have used whatever legal authority they have, and in some cases, assuming legal powers that they don't have, with thegoal of containing this viurs.

There are several problems with this approach.  The expectated numbers of confirmed cases and deaths from this disease were wildly inflated at the start of this health crisis, yet many national presidents and the lower-ranking governmental officials, such as Governors and Mayors, used these false numbers as the basis for taking away the freedom of their people to do a wide variety of activities, including shopping for food, having parties in private homes, and even attending worship services at Christian churches and Jewish temples.

The rights that were stolen from the American people in particular are named explicitly in a document that has a very special place in American history for two reasons.  It's a list of amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and the ratification of this document was deliberately delayed in order to secure the votes that were needed to ratify the Constitution itself.  This is a copy of a painting that depicts the moment when America declared itself to be a new nation.

Because the British Empire still considered us to be thirteen colonies, when they heard the news, much later, they sent armed troops to enforce the harsh laws that we had just rebelled against.  Our own people trained and armed ourselves as much as we could, and it was good enigh to win a war that cost many lives on both sides, but we did win, so we began the process of establishing a new government, based on the best principles that we knew.  Fortunately for us, many of our leaders were highly-educated and faithful to a religion that taught good principles, like personal humillity and the love of others..

The United States Constitution has seven parts to it, called Articles.  The first three Articles explicitly give some power to three separate parts of a brand-new government.  America needed a new government because we had fought and won a war against the world's strongest army and navy at that time, the British Empire.

Any power that hasn't been given to one of the three branches of the U.S. Government is a power that the people retain.  This is explicitly mentioned in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution.

It isn't well-known, but the original proposal to add amendments to the U.S. Constitution was a list of 12 propsed amendments.  The elected representatives of the new American government voted on these proposals, one at a time, and 10 out of the 12 proposals received a majority of the votes that were cast.

I have seen enthusiasm growing among America's elected Mayors and Governors for political power that the U.S. Constitution doesn't give them.  In short, they have become dictators, which I wrote about in this essay, written in July 2012 and in this essay, written two years later, in August 2014.  The first page states some universal political science principles tnat can be applidd to any country.  The second page applies those prinvciples to the United States.

These are the first paragraphs of an April 5, 2020 news story published by the NBC affiliate in Boston.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh on Sunday issued a recommended curfew of 9 p.m. and asked all residents to wear a mask when leaving the house after the city saw its largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases.

The recommended curfew extends through 6 a.m. each morning and applies to all residents except essential workers, the mayor said. People are encouraged to utilize delivery services as much as possible after 9 p.m.

As evidence of the enthusiasm of the Mayor of Boston for the power of a dictator, this is the 11th paragraph of the same news story.

There is nothing that I won't do as Mayor of the City of Boston to protect our residents, and at this very critical time, we must do everything we can as Bostonians to protect one another. This is bigger than any one person - this is about the greater good of our people. Stay safe, stay inside, and let's get through this together." 

He has no self-imposed limits on his power, which means he has no self-discipline.  In addition, he has no respect for his own Oath of Office, which requires him to support and defend the United States Constitution

Just like a shocking number of other Mayors and Governors in America, he has either forgotten or deliberately ignored the immortal words of one of America's greatest Presidents, who has the honor of being one of only four men whose face is carved into Mt. Rushmore.  These are the last sentences from a speech he gave at the dedication of a new cemetary whose first bodies came from a rencent battle.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

"... we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Government of, by, and for the people must sometimes be fought for because dictators like the Mayor of Boston are eager to have power that they should never have.

This is one of many links to the text of this speech.  The full text is also carved into the back wall of the memorial to this great man, whose actions I am not worthy to try to copy.

Tonight, I will defy this dictator.  I will walk through Boston and the next-door city of Cambridge, the home of Harvard University and  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).  I will do it after 9pm, which is a violation of the Mayor's curfew, and I will blow a coach's whistle, similar to the one on the right.

I do not know whether I will be safe, walking through the streets of Boston and Cambridge tonight.  A lot of things can happen, including the possibility that I could be arrested or killed, but whatever happens, I am doing this because I must do it.  I named my Twitter account (@BennyTheKite) so that it would honor this man, who has been called the greatest American who was never  a U.S. president.

This is his biography on the Biography Channel website.

Blog pages in a series, part 3

The series in this set have a lot of pages.  The first set has five pages plus one page with videos.  The second set has nine pages, and a tenth page is more than half-finished.  The third set has five pages plus an extra two pages that are related. 

Public School Horror Stories

Each of the pages in this series has quotes of news stories and sometimes informal articles that document the bad behavior of teachers and administrators in America's public schools.  The 4th and 5th pages in this series are focused on one topic within the general topic of American public education.

1. This page documents the hypocrisy of the Michigan chapter of C.A.I.R., which demanded that Muslim students be allowed to take time away from classes to pray and which also demanded that Christian students could not participate in a Bible Study during school time.  This page also has 30+ links to news stories about teachers who were arrested for sexual activity with their students plus another 30+ links to news stories about teachers who were convicted of these crimes.


2. This page has a story about an elementary school in Manhattan that required its' students to learn the Arabic language.  Teachers in different states were arrested for soliciting a prostitute.  A school in Colorado criticized 7th grade students who had conservative political attitudes.  Two schools sent students out in handcuffs.


3. This page includes the story of a satanic group that wanted to distribute literature in a school system, various public schools that discouraged patriotism, one school that encouraged the desecration of an American flag, a teacher who forced a student to use his bare hands to unclog a urinal, and a section about dual-language public schools.  A police officer used a taser on a violent student at a Utah public high school.  A school nurse stole prescription medicine from students.  One boy was not allowed to read his personal Bible during free time at school.  A teacher showed an erotic film to her students.  A teacher and his roommate were arrested for possession of illegal drugs that had a street value of $6.2 million.


4. This page shows how some public schools, typically run by leftist activists, have overreacted when a young boy pretends to have a gun.  Students have been suspended for activities that are clearly legal, including wearing an N.R.A. t-shirt.


5. This page is about Common Core.  It begins with a summary of the three categories of objections to it.  Then, the page includes a YouTube video that shows how first-graders in one school district were taught how to write like a political activist.


6. This extra page, published in September 2013, before the publication of the second page in this series, has 23 YouTube videos.  Most of them are a news story about a public school horror story.

Reelect Ted Cruz

The first page in this set was written in March 2017, although Google misdated it.  Other pages were added later.

