Waking early the other day, I was taking the extra time to just consider recent events and resolve my day’s plans before I headed into them.

The oddest thing occurred to me – do we own ourselves, really?

(Warning – standby – rant alert.)

Here’s some points that have come across my lines recently:

• Government seems to be taking a larger run out of our lives (like enforcing healthcare choices), whether we want it to or not.
• Congress and elected officials seem to be listening to lobbyists and party officals more than the voters who elected them.
• Our food has increasingly had to be shipped in from thousands of miles away instead of being grown where we can ask and find out what went into it.
• We are being discouraged from working and being independent, since if we did make a fortune to retire on, we’d have it all taxed away – but people who never earn enough to pay taxes are given money from those who do.
• Various scams abound, from credit card companies and usury-level charges along with extraneous fees, to career politicians with their perks, to interest groups who are taking government money (ours) and being paid to promote some extremist agenda, to “Humane Societies” who aren’t trying to handle excess dogs and cats, but are rather trying to make us all into vegans by driving our farmers out of business with regulations.
• Our state-run, mainstream media won’t report on public demonstrations with more people attending than the President’s inauguration, but will tell us about a flu which is less harmful than the regular one – and that we should all line up and pay for shots to protect ourselves against this fiction.
• While the earth has been growing colder since the late 1990′s, our pollution has been growing greater but the only solutions is to what: raise taxes and cost of living for everyone.

So it seemed to me that we needed to stop and take all this into account and see what we could actually do about it.

Of course, the bulk of the problems above really deal with government issues – we are trusting an unresponsive, lobbyist infected government to handle situations we could and should handle ourselves.

Let’s look at some simple solutions to these:

1. People have stayed healthy for many more years than there have ever been insurance companies. And some of the cheapest health care right now has been started in some states where you pay a monthly fee directly to the doctors’ office in order to keep you well – not just when you are sick. No middleman – no one betting against your survival – no one saying you now can’t get any further treatment. And guess what – it’s cheaper by more than half.

2. Career politicians (and career government workers) are really a self-perpetuating business all by themselves. According to the Golden Rule, you have to give before you can get. But government has to take before it can give. And do you know who is writing all these bills that the Congressmen don’t have time to read? Lobbyists and professional government clerical workers – neither of which are elected, both protected from being fired for incompetence. Politicians only want to be re-elected so they can get the perks they voted in for themselves. They live in a different world and even if convicted still get a posh annual retirement income of hundreds of thousands each year – while they are in prison.

3. While there is all these complaints of Cargill, ADM, and Tyson controlling our food chain – no one is telling the stories about how community gardens have been springing up on empty lots inside our cities, as well as on rooftops. Where people are contributing their own labor and getting – literally – the fruits of their endeavors. There is the movement of locally-grown food, some call it the 100-mile diet, getting your food from within a hundred-mile radius of where you live. That way you could know what was in it and maybe even lend a hand in raising it, if you wanted.

4. Taxes have less and less to do with supporting the common good, and more for supporting the friends of whoever is in power in government. (Look at where those “stimulus” funds are actually going to…) Factually, if you take the recommendations given by the IRS guidelines, the most inexpensive way to work is for yourself as a corporate entity and increasingly resorting to barter of your business goods. That is the least-taxed method of making a viable living these days.

5. It looks like all the biggest scams are government sponsored or sanctioned. Credit card companies used to be regulated by the states and had to keep their interest fees low until the Feds in their “OCC” elected to take this right away from the States – and credit fees doubled, to nearly 1/3rd of the original loan. The Humane Society of the United States is actually anti-pet and anti-breeder and anti-farmer. Anything that has four-legs and reproduces is under their auspice – and is getting laws passed to make it more difficult to have pets or eat meat. Yet is runs no animal shelters – and had closed many down, destroying all their occupants. They are a special interest in Washington and do nothing humane. But government scams abound – since the government has a monopoly, who can stop them?

6. Our media has never been accurate in its whole history. They have always, always written sensationalist stories to sell advertising space. Any idea of “Journalist Ethics” was invented by Academics in order to sell classes for journalist wannabe’s. And when they lose their joint control of the air waves to cable and the Internet, they complain about how these “aren’t really journalists” – thank Gawd – and continue to pander to various government officials for “scoops”. The mainstream media has never, ever reflected the real world. Their soap opera’s actually get the closest, way more than their “reality” shows. (Who eat bugs in the jungle for a living?)

