What I've Learned So Far This Year

• A GFI (Ground Fault Interrupt) electrical outlet connects to two sets of wires. The LINE is the one that comes from the breaker box. The LOAD is the one sending power to the next outlet on the circuit you want to protect against ground fault. The outlets downstream won't have reset buttons, but may have little GFI stickers. Most important to know: these things get more sensitive with age, and may need to be replaced if they start tripping for no reason.
• Hunger isn't controlled by your brain. It  happens on a cellular level, and your will power has nothing to do with it.
• We've been completely wrong about how fat cells work. And the government is still recommending a diet based on that 5-decades-behind bad information. What they want you to eat may actually make you gain weight.
• We've always thought of fat as storing food energy for much later on, in case there's a famine, in case we can't find any game to kill, in case of a starvation event. But that's not how it works. Fat cells are designed to store fat and release it, alternately, throughout the day and night. Whether it's storing fat or releasing fat (as fatty acids) depends directly on the level of insulin in your blood. The level of insulin depends on how recently you've eaten, and on the proportion of carbohydrates in the food you ate, relative to the protein and fat. And if you consumed processed (white) flour or sugar, your body was able to break it down too quickly, resulting in an insulin spike, resulting in your fat cells storing lots and lots of fat, at least until the insulin levels drop again.
• If you occasionally indulge in white flour or sugar - say, a party and you eat cake and a soda - your body handles the insulin spike as it was designed to do. But if you indulge every day, having a soda with each meal, and a sweet, sugary dessert as well, your body is in a constant state of high insulin, storing fat most of the time and never releasing it, and this results in weight gain. This is how sumo wrestlers get fat - they consume high-carb low-fat food on purpose.
• You need insulin for your muscle tissue to make use of the energy from the food you eat. If you keep this high-carb diet up as a lifestyle, for years and years, your muscle tissue develops a very unfortunate tolerance for insulin, and thus needs more insulin just to keep you moving around. Your pancreas steps up the production of insulin, and a vicious cycle begins. Muscle tissues get more tolerant of it, as a sort of addiction, and the pancreas keeps increasing its production levels. Fat keeps getting stored, and  never released, and if you restrict your calories and fat intake like your doctor says, your metabolism slows down to keep you from starving. Eventually, you get diabetes when your pancreas can't keep up with the demand for insulin.
• Since I read about this in Good Calories, Bad Calories three weeks ago, I have cut out refined sugar and flour from my diet completely, and confined my carb intake to "carbs that matter," such as fruits and vegetables, and I have not made any conscious effort to control my caloric intake. I have lost 3.5 pounds, or about a pound a week. I find that I get full with less food, and I don't miss the sweets all that much. (I use Splenda in my coffee.)
• So those health food nuts that told us to avoid white flour and processed sugar... were right.
• There will be an annular solar eclipse soon, visible in the American west. An annular eclipse is when the moon blocks the sun, but it's too far away to block it completely, so you see a ring of fire around the sun. You still can't look directly at it, but it's still neat.

Way to go Catholics!

Hey, there, Catholic Church!

Yeah, you. No, I'm not a Catholic, just a friendly bystander who shares some of your beliefs, though not all of your doctrines.

So anyway, you guys have been advocating Government-run health care, or Obamacare as we libertarians like to call it. You know, the system where the government "pays" for everybody's health care, only they really don't, they take the money from us and pay for it that way. Sort of the collectivist principle. You wanted this because you saw some "right" to health care,  not really understanding that there can be no "right" that has to be paid for by somebody else - but we'll let that pass, because your heart was in the right place. You wanted the poor to have health care, and it was cheaper to let the politicians take care of it.

So  now everybody can have health care, and the world will be a better place. Good for you!

Thing is, any time you hand over responsibility to the government, you hand over the authority, too. Somebody else gets to make the decisions. And that's what you did - caring for the poor is the responsibility of the church, it's part of your mandate, but that's OK, you can trust the guys in Washington to do the job right, and it's not your problem anymore.

