Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Who's Ad Hominuming Who?

Jefferson Davis - Democrat
A recent Facebook post comment complained that an association the post was attempting to make between the KKK and the Democrat Party was unfair. The comment was, perhaps unintentionally, illuminating. The outraged individual (who claims to vote Republican) resorted to a defense in Latin, calling the whole thing an ad hominum attack. It sounds bad if you don't know what "ad hominum" means. The commentator mispelled it by the way calling it an "ad hominium" attack.  What our outraged friend said was, "Such ad hominium arguments leave anyone open to the charge of racism."

Seems like sauce for the gander to me. Just ask any conservative or Republican about ad hominum attacks and charges of racism. We got those thrown at us every day. Ad hominum refers to a claim or argument that is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. In this case the ad hominum argument says:
  1. The KKK was started by Democrats
  2. The KKK is racist
  3. Therefore all Democrats are racists
(obviously a fallacious argument)

or
  1. Democrats belonged to the KKK
  2. The KKK hates black people
  3. Therefore all Democrats hate black people

(also untrue since some Democrats ARE black).

or you could make this argument by introducing new information

  1. The KKK was started by Democrats
  2. The Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats
  3. Segregation laws were enacted by Democrats
  4. Historically, Democrats voted against virtually every law designed to provide women and minorities voting rights, the right to vote, civil rights and equal protection under the law.
  5. The Democrat Party has never apologized for it's history of racism, lynchings, disenfranchisement, Black Codes, and racial segregation laws that imposed a rigid system of officially sanctioned racial segregation in virtually all areas of life.
  6. The Democrat party has NEVER apologized for its history of virulent racism and its role in starting the Civil War.
  7. Therefore what would you conclude if this were the history of the Republican Party we were talking about?
James Earl Ray - Registered Democrat
And yet this is the history of the Democrat Party. Incredibly, though, the charge of racism is constantly being leveled at Republicans who have always voted almost 100% for every single piece of civil rights legislation ever put forward and who fought and died on the side of freeing the slaves in the Civil War. The Republican Party was even the political party of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King till his assassination by James Earl Ray, A Democrat

Does it make sense then that it's Republicans that get the racist label?

The Democrats were asked by one of their own to make a full apology for the party's long history of racism at its convention next time up. They rejected the idea. It's in the past, I suppose and who cares about that? 

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda director once said that if you tell a lie often enough, people will come to believe it.

Looks like he was right!

© 2014 by Tom King

Monday, February 24, 2014

I Will Never Die!


The most profound change in your life comes when you realize that when God says you have eternal life, He means it starts today. We are no longer subject to the kind of death that the human race fears so much. Eternity has already begun for us. If we cease to breathe for a time and sleep for a while then wake when Christ comes for us, then death isn't death at all, but what my grandpa called a "dirt nap".  And oh, the joy when we wake up in that incredible "great gettin' up morning". 

Teach that to your children. It changes everything for them, especially their relationship to the trials, tribulations and the troubles that present themselves when they are growing up. It brings the petty persecutions, the sadness and loneliness of being an adolescent more bearable.

I got a peek at that idea in my senior year at Valley Grande Academy. I made the 500 mile pilgrimage to Weslaco, Texas mostly because there was this girl...


She dumped me the first week for her old boyfriend. I locked myself in my dorm room for 3 days. Our campus pastor, Mike Hansen, dropped by my room to talk. I didn't want to talk. I wanted to be miserable, but I let him in.  He told me something that changed things for me.

He said, "Tom, God has a wonderful girl picked out for you already. This one just wasn't her. She's waiting for you up ahead. You just have to find her."  I got up off the bed, took a shower and went back to living my life. Six more girls dumped me before it finally occurred to me that God might want to be more involved in the selection process. So I got down on my knees and prayed very hard. I said, "God, you pick the next one. I'm done."  Two weeks later the love of my life invited me to sit with her on the bus to Bible camp so we could play guitar and sing. Shortly after that God smacked me up beside the head (literally, I think - there was a sudden shock and I saw stars). He told me as clearly as I've ever heard his voice that this girl was precious to Him and that I was to take care of her.

So I did. But what Pastor Hansen told me taught me something I've never forgot. We live on God's time. He has all the wonderful things we can imagine prepared for us. All we have to do is walk the path he lays out for us. He never promised us unending sunshine and rainbows in this life. What he promised us is that if we trust our hearts and our lives to him that in the end it would be well worth the wait. I'm grateful that God helped me wait to find the other half of me. Together we have begun an eternal life together. I am not afraid anymore like I was that day in my dorm room when I was entertaining notions that my life was doomed to be eternally miserable.

If you come upon a young person who is deeply troubled, sad and discouraged, remind him that eternal life has already begun if he or she will only allow God to give that to them. We may have to walk a rough and rocky road to get there, but the journey is so worth it. Along that road you will find love, you will see the faces of your children as they enter the world, you will see them grow, you will grow closer and closer to your beloved and to God and when it's done you will go home with Jesus - every day a new tomorrow filled with joy unimaginable and nothing the devil can do to you will take that away from you.

