I've Moved

After a six-month hiatus, I decided to start writing again. The thing is, Blogger had some things in setup that I found a bit irritating, so I have moved. You may now find me here:

http://lucyemersonblog.wordpress.com

I have a new post up and everything. Hope to see you there.

A Thought on Bristol Palin

Bristol Palin won this week.

Oh, I know that Jennifer Grey got the DWTS Mirrorball Trophy, and deservedly so. I know that Kyle Massey came in second place -- also, I think, deservedly so. I am happy for them both; I do not mean to diminish their accomplishments. But Bristol's was the greatest victory.

Ever since she was pulled into the national spotlight two and a half years ago, she has had to endure thousands of people saying horrible things about her. They call her a slut, a tramp, an idiot. They call her fat and stupid. They use her ex-boyfriend, a young man apparently wholly without scruples, in an attempt to smear her and her family. They call her a hypocrite for daring to talk to other young women about how she made a mistake and how others ought not follow in her footsteps. When she started on Dancing With the Stars, they went into overdrive, seeming to grow more enraged and deranged with every week that they saw that their opinions were not in the majority -- but rather than conceding that perhaps they did not have a monopoly on truth, they lashed out, screaming about a vast right-wing conspiracy. One man shot his television and then threatened to shoot his wife over the matter. Others decided to take a more direct approach and sent death threats to Bristol and Mark -- and even then I saw commenters who refused to believe that perhaps the whole thing had gone too far, but rather insisted that news of death threats was nothing more than a publicity stunt.

My husband thought I was ridiculous for following the controversy as closely as I did; perhaps he's right. But it was rather like watching a car wreck -- I found myself continually stunned by the level of vitriol aimed at this young woman and, by proxy, to her mother. I held to a vain hope that people would see sense and realize that no one is worth that kind of frothing hate, let alone a 20-year-old young woman whose main offense had been to be the unapologetic daughter of a larger target of that same frothing hate.

Bristol did not win the Mirrorball Trophy. Her victory was a much more substantial one. She endured the screaming mob with her head held high. She refused to cower, to surrender her happiness, but instead redoubled her efforts in rehearsal. She won the hearts and earned the applause of vast swaths of her audience, and on the last night of the show, we all saw her let go of the last vestiges of  her inhibiting shyness and just be herself out on the dance floor. It was a beautiful thing to behold.

There are those who have crowed about Bristol coming in third place, hoping that this last arrow in their quiver will take her down. But no: the smile on her face when her name was announced speaks volumes. She was content with the standings, pleased with her own efforts, and happy for her competitors. Bristol was poised and gracious in her "defeat." But more importantly, she had retained self when so many sought to destroy her. And she had not merely held her ground, but gained more as she won over her skeptical (but sane) viewers. Carrie Ann Inaba had said, over the course of the competition, something to the effect that there's nothing more beautiful than to see someone recognize and claim their own inner power. The comment was not directed at Bristol, but it certainly applies, because that is what we all have had the privilege of watching these last several weeks. She could have surrendered to the madding crowd, but she did not.

And that is why Bristol Palin won.

A Fun New Blogtoy

I've received a fair amount of complaints about the comment process here on Blogger, and trust me, I'm in wholehearted agreement. I want feedback, so I want people to use the comments section , but apparently whoever designed comments on this site hates people. Or something.

I didn't want to move after taking the trouble to set things up just how I want them, but I was starting to think that I didn't really have any other options. And then I stumbled upon the solution earlier today. I installed IntenseDebate here at the Lucy Emerson Blog; it's the same commenting apparatus they use over at the Breitbart Big sites. It's quite user-friendly -- if you have a commenter profile on, say, a Wordpress blog, then you can use that profile here. Huzzah!

So please, feel free to leave any questions or comments you might have. I welcome the feedback.

