An Apocalypse Observed: March 2014

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Steer Small....The Case for Gentle Course Corrections

The Apartheid Solution to the Back Seat Unrest Dilemma

Remember when you were a kid and you went on one of those long rides with your parents. You were stuck for hours in the back seat with your brother or sister (or both in my case). Remember what happened when you ran out of things to do back there? Inevitably, one of you began to do the favorite thing that bored kids in the back seat of a 1963 Rambler do. One child always starts poking the others because it is vastly entertaining to hear them squawk. Next comes your sister going, "Mama, he's touching me!"And as the unrest in the back seat escalates, one of several things happen.

In one response scenario, the wise mother and seasoned-traveler-with-children pulls out her magic bag, tells the back seat bully to cut it out if he knows what's good for him and gives each child his or her choice of new somethings-to-do from the bag. With something new to keep their attention, soon everybody is busy and quiet again. The wise Mom smiles and settles back to enjoy the ride, knowing she's got more stuff in her bag and can keep the youngsters entertained for the whole trip. Notice that she gave each child a choice from the bag rather than arbitrarily assigned them a toy of her choice. Remember this. It will be on the quiz.

In the alternative response scenario, the ill-prepared mother turns around and tells the children, "Stop it!" The ensuing quietness lasts maybe 30 seconds if she looks sufficiently stern. Then, because sitting still is not a natural state for a human child, someone starts poking someone again. Invariably, the persecuted child demands, "Mama make him stop!"

The first response to the alternative response scenario is an escalation of the mother shouting tactic. "Do you want me to stop this car?" She asks. This is a stupid question because if she did stop the car, at least that would be something new. When this response fails to elicit a terrified spate of obedience, she issues alternative response scenario first response, part 2, "Don't make me turn this car around!" When this doesn't work, because this tells the children they have the ability to make mom do something and what child can resist that power, we quickly move on to...

The final response scenario: Mom actually stops the car (hey, it works). She gets out, drags the kids out alongside the road and commences to whip them till they squeal, or, more likely, she gets Dad to do it because his arm is stronger. Then everyone gets back in the car and drives on with much snuffling coming from the back seat. The snuffling continues until someone gets bored again, stops snuffling and begins poking someone else and then the cycle repeats.

"Now, of course," you say, secure in the knowledge that Doctor Spock has taught us better parenting skills than that, "Nobody these days would do anything that barbaric." Yeah? Well I bet I'd win a lot of money on that wager.


What an angry mama looks like!

Now lets look at the progress of civilization juxtaposed against the back seat scenario. The country grows, reaches the limits of its borders and settles down to become more and more crowded. As the frontiers disappear and there are ever fewer new horizons to explore and conquer, the natives settle down and get restless as natives are wont to do when they're all piled cheek by jowl in the back seats that are modern cities.

Someone starts poking someone else. Maybe someone's not being "fair". Someone's picking on or exploiting someone else. Inevitably, these restless souls appeal to the one entity they perceive as everybody's "Mama" - the bureaucrat-soaked, unimaginative, busy-driving-the-country-into-the-ground-for-its-own-purposes, government.

The government generally reacts in one of two ways just as the Mom driving the car does. Like Mom, the government is busy driving the car or telling the people who are driving the car how to drive it. She does not want to be bothered by the noisy children in the back seat (who are not driving the car).

Rarely, a wise government reacts by finding something for people to do. Whether you liked FDR or not, his Civilian Conservation Corps and Rural Electrification Project at least gave restless unhappy people something to do. President Kennedy, at the beginning of the restless 60s gave us the collective goal of going to the moon which took at least some of the edge off the back seat tantrums that would characterize the next decade. JFK also implemented another keep-them-busy project that at least served to keep people working and to thin out the number of restless young men - the Vietnam conflict. FDR had WWII, Woodrow Wilson had WWI, there was the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War and the War of 1812 to valve off a little steam. The Civil War was an example of what can happen when you delay dealing with problems in the back seat too long. The Great Westward Expansion of the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution kept people busy and relatively quiet back there in the back seat despite the fact that the back seat was often a pretty uncomfortable place to be while it was going on.