1. This page is about his basic biography and his early career.  It includes a few articles about one of his professors at Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz, who called him "brilliant".  There is a 2003 press release about the end of his job as the Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Office of Policy Planning.  There is a section about his personal faith and how he, as a U.S. Senator, helped a Christian woman who was being persecuted in the Sudan.  Another section is about a dispute he had with the openly lesbian Mayor of Houston.  Another section has videos of him listening to criticism.


2. This page, written in March 2017, is about him as an author.  There are quotes from many of the articles he's written for journals that include Real Clear Politics, the Wall Street Journal, and the National Review.  There is a large section about his best-selling book, "A Time for Truth", which the New York Times denied was a best-seller until the evidence was shown to them by many publishing professionals.


3. This page, written in March 2017, is about the November 2009 murder of some soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas and the fact that other soldiers were wounded.  President Obama called it "workplace violence" and denied the wounded soldiers the medical benefits that they would've received if they had been awarded the Purple Heart, but Senator Cruz, who represents Texas in the Senate, began a multi-year project, with the help of other legislators, to change the law that President Obama had relied upon.  He was successful.  This page also shows some of his visits to military bases and one Navy ship in Texas.


4. This page, written in March 2017, is about his dedication to the Rule of Law, Due Process, and other principles that are embedded into the U.S. Constitution.  He will support and defend these principles even when they're unpopular.  He introduced a Constitutional amendment to prevent the U.S. Government from overturning state laws on marriage.  This page also includes a section about Hillary Clinton's e-mail server, which he criticized in the Senate.
   


5. This page, written in April 2017, is about his principled opposition to legislation that claimed to give financial help to people who were hurt by Superstorm Sandy.  This legislation included many unrelated financial benefits, sometimes called pork.  The page also mentions his effort to get financial help for his home state of Texas when it was victimized by flooding.


6. This page has copies of tweets that he has made that show him interacting with various individuals and groups in his official capacity as a U.S. Senator.  These groups include the March for Life (January 2017), Texas Wheat Producers (February 2017), the British Ambassador Kim Daroch (February 2017), and the Customs and Border Protection agency (February 2017), and some Boy Scouts (March 2017.  This page was published in April 2017, but I have added many more tweets since then.


7. This page has copies of tweets that thanked Senator Cruz for helping them in some way.  This page also has tweets from VIPs who complimented him.  In May 2016, the Governor of Texas said that Ted was "the most conservative of all with a No. 1 ranking by American Conservative Union."  The police chief in Pasadena, Texas said, "Had the opportunity to met Senator Ted Cruz, who has always been an advocate of law enforcement on the national level." This page was published in May 2017, but I have added a lot of tweets to it, also.


8. This page is about his effort to repair Obamacare early in 2017.  Its' exchanges were failing.  This was a clear sign that the law had created an unsustainable medical economy.  A July 2017 Christian News Service article is quoted with this headline "Cruz: Free Health Care Is Wonderful in 'World' of 'Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Pixie Fairies’".


9. This page is about the Senator's commitment to the religious liberty of all Americans.  There are subsections.  One is about a Supreme Court case based on a business called Hobby Lobby.  The second section is about the Washington, D.C. City Council, which passed two City Ordinances that restricted the rights of religious-based health-care organizations.  The third is about his support for a county clerk in Kentucky who refused to process marriage licenses from two men or two women. The fourth section shows how he used religious liberty effectively as a campaign issue, and a companion section about the Democrat Party's hatred for organized religion.  Thee is a brief section about a conversation between the Senator and a gay business owner, followed by his support for Pro-Life causes.  The last section is a Supreme Court case involving a Lutheran Church.

In August 2017, a hurricane came into Texas.  The first large city it hit was Houston.  While it was still in the Gulf of Mexico, Senator Ted Cruz sent out, on his Twitter account, a series of tweets, some of them written in Spanish, to prepare the people of Texas, who he loves, for that disaster.  They're copied onto these two blog pages.

Page 1 covers the time period from August 17, 2017 to August 26, 2017.

Page 2 covers the time period from August 27, 2017 to August 31, 2017, but I added more tweets that were made by Senator Cruz, starting in July 2018.

Factions within America's political parties

Every major political party is like a large group that is formed for any reason.  There will always be minor disagreements among its' members.  Because the Democrat Party and the Republican Party have so many members, it would be impossible for every member of either party to agree on the best presidential candidate or to agree on the best policies for its' platform.

The pages listed below are arranged by the name of the party.  These pages were written in a different order.  The pages about Republican factions are labeled 1a, 1b, and 1c.  The pages about Democrat factions are labeled 2a through 2g.

The Republican Party

Page 1a

This page starts with a brief history of the party and then discusses the faction that represents Donald Trump's family and their supporters, some of whom are so loyal, they would forgive him if he shot someone in cold blood on the streets of New York City.

The Republican Party has other factions, some of whom are loyal to the traditional Republican respect for law and order, and the Rule of Law, which states that everyone, even people who have a lot of charisma and supporters, need to obey the laws passed by state governments and the U.S. Government.

The law that he says he could disobey without any consequences in this video, recorded in Iowa on January 23, 2016, is the law that makes it a crime to murder people. CNN video of the same event CBS News video of the same event the NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio

Some of his supporters are still so loyal to him today, they will forgive him for anything, even cold-blooded murder.

Page 1a also includes some information about another Republican family that has more conservative values.  This is the Koch family, which was headed by two brothers, although one of them died in August 2019.

In August 2017, I attended the last of 11 one-day events that were organized by one of the Koch brother's lobbying organizations, called Americans for Prosperity. This event was held in Richmond, Virginia.  The speakers included Steve Forbes, the GOP candidate for Governor of Virginia, a U.S. Representative in Virginia, and one of the five F.C.C. Commissioners. I recorded videos of all of them and this video.

Page 1a also has information about another conservative faction within the Republican Party, the Tea Party.  It is a movement, not a political party that is registered with the U.S. Federal Elections Commission.

Conservative principles were mentioned in a 2009 CNBC video on the page and explained in more detail in a 2010 video of a speech given by Michelle Bachmann, who was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time.  Both videos are on the page.

Page 1a continues with a long discussion of "Republicans who have been in office for along time", a group that is sometimes called "the Republican Establishment", then a discussion of the Mormon Church, a group that has many politically-conservative members, and then a discussion of Republicans like Booker T. Washington and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who were advocates of civil rights within the party.

