Protecting America's Youth from Tim Tebow

Okay, I have to follow up here. I'm getting fire from the left over my Tebow post. I have a question for those who find Tim's behavior unacceptable.

Is it that you find public Christian prayer offensive? Are you afraid the impressionable youth of America might look up from their game of Halo II or III or whatever it is and break out in a bad case of Christianity.

Again, I ask, "So what if Tebow takes a knee?"

A lot of more conservative folk find the public spectacle of two Navy women locking lips on a pier disturbing. The same critics who find Tebow's prayer disturbing, ask us to not only overlook this sort of public display of belief without comment, but to indure the interminable accolades of the press for the "bravery" these women have shown.

I myself have never said a critical word about what the two lesbian Navy gals did.  It's a free country. They can smooch if they want to.

But, whether we agree or disagree with a person's public actions, it is fair to say we cannot go inside a person's head and divine a motive other than one expressed openly by the actor. Perhaps the Navy girls were merely demonstrating their love for one another. Perhaps they were flaunting their sexuality to piss off people who think their behavior deviant. It is not for me or you to attach any meaning to their behavior other than the meaning they themselves express verbally. They did state they that they knew this act was making a statement about being gay. Mystery solved. We now know what they intended. Evidently some shipmates bought extra raffle tickets to help stack the deck so their lesbian shipmate would be awarded the traditional "first kiss". A crowd of gay rights supporters were at the pier to cheer on the couple. They have every right to make whatever public statement they want to make.

Same with Tebow. So what if you think his religion absurd. He has the right to express it so long as it hurts no one or threatens their physical safety.

Critics claim Jesus condemned public prayer of this sort "somewhere in the Bible"  Well, yes, Jesus did condemn the words of one public prayer. The words of the prayer were spoken aloud by a Pharisee. "Thank God I am not like that wicked tax collector over there." Christ condemned the Pharisee's condemnation without knowledge of his fellow believer who's prayer was, "God be merciful to me a sinner." That second prayer was also a public one and was not condemned by Jesus. It's is not that the prayer is public, it is the purpose of the prayer that is important.

The prophet Daniel's life was threatened by a law which forbade anyone to pray to any God other than the King. It was Daniel's custom to pray at the window daily. He did not change that custom simply because an immoral law had been passed. He went to the lion's den for his faith, though it would have been simpler to shut all his windows and pray in private.

Tim Tebow has physical gifts few people have. People with ordinary physical talents don't become NFL players. He also has some mental gifts because few NFL players become starting quarterbacks (1 in 45?). Tebow receives public accolades for those gifts because he uses them in a public venue.

Tim has much to be thankful for. His mother had difficulty with the pregnancy and docs advised her he would be either stillborn or badly damaged. They recommended an abortion to save her life. Mrs. Tebow refused and carried Tim to term. He was skinny and had difficulty eating when he was born. Needless to say he outgrew it.

To me that's reason enough to "take a knee" in gratitude, I don't care who finds it "an absurdity". And unless you guys are mind-readers, you cannot say with any certainty what his true motives are.

His critics have a right to comment. I'm just not sure why they think it's important to do so.

Are they protecting America's youth from corruption by Christians?

Okay, I can see that. You wouldn't want that going around. People might start treating others the way they want to be treated. Once that sort of thing gets started, God knows where it will end.

Tom King
(c) 2011

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Tim Tebow

Poor old Tim Tebow has been the topic du' jour among fans and critics alike lately. Apparently he prays before games and stuff.

His critics say he's "shoving religion down people's throats. To prove there's something wrong with praying on the sidelines, the sports and political press have really been working hard to find some sin or other they can pin on him so they can call him a hypocrite - without much luck, yet.


I don't get it.

If Tebow were to don feathers and do a little dance to the "Great Spirit" or bowed toward Mecca or burned some incense to a little golden Buddha he kept on the sidelines for spiritual comfort, the media would be all over the story.  Tim would be bravely practicing his faith in the face of great persecution. There would be feature articles and interviews aplent.  But because Tim's a Christian he's supposed to be "shoving his religion down people's throats". 

This is, of course, preposterous. The fact Tebow's critics can raise their voices to ridicule and mock Tebow's expression of personal faith merely proves that their throats are entirely free of any residue of Tebow's Christianity. 


C'mon guys. Check it out. Freedom of religious expression is one of the cornerstones of our way of life here in the United States. If Tebow was a Buddhist or Muslim or Native American shaman, you'd not hear one word of criticism from me. I am allowed to kneel and pray wherever I want to, so I respect the right of others to practice their own religion so long as it does not interfere with my right to not participate. I am allowed to practice my faith despite the fact that I'm in the majority religiously speaking.


If someone held a gun on the fans at Bronco games and made them recite the Lord's Prayer, I'd see what they were complaining about. But they're not. Tebow's periodic take-a-knee thank-you's to God force no one to change their beliefs, their behavior or their religious practices. They threaten no one's safety. They have no influence on the outcome of the game (though if you believe in magic or that God cares about how football games come out, I suppose you could argue that Tebow's prayers do impact whether or not Denver scores or not.  In that case, though, all you'd need to do is pray for the other team to neutralize it.

Unless, of course, you think Tebow's more holy than you and therefore a more powerful prayer. In which case you should apply to the NFL commissioner (whoever that is these days) to have the practice outlawed on the grounds that God is cheating for the Denver Broncos.  

I'd love to see the commish make a ruling on that one!

And, by the way. Christianity is not contagious. It's a choice and no easy choice at that. You can't become a Christian just by touching one or being near one that is praying. Tebow shouldn't be treated like a leper for being openly Christian any more than you should treat gay people like dirt for being openly gay.

Sometimes I think Tebow's critics have seen one too many Exorcist movies. Perhaps they fear that he's going to start exorcising demons from the NFL next. If he does, expect to see the Detroit Lions burst into flames any day now.


Relax, guys. Tebow's just praying. He's not reporting you to the Sunday School teacher with the boney finger that once told you that you were going to hell for whatever it was you were doing or touching that you weren't supposed to be doing or touching.

I'm just saying,

Tom

(c) 2011 by Tom King

There Ain't Enough Youtube Videos in the World...

(c) 2011 by Tom King



What?  Me worry?

 Why is it that Ron Paul people think that if you just watch enough Youtube videos you'll finally recognize the genius of Ron Paul and join their cult?
I'm sorry if that offends some of you. I have some friends who are rabid Paulistas and I do realize they have come to support Congressman Paul as a result of many hours of viewing Youtube videos and studying conspiracy theories. I know this because they keep sending me the same cut and paste Ron Paul talking points and keep repeating the same things over and over and over without variation. They send me link after link to videos that will "absolutely convince me".  If I present any argument whatever, they inevitably ignore it completely and accuse me of "not watching the videos I sent you".

Let me repeat this one more time.  I've read Ron Paul's writings. I've seen the videos about "blowback", about what really happened with 9/11, about how the Jewish bankers are destroying our economy, about how Israel doesn't need our support and we're only making it worse, about how our mere presence in the middle east is why Muslims hate us, about how the Japanese wouldn't have attacked us at Pearl Harbor if we hadn't provoked them by not selling them oil and war materials for them to use in their slaughter of Chinese, Koreans and Southeast Asians (the latest new Paulista talking point).