7. Read the actual NASA reports and you’ll see the global warming issue is a hoax. Warmest year on record was about 1998, last two years we have had record snowfalls and cold internationally, this summer was one of the coolest on record in decades for many states. Who started this rumor? A career politician. But is CO2 rising? Yes. Effect on global temperature – nothing. Our problem with CO2 starts with our governments, which expel this by the megaton every year and have nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, we truck our food in from thousands of miles away with all that exhaust and refuse permits to set up windfarms off some politicians’ East Coast homes. (Because they are unsightly?) Solutions to this fictional global warming are to tell polluting companies they have to buy credits from less-polluting companies. But the states with politicians in charge get more credits assigned to those states – instead of states with huge forests and pastures filled with grazing animals. (Oh, finally tracked down that other fiction. Excess cow flatulence is caused by feeding them corn and other grains, not their natural diet of grass – which most cattle are raised on for the bulk of their lives.)

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OK, take a breath, slow down.

The world isn’t all bad. Nor is it all that bad.

But the question comes back – Who Owns You? Or — Do You Really Own Yourself?

Consider this – if you own property and don’t pay the taxes on it, what happens? Some government employees are able to come in and seize your properties for the back taxes with guns and put you in prison if you resist. If you use a gun to defend your property, they are able to use lethal force (kill you) in their “defense”. And your relatives probably can’t even sue for “wrongful death”.

However, if you don’t make enough money to pay taxes because you don’t work, then you qualify for the government renting a house on your behalf and even giving you all sorts of handouts. Who pays for these? Oh, they tell some people who do work for a living to cough up – or they will come and take it, this all backed by gun-toting government employees, against which you can’t defend yourself.

Now if your property is owned by a corporation that you run, the taxes are much less and if it’s a non-profit, you might not pay taxes at all. Similarly, if you don’t really work for a living on anyone’s paper, and barter for everything you own, your taxes are very low, if not non-existent. But you do work for a living and control your own property – and don’t pay for someone else’s upkeep.

Can you control government? No.

Can you improve the government you have? Yes.

Solutions you can do to own yourself

• Let’s do one thing – make all government employees (including the elected ones) all term limited. States can do this for their own Senators and Representatives, they don’t have to get a Federal law passed (which will never happen).
• Another thing: educate yourself on taxes and learn to avoid high taxes by being smart. Only the dumb rich are taxed. Only dumb governments tax the dumb rich enough to make them move to lower-tax states. (Ask New York and California how this works. Both are failed experiments.)
• Vote your representatives out of office on a regular basis, otherwise. Let someone else have a chance.
  How about sunset provisions in every law, including the ones which have been on the books forever? This would mean government officials have to re-vote in all laws every few years to keep them on the books. (Like the Civil Rights Act, which is now being used to protect White minority voters.)
• Get your food all locally. Help grow it yourself to keep your costs down.
• How about insisting your city start recycling materials (they can actually sell the metal and plastic today, while organic materials can be composted back into – yes – local city gardens, or parks, or local farms. (Why does NYC keep dumping it into the ocean – isn’t that just more pollution?) And so we won’t have to spend all that fuel and CO2 trucking, training, and shipping food from California to NY, or Florida to California, or Arkansas to Alaska…
• Quit watching TV. Period. Rots your brain.
• Cut off your power usage by unplugging anything that doesn’t have to be on (like a refrigerator). See if you can’t get a solar cell to run some devices (like night lights). Figure out how you could have the same quality of living without extra doo-dads that someone sold you during a TV infomercial…

Those are just some of the ideas I’ve had for your to reclaim your life for yourself.

You can own yourself.

It will take some work.

But the more you can limit government and work it out for yourself – or in cooperation with your neighbors – then the saner life we can all have.

Try it.

Go ahead – leave your comments below. Agree? Disagree? Could care less?

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Somebody ought to give these guys a clue: put a sock in it so the rest of us don’t have to listen to your hysterical death moans.

While on the Internet the other day (my chief form of both livelihood and information), I was visiting right-of-center Real Clear Politics – who I adopted during the last three years of campaigning because they were the only ones who averaged all the polls.

I was astonished to find, after Tax Day, how many disparate and desperate opinion (not factual) pieces their were about what had happened. It went from twisted support to knife-twisted-in-back denial. Even commentary on commentary where Keith Obermann had used reportedly sexual innuendo to describe it.

Who cares? No, really – WHO CARES?!?