 - T. King © 2014

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Margaret Would Have Been So Proud

Margaret Sanger - eugenics enthusiast
In 2012 in New York City alone, out of 56,000 pregnancies among black mothers, 31,328 were aborted and 24,758 were born. There were more black babies killed by abortion than were born. (source: New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene)

It's interesting that conservatives are the only ones appalled by these numbers and the very people who accuse us of racism are the ones promoting abortion on demand. Margaret Sanger would be so proud of white liberal progress toward reducing what she called "...that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and a staunch believer in eugenics.
She is celebrated as a hero by the progressive left to this day.  And, in case you're confused as to who she is talking about in the quote above, here, in her own words, is her plan for reducing the numbers of "that grade of population".

  • "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."  
Who voted solidly for every advance in the rights of black Americans throughout American history?  It was conservative Republicans. Who voted against those rights right up until LBJ came up with a scheme to, in his own words, "...have Negroes voting Democrat for the next 200 years"? 

It certainly wasn't conservative Republicans.

Who wrote the Jim Crow laws?  Who enforced segregation? What party's governors fire-hosed civil rights protesters? What party still treats blacks, not as citizens, but as a separate (but supposedly equal) voting block? What party did Dr. Martin Luther King belong to until the day of his death. (Hint: he wasn't Democrat.)

The statistics from New York show just how successful progressive liberals have been at limiting the growth of the black population. With the horrific rate of abortions, the percentage of blacks in the American population has successfully been limited to somewhere between 11-13%. There's a reason blacks never became a third to a half of the American population as many population growth experts have predicted in the past.

Plans to limit the numbers of black citizens, hatched back in the early 20th century by eugenics enthusiasts like Margaret Sanger and other progressive socialist "liberals" have come to fruition. The numbers of people of color or diminished social standing (the poor) are being "managed" at the cost of literally millions of tiny little lives.

Sounds like a holocaust to me and it's not conservatives who are running the death chambers.

God help us that we have stood by and allowed this to happen.

© 2014 by Tom King



Friday, February 21, 2014

My Thoughts Are Free - My Data, However, Is Not!

I use both Box and Dropbox for sharing files with my clients, friends and family. Got a note from Dropbox clarifying their policy toward providing information to the government. That the new "policy" likely reflects a response to government snooping in their customers' data is, to say the least, troubling.

One could get upset about all this, but given the rather grim picture of the world's end given by the Christian and Hebrew prophets, there seems little point.  I've therefore decided that since the world is evidently going to hell in a progressive handbasket anyway, I'll just not worry about it, live as though I were free and wait for Christ to come.

I'd rather be fearless and trust in God, than live in terror of what the government might do to me. As the old German saying goes. "Sie gedanken sind frei."  Your thoughts are free.

Here's Dropbox's new policy regarding government data requests. Dropbox says it's going to tell customers when the feds have been snooping around in their data. I'm betting they won't be allowed to.

© 2014 by Tom King

Monday, February 17, 2014

Deepak Chopra is Full of It!

According to Deepak Chopra, "Religion is belief in someone else's experience. Spirituality is having your own." Chopra, in my opinion, is full of crap. Let's go to the dictionary.

A "religion" is a system of belief shared by either a group of people or professed by an individual. This system of belief informs ones actions and behaviors. A religion may be practiced as part of an organized church or association of practitioners. It may feature a belief in a deity, but it does not have to. Atheism, for instance, could be said to be one's "religion".

The term "spirituality" on the other hand, lacks a definitive definition that everyone accepts. Social scientists call spirituality "the search for the sacred" which pretty much means anything you want it to mean. In practice, spirituality generally is treated as a vague feeling of some nebulous connection to some higher spiritual plane by those who claim to be spiritual.

Look, I can buy spirituality as the "search for the sacred", if it results in your actually finding something sacred to believe in. If on the other hand, spirituality is a catch-all term for "believing God, if he happens to exist, approves of pretty much anything you do and most likely won't extinguish you from the university by refusing to prolong your wishy-washy life any longer than the usual threescore and ten, then I don't find being "spiritual" of any practical use.

Every person primarily sees himself or herself as one who serves or one who is served. We either see our primary duty as either to give to the world or to take from the world. The servant, who follows a religion, serves his beliefs whether it be the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments or whatever tenets his faith offers him as guidance for his life. One who is merely spiritual may drift with whatever winds blow down from above or below as the case may be. Because he has not tenets to his faith, the so-called "spiritual" man may, as Chopra puts it, create his own beliefs from whatever handy materials that suit his own inclinations.

The spiritual man has the luxury of believing whatever is convenient and rejecting anything that doesn't make him "feel" that vaguely self-satisfied emotion that seems to be a primary feature of being "spiritual".  We are in the midst of a paradigm shift where things related to the spiritual life are concerned. We seem to be moving away from a belief that one's spiritual life should be based on reasoned principals which shape our actions and behaviors accordingly. What is being offered instead is a spiritual life based upon, not reason and principal, but upon feelings and opinions  created by our own actions and behaviors, prejudices and personal comfort.

