Glenn Beck and Ron Paul Say "It's Not Obama's Fault!" - Welcome to the Apocalypse

Apparently Glenn Beck and, now, Rand Paul have decided that all the misery in the Middle East  was probably Bush's fault to for getting into the Iraq War in the first place. If this keeps up, Hillary Clinton will be the next president because conservatives will be fractured into two groups.

The new meme with the Libertarian fringies seems to be "It's NOT Obama's fault!"  Why not? After all, they agree with Obama's foreign policy so long as it conform's to Ron Paul's get-out-of-everywhere isolationist foreign policy. Even more disturbing, I'm hearing a willingness to punish the Israelis from the Paulistas. Not from Glenn, yet, but it does make me wonder and worry.

Are we so focused on guarding our pet pots of money that we're willing to let the world go to hell on the grounds that "After all, people always get the government they deserve and besides it's too expensive to protect the innocent."  I've heard that a lot lately. It's another new propeller-head mantra being used as an excuse for standing by and watching ISIS slaughter its way across Iraq. After all, the theme goes, the Iraqis get the government they deserve!

And now we've got the pope calling for a world government with teeth. Protestant charismatics are lining up to rejoin the Roman church at the pope's invitation after the pontiff declaring "Martin Luther's little protest is over." in a video message to Kenneth Copeland and his bunch. Francis says they finally got the wording right on the whole pesky salvation by grace doctrine so that we Protestants can all come back to Mother Rome now. No word on the other 95 thesis Luther nailed to the door, but Copeland apparently agrees that 1 is enough. Presbyterians are going full progressive socialist this week. They declared that God, in fact, does approve of gay marriage and wants Presbyterians to conduct the rites on his behalf. If Billy Graham were in his grave, he'd be rolling over in it.

We found out early on in the Obama adminstration that all the high churches (Presbyterians included) were receiving sermon suggestions from team Obama. So, now we've got so-called conservatives chiming in with leftists and excusing the president's blundering in the Middle East because it was Bush's fault?

Fringe Libertarians and fringe Liberals are becoming so close politically that now they are finishing each others' sentences.

Welcome to the Apocalypse. I hate to say "I told you so," but........................

© 2014

Ghosts of 1933 - Nationalists, Isolationists and Socialists, oh my!

Finally, my neo-anarchist Ron Paul lovin' buddies have come out of the closet. This morning I got another breathless post from my Paulista buddy with a copy of a Robert Sheer article praising Obama's policy in Iraq and flogging poor old George Bush yet again.

Well at least the Paulistas are expressing their love for Obama openly now. I've always thought these conspiracy devotees were neo-anarchists in disguise. Historically, anarchists always were the partners of socialists in revolutions and have always worked side by side with them to bring down nations.

Sheer asks when has nation-building ever worked?

How about post WWII Germany, Japan and Italy?


On the other hand I can cite you plenty of evidence that failure to nation build has failed?

Post WWI Germany, for instance!

So why did is it failing in Iraq?  It failed because Obama abandoned Iraq in the midst of the process. What I really can't believe is the attempt by Sheer to turn Saddam Hussein into our best buddy. The man was a megalomaniac, a butcher and he DID have weapons of mass destruction! Where the hell do you think Syria got all those chemical weapons? Where do you think Saddam got the stuff to nerve gas tens of thousands of Shiites in his own country. Did he wave a friggin' magic wand and suddenly their lungs were all burned our and their eyes roasted in their sockets?  Even if it was magic and he really didn't have chemical weapons, his magical powers would qualify as a WMD in and of themselves and the man needed to be put down. Ghaddafi fell because he over-reached. He was quiet all those years because he was afraid. Reagan blew up his house for attacking Americans. It made him appear weak.


Of course, in Arab countries a show of weakness will almost always get you killed. That's been going on in the Barbary States for more than a millenium. It's how leadership works in most Islamic countries. Only strong men willing to do horrific things to their enemies tend to survive long at the top in the Arab world - at least long enough to die peacefully in their beds, although you should probably do a toxicology screening as part of the autopsy.

