To My Well-Meaning Lib Friends

 (Libertarian and Liberal)

Prohibition did not make gangsters. They were already there long before prohibition. They were called outlaws and they just shot you in the face and took your money instead of selling you something illegal. Bad guys always find something to do that's illegal - alcohol, drugs, gambling, banks.  If poodles were illegal and expensive, crooks would be running black market poodle smuggling rings. There are always going to be crooks. Nobody makes them be crooks. They choose to be crooks. Crooks always find something to be crooked about. And actually the stuff about Prohibition being a failure is not true.  It's common knowledge that is simply false. Prohibition helped our culture reset. Before prohibition, heavy alcohol use was widely accepted in our culture. It took a generation of children being raised without a whiskey bottle on the breakfast table to break the self-destructive cycle of alcohol abuse.

And yes, Al Quaeda is run by Muslim fanatics, not by the CIA.  The CIA isn't that well-organized.

And if it's our right to smoke pot, take drugs and consume whatever we want to as you say, then will you people please shut up about aspartame, McDonald's hamburgers, statin drugs, pain pills and anything else you keep sending me to "reveal the truth" to me about whatever it is you think is poisoning us!

If you can smoke pot, I should be able to dang well drink a diet soda in peace!

(c) 2013

War on Drugs/War on Terror - A Waste of Time?

If the War on Drugs created more drug users, then will the War on Terror create more terrorists?

That's one proposition being posted all over the web lately by the usual libs (liberals and libertarians).

It's flawed logic.  It's the classic propaganda ploy.  Start with a "truth" that isn't true and then extrapolate a false logic conclusion from it.  In this case, if the War on Drugs created fewer drug users, the premise would fall flat.  And there's no evidence that the war on drugs "created" any more drug users.

Reducing the supply of anything, even drugs makes that thing more expensive.  Nothing will get rid of drug use or people willing to supply drugs.  That's true, But let's look at the current administration's relentless efforts to reduce the price of oil and gas in order to raise the price and force us to reduce our consumption.  It follows that if that works, then if you deliberately reduce the supply of drugs and the price will go up and people will have to either quit or use less. 

Making it all okay and safe to peddle drugs as liberals and libertarians suggest only makes for more drug users we have to take care of in the end.  Besides, contrary to the mythology, Prohibition actually worked.  A recent article in the American Journal of Public Health argues that Prohibition actually was a success in many ways and only failed politically.  Prohibition changed the larger culture from one in which alcohol was pervasive to one in which the majority of the Prohibition-era children were raised in alcohol free homes.  It took years for alcohol consumption to rise and again become pervasive in the culture.  We're only now seeing alcoholism rising again and we will bear the health care costs that go with it if we don't continue to insist upon temperance efforts like the prohibition on advertising addictive substances like alcohol and cigarettes.  If we hope to stem the tide, history shows you have to build levees and dikes. 

Repeal was caused by political failures, the Depression and false promises of greatly increased tax revenues.  It passed, sort or, even though prohibition was still widely supported.  The rate of alcoholism remained low for some years after Repeal because many states and counties kept prohibition laws in place and alcohol had been dislodged from its once ubiquitous place in American homes.  I lived in two counties in Texas that are still "dry", 80 plus years after Prohibition. If you drink, you have to really, really want to drink in Smith and Johnson Counties. The nearest liquor store is in the next county.

Legalization didn't reduce either crime or alcoholism.  The criminals simply found other criminal activities to take up.  It became easier for folk who were already alcoholics to get booze.  But the culture that once surrounded alcohol consumption had been taken out of the mainstream in a big way.  Repeal brought some alcohol use back into the culture, but the experience of Prohibition forever attached a stigma to drinking.

In the same way repealing drug laws will only serve to make drugs more "acceptable" in American culture and make it easier for people to become drug addicts. Prohibition it turns out, did a lot of good and actually helped stem a rising tide of alcoholism in the United States that would soon have done irreparable damage to our economy and culture.  Do we really want to see the rates of alcoholism in our nation rivaled by rates of drug addiction?

