Speaking of that kid…

I’m teaching him to tend the garden. He LOVES fresh strawberries!

There ya go.

Many things are new since I last blogged. I’ll just hit the highlights, and we’ll say we’re caught up.

1) My friend Will and I have begun a farmers market in Osage Beach. It’s (creatively) named Osage Beach Farmers Market. Our first market day was May 10th. We’ve had another since then, and both have been a great success! We have some fantastic vendors selling some fantastic foods and non-foods, and we expect all that to continue to grow. One those amazing vendors is my wife. I’ll get to that in a minute. The market is every Thursday, from 4-8PM. Check us out on the web: www.osagebeachfarmersmarket.com . And please “Like” us on Facebook (just search “Osage Beach Farmers Market”)!

2. Ron Paul has stopped actively campaigning for the Republican nomination. This means he will no longer spend money running ads and campaigning in states that have not yet held primaries. The Liberty R3volution marches ever onward, however, and many Ron Paul delegates will show up to the Republican National Convention. We will continue to tell the establishment that we want LESS government and MORE freedom.

3. Sweet Kate’s Bakery is now operational. That’s the bakery that operates from our house – on a very small scale. Kate bakes the most amazing breads and pastries, and has begun selling them at the farmers market. I transformed our laundry room into a now-health-inspected-and-approved commercial kitchen. If you live in Missouri, you simply must come to the market and try her baked goods. If you don’t….you probably should anyways. I have the most amazing wife. Period.

4. Apparently sunscreen might increase your risk of skin cancer…? Typical. This article tells all about it.

5. I now write for the Lake Expo, a local news media. Check it out at www.lakeexpo.com. You can read my first article – about the farmers market, of course! – here.

6. My brother, Daniel, graduated from high school (valedictorian)! My sister, Jessica, graduated from Dental Hygiene school (with a 4.0 in her last semester, and having aced her state boards)! CONGRATULATIONS to my super-achieving siblings!

7. The garden is looking pretty good. Lettuce is going crazy. Tomatoes, peppers, and squash are growing (nothing to eat yet, though), potatoes seem happy, onions are doing well. We’ve eaten a few strawberries. Carrots are planted. Herbs are growing. Worms have nearly ruined our few broccoli plants (oh, I kill them, but apparently not quickly enough nor often enough). Something has been snacking on our spinach (before we were able to!). And a few of our pea plants have just randomly died. On the bright side, since we had the pigs in the garden to till it up for a while, and we fed them food scraps in there, random tomato and squash plants have been springing up all over the place! It’s great!

I’ll end with that. Now that we’re all caught up, we can blog a bit more regularly again.

But in focusing so much on our displeasure with Barack, we have sacrificed substance. Conservatism has become – more than anything else – about simply defeating Barack Obama.

But that’s a negative definition: “Conservatism is NOT Obama.”

Few of us have bothered to ask, “Well, what IS conservatism, then?” (I asked it in a recent post.)

What do we want from the supposedly-conservative Republican party? I would contend that, because we don’t know the answer to that question, we have ended up with an empty suit at the head of the presidential nominee race – Mitt Romney. And in that way, Obama has defeated us already.

On Mitt. I’m tempted to say, “He seems like a nice guy, I just don’t think he’s a conservative.” But I’m tired of all the pretense. When I look at him, I see a man who is all politician – a man who, as evidenced in myriad video and audio clips, will say or do just about whatever he thinks will be politically expedient.

This is the man who passed the equivalent of Obamacare in his own state, but who criticizes Obamacare. This is the man who was pro-abortion before he was pro-life. This is the man who railed against Hilary Rosen for saying his wife had “never worked a day in her life,” but who also said that stay-at-home moms should “have the dignity of work” at an outside job.

At last weekend’s Missouri district conventions, it seemed apparent that Missouri Republicans are attempting to coalesce behind Mitt. Well, except Ron Paul people. We Ron Paul people worked hard to obtain delegates, but in the end, people just listen to FOX news more than they listen to the bells of liberty and the overtures of reason. After the convention, a Romney supporter who had observed our passion for liberty attempted to exhort Kate and me to “keep that spiritedness going” (or something like that). As though he thinks passion is transferable. As though he thinks that if I can be passionate for Ron Paul, I can be passionate for Mitt Romney.

I can not be passionate for Mitt Romney.

Why not?