Neo-anarchists and their willing allies on the left, think that if you repeat "Saddam has no WMD's" and "power vacuum" enough times that it will make sense to people with a modicum of native intelligence. Why not? It worked for another famous nationalist/socialist - Joseph Goebbels. In 1939, these idealogues would have been fretting about a power vacuum in Europe if we removed Mr. Hitler. They were, in fact, carving Mussolini's ugly mug on the walls of New York public building in tribute to his visionary leadership. They were isolationists, pounding their tubs and insisting that the world would sort itself out on its own without our interference.

I want to scream I really do. We are so doomed! Between the unicorn/rainbow/sex/drugs/rock n' roll left and the isolationist/anarchist/conspiracy-obsessed fringe right, we're in the hands of a generation of spoiled brats who hate America and everything that they can't have or control.

God give us strength because the American ship is sinking fast and the passengers aren't bailing anymore. They're pouring water in to make us sink faster.


And I just realized something scary. The fringe right are nationalist, America only fanatics. The hard left are socialists.  Nationalists? Socialists? Working together? Sharing goals? Anybody remember the last time nationalists and socialists got together on something during a big economic downturn?


All we need is some determined fringe radical with a fanatic following.................................uh-oh.


© 2014 by Tom King

ISIS and Her American Political Minions

Has anyone twigged to the fact that the acronym for the jihadi army now slaughtering Christians and Muslims alike across Iraq and Syria is "ISIS"? It's the name of the Egyptian Goddess Isis - the mother of Horus, the Egyptian god of war! Her name means literally "throne". Is it an accident that ISIS marching on Baghdad - the prophetic seat of the Caliphate that Islam believes precedes the conquest of the world and the coming of the Muslim version of the Messiah? Check out Isis' headdress. It's a throne. Of course, that's all coincidental. The Obama/Ron Paul policy clearly states that if we just leave the Middle East alone, peace and joy will break out spontaneously.

Speaking of the vast Obama/Paul conspiracy, I was challenged today by a Paulista in the middle of his rant about how evil George Bush was. He challenged me to "...tell me what GOOD has came (sic) out of "The Idiot's" lame adventure ? How bout ONE thing?"  Okay. I can do that. He also asked what Jesus would have done in George W. Bush's place? Obviously he's thinking "turn the other cheek", not the sort of political answer he might have received from the God of the Old Testament. An omniscient God might give my friend a rather different answer than the one he expected. So let me answer my isolationist friend's two major questions.

1. What would Jesus have done in George W. Bush's place?

If Jesus had been in Dubyah's place, we'd all be in heaven now. It would mean He'd come back to get us and he would have taken home the innocent and let the guilty burn down the world around themselves. Unfortunately, President Bush (my hero), had no divine powers. He couldn't take us off planet. His job was to protect and defend people who are stuck here on this planet with no other place to run. He did that, I believe, to the best of his ability. Your characterization of the former president, paints a very different picture of the man than either his words or his deeds in his personal life would match up with. The man is a humanitarian of the first order, working thousands of hours and donation millions of his own personal wealth to fight AIDS in Africa. He greets soldiers coming home at DFW airport whenever he can. He was the first politician to reach the hospital at Ft. Hood after the shootings and, unlike your hero, Barak Obama, he didn't bring an entourage of press photographers. In fact, he was in and out before the press could react. He seems a decent man who does good works out of sight of the press. Not the sort of evil arrogant plotting Machiavelli your conspiracy theory suggests. His charity work goes largely ignored by the media which is too busy vilifying him.