Typically, governments react by telling the people to stop being brats (going straight for the alternative response scenario). When ordering folk to stop misbehaving fails as it surely will, they move right along to making empty threats and from there straight on to paddling the miscreants in the grader ditch alongside the car (or in a nice gulag or concentration camp).

Often, the children in the backseat will help insure their own forthcoming flagellation by demanding that the government "do something". By demanding that the government fix the problem and to do it NOW, the children give tacit assent to the government's assumption of even greater power over them (in the name of doing something about the problem, of course). Government, which firmly believes that you should never let a good crisis go to waste without using it to increase the power of those who hold the reins, passes laws ostensibly to protect the kids in the backseat from themselves. In the process, wherever possible, the folks in power will use the opportunity of creating laws to "protect" us ll, to also make sure that the folks, who are in charge at the moment, remain in charge. After all, who loves you more than your Mama. Certainly not those nasty Republicans.

When it get's to the "Don't make me turn this car around" stage, you know you're in trouble. In turning the car around, the government takes you out of the public eye and takes you where nobody can see what's being done to you to shut you up and make you behave. Isolation is the prelude to particularly nasty things happening to the kids in the back seat. Examples of these nasty things that happen to naughty children include China's great cultural revolution that resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths, purges of "enemies of the state" under Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Adolph Hitler and ethnic cleansing under Slobodan Milosovic, Hitler and Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Every dictator in history came to power believing their job was to bring order to their beloved nation and that order was best achieved by making people compliant. Most of them believed or at least said they believed that they were making things fair for everyone. The started out to make people stop poking each other and ended up in that grader ditch flailing away with the nearest switch they could find because they would not. If the United States winds up a police state in the name of hope and change, remember.....

YOU asked for this!

Disturbing image from a law firm's advertisement

If your government ever comes to believe it's purpose is to make sure the people in the back seat comply with all its orders, we are well and truly in trouble. There is a bit of advice that the old sailing ship captains used to give to their helmsmen (these guys who actually steered the ship). It applies to how we ought to empower our governments to steer the ship of state. The captain's advice?

"Steer small."

It's not big changes we need, but small course corrections. We don't need to bring out the lash and start lashing any sailor who complains. We need to choose a course and keep to it. A straight well-plotted course is far more inspiring than one that wanders aimlessly whichever the way the wind blows. Useful work for the sailors to do (or for that matter, the kids in the back seat) keeps both the quarterdeck and the back seat a happy place. You get there by having a government that meddles as little as possible, sets a clear course and allows the children plenty of stuff to keep them busy and content.

Not a terribly progressive idea, I admit.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Channeling His Inner Neville Chamberlain

Streamlining the Military - Different Sauces for Goose and Gander

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's new defense budget proposes to reduce the size of our military to its lowest level since 1939. He makes noises about making the military more stream-lined, flexible and lethal, but one sees little of that in what we've seen so far. What we've seen so far in history is a pattern of Democrat presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama demoralizing and defunding the military every time they have the power to do so. After Carter's disaster in the desert during the Iran Hostage Crisis Clinton's record with the Black Hawk Down incident and the bombing of an aspirin factory, one waits with baited breath to see the results of Obama's gutting of the US military.

I notice the media have stopped counting the number of deaths in Afghanistan since this president came into office. I remember during the Bush years we used to get an ABC special every time we got another death toll magic number.

George W. Bush with the troops

The idea of stream-lining the military is not new. I remember President Bush proposed stream-lining the military at the very beginning of his administration. He proposed a massive re-evaluation of all systems and equipment and a careful, planned sharpening of the sword so to speak. He believed we should skip a generation of weapons and shifting funds from weapons development programs that would be practically obsolete when completed and used the funds to speed up technology, which would give us speed, flexibility, potency and survivability on the battlefields of the future.

The Democrats howled like they’d been personally sandpapered and dipped in alcohol. The perfume princes (the guys already planning their post-service consulting careers) in the Pentagon hated it, but it would have given us a lean, affordable and extremely scary military a decade later. Of course, 9/11 intervened and prosecuting a war and squeezing the money for it out of the Democrats prevented his going ahead with his plans for upgrading the post-Clinton military, but it would have worked I think.

