An unapologetic collection of observations from the field as the world comes to what promises to be a glorious and, at the same time, a very nasty end.
At this blessed season, I feel compelled to warn all my liberal friends
who might have received an "official Red Ryder Carbine Action, 200 shot,
Range Model Air Rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that
tells time" for Christmas or who might have purchased one to protect
themselves from the ravening hordes of evil Trump Minions (not to be confused with actual conservatives) who are sure to
descend upon them to take away their pot, food stamps, National
Endowment for the Arts Grants, or to tell them who they can have sex
with.
Here's a nifty experiment you can do at home that debunks the whole CO2 is a greenhouse gas mythology. The experiment shows that CO2 only reduces the temperature and it has to actually go well above the most dire of currently projected levels to do that. That much CO2 would make plants grow more thickly and spread more rapidly. An abundance of CO2 could theoretically turn deserts into grasslands and forest rather than the opposite thing.
But then, that probably wouldn't convince people to create a global collectivist state, give up their cars and move into hive cities where the central planners could more easily centrally plan.
So for now they'll likely stick to the CO2 is bad thing.
A guy in Texas yesterday heard gunshots and a crash downstairs. When he checked, he found a pair or intruders in the house, one of whom was in the kitchen beating his brother. He ran back upstairs, told his wife to call 911 and got his firearm. He went downstairs and put a non life-threatening bullet hole in the back of the intruder who was beating his brother and threatening him with a gun. The other intruder fled when faced with an armed homeowner.
This will be statistically documented by gun control advocates as an incident of gun violence in which the burglar is counted as the "victim" of gun violence. This will never appear anywhere as a successful defense of a home with a weapon and will be folded into the "incidences of gun violence" category along with suicides, drive-by shootings and domestic violence. It's a shame we don't keep good numbers on how many would-be burglars, rapists, and muggers ran away from armed people they sought to make victims of.
And just so you know what Paul Harvey used to call "The Rest of the Story," Texas's Castle Law defends the homeowner's right to shoot violent or threatening intruders without penalty to the homeowner. Your home is your castle, at least in Texas. AND in case anyone decides to take up burglary in Texas you should know this. Your mama won't be able to sue anyone because you got yourself shot climbing into someone's window and have to poop in a plastic bag for the rest of your life.
Who's going to have the whole world in their hands? That's the real question and militant environmentalists believe they have the answer - more power in fewer hands.
In expressing my skepticism as to whether human-caused (anthropomorphic) climate change, someone who knows me for a Christian asked, "What about stewardship?
Well, what about it?
I
believe in stewardship. I do. I think therefore that all of us should clean up our own messes. That
doesn't mean we all have to become one giant Marxist collective and give
up our freedom to decide for ourselves whether we want to drive a car or
use public transportation, live in the city or the country, or start a
business or work for a corporation or the government.
What it's really all about is who
makes the decisions.
I believe decision-making should happen as close to the individual and his community as
possible. I don't believe collectives are good for individuals or, for
that matter, the Earth. We err when we place the kind of power a
socialist government needs into the hands of the central planners who
run it. And trust me when I tell you, the bulk of the environmentalist movement are died-in-the-wool progressive socialists who believe that the solution to the threat to the planet is collectivist global government and a massive reduction in population, mostly in Western nations for some reason.
To save the planet we are told we must give up power to those who are smarter than we are and obey their directives as to where to live, what to eat, how to get around and how to educate our kids. In other words just grant them power and they will save us from a threat I frankly do not believe is so great we should bow to their golden ideological image. The lust for power to, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden put it,
"...be like gods" is dangerous. While most of those trying to put into place a
kindly and benevolent powerful government may actually have the best of
intentions, we must remember that the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. Karl Marx truly believed that the rich were evil and that
workers, if placed in charge of everything, would be good and benevolent. Turns out power attracts the
corruptible and the finest most trusted leader in the world must one day hand off
power to another, if someone doesn't stick a knife in him first and seize that power for himself. Do you see the danger?
The idea that
some giant collectivist government can "save the planet" is merely
propaganda designed to convince people to give up their freedom in
exchange for the illusion of safety. It's all been
tried before. The death toll was horrific and the destruction to the
environment appalling. All at the hands of what was to have been a
worker's paradise. Putting power in the hands of corruptible humans for
whatever ostensible reason (saving the planet, saving the poor, saving
the peace) is always a mistake. As CS Lewis put it:
This week the Donald began purging his inner circle of people who either make him unhappy or who might tarnish his image. Christie's gone and Reince Priebus, whom he castigated as part of the evil GOP leadership, is now his chief of staff and he's taken on the CEO of Breitbart as his chief strategist. In addition he's already begun backing off his campaign promises and telling the media that his tough campaign rhetoric wasn't anything more than a device to get himself elected.
And, I imagine, to the great joy of his more rabid supporters, he told them all to stop picking on the Clintons because they are "good people". I'm curious to see how the Trump people explain his sudden reversals. He's talking about keeping big chunks of Obamacare and making hints at all sorts of new policy positions that should warm the cockles of liberal hearts everywhere.
You know how much I hate to say, "I told you so," but..............
You know, for a diminutive little liberal, Joss Whedon keeps delivering such lovely conservative/libertarian characters like Captain America, Malcolm Reynolds and others. I suppose that should not be a big surprise to anyone. After all, look at the multiple personality disorder symptoms you find in the progressive socialist Democrat liberal community:
Liberals hate the evil oppressive government and at the same time want more evil oppressive government.
Liberals believe in freedom and at the same time seek to achieve freedom by taking more and more of it away through government.
Liberals want to help the poor and oppressed and at the same time seek to destroy the middle class and working wealthy class and creating a proletariat that shares equal misery.
Liberals hate oppressive cops and lawyers and at the same time want to pass more laws that create more cops and lawyers and give them even more power to oppress.
Liberals hate powerful elites who conspire to control the lives of ordinary people and at the same time work desperately to make sure the powerful elites have much more power than they've ever had.