Every video I view, every Ron Paul speech or debate appearance I see, every cut and paste, 20 page e-mail I've read has only served to convince me even more that Ron Paul is not someone I'd vote for.

Period!

End of discussion.
I'm almost voting against Ron Paul's supporters.  Congressman Paul, I actually kind of like, even though he's way off base on Foreign Policy (and yes I've seen that video too).
Here we are at the end of the world and I'm watching the devil slice up the last remaining humans who have any sense, setting them against each other and confusing them with lies, conspiracy theories, racism, drugs and arrogance.  It's live and in color and ends with the Second Coming.

Those of us who manage to avoid being anal-probed will be heading for the mountains to hide soon. They'll be coming after us because of our unbelief in whichever "messiah" ascends the throne next, whether it's Obama or Ron Paul. Either one of them - their followers give me the willies. I promise you, if it's Ron Paul vs. Obama, I plan to fake my own death and disappear into the forest. Thank goodness I'm carrying enough weight on me to last a few months after the food runs out.

Just one man's opinion though. Feel free to pay no attention at all.

Tom

How We Could Have Prevented Pearl Harbor

But would it have been a good idea?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

I came across this puzzling statement today on a Facebook post about Pearl Harbor. "Japs wouldn't have even bombed us if we gave them the oil we promised for helping us in WWI."

Disregarding the racist slur that came along with the poster's apparent compassion for those who bombed us, I had to ask, "What is it with people thinking that it's our own fault every time some foreign nation bombs us, knocks down a skyscraper or blows up an embassy?"

Ron Paul during the Republican Forum on Fox the other day, blamed American policy in the Middle-East for 9/11 as though somehow we could and should be able to control the behavior of fanatical Muslim terrorists through smarter foreign policy.

This whole idea that we're somehow smart enough to figure out how to control the world's behavior is exactly what got us into all this in the first place.

We thought we could control Japan which was busily trying to create an Asia-Pacific empire at the time. We cut off selling them oil and steel because they were murdering innocent civilians in China by the millions. We thought it would make them stop murdering Chinese. Instead the Japanese got mad because we got in their way by refusing to sell them the tools that would allow them to keep murdering people.  So they attacked us. Chamberlain thought that if he gave the Germans the Sudentenland (which wasn't actually his to give away in the first place), then Hitler would leave the British alone. Next thing he knew the British were up to their eyes in German bombers.

I suppose technically this Facebook goober is correct. If we had just sold them the oil and steel they wanted, the Japanese probably wouldn't have attacked us on December 7, 1942.

If we'd have given them the oil they would have instead gone on to take China, to brutalize hundreds more cities as they did Nanking. Then, when they'd built a huge Asian empire, they'd still have bombed Pearl Harbor (just not till they'd conquered the northern resource areas (Manchuria/Siberia) and didn't need our oil and steel anymore.  It just wouldn't have been on December 7, 1942.  They they'd have attacked San Diego Harbor, San Francisco Harbor, New York Harbor, the ports of Houston, Charleston, Seattle, Miami, Mobile and on and on and on.

And we'd have been surprised because a whole lot of us don't really believe in evil. We think, like the B.F. Skinner behaviorists, that behavior is a result of external conditioning. Lots of us don't really believe in free will. We think everyone can be good if we just give them the right cookies at the right time.

But it doesn't work. You might get your kids to behave for a while, but once they are out of your control, they will do what they want to do - what they choose to do. 

On the international level, if we gave every cent we had to everybody that thought they had a grievance against us, we'd not only be broke, but they would all hate us even more because we were out of money. They'd have come to rely on it.  And, even if we did have unlimited money and gave it to them as fast as they could grab handfuls of it, they'd still hate us just like very spoiled rich kids hate their parents.

You cannot buy peace. Evil is evil. The lust for power exists and those who are evil and who lust for power need no excuse for committing acts of treachery. Oh, they will inevitably make up some sort of excuse, but that's more for you than for them. They will excuse their own behavior because of some sort of perceived slight on the part of their victims and then do or take whatever they want. They'll do it time and again until their conscience will no longer function and they have no sense of guilt anymore. When they stop making excuses you're in real trouble.

And that's pretty much when evil people self-destruct - when they don't care anymore.

The wages of sin, we are told, is death.*

Anyone who raises his hand against another, to take what does not belong to him whether it's money, land or power, commits a sin. The United States is one of the few powerful nations in Earth's history that ever chose to renounce taking the fruits of conquest. The Soviet Union planned an empire. China has never given up the idea. Even Britain still has an empire. In the last century, however, every territory won in battle by US forces has been given back to its people. In some cases, island nations, offered their independence chose to remain US territories. Others chose to be independent. Some chose poorly. Nations which attacked us unprovoked were conquered and not only freed, but we helped rebuild them.

Yet, but it seems, if you listens to the apologists, we are supposed to be the bad guys somehow.  Well, I don't think so. Yes, we've meddled in the Middle East. We helped them build oil fields and become wealthy - at least in nations where the people did not tolerate tyrants and dictators. We did not set up the nation of Israel. That was the British. All we've done is protect its existence. In return Israel has been a friend and ally in the region. We've had friendly relations with many largley Muslim nations, but remember. All Arabs are not Muslim and many are businessmen before they are religionists. We are not responsible if the religious authorities don't like us having a military base in Saudi Arabia. Nations deal with nations, not with churches.

Suppose the Christian church in the US were to demand that all mosques in the US be destroyed or that any Christian who becomes a Muslim should be killed. Would that be right?  Should other nations of the world base their relationship with the US on what the Christian church says or what the US government says.

There is a kind of political schizophrenia that progressive socialists and Ron Paul libertarians get into when talking about the Middle-East. On the one hand, they demand that the Christian church (the majority religion in the US) has no right to participate in, much less dictate US foreign policy. But with the Middle East they tell us that the demands of poorly organized religious authorities (especially the fanatical ones) should be considered above that of the duly constituted political authorities or the citizens of the nations of the Middle East.

With libertarians, the belief is that if we leave everyone else alone, their natural goodness will cause them to reciprocate and treat us well in return. Never mind that it doesn't work with evil people. The proponents of this policy believe that not "meddling" is an effective way to control the behavior of others.

With progressive socialists, it's all part of this same deluded idea that some of us are smart enough to figure out how to make everyone happy, peaceful and cooperative. They've been watching too many episodes of Star Trek in which the peaceful humans have figured out in some non-specific way how to make communism work on Earth. What they miss is the point that it's the power hungry evil planets out there that make the episodes interesting. Even the utopians realize in the end that there is plenty of evil to go around.

We Americans are raised to feel bad about accusing anyone of being bad. We were all raised to be polite. We'd rather so, "Oh, excuse me. My bad." than to have to confront bullies, thugs and evil-doers -even the petty ones. That's why you can watch on Youtube as two girls beat up another in a McDonald's and nobody steps in -- except one elderly lady whose sense of justice was rightly offended. The rest of the bystanders hauled out their cell phones to video tape the fight. Shame on them!

