I Like Sarah Huckabee Sanders

quote:

---

Sun Tzu, Scroll III (Offensive Strategy):

31. Therefore I say: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.
32. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.
33. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."

​

(Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translation by Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963)

---

Obviously, to learn what you can about the position that you oppose, or at least do not support.It's also part and parcel of seeking the truth. Or to quote from memory a radio interview I heard c. 1990 with the then-Governor of Mississippi justifying his push for education reform:

quote:

---

We have already tried ignorance, so we know that that does not work.

---

I'm sure that you are well aware of my extremely low opinion of "creation science" and of the extreme moral turpitude displayed and practiced by creationists. Am I just bigoted against them because I "hate God"? No. Rather, my position is based on having studied what their position through their own writings and on decades of very bitter experience trying in vain to discuss their position and claims with them -- HINT: creationists almost invariably refuse to discuss their claims and will do anything they can to derail any and all attempts at honest discussion.My entry into "creation science" and subsequent opposition to it were based on my sincere attempts to "find stuff that supported [their] argument[s]". How else was I supposed to learn about it?In 1990 on CompuServe, another member asked me about my position so I wrote an explanation of how I had arrived at it and posted it in the Science & Religion Library on CompuServe (Feb 1990) and it was the first page I reposted on my first website as Why I Oppose Creation Science (or, How I got to Here from There) (filename is warum.html; "warum" is German for "why?"). From that page:

quote:

---

[NOTE: In your E-Mail message to me (18 Feb 1990), you said:
> You have stated that you have invain, for the last 10 years, found
> no proof that there is a Creator.(unless I miss understood you) The
> information that I have sent you dealt with the subject. [EGW]

​

You had indeed misunderstood what I had said. I got involved in CS in the first place to find out just what the CSists' evidence for creation was. Like the rest of the public, I had heard "creation scientists" claim repeatedly that they have scientific evidence supporting creation. I wanted to see what their "evidence" is.
All I have found so far has been anti-evolutionary claims based on distorted or misrepresented evidence and false and misleading arguments. If there truly is a creation model, then there must at least exist the evidence used to develop that model. So the apparently total lack of evidence FOR a creation model not only brings into question the validity of the "creation model," but its very existence as well.

​

In order to offer some testimony and explanation as to why I am so opposed creationism, I hereby write this essay.

​

In my late high school and early college days (1968 to 1973), I was very much exposed to fundamentalism and so have already been proselytized to repeatedly. I remain unconverted and disdainful of the proselytizing attempts I see, which include the attempts to Christianize our government in order to use it to spread the faith and to impose it on everybody.

​

Although I first heard about creation science from the fundamentalists associated with Calvary at Sunflower and Fairview (Chuck Smith's church in Costa Mesa, Calif -- later moved one block away to become a large complex on Fairview) and from Chick Publication's "Big Daddy," I didn't pay them much attention. What I remember are vague claims of there being scientific evidence for a young earth and Noah's Flood, of which I only heard two specific claims. First was the story of the living mussel carbon-dated to be thousands of years old. I was immediately skeptical of it, but did not have any other basis to reject it at the time. Since then, I finally found a reference to the scientific article that claim was based on and looked it up. The creationists had misrepresented that article, so I was correct to have rejected it.

​

Also, there was the infamous story of the NASA computer program that ran calculations of lunar positions back through time, only to stop abruptly at 4004 BC with the error message, "There was nothing before this date." Then when they restarted the program from there and ran it back to the present, they found a day to be missing. The only explanation for the missing day was the passage in Joshua (?), in which the sun was commanded to stand still. Even then, I knew that the story grossly contradicted the function and capabilities of computers and so was impossible. It surprised me when, in this age of increased computer literacy, the story resurfaced a couple years ago (ie, in the late 1980's, about a decade into the personal computer age, in the Sunday supplement magazine in our local newspaper).

​

My interest in creationism was renewed at the turn of the decade (c. 1980) by sporadic reports that would filter in to North Dakota (where I was stationed), by a presentation by Dr. Duane Gish at UND (which I could not attend -- the presentation, that is), and by an article in Science 81. Since creationists were obviously still around, I was curious to see if there was anything to their claims, i.e. what their evidence is. After nine years of looking, I have found their evidence to be non-existent (and even decades after that, still no evidence to be found).

---

My essay goes on to recount my many discoveries about "creation science".The point is that it is very important to learn about those people and positions that are in opposition to us, especially what they themselves teach. That is why my NCO Leadership School taught us Marxism and Communism, not because the USAF wanted to turn us into Commies, but rather to make us more effective Cold Warriors by knowing our enemy (as per General Sun Tzu) and because we know that ignorance does not work.The example set by the other side, the creationists, demonstrates in real life Verse 33 from Sun Tzu: "If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."