But the Democrats hate the military, except when they can use it to throw an international temper tantrum, raise taxes and get soldiers killed to no purpose (see Black Hawk Down and Vietnam). Unless we change the complexion of the Congress and presidency, we’re going to be in the same place the world was in 1939. President Obama with his confiding to Vladimir Putin that he'd be able to be more "flexible" after his reelection, his hand fluttering and confusing and ineffective responses in Syria, Libya and the Middle-East in general have only convinced the dictators of the world that they can act with impunity. That America is a paper tiger.

Vladimir Putin and Barak Obama have a meetin'.

Unfortunately for our future as a planet which does not glow in the dark, America possesses terrible and destructive weapons. Ask yourself, if someone mistook you for an intruder and were pointing a gun at you, which would you rather have on the other end of the gun: a trained soldier or police officer or a frightened girl who barely managed to release the safety on her 357 Magnum. Criminals know for certain who is more likely to shoot them accidentally and probably hit them where it's painful if at all. They also know who to speak calmly to and not make any threatening moves at because they will likely wind up dead if they do.

We have a frightened bunch of girls in the White House right now with the nuclear trigger in their handbags. At least that's the impression virtually everyone in the world has after Obama's World Apology Tour and his confusing tough talk and no follow-through foreign policy.

Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler making "peace".

The current Russian incursion into Crimea and the limp-wristed response by this administration reminds me eerily of the Nazi incursion into the Sudetenland and Neville Chamberlain's sellout of the Sudetenlanders to Hitler for an illusory promise of “peace in our time”. Politicians who truly believe they are smarter than everyone else and can, through manipulation and charm, twist others to their will are every bit as dangerous and deluded as the dictators, tyrants and madmen who find them weak and stupid.

Just sayin’

Tom King

I remember President Bush proposed stream-lining the military, skipping a generation of weapons and shifting funds from weapons development programs that would be practically obsolete when completed to ones which would give us speed, flexibility, potency and survivability on the battlefields of the future. The Democrats howled like they’d been personally sandpapered and dipped in alcohol. The perfume princes (the guys already planning their post-service consulting careers) in the Pentagon hated it, but it would have given us a lean, affordable and extremely scary military a decade later. Of course, 9/11 intervened and prosecuting a war and squeezing the money for it out of the Democrats prevented his going ahead with his plans for upgrading the post-Clinton military, but it would have worked I think.
But the Democrats hate the military, except when they can use it to throw an international temper tantrum, raise taxes and get soldiers killed to no purpose (see Black Hawk Down and Vietnam). Unless we change the complexion of the Congress and presidency, we’re going to be in the same place the world was in 1939. The current Russian incursion into Crimea and the limp-wristed response by this administration reminds me of the Sudetenland and Neville Chamberlains sellout to Hitler for an illusory “peace in our time”.
Politicians who truly believe they are smarter than everyone else and can, through manipulation and charm can twist others to their will are every bit as dangerous and deluded as the dictators, tyrants and madmen who find them weak and stupid.
Just sayin’
Tom King
- See more at: http://www.ktbb.com/youtellme/2014/02/27/to-be-unready-for-war-is-to-invite-one/comment-page-1/#comment-13331

Thursday, March 13, 2014

What Are Saul Alinsky's Real Rules for Radicals?

Conservative Bugbear - Leftist Saul Alinsky

And why are we using them ourselves?
How we fight is every bit as important as why we fight or even whether we win or not. - TK

The great political debate of our times between the left and the right is fraught with lies, deception, hysteria and well-meaning fraud on both sides. What is disturbing about this is the assumption by the leadership and the movers and shakers on both sides that people are basically stupid and need to be herded about in their opinions like so many fat sheep. Both sides do it

For instance, there is an old email running around that claims that Saul Alinsky wrote the following "8 levels of control" that must be obtained before you are able to create a socialist/communist state. The email goes on to say that the first is the most important.

