If you imagine the Old West, you are very likely to bring up images of gunslingers shooting each other, gold miners fighting over claims or cattlemen battling each other over herds or water rights. In short, you probably imagine the Old West as hopelessly and unusually violent.

The truth is that the Old West was not any more violent, on a whole, than the rest of the United States in the late 19th century, and in most locales it was significantly safer. The truth is that people mostly got along with each other and formed cooperative local governments to deal with conflict resolution in a peaceful way. And, interestingly, even though most men openly carried guns, crime was significantly lower in general than in most American cities today.

And Utah, settled by Mormons, was, on a whole, one of the safest and crime-free areas of the West.

Consider the following:

*In the cattle towns of Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell for the years from 1870 to 1885, only 45 homicides were reported, an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season. In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, “nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.” Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had five killings in any one year. (Source).

*A detailed study of violence in two of the most violent mining towns in Aurora, Nevada, and Bodie, California shows that property crime rates were very low and that rape was nonexistent. Almost all men carried guns, but the guns mostly served as deterrents. “Robbery of individuals, burglary, and theft occurred only infrequently and rape seems not to have occurred at all. Racial violence and serious juvenile crime were absent also. The homicides that occurred almost invariably resulted from gunfights between willing combatants. The old, the weak, the innocent, the young, and the female were not the targets of violent men. In fact, all people in those categories would have been far safer in Aurora or Bodie than they are today in any major U.S. city. Even most smaller cities and towns are far more crime ridden and dangerous than were Aurora and Bodie.” (Source).

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If there is any doubt that progressivism is progressing to someplace very ugly indeed, I present to you the pro-Obamacare ads put together by a Colorado group. I know, I know, these ads are so bad they seem like they must have been created by a right-wing hit squad, but no, they are actually the production of Colorado progressives led by ProgressNow Colorado and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative.

The Denver Post actually talked to a representative from ProgressNow who said the ads are awesome and stuff.

Without further ado, I present to you modern-day progressivism in all its glory:

Yes, you too can now get “free” birth control by paying $2000 a year more in insurance premiums! Who said millennials cannot add?

And how about that portrayal of women? Yes, all women just want to hook up with random guys and get them “under the covers” because the guy is hot!

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If you like podcasts, I highly recommend the FAIR podcast. FAIR was voted the best religious podcast in 2011, but last year the Ardent Atheist won. If this is not a sign of our times, I don’t know what is.

In any case, let’s see if we can help FAIR win again this year.

For more information, please visit this link.

In the old days, right-wingers would often decry “socialized medicine,” which was a code word for state control of the health care industry. When you think of “socialized medicine,” you can consider the case of the UK, where doctors and nurses are literally employees of the government, but it may be more accurate to consider the cases of Cuba and the former Soviet Union, where everything is controlled by the state.

Obamacare is not socialized medicine. It is fascist medicine.

You are excused if you do not know what fascism truly is. Most people don’t. They are fooled by the false left-right paradigm. Fascists are not and never were “right-wing.” Fascism as an economic system was seen as the “third way” between free-market capitalism and socialism:

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.

So, if you want to use the left-right paradigm, leftists believe in Communism or Socialism and “right-wingers” believe in free-market capitalism. Fascism is right in the middle. So, you could call fascism a “moderate” economic policy, just as Obamacare retains a veneer of capitalism with government control.

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