There is a reason that the NY Times is estimating a 30%+ loss in advertising revenue for the next year. There is a reason for the “Big City” newspapers going under at a record pace. There is a reason that people who watch the Network news are fewer and fewer by double-digit percentages. There was even a rumor that one of the two people who watch MSNBC and CNBC (they take turns) – actually fell asleep…

Relevance.

The mainstream media can’t get used to the fact that it’s dying. A very slow and painful death (at least for the rest of us.)

It’s not that people don’t care. They don’t care for the slant, the diatribes, the couched phrases, the unabashed support of certain liberal senators.

People don’t care who is the anchor for the evening news or what sex they are – they don’t watch it anyway. (Except for the reviewers and those employed by NBC, CBS, and ABC. But these are the mourners, not the rest of the passer-bys outside the cemetery on the sidewalk.)

People do care about what is going on and what is really happening. And they know that there is more than two sides to every story – and that anyone who thinks they are some sort of expert officiator is full of more manure than any herd out there. (And they are thinking about taxing farmers for cow gas – what about newscaster and politician gas?!?)

While the mainstream media is dying off, why are local papers (and local banks for that matter) doing just fine and even – gasp – expanding in this economy?

Relevance.

What’s on the local newspaper front page? What happened locally that day. What’s on page 3 or page 5? National and World News. Oh, there is a blurb which runs at the bottom if something important is happening. But covering the election – it’s how the local voter turnout went.

Some used to say that there were bubbles on each coast (probably connected by a very long tube) where all the “really important” stuff happened. And we in the middle were lucky enough just to capture bits and pieces and overviews of it – that we should feel honored that there were three news agencies who would digest it all and present it in half-hour segments each night at dinner.

Let’s get something straight. They’re nuts.

I watch TV for the weather and get my news from the Internet. And this means that I try to avoid the National News, since they don’t carry local weather. My family likes to catch the sports as well. But that’s it.

And our TV has to be propped up when any “Network News” is on, because they are so slanted, the TV would fall off the stand if it weren’t supported.

Impartial? Look, my dogs are impartial – as long as I feed them something they can eat and they have a dry spot to lie in. My cows are impartial – as long as they have plenty of pasture or hay and water (and I keep the dogs from chasing them). Try treating a “news person” that way.

But is that a fair comparison? Well, how do the news people treat me? “This political party is horrible; that political party is saving the day.” The government did this nonsense thing today, but when the business do the same nonsense thing yesterday, they covered it as some horrible sin against humanity. Some politicians and candidates are held up on pedestals, some others are held up to thinly veiled scorn.

Do I need real facts that I can judge for myself? Yes. Do I need to put up with noise and pandering and slanted diatribes couched as “fair, impartial journalism”? Hell, no.

So around this house the TV goes off except for the morning and evening weather. We get the local “big city” paper on Sunday. I have one favorite comic strip, my brother-in-law likes the want ads, my mother likes the opinion section and the recipes (only one of which soothes the stomach – guess which…)

What’s entertainment? Nothing on TV. What’s the commercials for their “hot, new shows” — people dying, getting killed, being investigated after being killed, investigations into killings that happened years ago, specials on people who are trying to save the planet (which is being killed….) And so on. Ad nauseum.

Or there are “reality shows”. Nope. People on remote islands and deserts doing stupid antics and trying to act like the TV cameras aren’t there. Do you see any camera in a trailer park seeing people raise their kids while they hold down two jobs and their grandmother makes sure the kids’ homework gets done? Nope. We see millionaire bachelors fooling around with 20 or more women and deciding to “marry” one of them. Yeah, that’s real. Or game shows where 20 or so girls with amplified bosoms and barely dressed holding briefcases so a bald guy can tease a person into saying and doing really stupid things to “win” something in those empty cases. That’s real high-brow.

How about comedy. Go ahead – find some. Most of the half-decent comedy reruns used to fill afternoon slots and now has been replaced by “Judge Jerky” and “Judge Korky” and ‘Law & Order” reruns from five years ago.

OK, there is one show we watch when we can get it – a game show where the host is actually polite and funny at times and people do nothing but win money if they can guess the words right. Nobody dies, no one gets investigated, no one’s in prison. No sex, no violence, nobody dies (some of the jokes fall flat, but that’s no crime…)

Sure, there’s plenty of all that on the Internet as well, you could say. But there is also a lot of everything else as well – tons more. And the choice itself is relevance.