1)       Healthcare "Control healthcare and you control the people”
2)       Poverty “Increase the Poverty level as high as possible." Poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3)       Debt “Increase the national debt to an unsustainable level." That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4)       Gun Control “Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government." That way you are able to create a police state - total local control.
5)       Welfare “Take control of every aspect of their lives" (Food, Livestock, Housing, and Income)
6)       Education “Take control of what people read and listen to take control of what children learn in school.”
7)       Religion “Remove faith in God from the Government and school.”
8)       Class Warfare “Divide the people into the wealthy against the poor. Racially divide." This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with full support of the voting poor.

The email ends with this intentionally spooky statement:

     The bases are all covered!   We are ripe for the New world Order (World Communism)

It does sound familiar. It should. These "8 levels of control" are little more than a rehash of a hoax article back in the 40s called Communist Rules for Revolution. This isn't even original stuff and predates Alinsky. Alinsky had more than one set of "rules" outlined in his writing, but none were so nakedly radical as this hoax lays out. These 8 rules are nothing more than a crude attempt by ideologues on the right to link President Obama's policies to Alinsky. They probably think they are doing a service for their cause.

They are not! One can make a clear connection between the president and the tactics of the radical left. This can be done if we compare Alinsky's actual "rules" to Obama policy, but it requires more thought to figure it out. The original author of this apparently thought we all needed help to understand how Alinsky's advice to radicals is being worked out by the current administration. There is a fatal assumption that we are too stupid to get it. I find that offensive.

Here's what Alinsky actually said. It's a primer for people seeking to capture and retain political power.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.

The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.

The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right — we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp#rVShjCizoZYEBJT0.99

Alinsky's Rules for Power Tactics:

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Never go outside the experience of your people.
Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Alinsky was surprisingly sensitive to criticism that he wasn't ethical despite his nakedly amoral approach to politics. So he included a set of rules for the ethics of power tactics. These "ethics" are so bankrupt, it's little wonder his ethics were frequently called into question.

Alinsky's Rules to Test Whether Power Tactics are Ethical:

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
The judgement of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
In war the end justifies almost any means.
Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
The morality of means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical.
You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.
Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

If you want to confront Alinsky's tactics and defeat them, you need to do so with truth. When we make up things to discredit the opposition, we sink to their level and it's little wonder our side is not doing well in the great debate of our time. We cast ourselves as being on the side of morality and yet, we've grown so desperately afraid because of their perceived power (Rule 1 - Power Tactics) that we have violated our own rules of moral conduct (Rule 4), which is just what the opposition wants and needs for us to do to discredit us.

Please can we stop this? We cannot fight the enemy using his own tactics. Deception works in war, but not so much in politics where we intend to avoid killing our opponents. The Communist and Nazi states could do this with impunity because when their political war was done, they had no moral compunction about eliminating those opponents who remained. That's why the communist/socialist death toll was so horrific in the 20th century. They were just cleaning house after the victory - mopping up the battlefield so to speak.

If we are not to be like that, we must start now by being scrupulously moral as to what tactics we employ in the struggle. I cite an example here of fraud by the right. I can cite as many, if not orders of magnitude more, examples of duplicity and outright lying by our friends on the left, who are generally not as bound by the strict moral code that most conservatives espouse, that is, if Alinsky's "ethics" are any indication of the state of morality on the left.

I do not intend this as a blanket damning of anyone right or left. There are individuals who possess a powerful sense of morality and ethics on both side, who find lying, fraud and calumny reprehensible and disavow any "ally" who uses such tactics.

It is the moral left and the moral right that have the power to save this country for all of us. In order to do so, we need to turn a hose on the hothead who have lost control of themselves and will say anything, forward anything or believe anything evil of their neighbor. We are, at least those of us on the Christian right and left, are under strict orders to love our neighbors as ourselves. It's time those of us under such orders stepped up and led our own revolution - one in which love is that with which we charge cannons, rather than the naked hatred that bombards our media, our email boxes and our Facebook pages.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King © 2014

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Looking at the President Through Different Eyes

Conservative Christians do not understand President Obama. He claims to be a Christian and to have America's best interests at heart and yet he does things that make no sense to us looking at it from a Christian perspective.

I'm not going to speculate on whether the president is a closet socialist or Muslim or member of the Illuminati, so all you conspiracy theorists calm down. I haven't been converted yet. My beanie with the propeller is still safely tucked in the garage next to my tin foil hat!