Bush responded to an escalating war by terrorists by doing something rather more energetic than crashing some helicopters in the desert or bombing an aspirin factory. I think he was wise to do so. Osama Bin Laden had issued a very public declaration of war against America. Bush took him at his word. I personally think one should believe one's enemies when they say they want to destroy you. To not do so is the height of stupidity. To believe that surrendering to the demands of someone who not only says they want to kill you, but also has just killed 3000 innocent civilians is to invite them to go even further than they did. See Neville Chamberlain in the history books for an object lesson in how the whole appeasement policy works. Please tell me how pulling our troops out of the Middle East (which was what Osama was demanding) would have brought about "peace in our time"

Finally, as to how God might have instructed George W. Bush had God rung him up on the red phone......well, one need only go to the Old Testament to suss out how an omniscient God instructed Israel to treat its foes (the original Palestinians). That is not a policy any man should institute in today's world, since we have not got His unerring advice on the subject. Personally, we are instructed by Christ to turn the other cheek, a practice I adhere to when the cheek being threatened is my own. However, should someone threaten my family, I will act to preserve their life and safety. The commandment "Thou shalt not kill" in the original Hebrew reads more like "Thou shalt preserve life." It expands the meaning of that command to read it that way.

God has not left our current political leaders direct advice with regard to how a nation-state should act with regard to protecting its people. The Old Testament principle dictated that the judges were to raise up armies when innocent people were threatened by bullies and terrorists and to root them out and destroy them wholesale.  When the Israelites failed to do that, it always came back to haunt them, even thousands of years later when the descendants of those bullies and terrorists are firing missiles at their schools and synagogues. 

2. Can you tell me what GOOD has came out of "The Idiot's" lame adventure?  How bout ONE thing?

To be fair, I copied my friend's question just as he wrote it. One should probably use somewhat better grammar if one is going to call a former president an idiot. I can tell you one big thing right off.

NO TERRORIST ATTACKS ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR THE REMAINDER OF BUSH'S PRESIDENCY.  As soon as Bush was gone and the Obama/Paul retreat policy was implemented, they started hitting us at home again with attacks on Ft. Hood, a recruitment depot in Arkansas and other attacks or attempts. So we reward them for committing acts of terror and it can only be seen by them as a reward.  I'm sure the terrorist leadership and rank and file Islamic militants see themselves as having successfully frightened America - a nation of cowards to their way of thinking - into releasing the Taliban's terrorist board of directors.

SECOND GOOD THING WAS THAT IT GAVE JEWS, BUDDHISTS AND CHRISTIANS A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY TO GET OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. Tens of thousands have left Iraq and Afghanistan and apparently just in time if the Christian death toll is any indication. And oddly enough, I still don't hear a single word of sympathy from the Paulistas for the victims of the ISIS jihadi army.

A THIRD GOOD THING WAS THAT IT OPENED UP IRAQ'S OIL INDUSTRY SO THAT THEIR ECONOMY HAD AN OPPORTUNITY TO RECOVER AND STARVING PEOPLE GOT FED AND GOT JOBS. It also helped bring down oil prices not for the United States, but for Europe, China, India and other countries. We get our oil from Central America by and large and Alaska and such places. A relatively small percentage of our oil comes from the Middle East. Opening oil supplies helped keep economies going and staved off recession for years until a grasping Democrat House and Senate succeeded in wrecking the economy during an ongoing war by politicizing the funding of the Iraq/Afghan wars. It's quite a remarkable achievement in the annals of history to have held our soldiers hostage to one party's socialist agenda. Within 18 months of the Democrat takeover of congress, the economy collapsed. Good job guys. And the Ron Paul solution was to surrender the war on terror and come home and to beg the Democrats, still flushed with success to make government smaller and do away with the Federal Reserve. Like that was EVER going to happen.