Page 1a continues with a discussion of a well-known Republican Governor, pictured on the right, who threatened to leave the party because his political views were more moderate than he saw within the party.  This section also names a well-known conservative Republican commentator who did leave the party.  Other people I know on Twitter describe themselves as having left the party.  This section names a wealthy man who also left the Republican Party.

This page ends with my commentary about the corruption of the former Chairman of the Republican Party, Reince Priebus, by presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Page 1b

This page begins with a look at the most effective Republican lobbying groups.  It continues with the 2018 dispute between President Trump and the Chamber of Commerce over tariffs.  The Chamber is a traditional Republican group because they represent business owners.

This page then mentions a small faction called the Log Cabin Republicans, a 2018 spending bill in the House of Representatives, a dispute between the Club for Growth and a Republican member of the Senate. who was a big fan of President Trump.  The Club tried to have another Republican challenge the sitting Senator.

This page then mentions the fact that President Trump campaigned for the reelection of Senator Ted Cruz.  His efforts were successful.  The Senator was reelected in November 2018.

Page 1c

This page has more information about the Log Cabin Republicans and another group of gay Republicans.  The page also examines the complex relationship between gays and a pedophile group called the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

This page includes a tweet from James Woods, who used to be a Democrat, and it finishes with a large section about a Democrat who used to be a Governor.  Because of his strong patriotism and his moderate political views on foreign policy and other issues, I recommended to the Democrat Party in 2014 that they make him a presidential candidate.

The Democrat Party

Page 2a

This page begins with a clickable outline of all of the pages in this series, including the three pages about Republican factions.  I then give a short description of the history of the Democrat Party, and I name some patriotic Democrats because they are one small but important faction in this party.

The image on the left was sewn into the inside of clothing during the 1930s, when the U.S. President was Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, and when there was high unemployment in America.  There is a large section about him.

A large section on Page 2a also names F.D.R.'s successor, Harry Truman, as a patriotic Democrat.  Another large section is about President John F. Kennedy, another patriotic Democrat because he defended America against Russian military aggression in Cuba in 1962.  There is also a small section about President James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, who was an officer in the U.S. Navy, and a quote from a February 2019 article about former Vice-President Joe Biden, who was quoted as saying that he wanted a strong relationship between America and "her traditional allies".

The page includes a tweet from a patriotic American who has millions of followers on Twitter, and then it ends with a large section about a former Governor pictured on the right, who is very patriotic and who has moderate views about foreign policy and other issues.  He even has an N.R.A. membership.

Because of these factors, I wrote a page in 2014 that asked the Democrat Party to nominate him for President.

Page 2b

This page begins with evidence that the Democrat Party has many factions.  One piece of evidence is a late November 2018 Op-Ed in the Sacramento Bee that includes this sentence.  "And these intraparty rivalries are often quite nasty."  The page includes a large section about the rivalry between the Clinton family and the Obama family, as described by this best-selling book.

There is a small section that says that these two families settled their differences after the 2016 election by uniting to attack Donald Trump, who they correctly believed would be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

This page has a large section about Classic Liberals, a group that is defined by their willingness to be open-minded to new ideas.  For contrast, the page documents how some people have attacked the supporters of Donald Trump by grabbing MAGA hats from their heads, sometimes without any resistance, which shows the violently intolerant nature of these people.

The page continues with a large section about Democrats who have moderate economic views.  Some of them are part of a well-organized group called the Blue Dog Democrats.  This section has a sub-section about 2013 legislation called Wall Street Reform.  It was co-sponsored by a moderate Republican Senator named Chris Dodd and a moderate Democrat U.S. Representative named Barney Frank.

This page ends with a large section about the efforts of a new Republican President and the Republican Congress to reform the Wall Street Reform law.  A March 2018 Bloomberg story about this effort has a section headline titled "Divided Democrats".

Page 2c

This page has more information about the Blue Dog Democrats, who have moderate economic views.  There is a large section about Democrats who are forced by reelection pressure to soften their views because a lot of their voters are Republicans.  There is also a small section about the first Thanksgiving, because good harvests of food depended on a capitalist economy.

This page has a large section about individual Democrats who have had public disagreements with the policies of their party.  Each of these people has a small section.  They include Zell Miller. seen on the left, Roseanne Barr, and there is a very long section about President Bill Clinton, who reformed welfare and deregulated America's banks.

Page 2d

This page is about Democrats who don't like Capitalism because they prefer Socialism or Communism.  Capitalism and Socialism are compared early in the page, and then there is a section about Democratic Socialists, who secretly admire Karl Marx

There is a large section about the U.N. because their Agenda 21 is unmistakably anti-capitalist.  This program states that people have a right to eat, which turns farmers and other food producers into slaves who must keep working, regardless of the economic conditions that they live with.

There is a section about a Socialist website that is misnamed because many of their issues and many of the headlines on their printed newspaper are political, not economic.  An accurate description of them is that they are a Marxist organization.
This page has a large section about a freshman House member called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a section about an organization called World Hunger, which like the U.N.'s Agenda 21, insists that people have a right to eat.

The page also names, as an anti-capitalist organization, a college in California that invited members of the Venezuelan Government to speak about their economic initiatives.  This subsection includes two tweets from U.S .Senator Marco Rubio, who criticized this college for their invitation.
The page also names other Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and Bernie Sanders, who have been advocates for Socialism.  Thee is a short section about college students who were interviewed on-camera.  A YouTube video shows their satisfaction with Socialism and then their inability to define the word.

This page shows how some poor people have gained wealth.  There is a short section about the current Chinese dictator and another small section about the empty promises of Socialism.

Page 2e

This page is about Democrats who don't like democracy because they prefer street violence that is led by unelected radicals.  The page begins with a dictionary definition of the word "democracy", which emphasizes leadership by the people "Demos" in Greek.  When radicals plan a protest demonstration or a march, there is no input by any large group of voters on their plan, so there is no democracy, which was first developed in Ancient Greece.

The page mentions an alternative to a democracy, in the form of a dictatorship, including the explicit "dictatorship of the proletariat", which was stated by Karl Marx.  There is a section about U.S .Senator Elizabeth Warren, who publicly stated her support for a street demonstration called Occupy Wall Street.

Page 2f

This page names some organizations, usually supportive of the Democrat Party, that don't approve of the basic principles of a democracy, which are named in the previous page.

The city council in one California city allowed each of their members to choose members of various commissions, thus violating the right of the people to vote for people to serve on those commissions.

Some colleges have refused to provide adequate protection when a conservative student group invites a conservative to speak to their group.  Planned protests have resulted in the President of that college cancelling the appearances of those speakers.