Liberals complain that Christians wish to force their beliefs on others and at the same time use the power of the government to force their beliefs on Christians.
Liberals blame religion for starting all the wars and at the same time claim Islam is not responsible for starting the wars in the Middle East.
Liberals don't want the government coming into their bedrooms and at the same time want the government to pay for the consequences of what happens in that bedroom (supply contraceptives, pay for abortions, etc.)
Liberals don't believe in violence as a solution to problems between nations and at the same time hold that violent protests and riots are appropriate as a solution to problems between political opinions.
Liberals believe we should be free to use drugs and at the same time smoking should be abolished.
We are, I believe, in the final stages of Earth's history. We've elected a game show host as our commander-in-chief - a man who is used to making things up as he goes. I don't believe God particularly wanted Trump to be our leader. I don't believe He didn't want Hillary either. Neither one is a Cyrus. Often God gives us the leaders we ask for as a way to punish us. Eleven of Judah's Kings were bad kings - twelve counting Manasseh who was beyond bad. And don't get me started on Ahab, Jezebel and the Israelite (Samaritan) kings.
And won't God use Trump to "bless" America? Probably not. If God wants to bless us He may use the tools at hand or He may step back and let us stew in our own juices. The fact is that if God can use a flawed person to accomplish His will, he could just as easily have used Hillary Clinton. The Kings's heart, as the Psalmist says, is in the hands of the Lord.
The belief that we had to choose the lesser of two evils in order to help God along is, as Solomon so eloquently put it, "Vanity of vanities." The truth is we do whatever damned fool thing we get it in our heads to do and then, when it all goes badly, we drop to our knees and beg God to fix our screw-ups so we don't have to live with the consequences of our actions. That's kind of the philosophy of our "progressive" friends, only they, as Trump would put it, "...don't really bring God into it." But then Trump is a progressive too and the liberal left shouldn't be too unhappy to have him. First it was liberal cross-over voters who won him the Republican primary. All his life Trump's been a progressive big government Democrat and he's show a huge capacity for changing his mind over anything and everything that remotely resembles a principle, so all liberals need to do is wait for Trump's ideological tide to go out. And the beauty is they got Republicans to vote for him. He's kind of like an ideological I.E.D. just waiting to go off and knock everything apart.
So I'm declaring for the Independents - Joss Whedon's rebels in the Firefly stories. These were people who did not want to be exploited by the Central Alliance which wasn't doing anything for them anyway except exploiting them for their own purposes. They wanted to do a job, get paid, and keep flying. To use a term coined by Robert A. Heinlein, I grok what they are saying. Me too. But then I look for a kingdom whose builder and maker is God and not Karl Marx or any of his human followers. So it's not surprising that like Captain Reynolds, "I plan to misbehaver!" An ancient Chinese curse says, "May you live in interesting times." Well brothers and sisters, things are about to get interesting!
Trump Delusion Syndrome is a sad debilitating condition that has swept the United States of America in the past year. Psychiatrists say we haven't seen anything this bad since the great Progressive Flu of the 1920s and 30s. If you have any seven of these ten symptoms, you may have TDS.
You believe that there are only two choices in the presidential race despite the actual number of names printed on your ballot and the presence of a space on your ballot for a write-in vote and you believe that somewhere in scripture there's a text that says, "Thou shalt vote for the lesser of two evils."
You believe that if you don't vote for Trump, that automatically means you voted for Hillary, but if you don't vote for Hillary, it doesn't mean that you automatically voted for Trump.
You believe that, whatever thing you want the next president to do, will be done by Donald Trump no matter what he might have said to the contrary during the campaign or actually did during his life as a casino/strip club owner and indicted racketeer.
You believe that Donald Trump has suddenly become a Christian despite evidence to the contrary and will in any event, surround himself with good people who will help him to do the right things, even though that has never worked at any time in his entire life to make him any less sleazy and despite repeated statements anyway by the Donald that he "doesn't bring God into it."
You believe that, if he wins, God will use Donald Trump the way he did Cyrus, Sampson, Nebuchadnezzar and Elvis to do good in the world and that God will not use Hillary Clinton in a similar manner if she wins.
You believe God is a Republican and that voting for a Democrat is a mortal sin.
You believe that God can forgive and use Trump who claims to be conservative even though he is not and doesn't believe in asking for forgiveness anyway but that God will not forgive and use Hillary who claims to be a moderate despite being a card-carrying Marxist and doesn't believe she needs forgiven for that either.
You have called good friends "cucks", "traitors", "liberals" and all manner of other unseemly names and accused them of wanting Hillary to win just before blocking them on Facebook so you don't have to listen to their arguments against voting for your Cheetoh Messiah anymore.
You plan to blame Donald Trump's election loss (if hell doesn't freeze over and he wins), on the very conservatives who told you they would never vote for him way back when you were busily putting him on the ballot, even though Donald himself said he didn't need them to win and you believed him.
You believe that anyone who votes for a third party or independent candidate and not Donald Trump is going straight to the special hell - the one reserved for communists, axe murderers, and people who drive with their turn signals on.
* Note: TDS is very similar to Liberal Delusion Syndrome save that it tends to strike persons of somewhat higher intelligence and robs them of significant IQ points.
First victims as envisioned by horny environmentalist painters.
Just to touch on this one last time, I had someone describe my native American ancestors as the "first victims", a clever word play on the term "first peoples" which is increasingly being used in environmentalist propaganda to take the "American" out of the term "Native Americans". Now I think old Amerigo Vespucci was a no-good con-artist for how he got the New World named after himself, but we're stuck with the name and nobody really remembers Vespucci anymore anyway, so I have no trouble with the other terms. Truth be told the Cherokees on my side and the Choctaw on my wife's side probably thought of themselves as the Sioux did - as the human beings.