Oh, wait. You still have to pay for the insurance you provide to your employees. Well, that's OK, you can afford it. Wait again. What? They're making you cover what? Birth control pills? Oh, that's not good. You guys teach that those are a sin to use, right? So you have to pay for something that you consider sinful now. Oh, that's bad. Not really fair. But on the other hand, if the feds are going to be in charge of medical decisions, they have the authority to decide what's medically necessary. So birth control is now necessary. Sorry guys.

I wonder if abortion is medically necessary. I'm sure you guys would say no, but it's not your decision anymore. Well, you can always start some petitions if you like. But if and when those folks in Washington say that it is... well, it is. They can do that now. Thanks to you.

So next let's put them in charge of food. Um... what's the carb count on those little wafers?

Adjusting the paradigm

I was recently discussing logic with a friend, and we agreed that two of the most common logical errors made by intelligent people today are:

1. Extrapolating from assumptions and then forgetting that we started with an assumption. You almost always have to start with an assumption, so it's OK to do that, but you have to remember that when you do, your conclusion is itself an assumption, and not necessarily a fact.
2. Not checking your work for errors. When we find a conclusion that sounds good to us, we have one more step before we have something resembling facts. We have to check our work for flaws. We have to test our "facts" with an open mind, and that's most easily done by listening to people who disagree with us. Listening to them doesn't mean agreeing with them, it means considering what they say, and understanding what they mean, and checking their point of view for bad assumptions and errors... objectively. Are you a socialist? You should listen to a Libertarian and a Conservative. Are you a Libertarian? You should listen to the other two. And so on. Try to see errors in your logic, rather than in your conclusion. You should be able to tell if the other person is presenting a logical argument or just spouting doctrine.

One of the paradigms almost universally accepted by both capitalist conservatives and leftist socialists, is this three-tier income paradigm, where we have a bottom layer we call the "poor," which most of us define as people with less money than we have. (That's another logical error, by the way: not bothering to define your terms as you build your argument). Then we have a middle class layer, which we all tend to think of ourselves as living in. Above that, we have "the rich," obviously people with more money than we have or earn. Thus, a poor man in India believes that the guy in the USA standing on a corner with a cardboard sign is "rich." The guy on the corner thinks the guy who works at McDonald's is rich. The guy asking if you want fries with that thinks you're rich if you have a retirement plan, and so on, until the small business owner thinks the banker is the rich guy.

This image always makes a kind of sense to us, but it is flawed because it isn't and can't be uniformly applied, which means that we use the terms differently when we discuss or listen. Undefined terms are worse than useless, since they actually distort communications without us even realizing it. Worse, they distort thinking itself. Like the useless word "evolution," we think we're using it to reach a logical conclusion, but we allow it to mean one thing in this sentence, but another in that sentence. Or worse, two different things at the same time!

Try this way of thinking, though - four layers of wealth. Yes, I said four. You see, one of the layers we've been using is actually two layers with strongly differing characteristics.

The Poor: people who struggle to pay for necessities, and know luxuries as a rare gift. This group ranges from a person who has nothing but the clothes on his body, and never knows where his next bite of food is coming from... to the family collecting public assistance in order to eat and stay warm. He doesn't pay taxes that he knows of, except for sales tax.

The Middle Class: you can disagree on the definition for your own reasoning purposes, but for now let's use mine.  This could be a person who has a job, can pay for a small apartment, buy food regularly, and pay for some minor luxuries. It can also be the small business owner who manages to make enough profit to keep things going, feed his family, and save some of it for retirement. He may own his own home, though it's probably via a current mortgage. You probably already put yourself here, since we're a very large group.

The Successful: This would be the folks who would  normally be stuffed into the "rich" category, depending on who is drafting the argument. Many who are in this category are well-meaning socialists who mean somebody else when they say "rich," because they think of themselves as middle class, while those working for income redistribution are, if fact, targeting them, because that's where a lot of the money is that can be tapped. Think orthodontists who invest carefully, business owners with more than a dozen employees, people with, say, an annual family income of a quarter million a year or less.Shoot, make it a half million, with inflation the way it is.