A FOURTH GOOD THING WAS THAT IT CREATED A POWER VACUUM. I know, "creating a power vacuum" is supposed to be a bad thing. Diplomats like to deal with powerful leaders. It gives them the illusion that they've accomplished something when they get powerful people to sign treaties and stuff. (again, see Neville Chamberlain waving around his peace of paper signed by Mr. Hitler that gave us all "peace in our time"). Now let me think. How exactly did that work out? Anyone remember? A power vacuum left by the removal of an evil dictator is always a good thing. You just have to make sure something worse doesn't come along. Unfortunately, the genius diplomats think they need powerful leaders to manipulate (they being geniuses and all - they think they can do that). Big bunches of free people make diplomats nervous. I mean, who is going to control all those people?  I like power vacuums. Who says we need people holding that much power

A FIFTH GOOD THING WAS THAT IT TOOK BOTH THE TALIBAN AND SADDAM HUSSEIN OUT OF THE COMMANDER'S CHAIRS OF LARGE AND DANGEROUS ARMIES. Saddam had already tried to roll over his neighbors once. He saw himself as a great conqueror. He did have weapons of mass destruction which Syria is hauling out of storage now to use against rebels and any old enemies Assad can bump off in the confusion - Christians for instance. What did you people think was in those trucks rolling across the Syrian border contained? Humanitarian relief? Thinning out those armies gave everyone a break from the threat hanging over their heads.

A SIXTH GOOD THING WAS THAT WE KILLED OR CAPTURED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF THE WORST OF THE JIHADIS.  The evidence (no terror attacks for 7 years) suggests that killing terrorists DOES reduce the number of incidents of terror. It also encourages people to tattle on terrorists when someone actually then acts on the information and removes the terrorists. It has been shown that if you lock up 5 or 6 criminals in a town, it can reduce and even almost eliminate crime there. So, I suspect that removing 50,000 or so terrorists from the playing field might reduce the number of bombs going off, people being stoned or beheaded. What might the death toll have been otherwise. It was getting pretty awful during the Clinton administration. Remember the attacks on our embassies, the USS Cole and the first attack on the World Trade Center? Now that we've renounced the war on terror as foolishness and made it a police matter, how's that working out? This administration has like one "arrest" of a terrorist and they're going to appoint him a lawyer and probably give his defense team copies of the anti-Islamic "movie" that the administration says made him rape and behead an American ambassador. Now, every time a jihadi shoots up a military base or recruiting office they have to relabel it "workplace violence". At least when we were in open war with them, we were winning. In the past five years, this president has imposed rules of engagement that are getting soldiers killed faster than they were during the "evil Bush years". Wonder how come the media doesn't celebrate those milestones of death like they used to?

A SEVENTH GOOD THING IS THAT THE ISSUE HAS POLARIZED THE COUNTRY. One can see clearly the dividing of the sheep and the goats - if not the actual makeup of the two sides. It matters not that both sides see themselves as the sheep. No one wants to be a goat. Jesus said that just before the end, the sheep would be separated from the goats. I think the divisions are actually more subtle than many of us think they are. I also think that it is Satan's purpose is to use this separation process to set us against one another. Better for Satan's purpose for us to think, "He is a liberal. She is a libertarian. They are socialists." I am a neocon (according to those who disagree with me). It's a false label. Man, we are told, looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks upon the heart. The true division among us is not some political boundary. It's a division of purpose. The true division is between those who would stand for the right though the heavens fall and those who stand for themselves. 

I noticed the complete failure in my friend's challenge to express any sympathy towards the tens of thousands of Christian and Muslims who have lost their lives to these evil people. I would challenge everyone who reads this to stop and spend some time in prayer for the people being slaughtered by ISIS forces while our President plays golf and dithers impotently.

Once again, I want to thank all those with differing opinions on this subject, whether they be conspiracy theorists, Paul-bots, socialists, smug, self-important know-it-alls or honest folk, for inspiring another stimulating blog post. This blog could not continue without you. God bless you all and keep you in his care until Christ comes to take us out of this mess we've made. I'm certain He's loading up the bus to come get us even as I write this.