I'm as sanguine about what was done to the natives in the conquest of the Americas as anybody (and it was a conquest make no mistake). Some of my ancestors were first peoples It could have gone much more smoothly save for the troublemakers. Most of us were farmers and only wanted to use the land to grow food and raise livestock. There was plenty of space after all. As farmers, builders and manufacturers, we brought civilization's tools with us which could have been used by native populations to improve the quality of their own lives. Some of the tribes developed working relationships with the more technologically advanced invaders developed alliances. What spoiled it was the thugs and hooligans on both sides that preyed upon the innocent. There was much unnecessary killing that happened with plenty of guilt on both sides.
Some groups of Native Americans were little more than bands of thugs, stealing from other tribes and murdering Native Americans and settlers alike.
Some groups of settlers were every bit as bad. It was, after all, the French and English who invented scalping. Had the good folk on both sides managed to get together and shut down the thugs and bullies that were starting all these brush fire wars between groups of good people, America's story might have been much different, especially for the natives.
The trouble is that too many good people are so focused on making a living and caring for their families that they don't have a lot of time and energy left for forcing all those bad people to behave themselves. It's always that way with good people - too busy doing good to waste energy on dealing with bad people especially when they are trying to survive in a wilderness. And there are so many rotten people and it takes so few of them to commit enough atrocities to set off a war. Police have discovered that if you can remove just a handful of career crooks from a community, the crime rate drops precipitously. Perhaps if we could have eliminated some of our more thuggish forefathers from the gene pool at the time, things could have gone much more peacefully.
Now that civilization is plugging along, however, we need to take a closer, reasoned and less emotional response to the issues we face and to reason together to find solutions. As a community organizer, my job was to found ways to help people who thought they were liberals and people who thought they were conservatives discover that they were really all just people and that the issues were the same for all of us. We only disagreed on how to solve the problems. When we focused on the problems instead of trying to ram the square pegs into the ideological round holes, we could figure out some amazingly effective ways to fix things that were wrong.
The problem long term is that in this world there will always be evil people who are in it for their own benefit and no one else's. These trouble-makers are hard to see because they walk about amongst us disguised as politicians, lawyers, businessmen, union leaders, socialites, philanthropists and community "leaders". When I was doing nonprofit work in Tyler, Texas, I was shocked to discover that on those big marble donor walls they put on college buildings and hospitals, the list of "benefactors" contained both would-be saints and hard-core sinners. There were racial bigots who donated to "black" charities. One excused himself by saying black people "need" their own churches and institutions separate from whites. We had pedophiles organizing benefits and donating to children's charities. I had one lady tell me she gave money to charities because she couldn't bear to look at anything "ugly" and by giving her husband's money to these charities, she could avoid having to see ugly people and unhappy situations without any guilt. She'd bought emotional absolution so she wouldn't have to feel guilty about being wealthy.
Before we choose sides on issues, perhaps we should examine our own hearts first. If you want to be a card-carrying good guy, you should determine whether you are truly on the side of the angels or you are merely looking for an excuse to push aside our own guilt with bribes and posturing, so that you may live comfortably on the side of the damned and bask in your unearned moral superiority.
Liberal environmentalists hijack Native American issue. That's them back there in the crowd..
Well, once again, the white man is exploiting the first peoples. And where better to do so than in the hills of South Dakota where we're seeing video after video of poor downtrodden native Americans, often in colorful Injun dress, weeping over the evil being done to them by the terrible white Republicans who want to poison their water and take their land? Okay, before you start in on me, I can use the word "Injun" - it's allowed. If black people can use the n-word to refer to themselves, then I can use the "i" word. I have way more Cherokee blood in me than Elizabeth Warren has in her pasty white self. One of my great grandmother was half or a quarter native American and she wasn't the only one. I know this because the racist side of my family didn't allow you to talk about it. They would marry Injun women; they just didn't like to talk about it.
I use the word "Injun" because it was often used to refer to my ancestors by the sorts of white supremacist racists that created the KKK, Jim Crow laws, hosed Dr. Martin Luther King, and fought a bloody civil war to preserve their right to oppress black people. Instead of Injuns, however, or "redskins", today's racists refer to them in a paternalistic effort to protect their delicate feelings as "native Americans" or "first peoples". Today's racists have a much better public relations/propaganda department than the pre-1960s Democrats did.
Honestly, you should be very wary of stories like the one about the oppression of first Americans in the Dakotas. Environmentalist groups jumped on the Native American connection to the pipeline story because it was great propaganda for the progressive/socialist/environmentalist cause. Slate inadvertently lifted the lid on the environmentalist agenda in a recent article. The environmental lobby is on the case. Busloads of outside agitators have been brought in specifically to initiate a confrontation with police and generate footage for the media. The actual "peaceful" protestors have been caught up in violence initiated by white racist outside agitators from the radical environmentalist movement who view native Americans as a simple, therefore easy to manipulate, people and useful for propaganda purposes.
It's not that the tribes don't have a complaint. They clearly do and as in past cases the native Americans have a legal remedy and have won their cases where they were in the right. Let's face it, Americans really feel guilty about how some (not all) of our ancestors treated the first peoples (see I too can be politically correct). But there are better ways to solve this problem than to turn it into a referendum on whether or not we should use fossil fuels. That's not a native American issue. It's the issue du jour for liberal white progressives seeking to push a complex socialist agenda of their own. Given the history of socialism's treatment of native peoples, the native American community might want to choose their allies a little more carefully.
Some facts you should know.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved this pipeline project after doing an environmental impact study as well as an archaeological study, but, due to objections from the native American community have initiated a review of the both impact studies before the pipeline crosses the river. This was worked out after the tribes filed complaints and made requests to halt the project till further studies could be done. General Custer did not ride in and lead the bulldozers at sword point through Indian villages and burial grounds as some of the more hysterical headlines would lead you to believe. Even Slate admitted that there were better ways for the tribes to negotiate this issue.
The pipeline is not on reservation land, but crosses the river above the reservation. Pictures of bulldozers ripping up Indian burial grounds are largely fake. They are pictures of bulldozers gleaned from the web of construction projects hundreds and even thousands of miles away or along other areas of the pipeline project not disputed.