The Extremely Rich: Now we have those who own several factories, play in politics, and use their money for more than just making more money - changing the world, for example, which is a code phrase for controlling other  people - we're talking power. These are the people who can have their taxes raised, and never know it until they check the ledgers prepared for them. If they pay an additional million or so in taxes, it will make no difference in their lifestyles - they will eat in the same restaurants, buy the same toys, live in the same houses they would have chosen before the tax increase. These are the movie stars, the politicians, the bankers, the true elites of the financial world. George Soros, Donald Trump.

Now let's look at a cliché we argue about every day.

"Make the rich pay their fair share." When  you heard this before, you thought "the rich" meant the Extremely Rich. But is it so? Or, depending on your own income level, maybe you thought they meant the successful and the Extremely Rich, didn't you, because you had them in the same group. But when you hear this from politicians, they secretly know that they don't mean the Extremely Rich, they mean the Successful - and actually the Middle Class, meaning you - yes, you. If you have a computer, my friend, you are not poor.

Now understand this: The Extremely Rich control the politicians these days, ironically because of Campaign Finance Reform, so when taxes go up, they do so in a way that benefits them, and not you.

Are you getting the picture? Bear in mind that the people at the top of the food chain, the Extremely Rich, already see the classes this way, and use it to their advantage.

Now that you have the new image to use, the new paradigm I'm offering, lets look at our situation in the American economy.

Virtually everyone in America understands that we are in a desperately precarious position economically. The politicians and the Extremely Rich want to hold onto their money and power, so they need to keep the wars going, and they need to keep the economy from collapsing, and they need to keep the voters supporting them - or they're going to have to  "take over the country," as it were. They mostly keep the masses supporting them by pointing to the other party - we have to elect Democrats or the Republicans will take away our rights, or we have to support the Republicans or the Democrats will take away our money. Every election we are told that this is a crucial crossroads, and we dare not consider a third party or the [other party] will win. But when the Republicans had a majority in both houses, had their president in place, and even had a majority on the Supreme Court, did they undo any programs enacted by the Democrats? No. When the Democrats had the same majorities in their turn, did they repeal the Patriot Act or bring any troops home? No, they expanded the Patriot Act, and started even more wars. So both parties, or at least the people who control them, are different only in degree and rhetoric. (The difference in rhetoric is spectacular - unfortunately, words are useless in this case).

So the spending and the reduction in our liberties has continued to be increased in turn, as we change from one party to the other, and back. We abandon one in disappointment, then give the other one another chance, and they keep driving us to the killing pens. But there's a problem. They've kept increasing both the deficit and the debt, generation after generation, passing it on to the children, then to the grandchildren, postponing the pain of paying for it all, while honest economists (not the ones bought by the politicians, real ones) kept trying to remind us that eventually it has to be paid for, and the longer we wait, the more painful it's going to be. And each time they tried to remind us, the party in power minimized it, while the party outside told us we have to fix it, and soon, because it's always good to accuse the other party, even if the accusation is true.

So here we are, at last. We can't leave it for the next generation to feel the pain, because the problem is no longer over the horizon, nicely out of sight. It's looming. It crouches over us, fangs bared. So what are the politicians (and those who finance them) going to do? They've been misleading us for so long that they can't really tell us the truth, that we're going to have to get ready to feel some economic pain. But we and they all know what happened in Greece, and we know that it will happen here if we don't fix this.

 OK, the laws of economics are not breakable, they can only be bent. We have to get more money from somewhere if we intend to keep spending it to keep the powerful in power. So let's look at the options.

We could raise taxes. That's what the left wants to do. But...