© 2014 by Tom King

Failed Obama Middle East Policy and How Ron Paul is Partly to Blame

I'm going to catch H E double hockey sticks for this post, but I'm fed up and I don't care anymore.  I am utterly sick of hearing Paulestinians gloat as thousands of Christians and Jews in Iraq are being slaughtered by the peaceful Islamist armies marching toward Baghdad.  And I am violating my policy of not calling them names like Paulestinians, Paulistas and Paul-bots in this post because they keep calling me a stupid neocon and I'm tired of it.

As Inigo Montoya famously said, "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

If I get one more post from a Paulite gloating about how Ron Paul was right about Iraq and Obama should make him Secretary of State, I'm going to start marking these guys junk mail so I don't have to see it anymore and some of these guys are friends. Of course, they do give me a lot of blog material, which is why I haven't done it yet.

The gloating is completely disgusting. The fringe right is prancing around saying George W. Bush was wrong and this proves that Ron Paul was right. Not a word for the victims of Islam. Not a prayer for the dead or a word of condemnation for the army of Islam - and don't kid yourself, those guys are the armies of Islam. What's even more puzzling, there's been nary a word among my RP loving correspondents condemning Barak Obama's dismal policy failure in the Middle East. This strange support for a clearly disastrous Obama policy only helps encourage more Middle East foolishness by this State Department.

The whole region is going to go up in flames once we come back home to hide. It may tamp down temporarily once either the Sunnis or the Shiites wipe the other side out. When that happens, it will get quiet for a while alright. They'll use the time to rearm, but they WILL turn on us and there won't be a thing we can do about it. They will take Pakistan's nukes and make themselves some more. The top Pakistani nuclear scientist has already said that he wants to donate nukes to all the Islamic nations. Establish an Islamic mega-nation and that's going to be the first thing they acquire. And won't that be fun?

Meanwhile, if we follow the Obama/Paul doctrine, we'll sit back and wait for the attack, believing firmly that no one in their right mind would attack the USA. We're far too strong for that. And besides, we could boost our economy by not having to have such a big military. So let me get this straight. Let's gut our military, withdraw from the rest of the world and people are going to be afraid to attack us. Did you not watch the atomic bomb safety films when you were a kid? Let them attack us first?  Can you say, "Suicide"? I do believe these guys have been smoking rather too much of that marijuana they want to legalize.

And you can be sure that Islam will go first in any war with the West. They are not afraid of the consequences. Allah, their militant wing believes, will protect them. Besides, if Allah gives them a new terror weapon, they believe they must use it. Being terrorists, their militant wing is likely to hold the world hostage for as long as they can to the threat of nuclear war. They've always been able to raise money for the cause that way. It's kind of their favorite fund-raising technique.

I'm not saying all of Islam is evil, but if there is a peaceful wing of Islam, they are sure being terribly quiet about the excesses of their fanatical members. Silence is complicity, guys. When my church had an armed terrorist in our midst, we expelled him. He went elsewhere and wound up getting himself and 82 of his followers killed along with 4 ATF agents. The point is, we kicked him out from our midst once he revealed himself for what he was. If Islam is a religion of peace, it needs to expel their murderous members from their midst.


Every time one of my Paulista friends drops me a note to gloat about how Ron Paul was right, they call me a neocon and use all these talking point phrases over and over ad nauseum. The big killer argument is always that I'm a stupid neocon and can't see the truth (as revealed by Alex Jones, Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell) and if I'd just watch a few more Youtube videos, I'd understand and support Ron Paul. I've actually watched some of those videos and they are a hash of unsupported "facts" and wild speculation that works out to be about 90% uninformed speculation based upon ideology rather than an understanding of history as it actually happened.

It make me weary; it really does.  To believe all this "America is evil" crap and to think that peace and love will magically break out across the world if we just hunker down behind our borders and hide is the worst sort of stupid. It's not America's chickens that have come home to roost. It's the vultures created by an evil culture that treats women like cattle and unbelievers like dogs and dogs like vermin. And they are circling, waiting for America to lie down, nice and quiet-like in the sand.