Well, first, this brings me back to my original point: the only reason to like Mitt Romney is because we’re told he can beat Obama. But beating Obama is not my goal! Oh, it’s a means, but it’s not the end. But for most Republicans, I fear it’s the end. We don’t care who gets elected…”anyone is better than Obama.” We heard that said over and over at the Republican primary debates, by pretty much every candidate.

Except Ron Paul. He didn’t say it, because he knows that not anyone is better than Obama. If we have another president who provokes worldwide warfare, who bails out big banks and corporations on the public’s dime, who continues to drown our country in budget deficits and public debt, and who expands the role of government further into the private lives of citizens through things like the Patriot Act and the Affordable Care Act…well…actually, now it sounds like Bush and Obama were about the same. So we want to elect another president just like the previous two? No thanks.

In an age of seemingly strong, divisive partisanship – at least as the media would have us believe – the reality is that Republicans and Democrats are nearly the same. All hunger for power and money, and we have given our politicians the authority to obtain them.

But why else can I not be enthusiastic about Mitt Romney?

Because he possesses nothing about which I can be enthusiastic. It is not Ron Paul’s good looks or articulate speech that excite me (he has none). It is not his track record of “getting things done in Congress” (he typically votes “No,” and always votes “No” on spending bills…always). It is not his “electability” or his “presidential” air. No, none of those things can compel me to vote for a man (or woman).

But when Ron Paul talks about liberty – about restoring to individuals the freedom to live their lives as they please, without excessive taxation, without inflationary government policies that steal money from their pockets, without onerous laws and regulations over their private lives, without the heavy hand of government groping their children at the airport and peering into their private data without judicial permission, without losing their neighbors and children on foreign soil fighting meaningless wars, and with the promise of reverence for all human life and financial responsibility from the halls of Congress – when he talks about liberty that way, who wouldn’t be compelled to jump to their feet and cheer? Then, when I see the man’s voting record after three decades in Congress – a record that never betrays his principles – I know “this is a man of integrity.” This is not a flip-flopper who says what is politically expedient. This is not a man who cozies up to corporations for mutual benefit at the expense of the people. This is an honest man, committed to liberty and justice for all. This is the only person I want for president.

So I will not aid our nation in trading one corrupt dictator for another.

“If you don’t vote for Romney, you’ve essentially voted for Obama,” a person might reply.

But I disagree. Romney has given the party no vision for conservatism. Romney has given no concessions to the Tea Party and to those who want drastic cuts in government. Romney is an empty suit. Romney is unelectable, because Romney is just un-. He’s not any thing, he’s just not Obama. Not even Sarah Palin has faith that he’s a conservative (this video, 9:00-10:00)!

And this sums up the whole problem I have been trying to articulate. When the Republican party focused solely on removing Obama, they lost themselves. Instead of being advocates for small government, the Constitution, and liberty, they just railed against Barack. They spent so much on demolition, they forgot to invest in reconstruction. And for that lack of positive, substantial vision, the Republican party is now vacuous, and seems bent on putting a vapid, vacuous man in the White House.

So I would contend that, if you voted for Romney in the primaries, you actually voted for Obama. Because if Romney is the nominee, Obama will be the president.

Colorado republicans held their state convention on Saturday. While Ron Paul placed a distant fourth in their popular-vote election during the Colorado caucuses, he walked away from the convention with as many delegates as Mitt Romney – 13 – and potentially more in delegates who will be unbound after the first round of voting at the national convention. Santorum received 7 bound delegates. This article reports the details. This article (from the New York Times), on the other hand, was published just after the Colorado caucuses in February, and declares Romney and Santorum the state’s clear winners, assigning no delegates to Paul. There are more articles like this, for more states.

For example: Minnesota. Paul did fairly well in Minnesota, coming in second place to Santorum, who was running strong in most places at that time. This article (also from the New York Times), published just after the Minnesota caucuses in February (the same day as Colorado’s), assigns 33 delegates to Santorum and 4 to Ron Paul. But such was not the case on Saturday, when Minnesota held three of its eight congressional district conventions. There, Ron Paul received all of the 9 delegates at stake. Minnesota will send 40 delegates to the national convention, and many more of those delegates will be chosen this week at more district conventions. Ron Paul already obtained more delegates than he was forecast to – could he sweep the entire state?