One way, the spiritual life derives from God's guidance. The other way, the spiritual life derives from ourselves and what feels right to us as though we were the god, providing ourselves with guidance. That's pretty much what Chopra says in the quote I led with.

The world is being turned upside down. Soon those whose religion comes from God rather than from themselves, may fall off the planet. I suspect the Second Coming will be timed to catch them.

© 2014 by Tom King




Monday, February 10, 2014

SHOULD They Change the Washington Redskins' Name

This time let's make it something more appropriate for a DC football team.

They're still going on in the mainstream press about changing the name of the Washington Redskins.  Well, I think they should change it. Redskins is too good a name for a team from DC. I have several names that spring to mind.   

How about the Washington Politicians? I for one would thoroughly enjoy seeing them trounced repeatedly under that name. That name probably wouldn't help their win/loss record much, but then, who cares?  After all, it's Washington DC. They're like the Fabulous Freebirds of American Cities. Naming your sports teams for politicians probably isn't a good idea, though. Not if you hope to win regularly. Remember, the Texas Rangers were once the Washington Senators and look how long it took them to shake that stigma and get into the playoffs.  As a Cowboy fan of long standing, I wouldn't mind if Washington got beat up on for a few decades.

But I have lots of cool suggestions for the Washington Redskin name change:
  1. The Washington Politicians (logo - a big chicken in a pot)
  2. The Washington Bureaucrats (leave the helmet blank - they'll never be able to agree on a logo)
  3. The Washington Interns (the uniforms would come with Chap Stick and knee pads)
  4. The Washington Media Consultants (they could wear those stylish black trenchcoats everybody in Washington wears)
  5. The Washington Lobbyists (the team logo could be a martini glass)
  6. The Washington Corporate Shills (team logo - a stack of cash)
  7. The Washington Insiders (again - black trenchcoats but with sunglasses)
  8. The Washington Parasites (a half donkey/elephant motif I'm thinking or possibly a tick because I'm not sure anyone would recognize a picture of a leach)
  9. The Washington Political Hacks (Keith Olbermann in dark glasses)
  10. The Washington Talking Heads (the head of Dan Rather)
  11. The Washington Pundits (Dick Morris and James Carville silhouettes - one on each side)
Ooh, I know.  How about this?

The Washington Progressives  
(This could be their helmet)


The possibilities are almost endless.

I know - What with the latest round of debt ceiling extensions we could call them:

The Washington Wastrels

How about this helmet design for:

The Washington Lobbyists




Or my favorite....

The Washington Parasites



So many entertaining possibilities, BUT this is the best one I've seen yet.  It solves the problem entirely without changing the team's name. Just need a new logo!





© 2014 by Tom King

Friday, February 7, 2014

One is a Tragedy: 10,000, a Statistic

Thousands are dead in Muslim-led violence against Christians in Bangui last summer and it's started up again.
C. Africa Crowd Lynches Fleeing Muslim

What the headline does not say is that all this comes on the heels of a wave of horrific Muslim violence against Christians after last year's coup which replaced the elected president with a Muslim usurper.  Except in that bit of violence, it wasn't the death of a single guy who fell off a bus fleeing from angry people that the Muslim para-militaries had been persecuting. 

The anti-Christian violence last year resulted in thousands killed or wounded for no greater crime than being Christian or living in a Christian village. The difference is that along with the rest of the world, Christians are appalled at the brutal death of the Muslim man, but for the death of the many Christians last year, news outlets were virtually silent and unsympathetic. It is said that one death is a tragedy, tens of thousands of deaths is a statistic. This fact makes those who restrain themselves and their fellow believers from murdering wholesale, vulnerable to being cast as monsters in the "if it bleeds, it leads" modern media. The media excels at wringing public tears from personal tragedies. They are utterly hopeless at making people feel the same pitch of emotion over the systematic murder thousands. The violence does get reported but in sweeping general terms. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the individualized pathos has been missing - until now.

No doubt someone in the media will use this story to gin up sympathy for persecuted Muslims and try to pin it on Christian hate-mongers. The story does make a last minute mention of the fact that the Muslims were doing far worse to Christians last summer. It also hints that not all of the participants or even the persecuted were, in fact, Christian. Other media outlets will not be even close to that accurate when they tell the story.

To be fair the media has semi-consistently reported  on the violence against Christians (back on page 10 or 12), but it's all seemed rather without any real enthusiasm. There's an almost embarrassed tone some journalist get when they're talking about Christians who have been wronged, but then they get downright teary-eyed over an Israeli missile attack on a Palestinian village/terrorist missile launching base or a Muslim beaten to death by a mob, some of whom come from Christian villages. The media may appear to give coverage to both sides of the story, but reporters learn in journalism school, just how to tune the data to fit the story in your head and just who they ought to tune out. It would be nice if we could get as much outrage out of the Muslim media over the persecution of Christians as you get from Christian media over persecution of Muslims.

Jesus said that if they persecuted Him, we could expect they would persecute us. All that we really can do about that is pray for them that persecute us. We're under orders to do so from our Commander.

© 2014 by Tom King