President John Adams is credited with having said "We are a nation of laws, not men."  As a young man, I struggled to understand the scope of that statement.  Youth, it would seem, blinds you to the understanding of anything greater than self.  Time, as always, brings age, and age, sometimes, brings wisdom.

The nature of law, as we have always recognized it, was to create a peaceful harmony amongst people living in close proximity.  While freedom is manifest from the Almighty, laws are created by man to create a social construct.  Succinctly, in an organized society, you are and should be free to do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't hinder someone else's same right to do whatever THEY want.  You can walk around you house naked, if you want.  Going to Walmart that way, on the other hand, will get you arrested.  You desire to do without clothes gets trumped by everybody else's rights NOT

The best government, it is said, is that which is centered closest to the governed.  The Framers understood this.  That's why the entirety of the Constitution is based upon the idea of "enumerated powers".  Remember that from Civics class?  It basically means that if a power or responsibility isn't specifically set forth in the document as the milieu of the Federal government, then said government has no say in it.  Does that sound like the America we live in today?

As a governed people, it is up to us to decide what is legal and what is not, isn't it?  In a representative republic, the people at large decide what is a crime and what is not.  Or so we have been told since grade school.  Look around.  Does it seem that way to you in today's America?

By request, this next article is about crime in America.  But is crime really the problem?  It's always been around since the beginning of mankind.  Purveyors of crime, like Billy the Kid, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone and the like have a storied history in this country making them quasi-folk heroes that even Hollywood took notice of.  Pablo Escobar is as close to a national icon as you get in Columbia.  Crime is bad, right?

You know that you are upset.  You KNOW that something is wrong.  Amongst your family and friends, maybe you even talk about it.  But one thing I've come to find to be true.  The happiest people I know are Amish.  They don't have a television or radio.  They don't go to the movies.  They are completely removed from the cranial lavage we are subjected to daily.  Kinda makes it pretty obvious what the problem is, now doesn't it?

Facts, logic, reason, and truth.  According to Aristotle, these are the pillars of wisdom.  They are also, now, a target rich environment for the Power Elite to mold and form society in the direction they want us to go.  But will we follow?  So far, yup!

Garbage in, garbage out.  The human mind is much like a computer in that regard.  If you made it through the first piece of this article, congratulations.  It's a tough go to try and wrap your head around the concepts of how the mind learns to interact with it's environment.  Let's build on that, shall we?
 

I saw online that Leonard Nimoy's birthday was March 26th.  Mr. Nimoy played the character of Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek TV series.  The character's core value was that of pure logic.  It made me think of all the hours I spent in my youth watching the show and contemplating the idea of logic, what it was, what it meant, and how to apply it in real life.  It seems we are very short of logic in every day America lately.

Back in 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) coined the phrase "defining deviancy down".  He said that there was "a limit to the bad behavior that a society can tolerate before it has to start lowering its standards".  Senator Moynihan, a classic liberal, recognized 30 years ago that we were lurching toward evil at a breakneck pace and the only way we, as a society, could reconcile that was to keep lowering the standards of morality until they reached extinction.  He was right.