My reaction to the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East is to offer up prayers for the thousands being slaughtered in Iraq. It's genocide and we are supposed to be against that. A Christian woman and her two children are sitting in prison waiting to be stoned because her father was a Muslim and she chose not to be one. Muslim warlords in Africa are suiting up children as soldiers to go and slaughter Christians for Allah.

I'm just about ready to declare war on Islam. It wouldn't take very many carpet bombings of ISIS army formations, SEAL team strikes to eliminate Muslim warlords and a few air strikes on the houses of terrorist leaders before the nations of Islam would decide to take the road to peace.

What Ron Paul, Alex Jones and Lew Rockwell do not understand (and apparently my Paulista buddies don't either) is that the Arab/Islamic culture only understands strength. The culture is a tribal culture. It always has been. Islam draws its DNA from those origins. Over the centuries European diplomats have despaired of making any real progress in Islamic/Western relations. Throughout Arab history a substantial majority of sheiks, caliphs, pashas, bashas, shahs, sultans and kings of Araby were strangled by one of their lieutenants fairly early in their terms of office. Few Arab leaders ever died comfortably in their beds. Any slight show of weakness in a leader virtually demanded that someone stronger kill him and replace him with someone stronger. Politics in places like the Barbary States was a bloody Darwinian business. The Arab cultures to this day see a nation that is hiding at home as being weak and unworthy. Steeped in the belief that strength is the most important thing, Arab/Islamic strong men feel duty bound to Allah to subdue the weak in Mohammed's name.

Modern historians like to pain Muslim culture, particularly where it existed in Spain as benevolent and tolerant.  A 13th century Spanish Grenadan Muslim general wrote, "It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts of burden, if it is not possible for Muslims to take possession of them." This "peaceful and tolerant fellow advised his fellow Muslims to raze cities and do everything in their power to ruin anyone who wasn't a Muslim. So much for the religion of peace.

When the mullahs talk about subduing "the weak" - there talking about us, guys. As seen through Middle Eastern eyes, Bowin' Barak is the epitome of American gutlessness. And Ron Paul looks like a major wimp to the warlords and pashas over there too and not a whit of difference between the two.

More and more, I find that I really do miss Ronald Reagan. If we could only find someone like the Gipper, who wasn't afraid to tell the truth right out where people could hear it - advisors be damned, we might restore peace. Reagan was willing to be strong. He started developing defensive weapons against nukes and then had the stones to walk out on nuclear disarmament talks at Reykjavik. The result?  He got an entire class of the most dangerous nuclear weapons in the world eliminated. He publicly challenged Mikael Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" and down came the Berlin wall. When Mohamar Gaddafi bombed our soldiers and blew up a planeful of people, Reagan bombed his house and wiped out his anti-aircraft capabilities in one shot. Gaddafi was quiet for 30 years after that.

What we don't need is government by wimps. The Paul-bots* are going to get all over me about this, but I think GW was right. Preemptive action was the best way to bring peace to the Middle East. Obama's wimpitude confused them and the noise from the Paulestinians encouraged them. That's not George's fault. He did the best he could with the crowd of colossal wimps he had to work with.

Just my opinion, of course, but I'm right.  Feel free, however, to puff and sputter about the Illuminati, the Bilderbergs and tell me how steel doesn't melt.

© 2014 by Tom King

*That's equals exactly half of the total number of names I've been called by Ron Paul fans in just the last 4 emails I've received. I'll stop now, but don't make me do that again. I have more euphemisms and I'm not afraid to use them.

Giving by the Rich Declines Under Redistribution

(Except for a Recent Surge in Funding for the Arts)

 

According to a Pew study, between 2009 and 2011 the wealthiest 7% got wealthier by a big 28% and the rest of us got poorer by 4%.  Oh, dear. That was during the time Obama had the presidency and the Democrats had both the House and Senate. How could that be?  Oh and another shock. Charitable giving by the wealthiest 7% of Americans declined and is only slightly recovered.