Students have assaulted other students without any consequences.  This is documented by videos of the violence.

Free speech was enforced by actions taken by the U.S. President a U.S. Senator, a U.S. Governor, and the U.S. Justice Department.

There are sections about these organizations.

• the American Civil Liberties Union, which often ignores the civil liberties of political conservatives,


• the Democratic Socialists of America,


• Antifa, a group of vigilantes,


• the Sunrise Movement, a new group on the political left, and


• two students of a high school in Florida who became anti-gun activists when someone murdered some of their fellow students

This page ends with a discussion of the future of the Democrat Party.

Page 2g

This page begins with news stories that show how two radical Democrats, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, lost some of the popularity that they had in 2016.  The page continues with more information about the Blue Dog Democrats, who have moderate views on economic issues.  Finally, a well-known gay man asks all of the factions in the Democrat Party to stop fighting with each other.  This plea is similar to one made by Rodney King, whose 1991 arrest led to riots in Los Angeles, mostly because his arrest was videotaped.

Future pages in this series

An unfinished page will show that at least three of America's minor parties also have factions.  These parties are the Green Party, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party.  When I publish this page, it will be labeled Page 3.

Blog pages in a series, part 2

These pages have YouTube videos that are part of a theme.  Sometimes, the whole theme is contained on one page, but other times, the theme shows up on multiple pages.  These pages are arranged in chronological order.  The first page listed was published the earliest.

I try to update the viewer numbers for the videos in each set after a year has passed since the last update, but sometimes a year and a half passes since the last update.  If one video has had a large percentage change in its' viewership since the last update, I will keep a record of the viewer numbers during each update.

Sometimes, a video will have such a large increase in its' viewership, it will end up with more viewers than other videos that were listed higher on the page.  When that happens, I will adjust the order of the videos to maintain the ranking.

International Talent Shows

The pages in this section show people competing in shows like America's Got Talent and the X-Factor, except that they're competing all around the world.  Some of these videos show the contestants talking with the judges in languages other than English.  Some of these videos show people dancing, doing magic tricks, working as a ventriloquist, and showing other talents.

I try to update the viewer numbers once a year for these pages, but sometimes, the updates are made more than a year after the last update.

Page 1

All of the 21 videos on this page have been watched more than 40 million times.  The most-watched video has been watched 241 million times. as of the February 2020 update.

Page 2

All of the 21 videos on this page have been watched a minimum of 4 million times.  Any video that has more than 40 million viewers will be moved to the first page.

Popular Videos

The pages in this section have videos with a wide variety of subjects.  Some are homemade and planned, some are the records of unplanned events, and some are scenes from Hollywood movies.

I try to update the viewer numbers once a year for these pages, but sometimes, the updates are made more than a year after the last update.

Page 1

All of the 23 videos on this page have been watched from 5 million to 15 million times, although there are links at the bottom of the page to videos that have less readership.  I still recommend those videos.

The topics on this page include Saddam Hussein's last moments before he was hung, trick shots performed on a pool table, a store security camera that recorded the unsuccessful attempt to rob a gas station, and a woman who briefly came out of a long coma with the help of a new drug.

Page 2

All of the 21 videos on this page have been watched from 15 to 30 million times.  The topics include a woman in England who weighs 610 lbs. (her 11-year-old daughter performs some grooming on her), a collection of short videos of babies who taste lemons and limes, Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, a U.S. Marine Corps sniper doing his job, and an Uber driver who registered a Mercedes car but who sometimes uses a two-seat Lamborghini to pick up passengers.

Page 3

All of the 32 videos on this page have been watched more than 30 million times.

These topics include a 6-year-old girl that has played the piano at the White House, a 6-year-old boy who has played the violin at an André Rieu concert, two surprise marriage proposals, a woman with two heads, an expert belly dancer, a 60-year-old man who is friends with a polar bear, and a python that eats a whole alligator.

The most-watched video in this set of three pages is a one-man show about the evolution of dance.  This 6-minute video has been watched over 300 million times.

My Favorite Music

The videos on these four pages are all music videos.  Some of them are live performances.  Others are heavily-edited collections of film clips and still photos.  Others, however, simply combine one still photo of an album cover with music from a store-bought CD.

Most of the music in this collection is early Rock and Roll, but I also like late 1950s Doo-Wop music, some country songs, some jazz music, and some classical music, typically played by an orchestra.  Some of the songs on these pages are deliberately funny and even silly, such as a song that is often heard on Halloween about a party with Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolfman.  A few music videos are copied from movies.  One of the most watched videos was taken from the movie "Grease", starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

Any performer or group who is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the Country Music Hall of Fame has a link to that page in the description of the video.  Some songs on these lists appear on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.  The bottom of Page 1 of this series names and links to the top five songs on this list.

The #1 song on Rolling Stone's list is Like a Rolling Stone, sung by Bob Dylan.  The description of this song was written by Jay-Z.  I disagree with him.  I think the song is too serious.  I prefer songs that can be listened to as entertainment, not because they inspire social change.

Every video on every page has been watched millions of times.

Page 1

All of the music videos on this page have been watched from one to five million times each.  The performers include Sam Cooke, Whitney Houston (pictured on the right), Anne Murray, Brenda Lee, Ray Charles, and Pat Boone.  The Beach Boys have three songs on this page.  One video shows an unusual song because the "music" is played by a manual typewriter, with the help of an orchestra.

The description of the Connie Francis video includes her page on the Biography Channel and her IMDb page.  The description of Mahalia Jackson's music video also includes a link to her page on the Biography Channel.

Page 2

All of the music videos on this page has been watched five to ten million times each.  The performers include Roger Miller, Ray Charles, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Chicago, and Ricky Nelson.  Two Doo-Wop groups, The Isley Brothers and The Platters, pictured on the left, have a video on this page.

A live performance of God Bless America, sung by Kate Smith, is also on the page.  A silly song called Popcorn is also on the page.

Page 3

All of the music videos on this page have been watched from ten to twenty-five million times each.  The Beatles and The Beach Boys have three songs each on this page.  There are two videos of the song "Proud Mary", sung once by Tina Turner with her husband Ike and a live 2009 performance by Tina without her husband.  Other performers include Diana Ross, Charley Pride, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, The Monkees, and a man who plays boogie on a piano inside a shopping mall.  The #1 song on this page is a famous song from the 1938 movie "The Wizard of Oz".