• You can't raise taxes on the poor. They don't have the money to pay.
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• You can't raise taxes on the Middle Class, because they will have no choice but to spend less, which means profits go down for the corporations, which means less money flows to the Extremely Rich, which defeats the purpose of taxing the Middle Class.
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• You could raise taxes on the successful. But if you do, they will invest less in the corporations, they will hire fewer people for their own businesses, and actually they will lay off some of their existing employees, rather than operate at a loss.  When they do, the economy goes into a deeper recession, less money is spent on consumer goods, and you've defeated the purpose of taxing them, too.
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• You could raise taxes on the Extremely Rich, and that will probably be done - but only to an extent that won't be painful to them, because they control the people who write the tax laws and spend the money. Once it starts to hurt, they will hand off the hurt to the other three classes, because - well, because they can. In any case, it won't be enough, not even close. It wouldn't be enough if you hit them with a 100% income tax rate.

Well, we could cut spending.

No, I don't mean the way they're doing it now. When they talk about spending cuts, they really mean just cutting the rate of increase. Instead of increasing spending by a trillion dollars, we'll only increase it by a third of a trillion, so we have a spending "cut" of two thirds of a trillion. You think I'm kidding? That's not even new, Bucky. They've been plying that fraud for decades. You could look it up.

I mean actual cuts. Eliminate several departments, such as the Department of Education, the Commerce department, with all those czars and bureaucrats. Get rid of those thousands and thousands of TSA employees and the jobs program that the TSA really is. End the block grants. Stop building the empire and bring the troops home and commit them to defense rather than nation building and trying to bring "freedom" to people who want no part of it. End the drug war, which hasn't worked and never will. Repeal Obamacare. Tighten up social security eligibility. This would actually work, and would be less painful than a collapse. It's what serious economists, libertarians and that crazy old man Ron Paul are suggesting. But it would mean less power for the incumbent politicians, so it's unthinkable.

Or we could print more money, aka "monetize the debt."

And that's what they have decided to do - and will keep it up as long as we can until the collapse, while preparing shelters for themselves for when it does. You don't know it, because they reworked the formulas for calculating inflation and cost of living data. But they're printing money like Guido and Louie down in the basement. That is why your money buys so much less than it used to - whether you buy gasoline, groceries, or a home. Services you contract with keep raising their rates, medical care keeps going up, pretty much everything you pay for. Which means it's really an "inflation tax." They print the money to pay bills, and you pay for it because it makes your money worth less. And since they reworked the spreadsheet, your COLA you were so proud of won't begin to keep up. If you're on a fixed income, it's even worse. So you feel the pain, but you don't know why.

The Extremely Rich own the banks, and charge you 25% interest on your credit cards, but if you save  money with them you earn less than 1% - so they're not feeling any pain. And the money keeps flowing from you to them via the tax laws and spending policies, though you have this image that the money really flows from them to you somehow. So you resist the idea of cutting that spending. And you call for more taxes on the rich, but those taxes won't hit the Extremely Rich, they will only hit the Successful, and you.

It's a neat trick. And they get by with it, because you don't follow the rules of logic, and define things, and recognize false assumptions when you try to figure things out, and listen to opposing views when you can.

Logic would be your friend if you would only let it.

Political fallacies

I keep seeing these posts on Facebook that are supposed to wake up the reader, but actually just offend people and have nothing to do with rational thinking. I suppose it's an election year, and a hotly contested primary, but some of these posts actually turn the truth upside down.

Example: A cartoon shows Jesus talking to a disciple, with the label "Republican Jesus." He is saying something to the effect of "Feed the poor? Of course not. If they don't want to be poor, let them get jobs like anyone else."

Put aside for now the question of whether the poor want to work, or if they can find jobs. The point of the cartoon is that Republicans don't care about the poor, and that they should, if they are at all Christian. (I should point out here that I am not a Republican; I am a Libertarian).

The truth is that according to surveys and tax forms and so forth, rich Republicans donate far more of their own money than do rich Democrats. I suspect that Libertarians donate even more as a percentage of income, but of course nobody researched that. Besides, there are no rich Libertarians who will admit it.