I'm one of those Americans who, though I don't like calling anyone evil, have come to realize that if you don't say or do anything about evil when it presents itself, you are condoning it. I can no longer say, "Excuse me," to some thug that's beating up someone half his size because I'm in his way.  And I don't think our country has any business saying, "My Bad!" when a bunch of nasty evil little minions of Satan fly an airplane full of perfectly good people into a skyscraper full of more perfectly good people.

May those of us who still believe in right and wrong find the courage to stand for what's right. It's no good thinking we can somehow manipulate other nations into doing right. It's a conceit with deadly consequences. It's the difference between the idea that might is right and that might should be used for right only. I distrust those who think their ideology is is powerful enough to manipulate the behavior of whole nations.

We're coming down to a point in history where it may be left to those who stand in the breach to do what is right to to turn the tide of totalitarianism, if it can be turned at all.

Remember the Spartans. Remember the Alamo. Remember Pearl Harbor.

Stand tall and God bless America!

Tom King

*Romand 8:28

It's Ron Paul's Fault I Put a Bullet Through My Flat Screen

Watched the Republican forum tonight. I was impressed with Perry and Gingrich. Both answered well. Romney avoided saying much of anything showing off his skill as a "politician".  Santorum and Bachmann sounded pretty good too.

But if I have to listen to Ron Paul tell Americans one more time that we need to understand what we've done to make the terrorists mad enough to attack us on 9/11.........I'm going to assault my television set.   Then I'm going to send Congressman Paul a bill for replacing my TV set along with a list of reasons why it's his fault that I put a ballpeen hammer through the screen.

You might be a Ron Paul Supporter if.....

1. If you've systematically "liked" every Ron Paul site on Facebook, you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

2. If you've ever told anyone they weren't a "real" conservative, you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

3. If you believe the Constitution guarantees you the right to smoke a doobie, you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

4. If you've written more than 3,000 10-page posts to people who have previously asked you to "Please stop for heaven's sake!" you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

5. If you think the holocaust was then and this is now, you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

6. If your friends have threatened to "defriend" you on Facebook, you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

7. If you know all about how to grow plants under artificial light in your basement, you might be a Ron Paul supporter. 

8. If you whip out Youtube links like Billy the Kid used to whip out his pistol, you might be a Ron Paul supporter. 

9. If you're sure George W. Bush had something to do with 9/11 and Ron Paul is just waiting to be elected before starting the investigation and trials no matter how much he denies it, you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

10. If Jehovah's witnesses hide when you come to their door, you might be a Ron Paul supporter.

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Free Your Mind and Think...

 (c) 2011 by Tom King

 Saw this little gem (right) posted on the Internet. The author should take his own advice to FREE YOUR MIND AND THINK.

Mr. Lester demonstrates a profound lack of understanding as to what money really is and how it works.  Mr. Lester (I'm not sure what the "B" stands for, but here, I think I'll call him, Bob) seems to think money is like cats or old newspapers - something we collect that has little or no purpose once we've hoarded it up. If we keep control of large amounts of money, old Bob assumes we keep others from having any. Bob apparently subscribes to the idea that money and economics is a zero-sum game. Either that, or I suspect Mr. Lester's been watching "Hoarders" on TV, looked around his apartment, felt threatened and needed someone else to identify as a hoarder to take the heat off his own conscience.

Actually, wealthy people, by and large (and with the possible exception of Scrooge McDuck), do use their money - spreading it around, if you will. They buy goods and services, they build businesses that hire people, they lend their money to cities in the form of municipal bonds so our cities can spread the wealth they don't have and keep your streets clear and repaired, your sewers and water pipes working. They buy shares in companies that allow those companies to hire employees to make goods and sell them to us in places like Wal-Mart. Their money builds stores where we buy food. Their money is lent to states and counties (bonds again) so they can build bus lines, airports and rail transit. They pay virtually all of the taxes in this country. More than half of us pay no income tax at all. Bob imagines that wealthy people have these big giant buildings in their backyards, like Scrooge McDuck, where they go and swim in their cash once in a while.

It isn't so.  Bill Gates is fabulously wealth, true. He's becoming a bit of a megalomaniac in his attempts to use his money to meddle in the culture. But at the same time, his enterprises support the state of Washington's welfare programs practically all by themselves through the property and sales taxes Microsoft pays. If Microsoft's, Amazon's and Boeing's owners gave away all their money, as Bob suggests, their companies would soon shut down. They would stop making money and employing people and pretty soon all the money they gave away would be used up and Washington would have to stop feeding the poor, running transit lines and homeless shelters.  State health care and all the state-run liquor stores would have to shut down because they would no longer be subsidized by taxpayers like Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft. Poverty, like some kind of economic vampire, drains the economy of resources with precious little return. The free market economy depends on its members exchanging their labors, their work for food, clothing, shelter, utilities and recreational opportunities. If we build up a huge class of folks who do nothing for those things, the whole thing will one day collapse. We should, of course, help the poor and there ARE those who can give little back in the way of work, although, you'd be surprised how much even the disabled and homeless could give back. I worked in vocational rehab for years and in a pinch, most people can find something to do to help earn their keep, even in a small way.

Good cow, people. Money is not like cats.  If you hoard cats, you have to feed them, take them to the vet and clean up their crappy litter boxes. A cat never hired anyone, never started a company, nor built a road. They consume, producing only good feelings and a lot of soiled kitty litter for the cat owner.  Money is most useless when it is sitting in a vault. Most money is imaginary anyway - just numbers in a computer that tells you how much money you would have if there were actually that many greenbacks in their vault and not just in their computers. Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon. He's not a real billionaire, though many of our Marxist friends firmly believe that he is.

If everybody tried to turn everything of value into cash so they could swim in their money, the U.S. treasury would be up printing hundred dollar bills nonstop, 24 hours a day for months and months and months to create the piles o' cash Bob imagines are sitting around awaiting redistribution. Money has value because it works. Even sitting in a savings account, your money helps me buy my house because it is used to fund my mortgage. I pay it back with interest. If you check it out of the bank so you can take a swim, you don't earn interest and that's all a savings is good for anyway. That and I don't get to build my house, the carpenters have lost their jobs and so on and so on.

There's a serious flaw in Mr. Lester's logic.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

Cain't Get No Satisfaction - More Sniping From the Propeller Heads!

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Just got a cut and paste hit piece on Hermann Cain from a friend of mine who keeps trying to convert me to a certain political cult I will not name here because, frankly, I'm weary of hearing from the fringies about how he's the second coming incarnate. They keep on coming like Jehovah's Witnesses on steroids or something. While I understand the urgency of the potheads, I'm quite at a loss where apparently rational folk like my friend are concerned.

My friend says this (I have included the entire post. To protect my readers from the urge to harm themselves while reading this stuff, I urge them to take any anti-anxiety medication they've before proceeding):

• In this case, I believe RM* is right. Cain is making art out of making
  fools out of a bunch of idiot voters. People today are too damn lazy
  to learn what is at stake. I'm sure the Republican who wins will be one
  who those with BIG MONEY want the obedient sheep to vote for.
  If the stakes weren't so large, this would be funny stuff.
  