Page 4

All of the 38 music videos on this page have been watched more than 25 million times.  This page includes four Beatles songs and five Elvis Presley songs.  There are five Doo-Wop songs on this list, one each from The Temptations, The Drifters, The Ronettes, The Platters, and The Crystals.  Other performers include Aretha Franklin, The Righteous Brothers, Chuck Berry, Led Zeppelin, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, The Doors, and Johnny Cash.

One music video, with 31 million views as of March 2019, was recorded during a live performance by Simon and Garfunkel in New York City's Central Park.

One music video, with 60 million views as of March 2019, is a small-band jazz group headed by Dave Brubeck (see the photo on the right) that plays a quiet tune without any singers.  This song, "Take Five", was on the jazz charts and the popular music charts for a long time.

One music video on this page, with over 127 million views as of March 2019, was sung by Frank Sinatra's daughter.

The most-watched video in this set is the last scene of the movie "Grease".   It has over 330 million views as of March 2019.

Christmas Music

This series was published in December 2013.  Most of the music is copied from a CD.  I update the viewer numbers once every year, and usually in early December, but one year, I did the update in late November.  Some of the music is sacred music, appropriate for a church service, but other music was recorded by individuals and groups who wanted to sell extra records and CDs in December.  Two videos show Christmas music sung inside a shopping mall.

This set of videos also includes some silly songs, including one recorded by The Chipmunks, one about Snoopy fighting in a biplane battle, one about a woman who sings, tongue-in-cheek, about Santa giving her some very nice presents, and one about someone's grandmother who was in an accident that involved Santa's sleigh.

One woman, who was a regular performer in a Las Vegas hotel many years ago, sang "The Twelve Days of Christmas", with altered lyrics.  One of her early presents in the song was an alcoholic beverage, so every time she sang a verse, she pretended to get more drunk. 

The best-selling song in human history was first recorded in December 1941 by Bing Crosby, shown on the right.  One reason why it sold so well then and still sells now is because it gives comfort to deployed servicemen who miss their families.  Wikipedia's page that lists the best-selling singles proves this.  This page of the History Channel commemorates the first time this song was released, on Christmas in that year as his gift to the world.

Page 1

Every video on this page has been watched from one to five million times.  The description of "Sleigh Ride", an instrumental song (no vocals) includes links to seven other videos of the same song, performed by other people.  One video shows a parade during December at Disney World in Florida.

Another video shows President Obama's dog walking through part of the White House.  President Obama and Michelle spent seven of their eight Christmases in Hawaii.  This is documented on this blog page.  Two songs on this page, "Silver Bells" and "An Old Christmas Card", were sung by a country singer named Jim Reeves, shown on the left.  This is his page on the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Page 2

Every video on this page has been watched between five and fifteen million times.  This page includes the music that is heard during a half-hour movie, starting the characters in the Peanuts comic strip.  This page also includes another song that is the basis for a much-loved half-hour children's television show, called "Frosty the Snowman".

There are two videos that have songs sung by Gene Autry, shown on the right.  He wrote and sang "Here Comes Santa Claus" in 1947, and he sang a song written by Johnny Marks, who is in the Songwriter's Hall of Fame because he wrote a lot of much-loved Christmas music.  That song is "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer".

One video on this page has a traditional Christmas carol called "Silent Night", which was originally intended to be sung during a Catholic mass.  The video shows Beyoncé singing it during a network television show that airs every morning, but the bottom of the page has links to videos of 24 other people, including Elvis, the Boy's Choir of Harlem, the New York City Children's Chorus, Andy Williams, Whitney Houston, Connie Francis, Aretha Franklin, and Connie Francis, all singing the same song.

Page 3

All of the 17 songs on this page have been watched more than fifteen million times.  The most-watched video, a song sung by Mariah Carey, was been watched almost 400 million times as of the last annual update in December 2019.  The performers include Nat King Cole, The Jackson 5, Elvis, José Feliciano, and Brenda Lee.  One video, with 16 million views as of the December 2019 update, has a collection of 15 songs.  One video shows a light-hearted performance of "The 12 Days of Christmas" by an all-male group called Straight No Chaser, shown below.

One video shows a flash mob that sang "The Halleluliah Chorus" inside a shopping mall.  That video has been watched 53 million times since it was uploaded in November 2010.  A video of "Let it Snow", sung by Dean Martin, has been watched 121 million times as of the December 2019 update, but because this song is now "controversial", that video has been watched seven million more times in the last two months.

Other pages that have videos

These pages don't have enough videos to be shown on multiple pages, but each page has many videos.

Happy Valentine's Day!

This page was published on February 14, 2013.  It has a set of four videos about military life.

• a video of a surprise to a sailor who was commissioned as an officer without any advance notice


• a video of the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon performing in front of a large crowd


• a video, produced by the Army National Guard, of part of the Ranger school


• a video of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbird pilots

This page also includes a short video, less than a minute and a half, that has some inspiring words from President Ronald Reagan, as well as a printed copy of a soldier's prayer and this photo of a soldier who is praying.

Happy Mother's Day!

This page, written on Mother's Day in 2013, has four videos of female members of the U.S. military making a surprise reunion with their families in a public place.  Two of those four videos were recorded in a football stadium.  The page also shows two reunions between women who were adopted and the women who gave birth to them.

Surprise Reunions in Military Families

Thee are 16 YouTube videos on this page that show military families who didn't know that one of their family members, who has been deployed to another country, would be visiting them.  One video shows a woman who had no idea that her brother was able to obtain a one-day leave of absence so that he could attend her wedding.

Sometime after the 2020 President's State of the Union speech, I added a short video that shows the reunion, in the House Chamber, between this U.S. Serviceman and the wife and child who thought that he was still out of the country.

One more reunion video is also on the page.  It shows a surprise reunion that took place in England between a girl who sang a song with other girls, with the Queen watching, followed by the surprise reunion with her father, who is a member of the British military.

This page has a special section at the bottom of the page.  I ask discharged U.S. Servicemen and -women to consider running for public office.  Brian Mast, pictured on the left, was discharged from the U.S. Army when a bomb took both of his legs, but after he was released from Walter Reed Military Hospital, he decided to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This video was produced by his 2016 campaign for the U.S. House.  It shows him literally running, with two prosthetic running blades. He won that election and was reelected in 2018.  This is a link to a November 2018 article in the Palm Beach Post.

Animal videos

I wrote this page in October 2017.  It has 25 videos.  Three of them show animals (a snake, a hermit crab, and a lobster) throwing off their outside skin or shell.  Three other videos show animals (a tiger, a dolphin, and a giraffe) giving birth.