A more important point is that Jesus never advocated socialism. He did not say "Render unto Caesar so that Caesar can feed the poor." He said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's." In other words, pay your taxes to Caesar as he demands, but give your tithe to God, to feed widows and orphans (those who cannot help being poor), and to support the church (or synagogue).

When government feeds the poor, they remove any ability to help or encourage the poor to learn  how to feed themselves. It cannot distinguish between those who can't help being poor, and those who are poor because they want free money without anyone telling them how to live their lives. Both are out there in abundance, and anyone who has worked with a charity of any kind knows it from experience.

Further, the more money the government takes from people (rich or not), the less they have to give to charities. So when government increases its expenditures on behalf of the poor, they are not adding to what the poor man can get... they are merely shifting money from the private sector to themselves, and taking a cut off the top while they're at it. In effect they are taking away your right to decide who gets your charity dollars, and telling you whom you may give it to - and it can't be a religious institution because of the 1st amendment. So you have to support their approved charities first, through your taxes, and then you can optionally give a little more if you want to.

So that cartoon is profoundly dishonest and misleading.

Once again, liberty demands that government get the  hell out of the way. Let us keep our own earned money, and let us decide whom, if anyone, we will give it to when supporting causes we believe in.

If you believe in anything, if you are passionate about anything, for the love of God don't pass the responsibility to the evil of government. Do it yourself. Calling for the government to do it for you doesn't count. It's the lazy way.

Win 7 antivirus 2012 removal (EASY)

Win 7 anti-virus is one of those malware things that pretends to be your anti-virus package going off. Most of you, if infected, will immediately realize this, because you know the name of  your own anti-virus software package. If you don't, you should. But even knowing it, the thing has taken over your computer, and it's asking for credit card numbers to get rid of it.

It goes off within minutes of infection, popping up all kinds of warnings, many of which are in poor English ("you want remove this threat?"), which would be bad enough, but the worst thing is that it holds your computer hostage by blocking every application  you try to launch, telling  you that it's infected with something or other, and you can get your computer back by clicking here or here. Don't bother clicking on the buttons, they just take you to a worse place: a convenient input box for your credit card number. The windows that pop up are disguised to look like something from your control panel, but they are not. The X in the upper right corner does close some of the windows, but they pop right back in a minute or so.

You get this virus (which renames itself to match your operating system) by visiting a website infected with their bad javascript in the html, and then works by making a lot of bad entries to your registry. The code can be inserted without the webmaster's permission by a clever hacker if security isn't tight enough at the hosting company, or if the webmaster manages to inadvertently let the code get installed. Security isn't for sissies anymore. But it is often deliberately added to porn sites. Yeah, those nekkid girls aren't so pretty anymore, are they? Bunch of skanks, anyway.

So you go to your other, non-infected computer, and desperately try to find out how to get rid of this thing by Googling the name of the virus. (That's probably how you found this blog - welcome, by the way). You  find all kinds of solutions claimed, most of which tell you to buy this or that removal tool for $24.95. Some will give you a long list of registry entries to remove manually, and other files to look for and remove. You go through all that, you reboot your computer and .... it simply reinstalls itself. Crap! All that work for nothing!

Don't panic. And don't send anybody any money.

The solution is actually simple. Go back to a restore point before you got infected.

That's it. No searching for files, no downloading a $24.95 program, no running a deep scan for over an hour with a removal tool only to find it didn't work.

Restart your computer and tap repeatedly on the F8 key before Windows starts to load. Select the Repair option. Repair it by going to a prior restore point, one before the infection. Be patient, the process takes a while. When you reboot, your virus is gone.

Use the computer for an hour or so, normally,  just to make sure in your own heart of hearts, that it's really and truly gone. Tomorrow, after you are happy with the way it all works, make a  new restore point.

If you don't have any prior restore points? You're screwed. Just reinstall the OS and start replacing the data files from your backups.When you're done, tell the system to do restore points once a month or so. Go to Start, enter "restore point" in the search box, and follow the instructions from there.

You don't have your stuff backed up? Are you kidding me??