Govt 101: Balance of Power Redux and the Articles of Confederation

I love a good object lesson, and as it's one of my primary methods of learning, it is also one of my primary methods of teaching. The problem with an object lesson in a bloggish setting is that it doesn't always translate well. I've had family in town for most of the past week, which kept me occupied, but I also spent a fair amount of time musing on my last post here, and the fact that it didn't come off quite as I'd hoped. It seemed as though something was missing; I return, sore puzzler and all, in hopes of adding in those missing bits.

To recap: In our last lesson I showed you two triangles, one resting on its base and one on its tip. Each was a representation of the balance of power between governments and individuals. Whoever gets the long side calls the shots, and there is no such thing as each party involved claiming a long side. Government and individual are diametrically opposed in a power struggle, so this is a contest where one side's losses are the other side's gains. I repeat: there is no such thing as a situation wherein both the government and the individual can maximize their respective power. FDR was fond of talking about a "third way" in which government power could expand without trampling on individual freedoms; this "third way," like most policies FDR was fond of, was a load of malarkey.

But, like most things in this world, the balance of power is not a binary matter. It is not an all-or-nothing situation, which is why the word "balance" is in the term. I touched on this a bit last time, but I don't think I went as in-depth with it as I ought to have, so I'll take another swing at it here.

(I do promise you that if I get largely negative feedback about the content of my writing, I will not embark on a nationwide speaking tour in which I drone on and on, stringing together anecdotes of various degrees of honesty, in an attempt to convince you all that you're simply too stupid to grasp the higher nature of my thinking, and should therefore just trust that I Am Correct.)

In our first Govt 101 lesson, we were introduced to a highly simplified political spectrum; the second held the aforementioned triangles. If we were to put them together, we would get something like this:

The colors purple and yellow were not just chosen because they were the colors of my first high school (though that did play a minor role) but also because they have no affiliation with either major political party.  Each color is representative of the amount of power wielded by the government (purple) or by the individual (yellow). The choice of the darker color for government was no accident either, as it is significantly easier for government to lay claim to power than individuals; and once the government has laid claim to said powers, it's a nasty business trying to wrest them back. Think of it this way -- would you rather have to paint a purple wall yellow, or a yellow wall purple? Same idea.

Of course, what we have illustrated above is an example of extremes, and as such, is not anything you'll actually find in the real world -- at least not for any significant period of time. A government that has assumed total power over its citizenry is just asking to be overthrown; while, as we discussed earlier, total lack of government is as good as an engraved invitation to a power-hungry despot. So what you largely find in the world, governmentally speaking, is a series of bottom-resting triangles with purple bases and varying degrees of yellow at the top. Why? Because government holding the balance of power is the natural order of things, and whoever controls the long end or the base of the triangle controls how much power the other party gets.

And we have once again come to the dilemma of our Founding Fathers. As British citizens, they enjoyed levels of freedom not had by, say, French subjects. English Common Law was a large source of inspiration for the Bill of Rights. The problem, though, with English Common Law was that it wasn't exactly written down in the books, and was enforced entirely at the will of the King. Theirs was a bottom-resting government, with the yellow/purple boundary somewhere in the middle of the triangle, like so:

The Americans didn't really have a problem with this; their problem came when King George decided to move that dividing line up the triangle, thereby increasing his own power, thereby decreasing that of the individual -- all without consent of the governed.

And herein lies the problem -- if the governing power is calling the shots, they don't really have to care about the will of the governed. A wise ruler will do so anyway, or at least pretend to, if only to avoid the sort of disgruntlement that precedes revolution. But the fact remains that your degree of autonomy is entirely at the mercy of the ruling class in this, the natural order of things; and if you find yourself at the mercy of a tyrant, your options are to suck it up or commit to a war that you're unlikely to win. Neither is terribly appealing.

After the remarkable underdog victory that was the Revolutionary War, Americans decided that they didn't want their descendants to ever have to make that awful choice again. They wanted a system of governance in which the consent of the governed, or the will of the people, was paramount -- in other words, they knew they needed to invert the natural balance of power. Their first attempt, the Articles of Confederation, looked something like this:

In order for the individual to hold the balance of power, and thereby determine how much power will be retained by the government, you have to put the whole thing on its head. The AoC was designed a bit like a stand to keep the inverted triangle from tipping over. Many Americans were understandably leery of a system in which the government had too much power, so their main branch of government was the legislative (deemed the branch most likely to be responsive to the people) shown here as a box meant to hold the triangle steady, with the stubby little executive and judicial branches serving as legislative supports.