Other videos show animals in unusual environments.  One shows a young fox who had its' head stuck in a tin can.  Another videos show two foxes on a backyard trampoline.  Another video shows a young deer that accidentally went into a backyard swimming pool.  Another video shows how a young woman in Cambodia catches eels for her family to eat.

Two videos are about a fish that is sometimes caught by Japanese fishermen (see the photo).  Parts of its' body contains a poison that is deadly in very small amounts, yet it is sometimes served in Japanese restaurants after being cooked by experts who have a special license.  Some Japanese fishermen catch this fish and bring it to their wives, who cook it without this special training.  Sometimes, the results are tragic.

The top of this page states that wild animals often have a violent death.  Some of these videos show it, but the video with the largest viewership on this page shows a man giving a banana to a monkey.  That video has been watched 276 million times as of the February 2020 update.

Television Commercials

There are 26 videos on this page.  All of them were made to advertise a product or a service offered by a company.  Most of these companies are based in countries outside of the United States.  Two of these companies are an insurance company, based in the Netherlands, whose corporate logo is shown on the right.

Most of these commercials are very entertaining.  Some of them don't tell you what the product is until the last seconds.  My description of some of these videos doesn't announce the name of the advertiser because I don't want to spoil your fun when you watch the video.

A few of the commercials involve sexual situations, but they always do it with humor.  For example, at the beginning of one commercial, a woman is lying in bed, alone, when a dog enters and licks one of her feet.  This excites the woman because she thinks that her husband is doing the licking.  In another commercial, a woman sits on an office copier, with her skirt raised, to take a picture of her bottom, but when the copier malfunctions, she kicks it with the back of her feet while she still sits on top of it.  This commercial is for a company that repairs copiers.

Politics

All of the 20 videos on this page have a political theme. Four of them are about Michelle Obama, four others are about Ronald Reagan, and six of them are about Barak Obama, but other videos are about politics without mentioning politicians.  These 20 videos have all been watched a minimum of one million times.  The most-watched video has been watched 20 million times.

For example, one video has a scene from the television show All in the Family, which was on the air from 1971-79.  In this video, the character called Archie Bunker discusses politics with his wife.  In another video, a Louisiana State Senator explains why he switched from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party.  He has since left public office, but he is now part of the executive team inside the Louisiana Republican Party.

Another video shows brief interviews with Sarah Palin, who was a Vice-Presidential candidate in 2008.  Another video shows an on-air comment made by Bill Maher on his own show soon after the 9/11 attack.  His network cancelled his show soon afterward.  Another video shows a comedian named Red Skelton, who is in the International Clown Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame.  He hosted a show which premiered in 1951 on one network, but it moved to another network.  One day, he explained the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Reasons to Home-School Your Child

This page is part of a six-page set of essays about public-school horror stories, but this page is the only page that has videos.  There are currently 23 YouTube videos on the page.  They all show inappropriate behavior by teachers or other public school personnel.  Similar stories are shown in the form of quoted news stories on the other pages in that series.  You can find that series by clicking the "Education" tag at the bottom of the page.

At the moment, one video in this set is unavailable, but every so often, I find more videos to replace the ones that cannot be shown for whatever reason.

Special Note

A third page in this series will be added soon.  It will have links to a series about factions within the two main political parties in America and links to a nine-page set of essays that helped to reelect Senator Ted Cruz to his second term.

When a hurricane was approaching Houston in 2017, the Senator sent out many tweets, some of them written in Spanish, to prepare the people of Texas for this disaster.  Those tweets are copied onto two extra blog pages.  All of these pages will be linked in the next page in this series.

Blog pages in a series, part 1

I became a blogger in June 2012.  My first page was about a statewide holiday in my own state.  A month later, I had written several pages on topics that included Republican politics, non-partisan political science, and fiscally-responsible economics.

A month later, I started a second blog so that I could write about a wide variety of other subjects.  My first page on that second blog told the true story, as I remember it, about an experience I had as a teenager, helping a friend who had a minor medical problem.

Sometime after that, I started writing sequels to some of my original pages.  I did this even though some of those original pages had updates.  In some cases, the pages that had updates were so long, it was difficult to organize the material, so I moved some of the material that had been on that page to a new page.  In other cases, I knew ahead of time that I was going to write a series of pages about one topic, partly because I had a lot of material on that topic.

In one case, I knew that I was going to write a two-page series about Social Security because I had a lot of material about the problems with the current system and a lot of material about possible solutions to those problems.

These are the topics that I have written multiple pages about.  The order of these topics is more-or-less the order that the first page in each series was published.  Within each topic, the individual pages are usually arranged in the order that they were published, with the oldest ones being listed first.

Racism

The End of Racism was the third page I ever wrote.  It explains, using a simple logical argument, that the concept of separate human races is a self-contradictory concept.  The two main assumptions about race, namely the existence of races and the dominance of one race when a "mixed-race" couple has a biological child, always produce a logical result that contradicts one or both of the original assumptions.  This means that those assumptions are logically false.

The End of Congressional Racism  I asked Congress to ignore the color of the skin of our last president and then to impeach him for the actions he took while in office.

If you See Racism, Speak Up was based on an anti-racism campaign that appeared on a college campus.  It used reverse racism to fight racism, a tactic that will always produce racial hatred among many people.  This page includes pairs of memes and videos about well-known people, including Barak Obama, Malcolm X, Al Sharpton, and two segregationists (George Wallace and Louis Farrakhan).

The Beginning of Color-Blindness shows what happens when a person has abandoned the self-contradictory concept of separate human races.

Justice is not being done in Ferguson, Missouri was written a month after the riots began in that city.  I waited that long before writing and publishing my page, hoping that President Obama's Department of Justice would see that the shooting of a convenience store robber was justified, but he obviously wanted to continue the racial hatred that he had fostered all during his presidency.

Race for Dummies simplifies the logical argument I made in the first page in this series, "The End of Racism".  I take the reader, step by step, through the logical process of

Racism at Harvard University was written in early May 2017, soon after I heard that this university had approved a one-race-only graduation ceremony for later that month.  This page quotes the journal that announced the racist ceremony and it explains why I was (and still am) opposed to a one-race-only graduation ceremony.

Rally against Racism at Harvard University was a deliberate attempt to organize a rally at Harvard's racist one-race-only graduation ceremony.  I was the only person who showed up for the rally, but I didn't mind because I was doing it for the honorable principle of a color-blind society.  I protested the rally, during the rally, wearing a custom-made t-shirt.  Because Harvard held the same racist event in 2018 and 2019, I protested it both years, during the ceremony.  I will return to it again every year they hold it.