The good news according to The Nonprofit Quarterly, is that giving for the arts has risen. In other words, Mrs. Frumpyfeller's favorite opera company, The Bedford-Stuyvesant Companie' de Opera, is in danger of closing so Mrs. F orders Mr. F to give them something since she simply cannot live without seeing "Carmen" again this fall, performed in the ornate Lititia Frumpyfeller Auditorium de' Opera. And Mrs. Von Stuffypompous is concerned that there won't be enough paintings of tastefully naked people in the Stuffypompous Gallery over at the Uppity Museum of Fine Art so she pushes through a nice fat grant for the museum from their tax write-off foundation. The Uppity gives Mrs. Von Stuffypompous their Humanitarian of the Year Award.

The left is really struggling to understand why, that when they jacked up the taxes on the wealthiest among us, the wealthiest among us stopped giving to charities in nearly direct proportion to the additional tax bite they endured under the Obama soak-the-rich policy. Weren't they just supposed to just accept becoming poorer in the name of redistribution of wealth and keep on giving just as much? That's what pundits like Rick Cohen over at Nonprofit Quarterly were assuring us when he was singing the praises of jacking up taxes on the rich for humanitarian reasons.

Turns out, the rich weren't prepared to take a pay cut after all. "Shame on them!" cries NPQ. I mean, the filthy rich should at least be grateful that the administration left all their favorite tax loopholes in place. They did, after all, keep getting richer under this Democrat administration, despite all the "soak the rich" rhetoric.

© 2014 by Tom King

Al-Quaeda on the Run in a "More Peaceful World"

Let's revisit the words of the smartest president who ever lived and his equally brilliant VP  over the past 4 years and cast them against the reality of today's event. Surely we will see that all is well in the world and going according to plan.~

•  "[It] could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government."  - Joe Biden (Larry King Live - 2010)

• “We focused on the terrorists and Al-Qaeda is on the run.” Barak Obama (2012)

• "The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever been." - Barak Obama (2014)

The Iraqi government is stable in the sense that it is losing ground and crumbling at a nice steady rate.

The president actually could say that the world is a more peaceful place, if by that you mean that as the bad guys are winning they are slaughtering more and more of their "enemies". There is nothing quite so peaceful as piles of dead people. Large numbers of those dead people were poor and ignorant so percentage wise that would mean more of us are now well-fed and better educated. Also, tens of thousands of the dead were Christians, so, by definition, we are now a more tolerant world because everybody knows how intolerant Christians are.~

And he does have a point about Al Quaeda. They are indeed on the run - with an Army straight toward Baghdad. Reminds me of an old Russian saying that was popular during the Communist era famines. "If you want milk, take your pail to the radio." In totalitarian nations, the news reports always paint a rosier picture than what is reality.

We could update that Russian observation for today's America this way.

• "If you want peace, take your palm branches to MSNBC."

"And that's all I've got to say about that."  - Forrest Gump (1994)

© 2014 by Tom King

* I use a new punctuation mark you may have noticed:  .~
 It's called a "snark mark" and is used to indicate sarcasm. I use it to help some of my more critical readers to recognize that I'm not being serious when I say things like "Everybody knows how intolerant Christians are.~"

An Open Letter to Demand Studios

I got a curt e-mail today from Demand Studios, a notorious content marketing company I worked for back when I was trying to get my freelance career off the ground. The pay was abysmal and the pace brutal. It was crap content and I wrote close to 2000 articles for them over a year.  I knew I was being taken advantage of, but it gave me enough to squeak by while writing other things that would eventually pay considerably more.