Then you have just learned a very valuable, but expensive, lesson. Make regular backups.

Now, to prevent getting such a virus, start using Firefox, and immediately use the add-on "No-Script" - it will block javascript from executing unless you approve the website specifically the first time you visit it. If you don't trust the website, and you can't see what's there without allowing javascript... then their content isn't really all that important, is it?

Don't visit porn sites. Those will usually have bad code. It's put in the site on purpose.That's why they set up the porn site - to infect your computer and maybe fool you into giving them a credit card number to buy phony malware removal tools. If you click on a link from a trusted site to an unknown one, even if it isn't porn, and you don't see what you expected, don't approve javascript for the untrusted site. In fact, it's best if you don't approve javascript for any site that you only visited because of curiosity. Curiosity killed the computer. If you can't stand it, wait a day or so and ask the person who sent you if they got a virus from it.

The really popular sites are usually OK. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube. But be careful about links to external sites. That's where they'll get you.

(Thanks go out to my best buddy Dave, who shares all kinds of cool computer knowledge with me, specifically how to play with restore points, and who has never been wrong about this sort of thing. Thanks, Dave).

Today I am thankful for...

The turkey is out in the garage in a roaster oven, quietly getting ready to be taken to the assisted living facility where GA's parents are expecting us to arrive, bringing Thanksgiving dinner with us.

So this would be a good time to think about what I am thankful for, while waiting for my turn to go in and wash the prep dishes in the kitchen.

These days, it has become fashionable to be "thankful" to each other, rather than God. The purpose of the holiday was clearly to set aside a day for gratitude to the Creator, but the secular segment of American society has succeeded in doing to Thanksgiving what they have done to Christmas, and they take advantage of the holiday to enjoy the fun parts but excise God from it - a most ungrateful attitude to have. But worship is, after all, supposed to be voluntary, or what use is it?

So the first thing I'm grateful for, in no particular order, is the fact that we are still free in America - not as free as the Founders intended, because so many are willing to empower government with duties they don't want to bother with personally. But still free enough to worship as we please, at least in private - we aren't really allowed to be too public about it, lest somebody see it and be made uncomfortable.  They can't really forbid it is the point - we still retain the right of worship and free speech, if we're willing to accept being ridiculed for it. Some places in the world will behead you over it, so a little ridicule can be accepted. Some imply that I'm not a "free thinker." I can deal with that, and I can be perfectly confident that I think freely, other opinions notwithstanding. And I am grateful that they, too, have the same free choice that I do.

I am also thankful for these things...

I was able to retire early, which means I can enjoy not having to go to work every day at an earlier age, when I am able to still enjoy things.

I have a wonderful wife, whom God gave to me at a time when I wondered if I would have no mate.

That same wonderful wife seems to be free of cancer, though we can't be absolutely sure. We have all the assurance we can expect to have in such circumstances, that it is indeed so. I am grateful that God moved us to Houston, against my preference, so that when the cancer was found she was working for the best cancer center in the entire world, and she also had an excellent health plan to pay for it.

I am grateful that my sister has found better health and is enjoying a new hobby, geocaching, which has provided fun and excitement in her own retirement years.

I am grateful that my mother is still around, and of sound mind and body, which is not surprising after a lifetime of walking happily with God.

I am grateful for my daughters, and for the grandchildren they have provided. 

I am grateful for the friends I have. They are fine friends, and numerous, and so enjoyable to be around. Dave and Sumi, Cody and Jena, Beau and Charlotte, Phil and Misti, Chaston and Kristina, Carl and Jane, Justin and Ashley, Maria and Maya, James and Marcus, Lois and family... the list goes on and on.

I am grateful that I can still see well enough to read and drive and go geocaching.

I am grateful for my cousins in Louisville, and my aunts and uncles and other family. I am grateful that I was able to go to the Dominican Republic to help start a fledgling drama ministry, and bring back some coffee.

I am grateful for all the traveling I have been able to do, in Europe, in Mexico, all over the USA.