What I am going to challenge you to do is to look at this administration through the eyes of the Muslim world. Seen from their perspective, President Obama appears quite different than he does seen from an American or Christian perspective. Here are some things about this administration as they probably look to the nations of Islam.

Immigration - The administration is busily releasing hardened terrorists from GITMO and has initiated a program to grant so-called "minor terrorists" admission to the United States. These include individuals who supported the Muslim Brotherhood takeover and who now are at risk from the military who stopped the takeover. Meanwhile, the Obama administration threatened to deport a family that fled here from Germany because they wished to homeschool their children and the German government (under a 1936 Nazi law that made homeschooling illegal) planned to take their children from them. If I were a Muslim, it would signal to me that the president was sympathetic to Muslim causes and unsympathetic to Christians. Also, this president has made no effort to grant emergency refugee status to Christians who faced systematic slaughter in Syria, Egypt and African Muslim states. As a Muslim, I would see this as an effort to open the United States in the same way that Europe has done, a move that will one day allow this country to be as thoroughly Islamicized as Britain, Sweden, France and other European nations..
Foreign Policy - When Muamar Ghaddafi finally opened his borders and attempted to repair relations with the west, Islamic fundamentalists rebelled with aid from terrorist groups. The United States rushed into aid the pro-terrorist side of a conflict in which neither side was the side of the good guys. Then we stood aside on a second 9/11 and allowed an American ambassador and his security force to be brutally murdered. He's opened a dialogue with rogue states. bowed to Middle-Eastern kings and generally cast his own nation as the bad guy with his world wide apology tour. He has given lip service to our historic support for the nation of Israel while steadily distancing us from them. He has stepped back and let Russia begin the reconquest of Georgia, the Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc states with nothing more than a whimpered protest. Were
Economic Policy - This president appears to be bankrupting his own country with his efforts to appease foreign nations through massive payoffs, to create a majority dependent class in America that can be depended upon to vote the status quo and to suppress the American economic engine through punitive taxation and over-regulation. Were I Muslim I would believe that Barak Hussein Obama was acting in the interest of the future worldwide Muslim State that is prophesied in the Koran, by weakening the nation that stands as the primary obstacle to the success of the coming jihad. His domestic policy appears to be intent on weakening the United States from within. At least that's what it would appear to me looking at it through the eyes of one who believes in the eventual world domination of Islam.
Religion - None of what seems to be a pro-Islamic policy, would be possible if, as the president claims, he is a Christian. If he is a Christian, then, he has left the Islamic faith he claimed to embrace when he was training in Indonesian Muslim Schools. By all rights, as an ex-Muslim, he faces the death penalty for leaving the faith according to the tenets of the Koran. Yet, he gets a by from the Muslim world and there is a widespread belief that he is a Muslim in the Islamic world. Many believe he is a secret Muslim and see, in his actions, someone acting in the interests of the faith.Besides the Koran allows Muslims to lie to infidels for the sake of the faith, so it's easy for the Muslims to believe that his claim to being a Christians are all part of the plan.

I am not saying the president of the United States is a Muslim. Personally, I believe that it is the president's deep-seated belief in progressive socialism that drives him. I think he sees himself as leader of a world-wide socialist government one day. I don't think this man plans to ever step down from power and retire comfortably to his ranch in Texas to write his memoirs as his predecessors have done. I think he has ambitions for a larger role in the world once he's tamed and defanged the American Beast. I believe his handlers find him useful and want to see him rise to such lofty heights.

If you search for those handlers, you will find them hiding in plain sight. They'll be on the boards of political action committees. They'll be donating billions to help get suitable politicians elected to high office. They'll help develop public relations and marketing strategies to support their chosen figureheads. They don't have a secret handshake or meet at secret mountain hideaways to plot the end of the world. They are not the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers. They laugh at the fools who fall for that distraction and make themselves look ridiculous in the eyes of their fellows.

They are people who crave power, but not the kind of fame or glory that the politician craves. They act together with other powerful men because they have interests that coincide with them. They believe they are smart enough to manipulate the leaders who manipulate the fools who make up the ignorant masses of the world. They pull their strings always from what they believe is a safe distance.