The problem with the Articles of Confederation is that the federal government had too little power, as indicated by the Curvy Lines of Wobbliness above. The purview of the federal government under the AoC wasn't so different from the same under the Constitution -- handle national defense, international affairs, and make sure the states play nice. Unfortunately, federal power under the Articles, like British Common Law, was almost wholly enforced (or not) at the pleasure of the sovereign -- in this case, the people, acting largely through their various state governments. (States wielded quite a lot of power, but they were and are much more responsive to their constituents than a federal government can be; therefore, for simplicity's sake, I have included them in the yellow.) Sure, there were laws, but the federal government had very little ability to enforce them. It is impossible to do a job properly when you have the responsibility but not the necessary authority, and so things started to fall apart. And our Founding Fathers knew that, without an improvement upon their initial design, their grand experiment in individual sovereignty would come to a dismal and premature end.

And so they went back to the drawing board.

Government 101: The Balance of Power

Nowadays we see a lot in advertising about "natural." It's usually accompanied by vast open fields, cool clear springs, majestic forests, and associated warm fuzzy imagery. "Natural" is by definition a good thing, we are told. But is it?

As with most things in life, the answer is not always. I don't know about you, but my house is an artificial construct, as are most of the things in it. If I had tried to give birth to my son in a more "natural" way, the experience almost certainly would have killed me. Some of the most potent poisons known to man are 100% natural, as are both deadly germs and the creatures that carry them. In the LDS Church we have a scripture that says, "The natural man [that is, a person who makes no effort to curb his impulses] is an enemy to God."

Nature is great, but it is only by manipulating those things found naturally in this world that people are able to even survive, let alone thrive. And government is no different; the natural balance of power amongst people looks something like this:

At first glance this might seem like a good thing -- "Woo-hoo, we're at the top!" Unfortunately, this is not the case. The choice of a triangle was a deliberate one: not only is it shown here in its natural state (i.e., resting on its base) but it's the perfect representation of the finite nature of power. Unlike wealth, power does not grow when shared (note I said shared, a voluntary action, and not redistributed, an involuntary one), but rather the more you give to a governing body, the less of it you have.

The proper way to look at this triangle is to know that whoever has the long side is calling the shots, as well as to know that the individual and the government will always be directly opposite each other in the balance of power. For instance, let's say we have two nations where the above triangle is an accurate representation of the balance of power in each nation; but one is rather more totalitarian than the other. Their graphs would look something like this:

The purple is power retained by the government; the yellow is power granted to individuals. And yes, individuals do have more say over their own lives in Country A, and the choice between the two would not be difficult. But the fact remains that in both cases it's the government granting that amount of power to the individual -- meaning that the government can also take it away. That black bar moves up and down at their whim, and there's not much, if anything, you can do about it.

Okay, so this is the natural balance of power -- what is the unnatural then?

Glad you asked. It looks something like this:

In this chart, it's the individual who has the long side, and is therefore calling the shots. There is, however, a rather massive problem -- when was the last time you were able to stand a triangular object on its point? If you managed it, how long did it stay up? This is an unstable condition at best; this is a chart in which the government has too little power. Just as a triangular object balanced in such a way will inevitably succumb to gravitational forces and topple onto its side, so too is a nation that is governed in such a manner ripe for the taking by those who are power-hungry and ruthless enough to grab for it. Trouble will come, power will shift, the triangle will fall over, and the individual will once again be left with the tip.

(One of the oft-told lies about the Tea Party movement is that we want no government whatsoever. Not true. Total lack of government -- anarchy -- is antithetical to the cause of freedom for the simple reason that it cannot last. People cannot maintain a society with no laws, and laws are useless without a governing body to enforce them. Such a setup is an open invitation for the aforementioned power-hungry and ruthless to step in. This is why you often see proponents of Communism, a vastly totalitarian form of government, marching under an anarchist banner. It may seem contradictory, but in reality anarchy -- a breakdown of law and order -- would be a very quick way of establishing a totalitarian regime.)