The pipeline is a safer alternative for transporting oil (fracked or otherwise) than transporting it on trains. Trains derail with alarming frequency as our transportation infrastructure has deteriorated under a Democrat administration obsessed with social programs designed to attract new Democrat voters. And derailed oil cars make a frightful environmental mess.
Fracking gets brought up because it's the latest environmentalist buzz word for generating nameless horror out of nothing. The oil being pumped out of the ground is by no means largely fracked.
The violent agitators who have triggered the government response are largely white outside agitators shipped in for just that purpose. It's an old communist revolutionary's trick.
The complaints about violent government and police thuggery are coming from the same people who want to disarm the entire populace leaving only those same government "thugs" they are complaining about to be the only ones with weapons against an unarmed and helpless "proletariat". This is not about government bullying. It's about furthering an agenda in which the political elites have enough power to bully everyone without fear of pushback. They just need us to vote the right way and images of oppressed peaceful native Americans is a handy tool to get us to do that.
White liberal environmentalists provide paternalistic support for poor helpless native Americans. At least that's what they want you to believe.
I use the term proletariat because progressive socialist elitists see people as a big old stupid herd to be controlled for their own good. This generation of collectivists is a little more subtle than their racist forebears, the eugenicists and Democrats. They are still intent on separating us by race, but they are calling it multiculturalism and asking us to herd ourselves into separate racial pens. It's a sort of political breeding program designed to weed out the troublesome.
The collectivist left and their environmentalist toadies are pressing for a society in which only the self-styled smart leaders have guns and troops while we give up our own means of self-defense should our leaders dare to impinge upon our liberties. What a wonderful world that will be! The progressive dream is a world in which the ignorant masses are herded into cities where they can be watched by an armed government, onto public transportation where their movements can be tracked, into government healthcare monitored by the IRS in order to better decide who is worth spending healthcare dollars on, and into government jobs (all jobs are to eventually become government jobs). The idea is that we will all be generally treated as nearly the same as possible, much like your mother tried to do when you were a toddler.
Our elite smart people leaders believe that equality and fairness is the equivalent of sameness. It's the best they can do in order to be able to manage something as complex as a nation's people and economy. It's an old plan that dates back to ancient times. You have a noble special class that runs things and a vast peasantry to do the work. Unfortunately for the peasants, what this ancient scheme always winds up doing is creating a vast shared misery for the peons who serving the lords and ladies of the elite classes in their shiny castles.
The left is using our emotions and propaganda stunts like this one and the black lives matter riots to gradually nudge us into the corrals and sheep pens they are building for us. Even more ironic, they are using our own money to do it. Our taxes are building the social slaughterhouses they will use against us to make us less troublesome. The self-styled intelligent environmentalist elite wish to vastly reduce the number of people on the earth. Ideally, there would be enough left in the collectives to serve the needs of the leader class and leave vast stretches of the planet to return to "nature", the new god that they claim to worship.
In reality, in the narcissistic world of the "progressive", the only gods they worship are themselves. It dates back to Eden and the first lie. "Eat of this fruit and you will be like gods," said Satan, who was, by the way, the first "progressive" and the first socialist. He has always disagreed with God on the issue of free will. Throughout history, the dark one has shown that he believes that external control of the human race is essential to peace and safety and his own twisted idea of perfection.
In concert with Lucifer's original population management theories, the progressive movement seeks to create a heaven on Earth without the bother of, as Donald Trump memorably put it, "....having to bring God into it." The model embraces Darwin's survival of the fittest evolutionary model, BF Skinner's idea that external rewards and punishment, properly applied, can make people into whatever we want, and Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Basically the Marxist theory is this:
Some people are genetically better than others and should rightfully rise to a position of leadership over the masses. (Darwin) These persons should work to eliminate genetic types that are proven to be undesirable through abortion, population control, and in extreme cases, genocide.
It is possible to make people better through the application of law and by other external means. (Skinner). That's why socialism is always big on re-education camps, for if you disagree with the collective, you by definition, don't understand the goodness and wisdom of the collective (i.e. government).
If you provide people's basic needs in an orderly way, they will naturally be happy and seek to be productive for the good of the collective. (Maslow) This belief explains why it's always a mystery to socialists when the worker class quits doing any sort of quality work and the economy collapses. The basic food, housing and crappy medical care was, according to the ideology, supposed to make the masses happy, productive and content.
We face a looming future in which for the next four years we are likely to be led by either an open socialist or a closet socialist, both of whom are anxious to test the power of government to do what they believe God has failed to do - create an Earthly Utopia. Either way the power of the government will grow stronger. The power of the people to exercise self-determination will fade away.
I believe we are in the final days of Earth's history. I am not afraid. Even so, come Lord Jesus is my prayer. I am ready to become a citizen of a New Earth in which freedom, love, joy, peace and plenty reign and death is no more - a land without governors, presidents, senators, congressmen, regulators and tax collectors. For eternity, no more filing 1040s. How cool is that?
Hitler was elected Chancellor in 1933 because he promised to make Germany great again as a Christian nation.
For a Pocketful of Mumbles....
Such are promises as Simon and Garfunkle once sang. It's kind of sad to see. Billy Graham's son is all over Facebook trying to explain why it's
okay to vote for Trump. I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Historically we've seen it all before and the devil is nothing, if not determined to conquer the world his way. It's the whole point of the great controversy between God and Lucifer. It should come as no surprise that Lucifer sticks to his same strategy built upon the premise that free will is too dangerous and that humans need a ruler (namely him) to keep them in line.
So here we go again, this time in the United States instead of Europe or Asia or somewhere else. This election, we have been presented with two cartoon candidates who are both understudies for the father of lies. To vote for either is to vote for what
you hope is the lesser of two evils. I keep asking someone to show me in scripture where it says,
"Thou shalt choose the lesser of two evils." No one ever has. They just repeat the lesser of two evils argument or try to make excuses for Trump's abysmal behavior, his somersaulting policies and his serial lying. He and Hillary could be sisters.