They do not look behind themselves. They do not notice the fine strings attached to their own limbs nor are they aware that there is a darker power than themselves at the other end of those strings, manipulating the manipulators who are manipulating the leaders who think they are manipulating the masses.

And those who disconnect from the strings are a threat to the whole nasty plan.

So how do you disconnect? How do you free yourself from the influence of all this manipulation and, to call a spade a spade, EVIL? To escape, to see the world as it is, you must become free yourself. I, personally, believe that a daily walk with Christ will do that for you. Jesus said "The truth shall set you free." It will certainly open your eyes. Harry Nillson once said, "You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear. You dig?" This is true if you see yourself as the center of your universe. And, in consequence of your ego-centric paradigm, you assume that everyone sees things the way you do.

But they don't! People who see things differently than you are not being deliberately oppositional. They truly see things from their own point of view. The more radicalized that point of view, the harder it is for you to see things through another man's eyes. It's little wonder our nation is so polarized. the fringes of opinion in our nation have grown so far apart that they are no longer able to see each other as human beings. We're so deeply inside of our own ideology that we can no longer empathize with anyone ourside the parameters of our deep-seated belief system.

The only way out of that trap is the simple rule that Christ articulated for his followers. Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. As it turns out the act of bestowing love on others is the bit that teaches us to see things as they really are. Rodney King whose beating by LA cops started a riot in LA saw the bloodshed and horror being perpetrated in his name and asked, "Can't we all just love each other?"

The horror that Rodney witnessed on television through the God's-eye view of helicopter mounted TV cameras, apparently shook him to the core. Perhaps he remembered his mom or grandma taking him to Sunday school. Whatever it was, it helped him see things as God sees them and he had to speak out; to call for the only thing that could end the hatred and bloodshed.

There remaineth three things, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love. We may have faith that our ideology is correct. We may hope for change right down to our wishbones, but in the final reckoning, it will be love in action, not feelings or a vague sense of rightness that will change the world. It will be love shown in our actions. You can't scream, "YOU MUST LOVE ME!" while burning down an appliance store or trashing a church. You can't cry, "Love is all there is," while hounding anyone who disagrees with your lifestyle. You can't cry, "Jesus saves!" while spraying "God hates fags!" on an aids clinic wall.

Not if you don't want to be driven mad by the inconsistencies between what you say you believe and what you actually do. If you believe in the Golden Rule, you really should practice it if you want to maintain your sanity. If you believe you should love everybody and you don't, your brain will make itself crazy trying to deal with the double bind you've placed yourself in.

We are living in an increasingly mad world. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go home before the whole thing melts down.

Tom King © 2014

Monday, March 3, 2014

Diplomacy Always Triumphs Over Action (Our Ideology Says So)

Pay no attention to those masked Russian soldiers with very large guns.
They're not really in Ukraine. President Obama has used his magic diplomacy!
We may expect unicorns and universal healthcare any minute now.

In 2008 Sarah Palin predicted that a wishy-washy response to Russia's invasion of Georgia would only encourage them to invade Ukraine next. The liberal press piled on her for that calling her a dim bulb and telling her not to worry her pretty little head about that because Obama's wise diplomacy would prevent that from ever happening. Now that the Russians have invaded Ukraine, the liberal self-appointed pundits claim that diplomacy is actually working despite appearances to the contrary.

One self-styled pundit said that threats of violence never work with Russia and that the Cold War ended, not because of Reagan's tough stance with the Russkies, but because of "diplomacy". Yeah, right - diplomacy in the form of more US military power than the fragile Communist Soviet Union's smoke and mirrors economy could keep up with. Diplomacy, they say, is actually working because President Obama is the smartest president ever and because, according to our ideology, diplomacy works. Diplomacy, they say, if done properly by a Democrat administration, works. The liberal punditry have said it works, therefore it must be working (again, despite evidence to the contrary).

Me? I think Palin was right.

© 2014 by Tom King
Sarah Palin image © Gage Skidmore
Russian soldiers © Daily Caller

An Apocalypse Observed