DS was informing me that the quality of my work forced them to revoke my writing "privileges".  They've been thinning out their writing stable out for some time in favor of writers that produce dull copy without complaint and without arguing with editors. As nearly as I could tell their "editors were mostly 20-something communications majors fresh out of college.  The DS editorial staff was arrogant, irritable and often almost illiterate. They frequently had no idea what they were asking you to write about, but confidently ordered changes that made no sense.

The note came from a no-reply e-mail box and the company offers no way for you to contact them or return a reply. This is also how the communication between writer and editor goes - one way, editor to writer, lord and master to peasant. Therefore, I decided that I'd post an open letter to them in the hopes that some day one of this modern day pulp nonfiction publishers' staff members might read it and know what they think.

Anyway............

________________________________


Dear Demand Studios:

I haven't written for you guys in more than two years. The fact that it's taken this long to get around to flushing me from your author list, says something about your management of the folk who write for you.

I wouldn't write for you guys in any case. Your reasons for removing me are immaterial and more than a little insulting given the hundreds of successful articles I wrote for you. The only rejections I ever had with you were the result of mistakes your editors made in the assignment of topics.

Since leaving DS behind, I've found other outlets to write for. I'm doing independent commercial freelance writing and I'm the top writer with a new company for which I've ghost-written 20 some odd books in the past 18 months. It's actually kind of nice to make a living wage writing copy I can be proud of.

There's no need for the intimidation routine. I get it. You use up writers and toss them aside and feel you need some kind of lame excuse. Writers to DS are a commodity. If that's what you want to do, you are perfectly free to do so. As writers we are perfectly free not to work for you.

It was a learning experience mostly of the sort that you don't wish to ever repeat. I do know what I'll tell any new writer if they ask about DS as a web-publisher.  Good luck with your business model. You'll need it.

Respectfully,

Tom King




© 2014

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics*: Just Say "NO" on "Equal Access to the Internet"

© The Hacker News

They are doing a survey on SurveyMonkey asking the deceptively simple question "Should everyone have equal access to the Internet?"

Instinctively one wants to answer yes. It all sounds very liberty, equality and fraternity (the motto, by the way, of the French Revolution).

I'm sure that the survey will show Americans overwhelmingly support Internet equality. It is, after all, rigged to do so. Any day now we'll see a headline saying 85% of Americans support Internet Equality. What the survey doesn't say is that, by equal access, the proponents of the legislation behind this survey mean government control over private enterprise on the web. Under this so-called Internet Equality Act, Internet providers could be forced to block large users of bandwidth from paying extra to insure their content is unaffected during peak use time. Streaming video providers and media sites like, oh, I don't know.....Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, PJTV and other pesky conservative media could be seriously damaged through site slowdowns. In addition, denial of service attacks would be much easier to carry off.

What's even more troubliing is that if so-called "Internet Neutrality" laws go through, we would be giving to the FCC the same sort of hunting license this administration is handing the IRS through Obamacare.  We would open the door to government agencies selectively blocking or at the very least slowing down the sites of opposing opinion content providers to unwatchable levels, especially if they are at odds with the current administration, given that the administration runs agencies like the FCC and IRS.

Before you guys on the left start hopping up and down, remember this. It doesn't look too good for you in this upcoming election and if, horror of horrors, a Republican were to get into power with a Republican congress............well, what's sauce for the goose! If you like your Huffington Post, you may not be able to keep your Huffington Post if the next election goes against you.

I said, "NO" to the question on the survey because the strength of the Internet is that it is perhaps the last free enterprise zone in the world save the black market. Let private enterprise handle it. If you don't like the way your provider doles out access to its customers, the solution is simple. Get another one. If I were a leftist, I'd start my own Internet provider and provide preferential access to liberal content providers. I'd probably go broke doing that, but President Obama would probably save me with some nice grants or government contracts like he gave Solyndra. At least I'd be able to retire with a nice fat golden parachute after I went bankrupt.

*"There are lies, damned lies and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli, British Parliamentarian

© 2014 by Tom King