Two Versions of Racial Justice in American Television has two stories, both of whom involve Al Roker, who used to give weather forecasts on NBC's Today Show.  He criticized Megyn Kelly for asking some members of her television audience about racist attitudes towards Halloween costumes and he ignored the obvious racism of the host of a late-night television show when he wore blackface during a one-man skit on his own show.

California's drought

A few months after I started blogging, I discovered that California had some drought.  This has always bothered me because their western neighbor is the world's largest ocean.

During my research, I learned that this drought had started decades ago and that the state was emptying some water out of their reservoirs into rivers that ended up in the ocean.  I also learned that this same state has annual and very destructive wildfires.

Water Economics is the first page, written in August 2012. It's also my most-read page, with over 271,000 Google-confirmed readers since then.  A lot of that readership happened from late June 2016 to early August 2016, when there were thousands of readers every day.  This page has a lot of news stories about the drought and information about the amount of water that was in certain reservoirs in the state.

The page also outlines a scientific solution that involves transporting filtered seawater to a large, hot, dry, and uninhabited valley in California.  This would create a man-made lake, but it was a natural salt-water lake millions of years ago.

When the water enters this valley, some of it would always be evaporating, leaving only the salts behind in the bottom of this new man-made lake.  There are many benefits to building the very large-scale infrastructure project that would transport the water to this valley, including an increase in rainwater over a very dry part of the United States.  This new source of clean rainwater would allow people to plant and harvest crops, thus increasing the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

Other benefits include a reduction in the fire danger in California and a reduction in the rate of the increase in the ocean water levels. This 30-second video is a preview of a four-part PBS series about the danger of rising water levels to some cities around the world.  Each episode is one hour.  The four cities are London, New York, Miami, and Tokyo.  Each city has a different method of dealing with the water.

More than two years after I wrote that page, I wrote this page in December 2014 which condensed the basic concepts.  It doesn't include the news stories about the low harvests of food crops or the analysis of the university study of the water rights in California, but it does include the step-by-step process of making it rain in the American southwest.

After I published the original page in 2012, there were three periods of intense international readership.  The first one began in December 2014 and lasted for about a month and a half.  In January 2015, I wrote this page to show some of that readership.  After the page was published, there were two other periods where I saw even more daily readership, so I updated the statistics on the page.  During the last of these periods, from late June 2016 to early August 2016, there were just over 7,300 readers every day, including weekends and holidays.

In June 2015, I published this page which begins with a look at the California economy.  Later in the same page, however, is a very long list of links and sometimes quotes of news stories about the drought in California.  I mentioned a few times on that page the fact that a scientific solution to the drought is on another page, and I linked to that page a few times.  I have continued to add more links and quotes of news stories about the drought in California, along with stories about flooding whenever that happens in that state.

In July 2016, I wrote this page on another blog.  It has the same concepts, but it was written for younger readers.  This page includes more graphics, some animated graphics, colored text, and a different writing style.

Also in July 2016, I wrote this page to examine other people's ideas about the drought.  I looked at two U.S. Government agencies and a handful of well-known environmental organizations.  Overall, I was unimpressed with the scholarship of these organizations.  Their pages made many statements without any documentation of their facts, figures, and quotes.

In December 2016, I wrote this page to show my research into the fact that there was once a natural salt-water lake where Death Valley is now.

Also in December 2016, I discovered that an environmental organization called the Natural Resources Defense Council had published an 85-page report in 2004 about the California drought.  They linked water use with the energy that was required to transport it.  Because their goal was to reduce energy use, their report advocated for a reduction in the use of water, even though this would mean smaller harvests of food crops.  I wrote this page to analyze their report.

The last page in this series is based partly on a book that was written by a famous French author and partly on some historical facts.  This photo shows the cover of an English-language translation of the book, which was his last one.  There is a below-sea-level area inside the Sahara Desert, and it's located less than 100 miles from the Mediterranean Sea.

Those two facts, put together, gave some military engineers an idea in World War II to dig a canal from the sea to the area in the desert so that this would become a new salt-water lake.  The individual laws of physics that I mentioned in the first essay in this series would mean that some of this water would become groundwater, and some of it would evaporate, producing rain clouds and eventually rainfall somewhere else.

If a canal was dug that permitted water to flow from the Mediterranean Sea to the low-altitude area within the desert, it's possible that crops could be planted and harvested.  This could enable Africa to increase its' total Gross Domestic Product by a significant percentage.

Economic Theory

The second blog page I ever wrote shows how a truly free market is self-regulating.  When people make poor economic choices, they pay an economic price for those choices.  At that point, Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" principle becomes active.  Smart people will learn from their mistakes and stupid people will keep making poor choices.  As a rule, the inherent competition in a free market encourages people who own a business to offer high quality products and services at a low price to the customer (because these business owners are competing for the customer).

In August 2012, I wrote this page, which shows how a high amount of up-and-down income mobility (defined on the page) results in a high amount of internal peace in any country.  The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution uses the term "domestic tranquility", but it means the same thing.  If there are ways for a poor person to increase his financial status, and if there are ways for a wealthy person to lose a large portion of his wealth (for example, by being convicted of serious crimes and going to prison), then the people will sense the monetary value of honesty.

In September 2012, I published this page, which makes a distinction between the voluntary financial donations to a church or a charity and the involuntary redistribution of wealth that was the goal of President Obama, according to two YouTube videos that are on the page.  One has an audio recording of his words, made in 1998.  The other video was recorded in 2008, ten years later, when he was a presidential candidate.

In October 2012, I wrote an essay about the relationship between tax rates and the total amount of tax income that any state or nation receives.  I used pictures of brownies like these to illustrate my point.  This essay is a personal favorite.

Each brownie represents a $10,000 block of family income, so one photo represents $10,000 and the other photo represents $30,000.

On the page, I showed how a large change in the tax rates caused people to adjust their economic behavior, including how they spend and invest the limited amount of money that they receive from a job.

In November 2012, I wrote this page that celebrates the craftsmanship of the people who helped to grow America.  Their crafts became their names.  I named some Millers, Bakers, Coopers, Smiths, Wrights, and Masons, and I showed how each of these crafts resulted in a service or a product that make life better for the customers who bought those services or products.