Remember this. In 1933, Adolph
Hitler was supported by the churches of Germany because he promised to
protect their liberties, because he promised to "Make Germany Great Again" (sound familiar?) and because he was less evil than the Weimar Republic candidate.
In 1932...
Hitler did not close churches.
Hitler did not execute clergymen.
Hitler did not exterminate Jews.
Hitler did not exterminate Gypsies.
Hitler did not over-run Europe.
Hitler did not execute 6 million Germans who didn't agree with him.
Hitler did not bomb civilians, steal art treasures for himself or shoot rockets at London......
He did none of those things...............until AFTER he was elected!
And Trump has all those great heroic posters like the other guy too!
First they compared him to King David. Poll numbers continue to fall. Now it's Samson. Samson, they say, didn't drink wine, has a tendency to lie, has a weakness for women and his hair is sort of a big deal. Therefore, he is Samson!
Great sufferin' honk! Samson? Really? At least Samson knew he was such a rotten person that in the end he deserved to die with his enemies. Okay, premise accepted. If Trump actually did all those things he says (or actually, his minions say) that he will do and then, if he died suddenly before he could do any more harm, then I might accept the Samson analogy and, who know, it might be for the best. Unfortunately, God hasn't promised He would kill Trump before he does any serious damage.
Remember, not so long someone else promised to do all these good things and make his country great again. He was a vegetarian, lied constantly, had a weird thing going with women and he had a weird comb-over and an odd mustache. HE did die in the end, but not before he took a couple of hundred million or so people with him - AND we had to use the Russians to scare him badly enough so that he finally killed himself.*
Here's the "other guy" in his suit of armor!
That sounds more likely what might happen to Trump, if we're lucky. I'm not so sure God will be nearly as patient with us humans this time if we put another wicked megalomaniac up for leader of the world job. We may be on our own this time.
King David committed adultery and he was a good leader, therefore Trump can be a good leader so vote for him anyway.
Here we go with another false analogy. The comparison of Donald Trump to King David is entirely specious. David's adultery was a single event. Trump is a serial adulterer, groper and disrespecter of women. When
David sinned, God called him on it and punished him severely; probably more than he would have others of his children, BECAUSE David
was the king. God always chastises those he chooses as leaders for their sins. Moses lost the promised land because he lost his temper and struck a rock. Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden. Jonah wound up inside a big fish.
Next look at David's response when called on his sins. The prophet Nathan showed up at the palace and publicly called the King on his infidelity and murder of his friend. David admitted his sin and submitted himself to God's judgment.
That's the difference between King David and King Trump. Trump brags about his sins till he gets caught and then does whatever he thinks will get him out of trouble with the least effort. In the same situation as David, Trump would
have had his foundation send over a nice donation to the temple and then covered it up. Trump doesn't ever need forgiveness from God he says. He doesn't think he ever does anything really wrong and if there's a problem, he
just "takes care of it" - usually he pays someone off with someone else's money.
I don't think there is any fair comparison between the two. David was a leader. He publicly owned up to his sins. Trump is the Godfather. He is exempt from sin because he's a celebrity. Big difference. I don't see how anyone can support Trump or his female doppelganger, Hillary Clinton either. Both are living, breathing examples of how rotten the leadership of this country has become. America needs a flush lever installed on it. The whole thing is full of crap!
So in order to improve his image with black people, Donald Trump goes
to a black church and brings with him a man who started his career as a
bookie. And was convicted of shooting one man in the back, stomping an
employee to death and was sued for fraud by and settled with every boxer
he ever managed. He served four years in prison for manslaughter.
Mike Tyson, the
former undisputed World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, says of his former
manager, "(King is) a wretched, slimy, reptilian mother@#$%.
This is supposed to be my 'black brother', right? He's just a bad man, a
real bad man. He would kill his own mother for a dollar. He's ruthless,
he's deplorable, he's greedy ... and he doesn't know how to love
anybody."
Smooth move
Donald. Who are you going to get to introduce you next time? Maybe Kim
Jong Un could introduce you as his "best buddy" before a speech to the
United Nations. Or how about you prop up Fidel Castro to introduce you
as Cuba's new "business" partner?
Has this man no sense?
Thomas Kuhn - Irritator of scientists and politicians.
If you're not a historian, a scientist, a philosopher or a physicists, you probably haven't heard of Thomas Kuhn, the author of the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" - at least not directly. You may, however, be familiar with the term "paradigm shift". This is the idea that ideas in a particular field or in a person's worldview remain static until enough evidence comes together to change that worldview causing a shift to a new paradigm. Christians call this a "conversion experience". Buddhists may call it "enlightenment". Archimedes responded to his own little paradigm shift by shouting, "Eureka!" A paradigm shift, one would think, would be a good thing - a step toward enlightenment. Unfortunately, not everyone always thinks so. When a paradigm shift happens in science or politics or religion, such a shift tends to either make the scientist or politician or theologian terribly uncomfortable or ecstatically happy. Martin Luther experienced this elation when he discovered the principle of righteousness by faith while reading the book of Romans. Pope Leo X on the other hand, experienced profound discomfort when Luther nailed them to the door of the chapel at Wittenberg.
Kuhn's book is pretty heady stuff, but let me give you a very rough idea of what he says. Kuhn maintains that science doesn't progress in a straight line, but roughly in a series of steps with a plateau in between these apparent shifts. The plateaus he calls paradigms. During the period when the paradigm is broadly accepted, scientists (or politicians or theologians) busy themselves proving the paradigm. If enough anomalies arise that don't fit the paradigm, eventually scientists, politicians, et al (usually from among the younger generation whose opinions are more flexible) will begin to develop a new paradigm model which, when enough evidence is gathered, causes the old paradigm to shift to the new one.
In science, you see this happening at the time of Isaac Newton and again with Albert Einstein. Politically paradigm shifts happen around things like the rise of the Roman Empire, the American Revolution and Karl Marx and the Russian Revolution. In the realm of religion, The Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Jesus Christ, Constantine and Martin Luther have all created religious paradigm shifts in their day. The reason a paradigm shift is such an upheaval is because the folk invested in the old paradigm don't want to have to stand up and tell their students that what they were saying last year was, well......wrong!
