PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Outside of the major metropolitan areas, the real reason there is a constituency for mass transit is the “poor people” industry: poor people can’t afford cars, old people can’t drive, cars are unsafe, travel distinguishes class, and other subliminal motives. Stripped of self-righteous evangelical fervor, pro-mass transit arguments collapse. Most peopl...

<p style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Climate Change denial is a sophisticated tactical position: Climate-deniers don't actually believe their arguments, they simply don't want any of the proposed "solutions" imposed on America, all of which are insidious wealth redistribution schemes. It's easier to deny the whole thing, and it gets an Environmentalist's go...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">America seems to be teetering on economic collapse: a large portion of the population feels disaffected, there is ever-increasing wealth disparity, grid-locked politics, Crony Capitalism, Climate Change, 10s of millions of people chronically unemployed, National Debt, and most importantly, people simply expect it because everyone has a natural tendenc...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are a lot of people who are certain they can predict the future. Demagogues are particularly guilty of this personality trait: they make pronouncements about what will happen with no sense of humility nor doubt, constantly claiming some kind of special inborn ability to read people's minds, dissemble hidden motives & project the past into th...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let's review another batch of original concepts guaranteed to make you sound provocative at a party:</p> <p style="text-indent: -0.27in; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.27in; page-break-before: auto;">1. Gay marriage is a matter of the law but what you do in your own church is your business.</p> <p style="text-in...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">People are no different now than they ever have been, but back-in-the-day, if someone was bipolar or subject to depression, their small community knew about it & would make allowances, and taking care of children or working in the fields was hardly affected by non-physical maladies. In fact, many famous figures in history probably owe their except...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Everyone wants control, and leveraging society's reverence towards children is a common method to grab it. Combine that with sanctimonious posturing & conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccine movement explains itself. The attraction to pseudoscience is also easy to understand because people want to think they know special information that gives th...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">ObamaCare is the nickname given the Affordable Care Act but a more appropriate nickname would be “Obamasurance” because it does not provide healthcare, only insurance, and only through private companies, and only to those people who can navigate the relatively difficult steps to obtain it. Not only that, the Affordable Care Act is anything but afforda...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">No industry has so completely captured its regulators as the pharmaceutical companies. Hidden agendas are in every public pronouncement: drugs need to be expensive to fund research into new ones, foreign drugs can't be trusted, drug trials must be large & time-consuming, government cannot negotiate drug prices, patents may be allowed for drug twea...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Medicine is a taught skill, not rocket science, and learning medicine needs a total rework. People get into medicine by taking a series of very difficult timed memory tests, exactly the kind of short-term, plastic memory that human beings start losing at about the age 18, and by 35 it is obviously apparent they no longer have: by 50, everyone is stupi...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Medicine is not a science. Medicine has components of science, and the people involved are smugly certain what they know is proven, but in fact, at least half of what they call “evidence-based medicine” is bunk, and almost all of the purveyors of alternative medicine are little more than witch-doctors & shaman. Your personal doctor is little bette...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The stricture against prostitution originated in religion but now its continuance is more momentum & conservatism. There seems to be no rational reason to restrict prosetituion other than the obvious government regulation that any personal service business would enjoy. The condemnation seems to be a subtle manifestation of female jealousy, in the...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The simplest of all societal axioms is: for rules to work, people have to want to obey them. There is no better example of this fundamental concept than the failure of prohibition in the gangster-ridden 1930s, and now, the so-called “War on Drugs,” in all its abysmal failure, worse than a failure, it is a stake in the heart of our whole judicial syste...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In topsy-turvy, status-conscious America, a degree in B-B stacking from Yale has more cachet than an Engineering degree from Podunk University, and people are often hired simply because they are Ivy League graduates. This is discrimination at its most insidious, and a prime reason why higher education is failing America. It's also the major indication...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The liberal arts are: literature, history, philosophy & the sciences. In classical antiquity these subjects were “worthy of a free person,” the Latin word liberalis. Liberals participated in public debate, on juries, and military service, as well as art, music & astronomy. America inherited this Old World education tradition and has been mostl...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Married couples have special inheritance, medical, retirement, and childcare benefits & responsibilities. The law considers the married partner as having a vested interest in the well-being of the other partner, and there are volumes of case law defining & protecting that arrangement. So, from a legal point-of-view, “gay marriage” actually str...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let's review an eclectic range of original concepts & new ideas, new to you anyway:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">1. Constitutional plain language requires people to be mind-readers of dead folks.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">2. Patents are justified rent-seeking but Copyright is hero worship....

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Do you want to be the center of attention at a dinner party? Simply say you don’t believe in evolution: nothing gets the modern elite indignant faster than rejection of their group geist. Be careful though because no amount of backpedaling or explanation on your part will ever remove the taint of suspicion about your intelligence. In the future, whene...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Though there are religionists who try and deny it, Freedom of Religion includes freedom from religion. Some people try to associate that Right with atheism but in recent times, atheism has become its own religion: they proselytize, they have believe-it-or-else evolutionist dogma, and they simply rely on faith that there is no god. And the Atheists who...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are few things in political debate as abused and fraught with hypocrisy as the citation of moral values as the reason to do something. Not only does self-righteous indignation germinate from the feeling of grandiose moral superiority, both detestable qualities, but nothing is more subjective. We did not grow up in the same neighborhoods, attend...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's fair to say America was founded on religion. Early settlers didn't come here for opportunity so much as to escape oppression, often religious oppression. The liberty they were lusting after was the liberty to believe crazy stuff without being persecuted by those who thought everyone should believe some other crazy stuff. It's also fair to say tha...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Every competent person has some under-utilized talent or capacity locked away, unable to perform due to society's impossibly rigged game. The so-called, “Sharing Economy,” gives those people an opportunity to capitalize on their resources, which is why it is anathema to rent-seekers, gate-keepers & restrictive unionists of all kinds who use artifi...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The U.S. has had an ever increasing National Debt for most of its recent history, to the point of no return, and there’s no reason to think politics can ever be fiscally responsible. Debit cards have become the solution for private people who have a tendency to go into debt and not be able to pay it back, so let's extend that idea into the public sphe...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Article I, Section 8, Clause 2 of the Constitution grants to the U.S. Congress the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States. In 1798, a decade after adoption of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.”</p> <p>A...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Alleviating unsustainable debts that trap people for life was so important to the writers of the U.S. Constitution that they included bankruptcy as a basic right, part of the core guarantees. Why? Because people that are forced into debt service, or worse, Debtors Prisons, are little more than slaves, which makes it creepily ironic that slavery itself...