I am also grateful for things that most of us only appreciate when they don't work: refrigerators, air conditioning, TV, the internet - yeah, we could live without them, but they make life so pleasant. Well, maybe not TV, except for movies. :)

I am grateful for my comfortable home.

And I am grateful for all the turkey sandwiches to come. Oh, yeah, baby!

Robbed Twice

I keep hearing these angry complaints about the corporations.

Mostly, they're accused of being greedy, which they are.

What bothers me most, though, is how most people see this as a failure of capitalism. What they are doing is not capitalism, it's fascism.

Yes, I said fascism. You probably see the word fascism and you think of nazis, kicking down doors and burning jews in a nearby oven. But fascism simply refers to a working relationship between government and business. In the 1930's, fascist governments ran the businesses. It was said of such governments that "they make the trains run on time." But it was also said, correctly, that there was a certain loss of freedom in such an arrangement, and that is the problem.

We need to stop thinking in terms of capitalism allowing the corporations to screw people simply because they don't pay high enough wages. We already have the government setting the minimum wage, and in any case, "unfair" wages aren't really the problem.

Here is the problem. Our government has encouraged all of us to invest our retirement money in IRA's, and similar tax-deferred arrangements. This benefits the corporations in an obvious way - they can more easily attract investment money, and more important, those investments are controlled indirectly, which means the investors who own minor portions of the companies have no real say in how the companies are run. They simply hand over their money and hope for the best.

This allows the CEOs of those companies to collect huge salaries with little or no pressure to actually earn those salaries. The boards who would normally keep that sort of thing in check have no incentive to do so, because most of the investors have no incentive to pay any attention to how the companies are run. For instance, my IRA is spread out over forty or fifty companies. It's a mutual fund. There is no real way for me to influence the policies of the companies I've invested in.

So here's what they do instead of paying me my dividends. They (the corporations) pour money into the campaign funds of politicians who I not only don't want to support, I actually want them out of office. Did you get that? They're taking my money and giving it to politicians I oppose. And it's worth noting that most of those corporations donate to both major parties. You might ask yourself why.

The politicians, in turn, give money back to the companies, in the form of contracts, subsidies, and sometimes out-and-out gifts, only they call them "bail outs" when they just give them the money.

Let's review: the government provides incentives I cannot ignore to invest my money in businesses. The businesses take my money and give it to the politicians I don't even like. Then the politicians use the power of government to take my money by taxation, and give it to the companies. It's a win-win for them, but I get robbed twice.

Now, to make it worse, socialists are camping out at Wall Street and other places where businesses make their homes, and they demand... even more power for government to transfer wealth. I assume that they expect wealth to transfer into their pockets, even though the direction of flow has always been in the other direction. (What was that about the definition of insanity?)

Now, the government has no Constitutional authority to take tax money and give it to private corporations. They just do it, because few of us really care about rule of law and limited government anymore. In fact, the news outlets constantly tell us that such ideas as limited government are "insane." Of course, the news outlets are all owned by... corporations.

The solution here is to make one minor change in election law: make it illegal for corporations to donate any money to a political campaign. Actually, it should be illegal for anybody to donate to a campaign for any candidate he can't actually vote for, and that would include corporations, who aren't really people in any practical sense, and cannot vote.

Yet what we have in our election laws is that citizens, meaning you and I, have a strict limit on how much we can donate to a campaign. We can't even put up a poster or distribute a flyer for our preferred candidate unless we first file paperwork with the FEC. Every time a new law comes out to "take the money out of politics" or "make it more fair," the effect of that law is to further limit the power of the individual and increase the power of the corporations. Millions of dollars go from corporations to the candidates who are in bed with them, but candidates who depend on real people for support can't get news coverage, can't get much money because of contribution limits, and are painted as unelectable because they... um... don't get much money.

With real capitalism, poorly run businesses should be allowed to fail, no matter how big they are. Politicians should never be allowed to give tax money to them for any reason. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to give money to politicians. That would be real election and finance reform, if we could only get it.