  What's Cain's real purpose? Since he has zero chance, what is he
  really accomplishing? Well, he's siphoning a bunch of time from the
  media airwaves and diverting meaningful conversation of real issues
  towards his "brutha from another mutha" talk and his wanna be
  girlfriends. I guess people want to be entertained and not informed.
  In this regard, he is doing his job well. Even when he loses, we will
  see his face on the tube for a long time as he pontificates. For me,
  
  
  I've seen enough of this black-faced GWB and his idiotic 999 stuff !!!!

Boy howdy does that make a deep intellectual argument (that was sarcasm in case some of the people who will be flaming me later missed it). Can you say Occupy Wall Street? Sounds just like some of the man-in-the-street interviews we've been hearing from OWS lately, doesn't it?

So let me get this straight, guys:

If I buy this deft** argument against Herman Cain and your previous diatribes against Israel, the military, the Drug Enforcement Agency, illegal aliens, corporations and Republicans, then, tell me, O' Wise One***, where I can possibly find an isolationist, white, non-Jewish guy to vote for who secretly believes George W. Bush set up explosive charges in the World Trade Centers the night before 9/11 and convinced a bunch of Muslims to fly planes into them the next morning so he could set off the charges and bring down both center towers with two or three thousand people in it, so that he could pay back his buddies at Haliburton by frightening Americans, the British, the French, the Koreans, the Japanese, and several dozen other nations and trick them all into invading Iraq and Afghanistan so he could give Haliburton some juicy no-bid contracts so Haliburton's stock, which he no longer owned any of, would possibly go up?


Now, whooooo could it be who has such powerful credentials?

• It would have to be somebody, of course, who has the support of the propeller heads, conspiracy theorists, ufo trackers and who can draw that all-important Lyndon LaRouche vote.
• It would have to be somebody who can also get the pothead and peacenik vote.
• It would have to be someone who can get the anti-Israel vote, who really understands that what makes Muslims so mad at us is our protection of those pesky Jews and our interference with their plans to drive them into the sea.
• Probably should be someone who knows how to deliver babies and is a Real doctor (not one of those bogus Ph.D. types. Though why that has anything to do with anything, I'm still not sure, but folk smarter than I seem to think it important for some reason and that's good enough for me.**
• Someone who can channel his inner Neville Chamberlain.

Oh my, oh my, who could it be?

• And like my friends say, it would have to be somebody who doesn't have ZERO chance of getting elected.
• It would have to be somebody who doesn't look stupid in the debates when he talks.

Oops. Now I can't think of anybody anymore.

You know, I almost had this one guy in mind, but if he has to look smart in a debate and have better than a zero chance of getting elected.......I guess we're stuck with no candidate and we should just stay home on election day and let the forces of evil have their way****.

Sigh. Let the flaming begin!

Tom King - late of East Texas

*I think RM is some guy off one of the RP blogs and when this was cut and pasted, he just forgot that we have no idea who RM is since it could be Robert McNamara for all I know.
** More sarcasm if you're having trouble keeping up.
*** Yeah, still workin' the sarcasm thing - I can't help myself.
**** Sarcasm continues.... I got tired of doing italics, but you get the idea. It's pretty much all sarcasm.  Sorry, but it's back to daylight squandering time and I'm having reverse jet lag.

The Vatican Goes Whole Hawg Progressive Socialist

(c) 2011 by Tom King

In the wake of the pope's 2011 call for a central world government "with teeth", the Vatican has decided to throw its considerable weight behind centralizing world financial authority behind a "World Bank".

For those of us already nervous about the papacy's newly revived political activism, this announcement comes at a time when the United States is polarized solidly between conservatives and increasingly powerful progressivist forces pressing for greater centralization of authority and a reduction in national sovereignty in favor of world government. The Vatican apparently favors linking trade unions, world governments, international banking and international political parties (not to mention powerful world churches like Roman Catholicism) in establishing this universal world government. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves out everyone who believes central governments are a bad thing.  This proposal would require everyone in the world to accept what would be the ultimate central planning authority.  No matter that it's never worked before in history, that such powerful central authority inevitably commits atrocities and abuses against its own people.  Even the papacy at its height of power threw a downright bloody Inquisition to support its hold on power.  So much for trusting good intentions.

We are facing interesting times for those who believe in free market capitalism, small government, local planning and problem solving.  Liberty, protection of the right to worship, assemble, speak and bear arms will be the first American values to be squashed. Count on it.

Tom King - A Texan in a strange land.

How I Came to Vote Republican

The first presidential candidate I voted for was George McGovern. I didn't vote for him because I particularly like him. I voted for him because I distrusted Richard Nixon and didn't think he should win by a landslide. He did anyway and proved he was a sneaky bugger in short order.

I next voted for James Earl Carter in 1976 because he was a Washington outsider and I didn't like the way Ford was given the nomination for the Republicans.  I figured Carter for an honest man and a Christian.  I was 22 years old.

Something I overheard standing in line for that first vote troubled me. A young woman in front of me in the line said, "I just marked the straight ticket box. It was easier than looking at all those names I don't know and I voted for McGovern anyway."  The idea that people would vote straight ticket without knowing what any of the candidates believed seemed wrong to me and not very bright. With my Carter vote I came to realize that it takes more than being an outsider to administer the country. It takes genuine, workable ideas.

Over the succeeding (or, more accurately) failing) four years, as the gas lines lengthened and the price controls kicked inflation into double digits and we were humiliated and held hostage in Iran, I began listening to the radio messages of a California B-Western actor named Ronald Reagan.  Reagan was the first man I ever voted for in a presidential election and the first one I was ever completely happy with.  And, sadly, the last.

Ronald Reagan taught me that there were still some folk in politics who actually believe all the high-sounding phrases they use in speeches. More importantly, I learned that if you believe in Americans and get out of their way, they can do incredible things. Conservatism made sense to me. I'd seen creeping socialism rob America of it's spirit. I saw conservative leadership turn that around.

The Democrats had their chance to remold American society and all they gave us was malaise -- the same thing Communism gave the Russians and Chinese in the early days of the movement. Much longer and we'd have got some of the horror of the middle days of Russo-Chinese communism, the heyday of Stalin and Mao. Reagan shined a light on the great flaws of big government socialism and disrupted the Democrat-led march to the left.

My Grandpa became a Democrat during the depression and World War II under FDR. In his later years, he talked more and more like Reagan while he continued to vote a straight Democratic ticket. I never talked him away from his loyalty to the Democrat party, but I think he really liked Ronald Reagan and secretly admired him.

Me too, Grandpa.

Tom King, Puyallup, WA
(c) 2011 by Tom King

Why Perry Was Right on the HPV Vaccine

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Okay, before you flame me, just hear me out.  As conservatives, many of us have developed a knee-jerk reaction around certain issues, especially sex, property and religion. When confronted with certain issues, we often spout slogans without really thinking the thing through.  That tendency among conservative voters has nipped presidential candidate Rick Perry on the backside more than once.

One of the “burning” issues that turns folk against Perry has been the executive order he wrote that would have instituted the HPV vaccine program in Texas. Perry had excellent reasons for doing it the way he did. Had conservatives paid attention, they might have actually agreed with how it was done, but emotion got in the way. 

Knee-jerk conservatives thought:

1. This is a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease.
2. This is like handing out condoms in high school. The governor is accusing Texas girls of being promiscuous.
3. My little girl will never be promiscuous!
4. This must be political so the governor must be paying off some drug company or something.
5. Therefore the governor is bad and a tool of the drug companies.