I think we are facing a number of pending paradigm shifts today and they all seem to be coming together at once. The evidence for this is in the way the various factions are all shouting at each other, desperately defending their own turf, and not actually listening to one another. The arguments rage on and few are convinced of anything. There is a reason for this as Kuhn points out in his book.
"When (political or scientific) paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in the paradigm's defense. The resulting circularity does not, of course, make the arguments wrong or even ineffectual. The man who premises a paradigm when arguing in its defense can nonetheless provide a clear exhibit of what scientific* practice will be like for those who adopt the new view of nature. That exhibit can be immensely persuasive, often compellingly so. Yet, whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle. The premises and values shared by the two parties to a debate over paradigms are not sufficiently extensive for that. As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant communities." - Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
So the reason everyone is shouting at each other and no one is particularly listening is that we are all defending our paradigms, using our paradigms as self-evident proof that we are right. A hint at how this works can be found in the Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed../"
At the time and even down to this day and age, the royalists (today we call them "elitists") hold to a paradigm where the above enumerated "truths" are very much NOT self-evident. To them it was and still is patently obviously that some men are naturally superior to others and therefore should, by right, be rulers over what Karl Marx (and King George III) would think of as "the masses" or "the proletariat" - lesser quality humans who require the leadership of their superiors. This doctrine is held to be self-evident by Darwin and by those who believed in the "divine right of kings".
So in the political realm you have two competing paradigms.
Progressive Socialism which, I believe is a direct descendant of the feudal belief in a class of superior people called the nobility, has been invested in the idea of collectivism since it was first articulated by Karl Marx. Marx's model for human evolution saw no problem with the restriction of human rights, if it was necessary for the good of the entire race of man. Today that idea is pretty much that free sex, drugs and rock n' roll should be enough freedom to placate the rubes while their betters run things for them.
Constitutional Free Market Capitalism in which the majority of Americans (until recently) have been invested has been the paradigm in the U.S. since the states accepted the Constitution as law of the land. The Constitution itself incorporated long-held Christian values and the philosophy of John Locke and others of the day. Since then, this bunch of rugged individualists, almost unique in history, has been invested in the idea of individualism and personal freedom as the model for human progress and liberty for all. The equality of man was the paradigm of the day at our nation's founding and that paradigm led inexorably to
many reforms including the abolition of slavery and the rejection of imperialism as a foreign relations policy tool. The idea of an entitled elite has long been repugnant to Americans. We've believed, until recently, that people should be free to solve their own problems individually and as communities. We don't need no stinkin' Kings (or queens or commissars or dear leaders for that matter).
At this point Progressive socialists are trying to win the debate by convincing everyone they've already won the debate! Can you say "The political science is settled? The progressive left is using the culture, the news media, the entertainment industry and the increasing power of the government to cause a politico-cultural shift from free market capitalism to collectivism. It's the "everybody knows" argument and however illogical that argument actually is, it's a powerful one given human beings and their natural instinct to join herds of other human beings. The need to belong is powerful and progressives are adept in exploiting that need to their own purposes. The Constitutionalists, conservatives and some libertarians are stubbornly resisting the attempted forced paradigm shift in our culture, but, because we have neglected to maintain control of the education system, the next generation of Americans is coming up already indoctrinated into the progress socialist circle. They are being taught the "obvious" superiority of the collectivist model. Converting our kids back to old-fashioned American values is going to be an uphill battle from here on because most are NOT in our circle.
It's not that we don't have tons of evidence to prove our point or to break down our opponents paradigm model. We do. But like Thomas Kuhn pointed out, we're all arguing from within our own circles, using our own paradigms as a self-evident truth. If those we are arguing with won't step into our circle, then we're essentially talking to ourselves. We see the increasing tension everywhere in our world today between competing paradigms.
The Anthropogenic Global Warming "settled science" vs the embattled group of scientists who see evidence to the contrary.
Conservatives vs Liberals
Christians vs Muslims
LGBTQ (or whatever it is today) vs traditional marriage supporters
Pro-life vs. Pro-choice
Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter
Instead of looking at the facts like we all think we do, we mostly focus on the facts which support our own paradigm. When the sides become so incompatible, a "revolution" occurs. Sometimes it's peaceful, though that's seldom the case with political revolutions. Often it can be violent as it was during the Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, and the Vietnam War protests.
So what can we do to prevent all these factions from erupting into some new sort of paradigm-based cleansing of opposing viewpoints? The truth? Probably not a lot. Scripture predicts a very nasty end is going to happen just about now in Earth's history. Like the Mayans, the Christian prophetic calendar is about to run out.
The Good News? We can teach ourselves how to argue outside the circle of our own personal belief system (paradigm). We can take a page from Jesus who was very good at it as evidenced by the fact that there are about 2.2 billion Christians in the world today - more than any other religion. How did Christ do it? He stepped outside the circle - way outside actually. Here's how:
He reached out to the outcasts who had been pushed to the fringes of the Jewish circle - the lame, the insane, the lepers, the tax collectors, the prostitutes and the Samaritans. He drew them in and made them a competing core within the community of the followers of God. We do that by reaching out to those who were once with us, but who have drifted away.
He sacrificed himself in a tangible way for his followers. We must sacrifice our time, our energy and our money for those we have lost from our fellowship. They need to know we care about them.
He empowered his followers to reach out beyond the circle. His disciples and their converts went out to share the gospel with the Gentiles in every part of the world. Have you noticed that it is often those who come from the farthest from us, who become the greatest spokesmen for our causes? I think of atheists and agnostics who have become Christians like C. S. Lewis, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Doug Batchelor. I think of liberals who have become powerful conservative advocates like Bill Whittle, Milton Friedman, Dennis Milller, George Orwell and David Horowitz.
The key thing to remember is that, just because your paradigm says a thing is so, that is not going to be a valid argument to someone else who believes that his own paradigm, religion belief system, or ideology is also self-evident. Sgt. Joe Friday of the old TV show "Dragnet" perhaps said it best.