Finally, in my home state of Missouri, things are looking good for the Ron Paul campaign. Rick Santorum took the state by a huge majority in the February non-binding (meaningless) primaries. But the March caucuses attested to the excellent leadership, organization, passion, and dedication of the Ron Paul campaign and its supporters. Paul swept several crucial counties, and is poised to garner a large amount of national delegates – over half of which will be selected this weekend at Missouri district conventions. The rest will be chosen at the state convention in June. Based on my conversation with leadership and my access to delegate counts for each candidate, I’d say – as the Miller county coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign – Ron Paul has a good chance of taking the majority of Missouri’s delegates.

And the race continues. Ignore the lies from the mainstream media – from Fox News to MSNBC, they’re interested in writing their own narrative and selling advertising, not in reporting the truth.

Seek the truth, and you’ll see that this race is far from over. Ron Paul’s influence continues to grow. Mitt Romney is a pseudo-conservative, and Ron Paul is now the only viable alternative to him.

Texas voting is just around the corner….let’s see if my great native state decides to vote for liberty.

He can be rich if he wants. But I won’t have him being rich and complaining about it. Here’s what I mean.

He is complaining that his secretary paid taxes at a higher rate than he did – an anecdote he is using to support his proposed tax-hiking “Buffett Rule.” The rule is named after Warren Buffett, who is also complaining about being rich. “It’s not fair,” they wail, “that I should pay taxes at a lower rate than the poor!” (or…in the case of his secretary who made $95,000 last year…the upper-middle class) “We should change the tax code so that people like us have to pay more taxes!” they conclude.

I have a better idea.

Well, first, we ought to simply drop the “poor” people’s tax rate to match the rich people’s. Problem solved. (We’ll have to cut federal spending, but that’s nothing new, and it’s not going to happen anyways…)

But that won’t happen. So here’s another idea: let’s allow Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, and the apparently-many other guilt-ridden millionaires who are jonesing to pay more taxes to…well…pay more taxes. But instead of having their hard-earned money taken from them by the iron fist of the IRS, I would suggest we allow these sensitive souls to assuage their consciences by giving – out of the goodness of their hearts, the depths of their pocketbooks, and their obvious love for their country – as much money as they want to the government. We could even have a handy website where you could put in your gross income, and it would tell you how much you should donate if you want to “feel the pain” of those poor non-millionaires. The great thing about this option is that you can give the money to any specific government agency you want, instead of being forced to add it to the general pot.

With this – my brilliant solution – everyone will be happy. No one’s taxes increase, millionaires feel better about themselves, and Obama’s secretary will pay the same tax rate he does. Everything will be right in the world.

Problem: SOLVED

The reasons are numerous – an accumulation of dissatisfactions, irritations, disturbing posts by “friends,” and so on. But the reason I finally decided to quit Facebook – the event because of which I finally leaped from the precipice of illusory connectivity – happened just the other day to my dad.

Being one of the few holdouts against Facebook, my father finally decided to obtain an account one day, as it was a prerequisite for commenting on a certain online article. He gave Facebook a relatively-unused web-based email address for his account, followed by a false name and false birth date. Facebook rejected the name he provided (it was not much like a real name), so he altered it a bit, and he was in. Upon first logging in to his new account, my dad was met with surprise. A portion of his Facebook home page was suggesting “People you may know.” Those people were my siblings, my mother, and me.

How did Facebook know? I know the answer lies in the interconnectedness of Facebook’s nearly-infinite databases and the nature of online information sharing. But seriously: how did Facebook know? My father gave all false information except for his web-based email address that he hardly uses. Did that email provider give Facebook more information? Did Facebook find other places he had used that email address (perhaps in commenting on my personal blog) and connect the dots?

Does it even matter? The point is, Facebook knew who he was, even when he didn’t want them to. It is as though there was a little gap in all of Facebook’s databases, and that gap was filled when my dad simply clicked “Create Account.” All the connections existed long before he arrived; Facebook was simply waiting for one trivial click.

The situation gets even spookier when one considers modern facial-recognition software. It’s not difficult to imagine that Facebook knows the number of people in my immediate family. After all, my wife, mother, and siblings have used the site for a while, and we’ve all affirmed our familial connections (“How is this person related to you?”). So in family photos – many of which we have posted on Facebook – Facebook can easily see my wife, mother, my siblings, and me, but then there is frequently another male face for which Facebook has no official profile. Well, “had.”

So Facebook very probably knew who my father was and what he looked like before he even arrived on the scene. And this is unsettling.