Here’s me thinking it through and putting myself in the governor’s place (a Biblical principle that is ingrained in me):

1. The vaccine prevents a deadly, horrific and often fatal disease with a single shot for a lifetime.
2. The vaccine is thoroughly tested and 100% effective. Side effects are very few as vaccines go.
3. The governor was close friends with a bright, and likable young woman who died from this disease, who could have been saved had she had the vaccine as a kid. By all accounts the governor was greatly affected by her death.
4. HPV can cause cervical cancer.  Thirty women a day are diagnosed with cervical cancer in this country.  Eight of ten women will contract some form of HPV in their lifetime. Sixty percent of college women have some form of HPV by their senior year. You don’t have to actually have sex to contract the disease.
5. For those who don’t want to give the vaccine to their daughters, there’s an opt-out clause.
6. The company that makes the drug only gave a tiny amount to the governor’s campaign – not nearly enough to buy a governor or to make him do something like this totally in the open.

Why opt-out is better than opt-in

Too many conservatives thought the governor was accusing Texas girls of being slutty and, in particularly, their own little girls and they got all offended without thinking it through.  

Now imagine if you will, how it goes down under an opt-in plan:

1. You as a parent have to decide whether your elementary school little girl is going to grow up to be promiscuous or not – something you have very little data upon which to base such a decision.
2. If you fear she might, then you have to “sign ‘er up”, thereby publicly declaring that you doubt your daughter will remain chaste. 
3. You are also telling your daughter you think she won’t be able to keep her pants on when she grows up.
4. You’ve just condemned her to take the “slut” walk down to the school nurse or the health clinic to get a shot that will protect her when, as you obviously believe, she inevitably loses her virginity in the back of someone’s van.
5. Or you don’t get the vaccine, an action which does not affirm your belief in your daughter’s future chastity, only that you don’t want anyone to think your daughter is going to grow up to be a tramp.
6. The inevitable result is that relatively few girls will get the vaccine.

Now imagine the program as an opt-out plan:

1. The vaccine is one of the standard series of shots that all the little girls are receiving. So everyone gets the shots and there is no stigma one way or the other. It’s just something we all do because the law requires it.
2. If you are convinced your little princess won’t ever slip and will remain chaste (as will her future husband), until the day of her wedding, you can march down to the health department and affirm your confidence in your child publicly by opting out.
3. Opting OUT says publicly that your daughter would never do anything naughty and you trust her. Not opting out makes no comment, but simply obeys the law where vaccines are concerned.
4. Her friends will know. Not opting out allows you to insure against your daughter making a mistake without branding her as the opt-in plan does. And lest you think (mistakenly) that no one will ever know if you opted in, remember this.  Your daughter will know and that knowledge may cause her to make all kinds of mistaken judgments about what you think of her.
5. Not only that, but young people are a brutal tribal society. Whether or not your little girl has had the HPV vaccine will, inevitably, become public knowledge, because it’s too convenient a way for kids to sort themselves into groups.  Nasty teenaged boys will, certainly, use that information as a way to brand the “safe” slutty girls whose parents chose to have them vaccinated. I mean, after all, if their parents must think they’re going to be slutty, since they went out of their way to get their daughters protected.  It would be no different than giving your teenage daughter the pill, just in case. It brands her as a “safe” target and sets her up for sexual predators and makes it easier for her to make a "mistake". 

Karen Hughes another Texas governor needs you!

The misinformed uproar over the HPV vaccine was because of the word SEX. Because that word figured into the discussion, a lot of people's eyes glazed over and it became just another sex issue to rant about like sex education or free condoms in high school, and it wasn't that at all. 

Perry did what he thought best and got bit for it.  He could have explained it better, but Perry often neglects the PR.  He needs a Karl Rove and a Karen Hughes on his team to help him articulate what he’s doing. Whoever he’s got now, is reacting, not acting and it’s hurting him.  With Palin out of it, I like the idea of a Perry/Cain ticket more and more. It won’t happen unless Perry gets a stronger support system built around him.

3000 Cut & Paste Pages of Argument & Ron Paul is Still Wrong!



A deer in the headlights

 What is it about Ron Paul supporters that make them so determined to bury you in cut and paste talking points if you are a conservative, but don't like Ron Paul?  I disagree with Ron Paul's drug policy and defense policy positions. So I get assaulted with Ron Paul's 11 point plan (it should be 12 points, but they always leave out the "legalize weed" one for some reason).  Makes me feel like a back-sliding Baptist hiding from the deacons they've sent over to my house because I converted to another denomination. 
 
Ron Paul's idea of defense is to bring all our troops home and huddle up behind our borders - to create a Fortress America if you will.  That seems like a poor idea to me.
 
He seems to think if we leave them alone, the rest of the world will like us. Who does that sound like?  Do the Paulistas really believe every other country thinks like we do? Sure, if you leave America alone, we generally won't bother you either, but can the Paulistas really believe every body else thinks like that, especially when our ancestors got kicked out of every civilized country in the world precisely because we think that way?
 
Gen. George Patton pointed out that no fortress has ever withstood a determined attack. I might add, especially if everyone behind the walls is stoned.
 
I'm just sayin'
 
Tom King
Texan in a strange land.

Do Churches Teach You Not to Think?



The journey that makes the snowflake makes it unique among its brethren for no two journeys are the same.


Up front let me self-identify. I'm a Sevenfth Day Adventist - member in good standing and all that. I know I should leave them alone, but when someone posts a question like this or makes the claim that churches force you to close your mind and accept a kind of forced ignorance, I just can't let the basic assumption behind that claim stand.

A church is, after all, a place where people study and share ideas. Very few congregations have such a rigid structure that there is no exchange of ideas. The sermon alone is a flow of ideas from the speaker to those who hear him. Ministers constantly challenge the comfortable assumptions of their parishioners and invite them to contemplate that which is infinitely beyond themselves. What could be more mind-expanding than that?  What the recipient receives and how it gets interpreted, is entirely up to the listener, but as the Germans say, "Sie gedanken sind frei."  You're thoughts are free.

Holocaust survivor, famed author and psychoanalyst Victor Frankl realized this in a very powerful way when, his family murdered and himself stripped naked and tortured, he discovered that no guard, no SS torturer could reach inside to control who he was in his inner soul.  He discovered that if one has a reason why he should live, if one truly holds love in his heart, he can survive any horror, any trial intact.

Some basic truths I have found:


1. Before a man can clearly look at any set of data, think about it and decide for himself (or herself) what the data means, he must have a mental construct or frame from which to analyze the data and come to a decision as to what to do about it. For some, formal religion or a specific philosophy serves this purpose. Even if you think you don't have a religion or philosophy, you will pick an underlying belief system up from friends or from TV or family -- somewhere, whether you like it or not.  Everyone has a mental framework or belief system. The construction of this framework is the entire work of childhood. Were we not to create a coherent belief system, all the data we absorb would be meaningless. You would be trapped in a kind of perpetual befuddled infancy, unable to decide what was important and meaningful and what was not. There would literally be thoughts you could not think.
2. When that belief system or paradigm is challenged, it causes some level of anxiety.  You experience much greater anxiety if your belief system is fragile or not working very well for you.  You experience far less anxiety or maybe none at all, if you are secure in your intellectual paradigm and can assign meaning to what is happening to you be it good or bad.