Rather, they are serving their constituency, which is not the people and most definitely not us middle class folk, but rather large industries and corporations and the richest who donate so much money to them. As the Republican office holders seek greater personal wealth at any cost, they also keep an eye not only on which side their bread's buttered, but also the source of that butter.For example, the Republicans have long sought to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. Why? Why would anybody with the slightest shred of humanity want to deliberately cause such harm to innocent people?The answer is money. Social Security and Medicare benefits are funded by trust funds built up from payroll taxes. Everybody who pays into Social Security (some professions, like teachers, are exempt) pays 7.5% of their income through FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) and their employers match their contributions thus bringing the total contribution per employee up to 15%. The simple fact is that corporations don't want to pay that payroll tax, so they lobby their Republican minions to get rid of it.This became clear when Trump pulled a clueless Bush I "tax break", though in Trump's case there was an ulterior motive. The George H.W. Bush ("Bush 41") "generously" gave us a "federal income tax break" by reducing the amount of federal income tax withholding (FITW), thus increasing the amount of take-home pay, but without reducing the amount of income tax we would owe at the end of the year. As a result, we would still owe the same in taxes, but have less withholding with which to pay it. I know that many taxpayers who do not plan their taxes look forward to their tax refunds, seeing it as "free money" (even though it's their own money that the government has had use of all year interest-free), and rely on that big refund check to pay for necessities and bills they've been putting off. They were all caught short by Bush41's clueless "largesse".Trump pulled a similar stunt when he ordered the suspension of the collection of FICA payroll taxes for the rest of the year (for the last 3 or 4 months, as I seem to recall, with the threat to make it permanent the next year). That did not eliminate the requirement to collect those taxes, but rather postponed collection until the next year. That meant that while workers were taking home 7.5% more for the rest of the year, starting at the beginning of the year their paychecks would be 15% lower as they needed to catch up on their FICA contributions. And since any increase in a worker's pay immediately gets spent on necessities, loss of that increase would be very sorely felt.So why did Trump do it? What was his ulterior motive?That postponement of paying FICA directly benefited the employers. For those few months, those companies didn't have to pay payroll taxes, thus giving them extra money to invest, post profits, buy back stock, or to do whatever they wanted to do. Even though they'd have to pay it back the next year, they would still have been able to profit from that extra money (something that they could do but their workers couldn't) and, besides, the next year is in another FY quarter (one of the problems with modern business is that they live from quarter to quarter with their thinking and planning not extending beyond the current quarter).So how much money are we talking about? Let's assume a company with 1000 employees whose average annual income is $50,000. Each worker would pay 7.5% of that each year in payroll taxes: $3750. At the same time, the company would need to pay that same amount per employee, amounting to annual payroll taxes of $3.75 million. Not an insignificant amount of money.Now scale that example up to the number of employees of actual corporations (quick Google results):

quote:

---

Walmart -- 2,300,000
Amazon -- 1,544,000
United Parcel Service -- 500,000
Kroger -- 500,000
Home Depot -- 500,000
Target -- 450,000
Starbucks -- 383,000
Berkshire Hathaway -- 372,000
United Health -- 350,000
FedEx -- 345,000
Cognizant Technology Solutions -- 341,300
TJX Companies -- 340,000
Pepsico -- 309,000
Costco -- 304,000
Lowe's Companies -- 300,000
JP Morgan Chase -- 293,723
Concentrix -- 290,000
IBM -- 282,100
Jabil -- 250,000
Aramark -- 248,300
Wells Fargo -- 238,698
Citigroup -- 238,000
Microsoft -- 221,000
Bank of America -- 216,823
CVS Health -- 216,000
AT&T -- 203,000
Walgreens Boots Alliance -- 200,000
Comcast -- 189,000
Alphabet (Google) -- 186,779

---

Of course, those are only the USA-based companies in an international top-100 list, so I left out foreign-based companies that operate in the USA and employ Americans (eg, Volkswagen, Panasonic, Toyota, Hitachi, Honda). In addition, a number of those USA-based companies also have business overseas where they employ non-Americans not subject to FICA. Plus, we don't know the average annual income of employees of those companies. I offer that list only for some perspective of how small our thousand-employee company is and how small a tax bite that $3.75 million is compared to what actual corporations face.The amount of money companies have to pay in payroll taxes can be significant, even when only a small part of their total cost of business. Instead of using that money to pay taxes that benefit their employees, they would much rather have it for themselves. In the hyper-capitalistic world of international corporations run by bean-counters, the bottom line is the supreme goal in service of which we are all nothing but beans.BTW, those capitalists are your "globalists" who will without hesitation ship all our jobs overseas if that would reduce their cost-per-unit by pennies (and hence increase their total profit by millions).-------------------------------------I am reminded of National Lampoon's early-70's article on California. It included a photo of the California war memorial (Viet Nam War was still on-going) designed by Los Angeles' Cultural Director Ronald McDonald. It was a McDonald's whose sign replaced the "n burgers sold" with the death count (ie, "n Dead"): "... which echoes the theme that we are all meat."

She is not a Conservative, but rather she is a MAGAt. And a professional and shameless liar from her capacity as spokes-MAGAt for Trump.Her State of the Union "response" not only ignored the State of the Union address we all just heard, but it was also devoid of Conservative values or ideals. Instead, it was nothing but nonsensical culture war rhetoric. For me the only surprise was that she didn't also throw in the "War on Christmas" bullshit.-------------------------------One day on Progressive Radio, a host working out of her home studio was conducting an interview in which the interviewee was going through several MAGAt "talking points" when the host's dog started barking. "I'm sorry for that. She's reacting to all the dog whistles."