The only thing that effectively defeats a stubborn paradigm is the relentless bombardment by facts. Name-calling only solidifies an opponents position. Ad hominem attacks, straw man attacks and any number of logical fallacies will work against you. I highly recommend you check out the link I just gave you. It will help you not only improve your ability to articulate your position, but will also help you recognize flawed reasoning when you are pelted with it by some hysterical ideology who is upset by the facts you present. Here are some basic logical fallacies you should avoid.
In CS Lewis' brilliant children's book, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," Professor Digory, when told a thing wasn't logical by one of the children, lamented, "What are they teaching in schools these days?" I leave you with this clip from the movie (below) so this blog ends on less of a downer.
Enough blood's been shed for your freedom - stand up out of respect!
There are four verses to the national anthem. None of them are racist. For the most part we stop singing after the first anyway, but there is no other reason for this than that a national anthem should not delay the baseball, football or basketball game, nor delay the president's speech or the flyover by the Air Force.
Lately, however, a line from one of the unsung verses has been used as an excuse for sitting down during the playing of the anthem by Americans concerned with institutionalized (you guessed it) RACISM in America. Before you make assumptions about racism in our nation's anthem, you should perhaps read it for yourself. Here's the "offensive" verse. TRIGGER WARNING: The Star Spangled Banner was written by a man with some education who used words and grammatical constructions suitable for reading by other educated folk - high school or maybe college level for our latest flocks of high school graduates more probably. So if you read at a fourth grade level, the only thing you are going to pick up in this verse of the anthem is that it uses the "S" word and will merrily jump to conclusions from there. I have added explanatory comments in italics for those of you from Rio Linda. Verse 3
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, (he means the British Army)
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more? (he means they want to defeat the USA)
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.(i.e. patriot blood has purified the stain on America's honor left by the British attacks)
No refuge could save the hireling and slave (he's not talking about black people - see below)
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,(from getting their fuzzy butt's kicked)
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
YES! The infamous third verse of the national anthem does use the "S" word. In their desperate search for trigger words that wound their delicate sensibilities, the precious snowflakes who make up the Progressive Left automatically assume that when Key said "SLAVES" that the verse is racist.
IT IS NOT!
The slaves in question (and hirelings) that Francis Scott Key was referring to were not American negroes enslaved throughout the South. Key was talking about the mercenary and conscripted forces of the British Army who were conscripted out of their colonies and conquests. None of these "slaves" to the British were American Negroes nor can be understood as such. Scott never meant for the term "slaves" to be construed this way.
Don't you love the way progressives get all animated over trigger words like "slave" as though only black people can be slaves? I mean, how racist is it to assume that only black people can be slaves? This meaning was not inherent in how we used the word slaves back in Key's day. In the early days of the United States, anyone who was compelled to obey a tyrant, would be considered a slave no matter what color they were. The British Army often used conscripted troops, but to the American way of thinking, no one who served a tyrant, however willingly, could be consider any less than a slave. The US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are not documents that allow much room for slavery anyway. Despite compromises within the Constitution over how to count slaves in apportioning congressional districts, there was such a disconnect between the high language of the preamble and the Bill of Rights that the abolition of slavery was an inevitability, built into the bones of the document itself.
In fact, years later at the outbreak of the Civil War, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens in his famous "Cornerstone Speech", argued that secession was necessary to preserve the South's "peculiar institution" (slavery). Stephens argued that the US Constitution "rested upon the assumption of the equality of races". He claimed that because the Negro wasn't equal to the whites, the South must, therefore, secede or see slavery inevitably abolished. Yes, it took a while, but, in the end, the purpose of the Founders, equality of all men, was achieved. Though the principle of racial equality was established, again it took more bloodshed, and once again, the blood of patriots helped wash away the stain upon our national honor - or at least should have.
Once again, however, people in power wish to preserve the appearance of a gulf between Americans based on race as a way to keep a racial minority bound to the Democrat plantation. These "progressive" leaders attempt prove that there is such a gulf by claiming racism is so bad that black college students, for instance, should be segregated by skin color to protect them from having their feelings hurt.
Does anyone besides me hear the echoes of ancient bigotry in a policy like that. And we conservatives are faced with it on the extreme ends of our own political ideology. The alt/right Americans (many of whom support Donald Trump) who call decent Christian conservatives "cuckservatives" and race traitors are no better than their paternalistic elitist brethren on the left. They've swung so far to the right they have bumped butts with the racist Progressive left around on the far side of the Earth. That we listen to either of these groups with other than contempt and laughter worries me. It tells me Jesus is not too far from making a second appearance to the squabbling children of Earth. And as to whether any of this stuff is going to get better or not, I don't think so. Just remember. The Second Coming is a rescue mission and not an occupation or conquest. We're going to leave it all behind to burn itself down. We'll be coming back later to replant and rebuild. I'm really looking forward to that.
Carlton Krappantski* has every right to state his opinion...and so do we.
You know the
NFL has gotten a little too secure with its position in American
culture. If they don't take a hard stance on the flag disrespect by
players, they're likely to see everyone turn off their TV sets and not
watch the game for a few weeks. They seem to have forgotten up at the
NFL Commissioner's office that watching football is an optional thing
for Americans. And they don't seem to get it that a huge majority of the folk who watch football, buy football gear and go to games don't like seeing an NFL player like Colon Klaptrapki disrespect the national anthem and the flag.
Maybe for a couple of weeks we all ought to change our Sunday afternoon routines. Perhaps we could flip off the TV, grab a football and go play touch football out on the lawn with our kids and neighbors for a few weeks while the NFL finds a way to apologize for and discipline its members.
Freedom of speech means you can't be arrested for speaking your mind. We are protected from that by the first amendment and nobody is proposing that we arrest people like Colin Karpnackistan. In fact, setting Colin Krapernicrud free from his NFL contract might just be a proper response in this case - that is if the NFL doesn't want to see a fan boycott.