So I quit Facebook.

“But,” one may contend, “Facebook offers some really great services!”

Of course it does! The ease of communication is what makes the site so valuable. But I never really considered the true cost of that service until the incident with my father. In exchange for a “Share” button, I have given Facebook over a thousand photos of my life, my contact information, my political viewpoints, my consumer preferences, my favorite books and movies, a list of acquaintances, and a list of friends. In a way, I even gave Facebook my father, who – for years – imagined that his life was untouched by and unknown to the company. At that price, Facebook’s not worth it.

So I quit Facebook.

And this departure may very well stick. Because I’ve been there before – most of us have. We got irritated with the new changes, or we read some article about Facebook privacy issues, and we removed our account. But Facebook, like a true friend, remembered everything about us, waiting patiently for our inevitable return. And return we did. But this time, return I will not.

I know – there are privacy concerns with other web applications I’ll continue to use. My identity is “out there,” and it probably always will be. But Facebook, the king of personal data peddling, will no longer have direct access to it. Facebook still knows who I am – or who I have been up to this point. But I will no longer be complicit in telling it who I – or anyone else – will become.

This time around, audio and video recording were permitted (the ban of which caused the beginning of the end for the first caucus attempt), and the caucus was reportedly conducted in an orderly fashion without significant interruption or confusion.

Ron Paul supporters won the day, after laboring extensively in the preceding weeks to increase turnout. Being numerically in the majority, his supporters elected their own caucus chair: Brent Stafford. Stafford was one of the two caucusgoers who were arrested at the original St. Charles caucus (on charges of trespassing) after he led dissenters who complained that the the temporary caucus chair had broken the rules of the caucus, as determined by the Missouri state caucus rules and Roberts Rules of Order.

This time around, the caucus also avoided its previous mistake of electing a caucus chair by “voice vote” – an imprecise method that was used to elect the chair for the first caucus, despite the loud protests from Ron Paul supporters.

With Stafford as chair and Ron Paul supporters in the majority, the caucus moved smoothly and the county’s 88 delegates were elected – all of them Ron Paul supporters.

According to Todd Rio, caucus coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign in Missouri, St. Charles was a game-changer in Missouri. “The results of the caucus in St. Charles will decide the fate of Ron Paul delegates in District 3,” he said before yesterday’s caucus. St. Charles will send 88 delegates to the District 3 Congressional caucus, which will be held on April 21. District 3 receives 300 delegates, so St. Charles county will represent nearly 30% of the delegates at the district’s caucus.

A similarly important victory took place in the Boone county caucus (held March 17). The county contains the University of Missouri and Columbia College – a good thing for the Ron Paul campaign, considering the strong support he has among college-age voters. Ron Paul supporters were in the majority at that caucus as well, electing their own chair, and claiming all of the county’s 53 delegates. District 4 – in which Boone county sits – has 292 total delegates.

At Missouri district caucuses, over half of Missouri’s total number of state delegates (who will attend the Republican National Convention in August) will be chosen, along with the majority of the state’s electors (for the electoral college). So every victory at the district level translates into more delegates for a campaign who has delegate-garnering its primary strategy.

While Missouri went strongly for Santorum in the non-binding, oft-criticized February primaries, the Ron Paul campaign is showing that tenacity, passion, and organization can – and do – translate into votes that matter.

——————

See this article for more details on Tuesday’s caucus.

If he is not elected to the office of president, Ron Paul’s “foreign policy” may prove to be the biggest missed opportunity our country has seen in a long while

But it is not he who will miss an opportunity: it is we. We Americans – who are so busy looking toward the future that we have never bothered learning about the past – will miss the opportunity to embrace a foreign policy that would bring our budget back from the brink of disaster, stop antagonizing nations around the world, and strengthen our sense of patriotism and our ability to defend ourselves.

We are a nation seemingly thirsty for war. We act as though we’d like to avoid it, but in reality, we are chomping at the bit to fight the Iranians, decimate the North Koreans, and keep poking a handful of other countries until they flare up and we can fight a “justified war.” Why else did we send warships into the Strait of Hormuz?

We worship our own global authority; sanctified by our battle hymns, assured of our Christian roots, certain that they are the “evil empire” and we are the “city on a hill” (oh, Reagan, what a horrid, dangerous use of scripture for political momentum!), we have built the world’s most expansive, most expensive military and we (drone) strike God’s holy rod of justice upon any who would oppose us. For our cause is righteous, and our actions are eternally and unequivocally good. So we think.