And we come to the end of this admittedly depressing lesson with an equally depressing question: Is there nothing to be done to ensure that the balance of power rests with the individual? Are we forever doomed to be subject to the whims of a ruling class? This was the question that was presented to the Founding Fathers of the United States of America not once, but twice. And in our next lesson, we will have a look at both of their answers.

Some Thoughts About Election Day

This is very encouraging -- Sarah Palin's Class of 2010. It's a good reminder for those of us still surrounded by people who think that Progressives do anything other than further their own power that yesterday was a day of many victories.

Speaking of -- Oregon? California? NEVADA? Have you people lost your minds? Or is it just that Progressive policies have so crippled your states by chasing actual business people away that you all have populations heavy on the moonbats? No one really pays attention to Oregon (California's slightly-saner little sister), so I'll say it: Do you honestly look to the south at a once-fabulous state that is now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and say to yourself, "Mm-mm, gimme some of that!"?! And OR4! Peter DeFazio? AGAIN? This man hasn't faced a real challenge in ages, and now when he does he whips out both barrels of the smear machine, and you elect him anyway?? This is the same man who spent about 17 hours last spring pretending he wouldn't vote for ObamaCare so he could mug for the cameras a little bit!

"Go on, Pete, no one pays attention to Oregon; go pretend you don't like it and grab some limelight."

"But wouldn't it be rude to lead my constituents on like that?"

"Please! Who else are they going to vote for?"

Of course, we know that the above exchange is fiction. The idea of Mr. DeFazio caring what his constituents thought is laughable.

Also, he seems to model his campaign signs after whatever the current Pepcid AC box looks like. Just sayin'.

And grats, Oregon, on re-electing Gov. Moonbeam Jr, a man who, after his last two terms, even The Oregonian said was a failure. Good grief.

The idiocy of vast portions of the Left Coast aside, though, yesterday was a huge step in the right direction. And it might sound weird, but I'm kinda glad we didn't win the Senate. If we had won both, then Obama could easily blame all the failures of his agenda on the GOP Congress. With the Senate still in D control, this will be a bit more difficult.

The thing I think we all need to keep most in mind is that yesterday was not the war; it was simply a battle. It was an important battle, no doubt, and the results prove that those of us who wish to fundamentally restore our nation rather than transform it still have a fighting chance in all this. But yesterday was not the end of the heavy lifting; it was the beginning. Obama may, like all bullies, making conciliatory gestures to the new balance of power, but he will not move to the center. The Progressives will double down, and it's going to get really bumpy. Things will have to get worse before they get better, which is why now more than ever we need that firm reliance on Divine Providence that Thomas Jefferson wrote about. But do not mistake that firm reliance for a piggyback ride. As the saying goes, work like it's all up to you; pray like it's all up to Him. If you don't have a rep in Michele Bachmann's new Constitutional Caucus, and your rep will not join, then adopt someone else's. Make it a new hobby to write him or her -- encourage, strengthen, admonish when necessary. Pray for them all. These people are walking into the lions' den; make sure that they are well armed.

Now is the time to continue to educate ourselves and those around us, but also to prepare physically, mentally, spiritually, and materially for tough times; for they will come. But just as in the generations who came before us, we can face them down and emerge, perhaps a bit battered and bruised, but victorious.

Not a Bad Romance

For your listening pleasure, the fruits of my labor this week:




This would not have been possible without the hard work of the delightful Benjamin Shenberger of SubZero Audio. Round of applause!

As always, please feel free to post this anywhere you wish. In the interest of not cluttering up my front page, since Blogger seems to have an issue with embedded video and pagebreaks, I included the lyrics on the song's YouTube page.

I haven't forgotten Govt. 101 -- I've just been hard at work cranking this out this week. Stay tuned.