With addictive substances, you can be certain that the more of it that's out there, the more addicts these substances will create.  Studies showed, for instance, that rhesus monkeys given unlimited access to cocaine, took so much they laid down, quit eating and died. That's a problem with availability. The monkeys didn't take more coke because it was denied to them.  The forbidden fruit theory only works so far as the fruit doesn't become too costly.

With terrorism, taking out the supply caches and leadership makes it harder and more expensive to conduct acts of terror.  The 9/11 operation cost Al Quaeda a good deal of money and manpower to pull off.  Without the money, the operations get tougher to do, so you get fewer terrorist attacks no matter how badly they want to carry them out.  When President Bush was pounding Al Quaeda strongholds and taking out Al Quaeda operatives, there were fewer terror attacks on Americans.  So they started blowing each other up because it was more convenient and attacking American soldiers who shoot back with deadly accuracy. 

Since Obama has let up on the war on terror, terror attacks have only increased and come home to an America perceived as weak once more.  

How many more attacks will America have to endure before the President decides we've all been punished enough for America's "sins" and starts doing something serious about it instead of merely excusing terrorism and blaming it on some video no one ever saw.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King (c) 2013

If God Created Us, Then Who Created God?

A friend described that question as a problem in circular logic?

If one thinks of God as a creature who exists in our three dimensional world delimited by the boundaries of time, then there is a circular logic problem as he says.  If something must be created, then there must be a creator, but then if the creator exists, mustn't He also have a creator and so on and so on?

If, however, you believe, as I do, that God exists in a dimension that is outside of time, then the question as to who created God is meaningless. This problem arises because we are three dimensional creatures.  We experience life as a moving event, traveling along a stretch of time, experiencing one moment after another in linear fashion. We can neither go backward nor leap forward.  We assume, therefore, that everything in the universe experiences things in the same manner.

I don't believe that is true.  I believe, with some support from physics, that there are other dimensions beyond three dimensional space-time.  I believe that God exists in this higher dimension or "spiritual plane" as Scripture indicates.  I believe God occupies today, tomorrow and yesterday all at once.  That's kind of mind-boggling, but not necessarily impossible to get your head around.

I don't mean that God moves back and forth in time as Scripture seems to hint that angels do. I mean, rather, that God is always there a thousand years ago, today, tomorrow - all at the same "time" for want of a better word for an idea that transcends time itself.  So a "beginning" for God is a meaningless concept.   He is as Revelation says, the alpha and the Omega - the beginning and end all at once.  We have a hard time comprehending how that can be so. 

Physicists believe that there may be multiple dimensions beyond our own which encompass ours, but which we cannot touch nor comprehend in the same way that a two dimensional being who lived on a flat piece of paper could not comprehend the idea of depth, his body limited only to having length and width without any idea of "thickness".  He could not see us except where we placed our hands against the flat world and then he would only see the place where we touched his world and not us as we truly are.


In the same way we cannot truly see God.  When Moses asked to see God, God could only show him his "back parts".  For us to see God in any meaningful way, he had to create an image of Himself that was limited to our 3 dimensional world - in other words he had to create Christ who was in that sense God's son and yet Himself.

The idea that a powerful creative intelligence might exist in some higher dimension is not beyond the realms of science at all.  If anything at all, it should not be at all surprising that such a dimension might organize itself into a vast "intelligence" given it had infinite space and time to work with.  Why should we be surprised that there is someone there?

It may be that at some higher dimension than ours, only one creature may inhabit that dimension. Of course He would be exactly like God and I believe that He is God. No beginning, no end, the self existent one.  In the Old Testament he even calls Himself "I Am".   In that higher dimension, our time and space, the entire history of our world would seem like a rope to be twisted and created in one act - the beginning and end created at the same time.  It is we, the created who live out our lives along the strands one day after another.  For an intelligence to exist in a higher plane of existence, He would simply be there or not - either through the whole of time at once or not at all.

Based on the things I have seen and experienced, I think it's a very good bet that God is there.  I think He made this world like a cook makes a stew, placing all the ingredients here to insure that what comes out at the end of the process is the greatest good for all creation - a people who can be trusted with the keeping of the universe.

Tom King (c) 2013