3. Shakespeare said, "Methinks thou doth protest too much." When our beliefs are challenged and we are not truly secure in them it disturbs us.  When a challenge to your beliefs is clearly articulated, and you have no ready answer to the challenge it presents, you may experience a fight or flight reaction. Panic may ensue and you resort to fighting, accusation, intimidation or threats against the person who disrupts your comfortable belief system. You do this in order to protect your core beliefs. On the other hand, you may simply flee from it and refuse to look at anything which challenges your beliefs.

4. In truth we all are conservative in our thinking in that we naturally resist changes that threaten the mental structures we rely on to process information. That's why a sudden conversion to a new paradigm can be mentally disorienting and frightening, even if it's a conversion to a better, more stable belief system. 

5.  Ultimately, the strength of our belief system depends heavily upon how much thoughtful work you put into constructing that belief system. If you never examine what you believe; if you never purposefully consider what you believe; if you do not consciously accept ideas that make sense to you and reject ideas that you find through study and research are without value, then you never really develop the ability to resist the instincts of the herd. It's how the Germans both knew about the holocaust, but could claim, honestly that they didn't. Their unconscious belief system accepted the idea that something should be done about the Jews - everyone believed it, didn't they?  At the same time they simply avoided thinking about what that meant in terms of actually doing something about the Jewish problem.

Conclusion: We each begin our search for God or for some kind of enlightenment from exactly where we stand. There is no other way. If God is up there (and I believe firmly that He is), then He is quite capable of locating us where we are and bringing us to Himself along a straight and narrow path. Remember, though that the world is a three dimensional place. We all, if searching sincerely for God, will find Him and meet at His feet. But because we all start in different places, it is conceivable that our paths might never cross except at the end. It's pretty certain, in fact, that no two of us will ever experience the journey in quite the same way. That is why, like snowflakes, no two of us are ever exactly alike.

And that, my friends, is, I believe exactly how God intended for things to work. Our work is to search for truth, to examine our beliefs and to choose whether we wish to love outward or to do the opposite which according to Elie Weisel is indifference. Indifference is what happens when you turn love completely inward and no longer care about anything or anyone outside yourself.
 
Me, I choose love; the powerful reaching out beyond yourself toward infinite love that transforms the soul and leads you home. I choose love every day of my life. In the meantime, may you find for yourself that path that leaves you strong, self-aware, and truly possessed of free will as God intended.
 
Till then, I'll see you at the journey's end.
 
Tom
(c) 2011

Widdershins

The word of the day, as sent to me by Miriam-Webster was "widdershins".  It's an old word meaning "in a left-handed or contrary direction."  I just love this word and fully intend to use it whenever I can. It's absolutely perfect. It comes from the medieval belief that demons always approach the devil from the left. A left-handed, counter clockwise or 'widdershins' path was considered evil or at the very least, bad luck for the person who took it. By the 1500s it had taken its somewhat less sinister current meaning.

Were I to use it in a sentence, I'd say, "The United States is totally widdershins and we may soon find ourselves unable to stop it!" 

It's interesting to note that originally, widdershins meant "bad hair" and describes hair that stands out in all the wrong directions. I submit the following photo from the recent "Occupy Wall Street" protests without comment.

article (c) 2011

NP Quarterly Takes a Swipe at Another Conservative Philanthropist

Got my Nonprofit Quarterly today and found an article entitled, "Art Pope, Bankroller of North Carolina's Republican Agenda, Tells All" by Jeff Cohen. I read it with interest, thinking to hear Mr. Pope's side of the issue. Instead I was directed to a New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer that did everything BUT give Mr. Pope's side of the issue.



Art Pope during his days as a NC Legislator

 Mr. Cohen meanwhile suggested the New Yorker piece would tell you what made Art Pope "tick". It doesn't. Mr. Cohen tried to sound fair, but he did manage to get in a couple of comparison's to the Koch Brothers and used perjorative words like "secretive" and "tea party" (at least tea party is perjorative to liberals, many of whom apparently subscribe to NPQ).  Interesting that Mr. Cohen never touches on the overwhelming contributions by individual liberal cause-funders, many of whom dwarf what conservatives like Pope or the Kochs spend.

In a Newsobserver.com story by Rob Christensen about Mr. Pope, Christensen quotes veteran Raleigh political analyst, John Davis. "The Democrats have always had the ability to win the close races because they outspend the Republicans 3-1, 4-1, 5-1. That disparity has been eliminated by the new independent expenditure laws," Davis said. "I know the Democrats are frustrated by the fact that they can no longer run over Republicans with their financial advantage, but frankly they have had an undue influence over the legislative politics of this state for decades because they were able to get extraordinary financial advantage."

Davis adds, "Money flows to power, and Democrats have always had the power - the president pro tem of the Senate, the speaker of the House and the governor," Davis goes on to say. "There has never been anyone to stand up to the union support for the Democratic Party and the business support for the Democratic Party,"

Pope, himself, says. "Part of my decision to give more than usual is to try to offset the advantages that the Democratic Party has."

Pope believes his political contributions should be seen in the context of his family's larger philanthropy on a wide range of community projects such as $1 million for a new hospice building and $1 million to help move the new Campbell University law school to downtown Raleigh. His family also gives to local universities, food banks and indigent health care.

"What we give politically," Pope points out, "Is a fraction of what we give to charity,"

The New Yorker story is typically pro-Democrat and basically spends its ink whining because Pope, a North Carolinian with experience as an elected North Carolina legislator, is spending money to help break the hold of Democrats on power in North Carolina.

It's ironic that those who claim to believe so strongly in "diversity", object so strongly to a publicly expressed second opinion when it comes to politics.

Cohen, in the Nonprofit Quarterly article, of course, gets in a shot at the evil Koch brothers who actually have donated to Democrats and to organizations with liberal leanings. He fails, however, to touch on the obvious other side of the coin, avoiding mention of pro-liberal agenda philanthropists like conservative bugbear George Soros, whose charitable contributions are almost entirely about driving a political agenda. Soros and other big name billionaires spend folk like the Koch brothers and Art Pope under the table on political agenda driving.

So, why don't we hear any complaints about attempts by progressives to "buy the government", especially in a publication that bills itself as the Harvard Business Review of the nonprofit world and is supposed to be politically neutral?

The simple answer is, because folk like Jane Mayer and Jeff Cohen approve of money driving agendas, so long as the agenda is one with which they agree - specifically larger government. Since the objective of the conservative groups the Pope Family is funding is limited government, Pope draws the wrath of those who currently have a huge stake in growing their political power. Pope has further angered liberal media pundits and North Carolina Democrats by helping organize and sponsor Tea Party rallies and meetings around the state. (Insert gasp here!)