And yes, we used to watch Fox News and the Discovery Channel and even CSPAN – until some boobs decided to take it off the big dish – and we tried the small dish for awhile and got tired of paying for 20-30 channels of stuff we didn’t want for the 2 or 3 we did.

It’s cheaper to just watch what we want – local news and local weather – then turn it off the rest of the time.

Why, oh why do I have to listen and watch what some cock-eyed TV or newspaper executive – someone who has probably never had to change his own flat tire, or grow his own vegetables, or raise chickens for the eggs and stew them when they got too old – much less rescue a healthy calf that was born in an unseasonal blizzard, and raising them to a good weight only to sell them off at auction a year later.

No, most of these guys grew up in some suburb and then moved into a condo or apartment where they don’t even have a yard – working in another high-rise across town (so to speak) where they listened to other people in suits who spoke from “on high” about what advertisers thought people wanted to hear on those magic boxes in their living rooms.

And the “down their nose” attitude toward the rest of the country is infectious and spreads like the plague up and down the halls of those palatial boardrooms and studios.

Does anybody really care that Keith Obermann pouted until he got a door with a window in it for his new office? Hell, no.

- – - -

Here’s a reality show I’d like to see: get all those newscasters and TV personalities and line them up in front of a series of “pre-owned” cars. No, get some real used ones. You know, the ones where nobody cares to wax them any more because it would point out the rust spots worse.

Make sure they are dressed up in their usual suits and blouses and whatnot. Give them all a wireless mic so they think they know what they are doing. Then tell them it’s a contest and they have to change that flat tire on the car behind them, get it started and drive it to the filling station 5 miles away. Good luck.

I’m often talking out loud to my Senator or the President or one of these news anchors as I’m on the third day of fixing a section of fence the rain took out last fall and the wind dropped a couple of trees on during the winter. Do any of these guys look like they could even start a chain-saw, much less run one for a few hours? How about splicing barbed-wire? Know how to herd cattle just on your lonesome and two half-trained dogs without spooking them or losing any calves? Do they know what to do with a steer who’s got bloated up from eating too much wet clover in the spring?

I’ll swap them for their job almost any day – for awhile, anyway. I could do what they do with no problem. Write some stories and read them off in front of a robot camera. Nothing to it. Really. But it would be harder on me, because I know they wouldn’t take care of my herd and I’d be way behind when I got back because they wouldn’t know how to get the equipment ready for this season’s planting.

AND – they’d get all the good food, while I would have to make do with a bunch of stuff shipped in from thousands of miles away and was about as fresh as the bottom of my boots. (Would smell nicer, though…)

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Yes, I’m the same Dr. Robert C. Worstell who has a PhD and 7 other degrees. So don’t get all snooty with me. I’ve written, edited, and published around 4 dozen books and keep up with (more or less) another two dozen blogs – that I personally post to, not some scriptwriter down a long hall somewhere. I’ve given speeches, podcasts, videos – been there, done that.

But I also know how to drive a dual-axle 10-speed transmission, a John Deere tractor with a couple less (and two of those are reverse) – and which cover crops will bring back soil fertility in a worn-out flood plain.

And I know better than to take a tour bus into the middle of a corn field in Iowa in order to “get a story” about a combine and corn harvest, only to get stuck in soft ground (not even mud.)

Oh, come on. Same folks who got a corn picker and a combine mixed up last year (“reporting” some tragic accident from the year before). Heard the same story all day, about 5 or 6 times – somewhere in there it was corrected, at least by dinner. This was on national news – not the local channel. They’d have more sense.

- – - -

Do I know about big cities? Sure – I lived in L.A. for over 20 years. Right downtown Hollywood – not in those suburbs. So I’ve seen the crime, and the pimps, and ho’s, and “bruthah’s”, and the rich and famous as well. Porn peddled on the street corners and dirt almost everywhere (except when there is a premiere where they sweep it up and hose it down and put some red carpets over it.) The bums are back the next day, just as soon as the crews take down the velvet ropes.

Which do I prefer? Guess. Where did I make more money? Guess. Does money buy happiness or accurate news reporting? Don’t even have to flip a coin on that one.

So these news guys and gals should take a hint or two:

1. Get a real job, get a real life.
2. Go do something nice for someone for a change. Quit talking everything and everyone down because your ‘spozed to’.
3. Get a real yard and plant a real garden. Raise some tomatoes and lettuce, maybe some sweet corn.
4. Meanwhile, put a sock in it and j-u-s-t – s-h-u-t – u-p, would you?

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If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”