* And I know I'm not spelling his name right, but I figure if Colonic Krapenema can disrespect the flag of the country that made him wealthy, I can disrespect his name too - as in I'll never spell his name right ever again. Just me exercising my freedom of speech.
Conservatism is under attack and it's not who you think. Turns out we are our own worst enemy. Trump has carved off a segment of conservatives, mashed them all up with angry white people, angry black people, angry Hispanics and other fringe elements that look to Trump for salvation, but Trump isn't the whole problem.
I just spent an unpleasant hour listening to Stefan Molyneux and a guy who calls himself Vox Day explaining what the alt-right movement is all about. Apparently the term "cuckservative" originates with Mr. Day and loosely means "race traitor". The alt-right movement claims it's better that people stay in their own cultural enclaves - the nations that bred them in other words. They further claim that the US is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation and it's time we should make it that again. So now we have the Republican Party broken up into Trump minions, alt-right race loyalists, neo-cons, country club Republicans, Tea Party folk and a confused bunch of the rest of us who believe in the Constitution, free markets, small government and every one of the Bill of Rights.
There is an old military tactic known as "divide and conquer" that seems to be the primary strategy being used against the conservative community. Together people who identify themselves as conservatives make up 65% or better of voting Americans. Together we are a terrible roadblock to the conquest of America by progressives. Separated and fractured into factions, we're relatively harmless.
Ironically, progressives, those advocates of multi-culturalism and promoters of non-assimilation have used the very techniques they use to create "voter groups" against Republicans and conservatives. Sadly, they have a lot of help from us in doing it. Apparently conservatives are more than willing to help out.
At any rate, I've never seen good-hearted well meaning Americans so divided in my lifetime. I've read about it in history books. It never ends well for nations that have a divided populace.
Somehow we need to find common ground for all of us. We're more Americans than we are anything else if you get right down to it, but thanks to the media, entertainment industry and the political jabbering class, we've been convinced to huddle up in our own little homogeneous groups.
It's not easy to hold a nation together when it divides itself into narrow ideologies and political ghettos. Create those divisions along cultural and racial lines and it's even worse. We've got to cut that out or the America we know is going to be taken from us by a smug set of conquerors, who have figured out the Achilles heel in the American melting pot. Ironically, it's the same thing that is our strength - our differences.
TRUMP IS THE SAME AS REAGAN? Trump's PR Department Constructs New Meme
The Trump Machine scoured the picture files to find this pair of pics which equate a Reagan thumb's up to a Trump thumb's up! They still wound up with a Trump smirk alongside a genuine Reagan smile. Reagan's looking at people; Trump at cameras.
Here they tried to catch a Reagan smirk and pair it with The Donald's famous smirk. The problem for the PR guys is that Reagan looks like he shares and inside joke with his audience. Trump here looks like he knows something that you don't know and thinks you're pretty stupid.
I'm going to do this one in pictures so that the LIV Trump supporters at whom this is aimedmay understand. I just hope they'll notice the captions or they'll miss the whole point, but seeing as how the true believers will follow Trump off a cliff, I don't suppose there's much hope of that.
True conservatives (whom Trump says he doesn't need) love Ronald Reagan. He's far and away our favorite president of the past century and a half. So (since they don't need us), Trump's minions (shown at the left) have begun constructing a new meme. The old "lesser of two evils" meme has been successfully and widely debunked and is obviously not working with principled conservatives so they've taken a new tack. First it was the "devil you don't know is better" argument, which hasn't been as successful as they hoped, with Trump supporters beginning to jump ship lately as they realize that the devil you don't know is still a devil. Whoops!
So to reach conservatives (whom Trump doesn't need in order to win), the Trump machine has resorted to resurrecting the corpse of Ronald Reagan and propping it up beside pictures of Donald Trump that they have tried to match expression and mannerism-wise so that the LIV crowd might mistakenly believe that Trump is a chip off the old Reagan block.
Trying to remember which expression to use versus seriously presidential
There are a whole raft of these Trump/Reagan "which of these things is
just like the others" kind of photos on the web. A lot of them are png
files which makes me wonder if the same Photoshop wizard is making them.
I can hear the Trump PR department going, "Chuck, we need you to find
some pictures where Trump looks Reaganesque and match them up with old
Reagan photos. And we need those by tomorrow. Comparing him to the devil
hasn't worked out so well...."
Here's some more that Bozo the Candidate's crack PR team came up with....
Here we have the mouth open pose. I need hardly comment on which looks like a president and which like a side show barker.
Here we go, still trying to match the serious presidential face of Reagan. Best they could do is Trump's Monty Hall face doing "Let's Make a Deal!"
Trying to show how Trump captures Reagan's energy. Looks more like the Donald is doing an advertisement for the Squatty Potty.
Still trying to match up the serious presidential expression on Reagan's face with something (anything) remotely similar from the Donald. I've seen Dana Carvey do that same expression in his Church Lady skit on Saturday.
"Now who could it be?"
Church Lady could tell you who it is. The face and eyes are the mirror
to the soul. Does anyone beside me think that Trump and Clinton both are
using practice faces trying to gin up some real human expressions. Do
we have a pair of sociopaths running for president this November -
people not capable of expressing genuine emotions. Isaac Asimov once
wrote a story about an Android that ran for public office once. He
pulled it off. I wonder whether the victory of the robot said more about
how well the robot simulated human emotions and expressions or more
about how poorly politicians do?
We've certain tossed out any real people from the candidate pool this time around. All we have left are con artists, criminals and criminal con-artists with the cumulative moral strength of a pigeon. Here's hoping there are more wise and principled Americans out there this fall than it would appear based on the quality of this year's top tier presidential contenders.
Lest you think the Trump Machine's technique is new, here's a foreshadowing.
Here they compare Cruz to Nixon, Trump to Reagan and Rubio to Bush. We
are supposed to learn from this that Trump is Reagan. I'm not sure who they
are selling this balderdash to, but their collective brainpower could hardly
summon up the energy to light up a night light.