In the meantime, I don't suppose the nonprofits that are receiving Pope checks are complaining that the Pope family are driving a pro-education/pro-healthcare/anti-poverty agenda with their funding of hospital indigent care programs, hospices, universities and food banks.
Democrats claim Pope supports candidates that are "bad for North Carolina". While it's true that more elected Republicans might certainly be bad for North Carolina Democrats, others, Pope among them, cite the recent record of Democratic rule as one of failure - including corruption cases, a broken probation system, a troubled mental health system, a high school dropout rate, a recent tax hike, and budget problems.

As Pope points out, two senate candidates in recent years Democratic Senate candidates John Edwards and Erskine Bowles each spent far more of their own money on their campaigns than Art Pope has put into North Carolina conservative political groups.  If Art Pope is buying the state, as Ms. Mayer claims, he's going to have to come up with far more than he has so far, because his political adversaries are still out-spending him and have been for a very, very long time.

None of the article I read were by conservatives. The Newsobserver article was at least balanced and gave both sides of the story, allowing the reader to decide what to believe about Art Pope. The American system allows for dissent by American citizens. Perhaps, in recommending an article like the one Cohen gushes over in the New Yorker, Nonprofit Quarterly should also include a link to something that at least gives the other side of the story. Pope may be bad for Dems, but he apparently is generous with nonprofits. The question I'd ask?  Is Nonprofit Quarterly about what's good for a liberal political agenda or what's good for funding our nonprofits?

If it's about funding worthy causes, the Pope Family Foundation certainly deserves a pat on the back for its stewardship whatever you think of its politics.

(c) 2011 by Tom King

What if Mother Nature Wants Global Warming?



Mother Nature's Carbon Emissions
Lightning Strike Forest Fires



(c) 2011 by Tom King

There's nothing quite as surreal as a bunch of banjo players arguing about anthropogenic global warming. Fortunately the discussion takes place on-line. If we were all in the same room someone would likely get the El-Kabong treatment. If you don't remember Quick Draw McGraw, the cartoon horse/sheriff, you won't get the El Kabong reference. Trust me the El-Kabong treatment is painful, especially when banjos are involved.

What got me into this was being still hacked off at environmentalist meddlers who sicked the feds on Gibson (the guitar and banjo maker in Nashville) about some imported rosewood fingerbords.  Anyway after 19 pages of dueling web-links and some serious name-calling and one schmuck getting banned from the Banjo Hangout, I have a question or two for the Anthropogenic Global Warning (AGW) folks.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, granted, man has been pumping out carbon and other greenhouse gases from manufacturing, transportation and other things. But, at the same time, some things have changed that should have reduced the total output of greenhouse gasses:


1.We went from using horses and oxen to using mechanical cars, trucks, tractors, etc.. This would have reduced the number of horses drastically AND thus the amount of horse manure produced by said horses and thus the amount of methane-rich horse and oxen flatulence released into the atmosphere. I've never seen anyone attempt to correct their pollution statistics to include that reduction in pollutants. They used to have guys running all over the big cities with little barrels on wheels scooping up horse poop. They dumped those somewhere and the huge steaming piles had to have kicked a whole lot of methane into the atmosphere. Where are the calculations that take into account that we don't have that going anymore.

2.We fight forest and prairie fires. Hardly a fire starts these days that we don't jump on and try to put out. Back in the 1800s, prairie fires, set by lightening used to burn whole states worth of acreage, uncontested, blanketing huge parts of our country with thick clouds of carbon-laden smoke. I haven't seen any studies that correct pollution or carbon production statistics for the reduction in carbon emissions caused by modern wildfire fighting efforts.

3.As settlements have moved west, areas that were once strictly grassland have been planted with trees to act as windbreaks and landscaping for homes and cities, vastly increasing the number of trees in formerly treeless areas. I have seen estimates that the total acreage planted in trees has actually increased in the past couple of centuries, given man's propensity for tree-planting around his home and the massive tree-planting done by forestry products companies in an effort to restore these resources to harvest again at a later date. What impact has this had on conversion of CO2 into Oxygen and other organic materials and thus the amelioration of atmospheric CO2.

4.There has been a huge reduction in the past 150 years in the size of the great herds of bison that once roamed the prairies. It seems there is an assumption that domestic cattle replaced the bison at a 1 to 1 ratio or less, yet I see no evidence of modern herds of cattle that cover tens of thousands of acres and strip the prairie and lay down carpets of buffalo poop as the great buffalo herds once did. The methane production of a heard of a million or so of those big hairy beasts must have been incredible. Now that they are gone and replaced by their much smaller bovine relatives, where's the correction for what must surely be a reduction in methane production since the huge buffalo herds have gone?

5.The change in home heating and cooling techniques from the smoky wood-burning chimney (some houses had literally dozens of fire-places) to electric, oil and gas heat. Which produces more smoke, modern heating systems or a huge collection of chimneys burning 24/7 in the winter. The cities have certainly had clearer skies since we quit burning so much wood (and more trees were spared from the ax in the process). Has anyone corrected pollution figures from that?

I mean, we assume that we produce more pollution now, but the world was a pretty gritty place just a century or so ago. Horse poop everywhere, inefficient chimneys pouring smoke, vast bison herds, unchecked wildfires burning millions of acres per year, untreated sewerage from cities pouring methane into the atmosphere. Seems to me we should take that into account when we run the numbers on carbon pollution.

Also given that we are carbon-based life forms, you have to wonder if we reduce carbon "pollution", is that for sure a good thing to do?

•  Do we need a little carbon in the atmosphere to support life?
• If so, how much is enough and how much is too much?
• Just because it was "X" amount of atmospheric carbon last century, how can you be sure that's the right amount, especially when, at best, you can only estimate what carbon levels were two, three or ten centuries ago?

It seems to me almost as if some of those on the environmentalist side hold that Earth has deliberately produced certain species and certain mechanisms specifically to take part in creating balance and harmony in nature.  Noted environmentalist, Danny Glover (insert snicker here), says Mother Nature struck Haiti with an earthquake because we didn't get serious enough about global warming at the Copenhagen conference. Environmentalists sometimes seem to be arguing that man is unbalancing those natural balancing systems through his manufacturing and his use of machines for travel (except, of course, for machines being used by Al Gore for travel since he buys carbon offset credits and that makes it okay to fill up the stratosphere with jet aircraft exhaust).

But what if, Mother Nature produced man specifically because there wasn't enough carbon in the atmosphere?  What if she needed us to put out wildfires, cut back on the number of buffalos or evolved us because the beavers weren't building enough dams and she needed some creatures that were really, really good at backing up rivers?

I'm just askin' the question.

What if we're supposed to be warming up the globe?

No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition

I've had it up to here! Now, imagine me holding my hand horizontally just below my chin to indicate where I've had it up to. Everybody's got a pet conspiracy theory to flog or some new "shocking revelation" in their latest book  WELL, THERE IS A CONSPIRACY GOING ON BUT IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK.  The conspiracy theories and wild talk are little more than a smoke screen to divide us, to confuse us and to hide what's really going on. My favorite book says this:

• For our struggle is not against human opponents, but against rulers, authorities, cosmic powers in the darkness around us, and evil spiritual forces in the heavenly realm.  Eph. 6:12

Just quoting that text like I seriously believe it makes me one of those "fundamentalist" Christians that the Georgia chairman of an atheist group, which I shall not dignify by naming here, claimed ought to be "exterminated".  His words not mine. So much for a kindlier tone.