“What an exaggerator!” one may muse. But is this attitude not thoroughly pervasive in our nation? I don’t mean it is the attitude of 100% of the populace, but it surely seems to be the posture of our politicians. And among those who genuinely care about the country, I have too often found people who are well-intentioned, but who seem wholly unwilling to even question our military actions. Especially when there is a Republican Commander-In-Chief.

The solution is to be honest about our past, and once we’ve learned from it, to resolve to change our actions in the future.

The Past

The United States has fought justifiably in the past. The best example in the 20th century is World War II. Japan attacked us. So we entered the war – after Congress voted on a declaration of war.

But our nation has also been involved in many unsavory conflicts – engagements where our politicians used fear, propaganda, lies, hate, and twisted logic to keep the war machine rolling. Some examples…

1) Operation Ajax – In the early 1950s, Iran was a democratic, functioning nation. They had a parliament and a Prime Minister. The government began, in 1951, nationalizing the country’s oil production. Britain didn’t like this, since they had an interest in the private British company that had, up until this point, controlled all Iranian oil production. Britain mobilized for military action, and in the meantime enacted an embargo of Iranian oil. Winston Churchill then enjoined President Eisenhower to approve a joint operation of American and British agents (Operation Ajax) whose mission was to undermine the Iranian Prime Minister. They were successful; they overthrew the (democratically-elected, remember) Iranian Prime Minister and installed the Shah Pahlavi as the new dictator. So began a period of turmoil in Iran that has yet to be resolved.

2) Nicaragua – Between 1910 and 1912, the U.S. invaded Nicaragua, providing the military action and backing needed for a regime change. The reason for our involvement is generally considered to have been our desire to undermine European influence in the nation, particularly as the U.S. had decided to build the Panama Canal, and there was a possibility that Germany would attempt to build a canal through Nicaragua.

3) Iraq – In his book, “The Price of Loyalty,” Ron Suskind explains that the George W. Bush administration was eager to go to war with Iraq before 9/11 even happened. Even if Mr. Suskind is incorrect, the haste with which Iraq was connected to the war on terror is condemnation enough. Justifying a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, President Bush assured Americans that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he could very easily give them to terrorists, who could then use them on Americans. This, as we know, turned out to be false. So we invaded Iraq and spent 8-1/2 years there, costing our economy around $3 trillion, according to some estimates. Now, it would be folly to argue that Saddam Hussein was a nice man or even a good ruler. But we went to war with him without a declaration of war, under false premises, and while we were entering a war in Afghanistan at the same time. Operation Iraqi Freedom contributed to our serious economic woes, and who can say whether it will leave the Iraqis better off in the end? If this one of our interventions turns out like so many others, it will leave the people still oppressed, just with a new oppressor.

4) Libya – In yet another foreign intervention that was none of our business, Obama spent over a billion dollars to launch missiles in hope of a regime change. He and other politicians wagered our tax dollars that the Arab Spring would be a good thing, and down Gaddafi went.

These stories are enough to warn us, alongside the words of Eisenhower (who ought to have heeded his own advice) to resist the pull of the military industrial complex. Yet, our defense/military spending accounts for 43% of global military spending. We spend more than the next 15 nations combined.

“War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.”  -Ron Paul

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Hear me.

I love our country, and I love being an American.

I do not love everything that America does or that America has done. We are a country that was founded on the ideas of liberty and justice for all, but we have strayed far from these ideals – we have become oppressors. Our government oppresses its own citizens, and then meddles in affairs around the world that would be better off if we left them alone.

So I stand in strong opposition to President Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, when he cries, “God damn America!”

May God help America. May God have mercy on Americans, and on every other tribe, nation, kindred, and tongue.

And may Americans have the courage to be honest about our past – the good and the bad – and resolve to treat one another and the citizens of the world with dignity, honesty, and decency.

—–

A man is walking in a field

and everywhere at his feet

in the short grass of April

the small purple violets

are in bloom. As the man walks

the ground drops away,

the sunlight of day becomes

a sort of darkness in which

the lights of the flowers rise

up around him like

fireflies or stars in a sort

of sky through which he walks.

Then the Catholics have the Apocrypha.

And the Baptists have Lifeway publications.

And so on…

Thank God for spring!

Here’s a sampling of our Ozark spring so far: