Author: Paul Tiki

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America's Heartland Commentary Just my own thoughts Life

Ditch debt and learn to relax.

Ditch debt and learn to relax.

Pull up a chair and relax. This may take a little while

Many years ago, I was in a rough spot. You see, shortly after getting married, the wife and I (but truth be told I was the bigger culprit) went a little crazy with the whole credit thing. Didn’t have enough in the account, throw it on a Credit Card. Not enough room on the credit card? Call for an increased balance. Can’t get the balance increased? Screw them, transfer the balance over to the new card with a bigger balance. Want a better Car, E-Z payments… I think you can see where this was going. Add to this the fact that I was going to college, so let’s throw in some student loans. In a fairly short time, I managed to dig a pretty deep hole. It wasn’t all bad though. My degree was fresh and with my new family in tow we took off for my first new job out of college. Never mind the shiny new Mobile home we just bought that had a resale value of a badly used Hyundai. And the nightmare began.

While still in school, any credit card stuff was staved off by Student Loans. Those happened once a semester so nothing ever got behind.. I didn’t have to worry about payments because the Student Loan wouldn’t come due until a while after I got the dream job with a huge paycheck. Well, after a little more scrambling, I found that new job, but it didn’t pay as well as I had hoped. Was I annoyed at myself for not getting the paycheck I wanted? No, it was the college advisors fault for not setting my expectations right. Also, several of my classmates had just landed jobs in the pay range I was hoping for, but the critical difference was that they all had Computer Science majors and mine was in Information Systems. I couldn’t hack it for a Computer Science degree so I switched to a BBA program in Information Systems. I did well there, enough to even bring my suffering GPA up, and hey, Information Systems was almost as good as CS, right? Well, that was a resounding ‘NO’. Turns out that having the BBA made it easier to get ‘A’ job, that job was going to universally be a fairly low paying management type job.

By now, I have been living way beyond my means for 3 years of college in anticipation of a plum job that is not going to happen, and I have to take the first thing that comes along. Assistant Manager at a paint store. I was a sad sack. Miserable, unable to use the bulk of what I learned and was good at in the coursework, and not making enough to keep up with the lifestyle expectations I had. Also, all of that debt started coming due.

Apologies for that detailed description of what was going on, but I wanted to convey how easy it was to fall into the debt trap. At this point, FAFO is about to start rolling. I had spent about 6 years doing the FA part. Now I was about to FO. Things are going to move faster now, I promise

Well, the job I was working wasn’t going well. I was feeling shortchanged by life, I wasn’t all that good at my job, and the Debt just kept piling up. Creditors were no longer letting me have balance increases. New cards were not offering me great deals on balance transfers, I was living in a different city from where my mobile home was and attempts to rent it out led to a ton of damage and tenants would just would not pay the rent. Let that home go into foreclosure, Moved to another state, took another job that was horrible. Credit cards began threatening to sue, Student loans were calling and threatening action. Got fired from that job. We ended up in Bankruptcy court. That stopped a lot of the major harassment.. We were lucky in one area though. My inlaws let us move in with them. The city they lived in was nice, clean, had good schools and a thriving economy. My in-laws didn’t like me much, but that was ok, because I wasn’t planning to be around much. When we first got there, my wife had a job carry over from where we were. I took the first job I could find. Then I took a second job so my wife could take care of the kids. Flipped burgers until 4 then I worked on an assembly line until midnight. We sort of recovered, got out of the In law’s house. Rented for a while, then bought a house at probably too high an interest rate, but it was still cheaper than renting. It was a real house this time. I had a lot more humility, and strangely this helped lead to better and better jobs. Then I got in to the world of working for aircraft manufacturers. They paid really, really well. Unfortunately they are really sensitive to economic fluctuations. Got laid off 4 times in as many years. Frankly I blame lefties for that, since everyone was railing against the 1 percent and targeting them with IRS schemes, audits and so on, and the fact that politician were constantly calling out people flying in private jets. Anyway. the whole industry was tanking. There are 4 major aircraft companies out here, alson with tons of subcontractors. I worked for the big guys as well as the subs, and I got laid off 4 times in as many years. We were going to lose the house again. We were facing yet another bankruptcy over nothing. Then we decided to get radical.

During all of this mess, my wife began listening to talk radio. In the mornings, right after getting the oldest kids to school, she would catch Dave Ramsay. I started to listen to him on podcasts while driving. It started making a lot of sense. So we started by getting rid of the credit cards and saving an emergency fund. That alone took off a ton of pressure, and it was actually showing in job performance. Since the bankruptcy, we didn’t have a ton of credit card debt so we got rid of what we had besides the house and the Student loans. Then we had an epiphany. We had gotten our house at almost a steal, put a lot of effort into it, and we figured we had some good equity. What if we sold it and used that equity to buy something else? Obviously we would likely have to move out of the main part of the city and have a bit of a commute, but if we could get the payments down to something really small… So we put our house on the market, figured out what our equity should be, and then began talking to the realtor about finding a really cheap house. Turns out Rural areas can be a lot cheaper than metropolitan areas. There is a downside. You couldn’t get a Mortgage on anything under $50,000. Well, we were ready to take a tar paper shack if need be and we found our current house. It was old, built in 1920. It was beat up. But it did have modern wiring and central heat and air. It would do, and we had enough equity to buy it outright, for cash. With no more house or rent payment, we were able to pay off the student loans. We had no credit card payments, no car payments, and we rebuilt our emergency fund. Then we discovered something else. There are many home improvement projects that you can do for the cost of a house payment or two. Take Energy efficient windows. To have most of ours done cost a little over $2k. That was less than two months house payment at our old house. Insulating the ceiling, Less than a house payment. Fencing in the backyard, about one and a half payments. Redo on the upstairs plumbing, about half a payment. Building a large back patio, one house payment Adding wall insulation will be about 3 house payments. Granted, we did most of the work ourselves, but for the cost of a year’s worth of house payments, I suspect we will triple the resale value of the house, And we can do this precisely because we have…no payments.

Here is a beautiful thing. If money is tight, I won’t lose the house if I don’t do the projects, where you WILL lose your house if you don’t make your payments. If I lose my job, it’s not the same kind of crisis as it used to be. I can now put the money towards savings and investments. Building wealth. All of my work now ends up making my life better instead of making life better for Capital One. I really want to reply to Samuel Le Jackson. What’s in my wallet? Money. Actual Money.

In conclusion, I’m not extraordinarily lucky. I’m not a super genius. I wasn’t born to wealth. I’m actually kind of an idiot. But if I can manage this, you can too..

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Commentary Opinion Politics The Constitution The Law

The Second Amendment isn’t just about hunting or self defense.

We the people

The Second Amendment isn’t just about hunting or self defense.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The second amendment to the constitution carries a lot of meaning in a single sentence. There is a whole lot of creative misunderstanding, prevarication, and bullshit surrounding it and most of that can be traced back to the very same sort of people who the amendment was written to protect us from. So lets clear some of that up, shall we…

The first phrase of this amendment is where a lot of people try to find a loophole. “Militia means Military” they might say. Or they might go for the “Well regulated” part. They do this without understanding the meaning of those terms let’s take this in parts.

Militia, contrary to wide belief, does not mean Military. Or perhaps I should say, it does not mean a state sponsored standing army. Nor does it mean a crazy, armed, fringe group that likes to think of itself as an army. In the late 1700’s, “Militia” was a term that encompased the concept of a citizen soldier. A citizen soldier is a person who is prepared to fight, physically if necessary, for his community. Community could mean his house, his neighborhood, his town, what ever. The unit was of greater import than the individual, and the individual was willing to fight for it. If you look at the early actions of the Revolutionary War, a great deal of the fighting was conducted by people exactly like that. They were not organized in any great fashion. At Lexington and Concord, there was a couple of local leaders, a Captain and a Colonel and even a local Doctor that led American troops into the conflict. Captain John Parker was a Captain in the British army many years before Lexington. He no longer held any sort of formal active rank and was willing and able to fight for his community. Dr. Joseph Warren was a Physician who was locally active, was granted a commission to the rank of Major General by the colonies militia and chose to fight as a private at the battle of Bunker Hill, where he was killed. Those are examples of what a Militia man is supposed to be. Someone who is willing to fight for his community, a Citizen Soldier. You can look up Minutemen and other groups for more outstanding examples. The more germaine point is that there is no requirement for you to be a part of any formal organized fighting force.

The second highly misunderstood part of that phrase is “Well Regulated”. Back at the time of the founding, regulated did not mean subject to laws and ordinances and every sort of government control. People today conflate and confuse that with the term “regulation” as used in things like “Environmental regulation” or “business regulations”. Modern usage usually implies that there is a formal law or rule and that violation of that means you can be subjected to some kind of penalty. Back then, it simply meant “under control”. Under whose control? The amendment doesn’t say. I do know that many of the founders had a deep distrust of the idea of a standing army. They also specifically said in another amendment that powers not enumerated in the Constitution fall to the States or the Individual. Logically, since this does not have a specified power enumerated, then it falls to the people (Tenth Amendment). Congress does have the authority to raise an army, but the President, in the wonderful balancing act, has command.

What “Well Regulated” actually meant was trained and prepared and ready to fight. People also get wrapped up around the idea that the idea was to line up in neat rows and shoot at each other. While that was common enough, the French and Indian War was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and the American fighting men were well aware of guerilla tactics. So the fighting men of the American Revolution had to be ready to go from their peaceful pursuits to ready to fight with a minute’s notice (Minute Men), possibly from concealed positions, and frequently out numbered by what was, at the time, the most powerful military in the world. The author of the Bill of Rights knew this very well, and so that was a very large part of the reasoning. You cannot have a fighting force ready, at a moment’s notice, if they are not allowed to keep weaponry close to hand. I would argue that this was the primary reason for that amendment.

A very close second reason has to do with the second phrase, “being necessary to the security of a free state”. Now security against outside threats is kind of a given, whether it was the British, the unfriendly tribes here and there, the Spanish, and so on. But a crucial word gets lost in there. “Free”. Keep in mind they just finished a bloody, nasty war against what was, at the start, their own government, the Crown. They knew darn well that government overreach was a thing, and they knew all about what happened with notable republics like Rome. They knew that could happen again. The best way to prevent that is to have the general populace to be armed if they so wished. Any possible tyrant would not be able to easily just shut down opposition. Given that class distinctions and Nobility were now moot, the idea of a population at large that could feild an effective fighting force pretty quickly damps down the inclination toward the more brutal power grabs.

A corollary to this has to do not with the text specifically, but rather the concepts. Given that the founders wanted the citizens to be ready to fight, possibly another military, they wanted the citizens to be able to field military grade weaponry. At the time, that meant Sabers, Firearms, bayonets, and even Cannon and Ships with Cannon. I’m not talking about huge wallowing cargo vessels with a couple of guns to deter pirates. I’m talking about fast ships with lot’s of cannon that could take out a small town. Keep that in mind when someone complains about a scary black rifle.

That brings me to the next part. “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. There is really not much to discuss here. I assume that it is really important because it very baldly and clearly states things in a way that really isn’t nuanced at all. One could argue that it is one of the most clear and unambiguous statements in the entire Constitution. In a world of nuance and in a document filled with what some people would call flowery language, this one stands out to me. There is really only one interpretation to this. So I ask those on the Left: What part of “Shall not be infringed” do you NOT understand?

There are a great many and varied opinions on this, but I’ll plainly state my own bias here. I’m pretty much an absolutist. If I have the money and I want to buy a Vulcan mini-gun or a Howitzer, I should be able to. I enjoy going to the range. I have my own little arsenal because I have lived in areas where not being armed was likely to get you killed. I do keep my weapons in a safe manner and I am willing and able to use them, within a minute or less, to defend my life, my family, and my neighbors and in that light consider myself to be a humble militia of one. I’d like to think it’s pretty well regulated.

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Commentary Free Speech Just my own thoughts New Kid on the block Opinion Politics

The other side of Rights: Responsibilities.

Basic Rights.

The other side of Rights: Responsibilities.

By Paul Tiki.

This is kind of a riff on the excellent article written by Old Jarhead. The breakdown of what the founders were thinking and meaning with the concept of Rights was excellent. Rights are not just about what a person CAN do, but also what the government CANNOT do.

There is something else about Rights that is not spoken of, at least not enough, and certainly not in any organized fashion. There is a concept that was not brought up in my civics class in high school, nor was it mentioned in most of my later Political Science classes in college. For every Right you have and exercise, you also have a Responsibility.

To be clear, the Responsibility part of this is based more on Morals than on law, although there can be overlap. Most of the time, your Right to do something comes with the responsibility that you do not use your actions to infringe upon the Right of another citizen. This is where the law is most often involved. Here are some examples.
You have the right to free speech. You can say whatever you want. You have the Responsibility to not say something untrue that will harm another person’s ability to make a living, or damage their reputation in some way. We actually have laws on the books about this one for Slander (when the untruth is spoken) or Libel (when the untruth is written). You won’t go to jail for these, but you can be sued. Just ask President Trump and ABC and NBC if I recall correctly.

You have the Right to associate with who you wish. You have a Responsibility to not let such associations damage other people. This one is a bit nebulous, but here is an example. Your teenage kid is hanging out with that hooligan down the street. He has a Right to do so, but he also has the Responsibility to not participate in and even prevent (if possible) the hooligan from beating up another kid and taking his lunch money. I’m talking about teenagers here, but it also happens with adults, it’s just usually a bit more subtle.

Here is a big one. You have the Right to keep and bear arms. We are allowed by our constitution to buy, own, and use Arms, whether they are Firearms, Axes, Swords, or Pointy Sticks. This is one that the State loves to try to infringe in all sorts of ways. Theoretically, I should be able to carry a rapier on my hip. I suppose I still could, although law enforcement would likely call it probable cause for all manner of grief. The rapier isn’t a great example so let’s get to what the Right of the Second Amendment means and is commonly used for.

Firearms. Pistols, Rifles, Shotguns, Blunderbusses, Black Powder cannons, and so on. Arms, at the time of the Founding, meant all of these. Hell, if you had the money you could buy a frigate with 18 cannon and it be perfectly legal, even though you could, in theory, use it to destroy a small coastal city. But if you do choose to own some form of arms you also have a big Responsibility. You have to keep your arms from causing inappropriate harm. I stress inappropriate for a reason. To use a pistol in self defense is to cause harm appropriately. To use your Arms to stand up to tyranny is to cause harm appropriately. To leave a loaded pistol lying around where a toddler can get to it is where it can cause harm Inappropriately. That is just part of the Responsibility.

Knowing when and how to use it, not using your Arms to commit other crimes, and so on.
The right to peaceable assembly has been in the news a lot of late, in the form of various protests. You do have the right to go out and yell whatever damn fool thing you want and protest and so on. That’s fine. You have the Responsibility when you do so to NOT prevent other people from going and doing things that they need to do. You have a Responsibility to not get so carried away you set someplace on fire.

You have the Right to not incriminate yourself by what you tell the cops. You have the moral Responsibility to help them in most cases, or, at least, not actively hinder them while they are going about their legal and moral duties. This one is a little bit odd, because the Amendment in question was written to prevent an abuse of power common enough in various governments going back to the dawn of time. It’s there to prevent the government from compelling you to speak in a way that would get you in trouble. You see it again and again in modern cop shows or courtroom dramas where the evil government is trying to get some hapless victim to confess to a crime they didn’t commit so the real perpetrator can go free. Sadly that’s based on countless stories through history detailing the same thing.

I think you see where I am going with all of this. Yes, you do have the right to do a lot of things, but every single time you exercise that right, one should always consider, if only briefly, what the Responsibility is.
A very wise person once said “My Right to swing my fist ends where Your nose begins” Most of the Rights we enjoy are just like that. If you give it a moment’s thought, you should be able to figure it out if you just think about My Right, My Fist, and Your Nose.

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