As we engage our brothers and sisters in debate over the issues that face our nation these days, let us remember who it is that seeks to confuse and divide us and for what purpose he wishes to do so. If that confusion and division leads us, in the name of safety and security to accept a huge, intrusive and powerful government as a necessity, then we get what we deserve.

When the children of Israel wanted a powerful King like the other nations had, God warned them that a king would take their daughters for his concubines, take their sons for soldiers, their food to feed his armies and their money to pay for weapons.  He warned them that the kings would take their liberty, their land and their labor and return them only illusions of safety and security. We stand between two belief systems that offere us clear choices - small government or large; freedom or imagined security; independence or dependence. 

That we as a nation are still standing despite the determination of the forces of "hope and change" Progressivism, is a tribute to the tenacity of the American people and the quality of what our forefathers wrought. Voices on every side call for compromise, for acceptance of the inevitable and for handing over our freedom in exchange for promises of security and safety that Paul Simon aptly described as a "pocketful of mumbles".

Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, famously said, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."  I fear the folk who are buying the rhetoric of "hope and change" thinking the kindly government is going to make their car payment for them are going to be in for a nasty shock. Palin was right. No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.*

Tom King - Puyallup, Washington

* And, in case someone wants to draw a link between fundamentalist Christians and the Inquisition, remember please that the Inquisition was a policing arm sponsored by the Roman church and government authorities and they were punishing "heretics" many of whom were convicted of believing the same things fundamentalist Christians hold as principles of faith. If you wonder why fundamentalist Christians fear government, look to what the government sanctioned to be done against us under the Inquisition. And, like I said, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition."
 

Oh, Goody. Another 9/11 Truther Article

It's what I just live for....

by Tom King (c) 2011

A friend sent a link to me today to an article on (Oh, joy, oh rapture) The "Truth" about 9/11 and why we are all stupid if we deny that it was a government conspiracy.

It just never gets old with the "truthers".  They're almost as much fun as the "birthers" and the Elvis Ain't Dead Society. Got another link to a rambling post about how the truther's have it right and everybody else has it wrong.

I'm expected to believe that the same government that can't keep a Congressman's dalliance with the House pages quiet, managed to suppress all hint of the planning of a highly complex domestic terror attack from thousands of police officers, FBI, CIA and NSA agents (not to mention NCIS). I'm supposed to believe that technicians wired hundreds of carefully timed explosives without detection in a building that is full of people 24 hours a day - an explosives demolition job I might add that would require hundreds of expert demolitions people working surreptitiously without detection. And of the thousands involved in the conspiracy, I should also accept that no one talked about it to anyone beforehand; no one warned his Uncle Lou or his Cousin Bob (the sane one, not the crazy one that was recently abducted by aliens and returned to Earth with mind-reading powers); no one noticing that truckloads of unsupervised dynamite or C4 or whatever the latest exotic explosive touted by some impossible to follow up "expert" was being purchased and carried up into a building that had already been targeted once for destruction by Al Quaeda. What? Was Pres. Clinton responsible for that one and I missed the broadcast on KNUT - Paranoia Radio.


Oh, and you'd have had to actually find hundreds if not thousands of Americans who could live with their consciences about killing thousands of their fellow Americans - men, women and children in cold blood - not to mention the hijackers to fly the planes into the buildings to "fake" the attack. Now what exactly was the hijackers' motivation again?  Let me get this straight. They WANTED a nice war in Iraq so that 26,000 Al Quaeda soldiers and leaders could die at the hands of soldiers, SEALS and marines.  Oh, I know what it must be.  They all had Halliburton stock that was going to jump right up after 9/11. The flaw in that is that everybody's stock kinda dropped like a stone after 9/11 and besides they were dead so it's not like it would matter to them.

The truth about 9/11 is that if you hit a skyscraper with 70,000 or so pounds of fully loaded commercial airliner, then burn the upper stories with a full load of highly volatile aviation fuel, that skyscraper is likely going to fall down once stories start pancaking down on one another. The real miracle is that the whole thing didn't fall over sideways, but remained upright.  It was BECAUSE it was so well-engineered that the building remained upright - silly engineers were afraid some hurricane or high winds might tip the building by applying too much lateral force so the thing was structurally designed to remain vertical which is why they collapsed the way they did.

The truth about 9/11 is that people would rather believe in some vast government conspiracy that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and which nobody could ever hope to get away with in the first place, than to deal with the appalling fact that a handful of nut cases with the will and the determination and what, to an Arab oil sheik is but a handful of change could reach out and murder 3000 people without warning. It could happen at any time, anywhere, no matter how hard we try to protect our borders, no matter how hard we try to appease anyone out there who happens to be mad at us.

The best we can do is go over there and murder THE TERRORISTS in their beds. Oh, wait, that's what we're trying to do. Going after the actual guys who did this stuff - now there's an unusual idea. (By the way, I'm NOT advocating the slaughter of innocent Muslims I want to be very clear on that).

The HUGE surprise about this article was the Ron Paul ad at the bottom. I'm just totally shocked. I always thought those guys were so sane and rational................oh, wait. That was Rue Paul supporters I'm thinking of.

Tom

An Open Letter to President Hoffa

 

September 7, 2011

James P. Hoffa

International Brotherhood of Teamsters
25 Louisiana Avenue NW,
Washington, DC 20001

Dear Mr. Hoffa:

You, sir, seem to have no idea who the members of the Tea Party are.  We are not corporate shills. I’ve never received a dime to attend any rally or event, nor been offered any incentive to cast my vote in a certain way – something the Teamster’s Union can’t say with any honesty.  If your recent call for the Teamster’s “to take the son of a bitches out” was designed to intimidate me and other Tea Party members, you badly miscalculated. You have only succeeded in mobilizing us to further action.  All you accomplished was to encourage us to keep our ammunition a little closer and a little more accessible.

Nobody in the Tea Party I belong to declared any war on the unions or on your puppet president. We did however show up to vote last time and we’re going to do it again.  We’re sick and tired of the damage you and our cronies in the Democrat Party are doing to our country.

You can label us, you can threaten us and you can try to intimidate us, but wouldn’t it be better to listen and find out what our concerns are?  Your father thought he could use the Mob to help the union. Maybe you believe you can use the Democrats and the Liberal/Progressives in the same way.  You’re mistaken.

Once they are through with you and have the Worker’s Paradise in place, they’ll have no further need for the Union Brownshirts. Remember the night of the long knives. It’s happened before and it can happen again. Capitalism pays the workers that pay the union dues that keep you in that nice big office of yours in Washington. Don’t kid yourself like your old man did or you could wind up like he did. And it won’t be little old ladies from the Tea Party who did it.  Remember Leon Trotsky. Tyrants have no use for troublemakers.

I’ve sent you a nice unused bag of Lipton Tea.  Make yourself a nice hot cup or better yet, some iced tea and try and remember that the Tea Party folk are regular Americans just like your membership.  We will fight for your right to exist and to speak and to vote the way you wish, even when you call us “sons of bitches”.  The threat, however, was a bit much. We would appreciate it if you’d remember why we fought the Revolution in the first place.  Believe it or not, we’re on the same side.

Tom King

Puyallup, Washington (late of East Texas)