In March 2013, I wrote a page about the freedom of wealthy people to leave a city, a state, or a country if the taxes and regulations imposed by that government were too harsh.  The page included news stories about real people who had moved out.

In January 2018, my essay about income mobility, written in August 2012, was too large.  i had added a lot of news stories and articles about individual people who had seen large percentage changes in their income.  I took the material about individual income mobility and moved to a new page.

Applied Economics

The basic principles of economics, including the relationship between supply and demand, the effects of government operations on individuals and families, and the consequences of our economic choices, are applied to real-life situations, as described below.

The Boy Scouts taught many worthwhile skills to young boys, including how to build a campfire.  I wrote this page in July 2012 that told the true story of how I, as an older Boy Scout, was with a group of older boys who went on a weekend camping trip.  This page writes about this experience as a way of showing how assets (in this case, it was firewood) could be used to supply a group of people (in this case, it was a small group of Boy Scouts) with something they needed (heat).

This page, written in January 2013, was inspired by a news story about a plan to have the U.S. Mint create a single coin that had a trillion dollars of value.  This coin would then be used to make payments on the U.S. National Debt.  Even if you ignore the fantasy nature of such a plan, as a simple exercise in economic theory, many dishonest people would be willing to spend a billion dollars (assuming that they had it) in order to steal or rob the U.S. Government of a coin that was worth a trillion dollars.

This page, written in September 2013, stated the need for female professional athletes to have better sports agents.  This would result in them having a higher income.  The page includes five black-and-white photos of female athletes that I took with a camera in the 1980s, including the one on the right..

In February 2020, I started writing a new section about female athletes at the high school level who had filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on the grounds that boys who self-identified as girls were unfair competition in sports such as wrestling and track and field.

This page, written in January 2014, showed that a broken compact fluorescent light bulb was a potential hazardous substance, according to the laws that were enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency.  These laws required any company that had a broken bulb to measure the amount of mercury in the broken bulb and then, to dispose of it properly, depending on how much mercury was in it.

In August 2014, I wrote this page about a real-life example of people "voting with their feet".  When the state government in California began debating legislation that would require male porn actors to wear a condom when they filmed sex scenes, some companies that produced these films moved out of the state, and others announced plans to do so.

There are only two ways to stop this geographic shift from happening.  Defeat the legislation or build a wall around the state and enforce emigration laws with armed force so that companies cannot leave.  This is what happened in Berlin, starting in August 1961.

This page was inspired by an Alex Jones radio show with a fill-in host  The host described how a new customer contract for the PayPal payment service would allow that company to take full legal control over the intellectual property (trademarks and copyrights) of the customer.  My essay makes a carefully detailed grammatical examination of the terms of this contract.  It also examines a few attempts by the PayPal Corporation to deny what their contract clearly says that they are doing.

This page, also written in February 2015, documented U.S. Government fines on companies that totaled tens of billions of dollars.  I have added more material to that page since then, and the current total is $115 billion.  These fines were levied only during the eight years that B. Hussein Obama was in office.  The largest single fine was made against British Petroleum, and Obama's Justice Department fought hard against any effort to lower it, but in the end, the BP Corporation made a sincere and a timely effort to stop the pollution.  The Federal court that oversaw the case recognized this.

Social Security

In February 2015, I wrote two pages on the same day.  One was about some of the problems with this U.S. Government program, first proposed by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s as part of his New Deal legislation.  It was intended to give Americans some guaranteed income when they were too old to work.  The poster on the right was part of the campaign to pass the authorizing legislation.

Unfortunately, this program started experiencing some economic problems.  Some people who were ineligible for the benefit payments lobbied their legislators to be included, without enough income to cover the payments to these people.  One major change happened when benefits began to be paid to people who were younger than the traditional retirement age but who were not physically capable of working.  New legislation was passed in 1956 to allow these people to receive Social Security Disability payments.

This created a situation that is similar to the operating loss that some companies experience and are obligated to report to their shareholders.  This loss was intensified by many pieces of legislation, including bills that removed the retirement earnings test.  This page on the program's website has a record of the debate over this bill.

The first page of this two-page set of essays looks at some of the problems with the program, primarily the imbalance between the income of the program and the benefits paid out by the program.

The second page of this set looks at some possible solutions to this imbalance, including Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k) plans.  It mentions a quote from President Kennedy that is shown in this meme.  The evidence for this statement is in the video next to it.  It is a time-lapse record of one complete cycle of the tide in one part of Nova Scotia.

When the tide comes in, every boat rises.

The second page also links to information about a presidential commission that had the specific mandate to propose ideas that included accounts whose individual owners could invest their money.  This page includes two informative videos, narrated by a college professor, that show that the program offers a very poor return on someone's "investment" of the taxes that are taken out of people's paychecks.  An investment of this tax money in a stock index fund during a 20-year time period would vastly improve the amount of money that each person has when he retires.

A third, unfinished page of this series is based on this 2017 Daily Caller article which makes a comparison between the average account balance for a U.S. Government employee who has a Thrift Savings Account and the likely financial needs of a person at that age.

Illegal Immigration

This was originally one long page, but even after I wrote and published it in December 2015, I kept adding more material to it, so in October 2017, I moved the second half of it to a new page.

I still add new material to both pages occasionally.

The first page

This page begins with a statement of the importance of maintaining America's sovereignty, including our border with Mexico.  America and Mexico are now cooperating in this effort.  The mass-immigration of foreigners is a drain on the financial resources of the United States.  The previous U.S. President didn't enforce U.S. immigration laws, as was required by his Oath of Office, so American patriots began to defend our border themselves.

This page also documents some of the threats to our sovereignty, including organized terrorist groups who pretend to be refugee groups, immigrants who are carrying diseases, and sanctuary cities.

The page then shows an excellent 2½-minute video of various construction methods that could be used to build the border wall that Donald Trump said, during the 2016 campaign, that he wanted.  The video mentions some of the challenges that the builders will face, including different types of soil and, sometimes, very humid air.  The video also predicts a $10 billion cost to build the wall.

I quoted a news story about a judicial ruling that said that a private company could build the border wall.  I then stated my personal policy on immigration, which makes a distinction between legal immigrants and illegals.

Then, I quoted three 2016 presidential candidates on the subject of illegal immigration

I mentioned some methods of forcing unarmed and untrained invaders to retreat from our border.  They include some high-tech devices that are already in use in some cities for crowd control.  Another idea I mentioned is to deploy squads of armed Army or National Guard troops with Rules of Engagement that allow them to fire warning shots over the heads of any invader.

The second page

This page begins