Donny They Hardly Knew Ye

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..............

© 2016 by Tom King

Joining the Browncoats - I Aim to Misbehave

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:

1. Liberals hate the evil oppressive government and at the same time want more evil oppressive government.
2. Liberals believe in freedom and at the same time seek to achieve freedom by taking more and more of it away through government.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.)
9. 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.
10. 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!

© 2016 by Tom King

Trump Delusion Syndrome: Do You or Your Loved Ones Have It?

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.

1. 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."
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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."
5. 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. 
6. You believe God is a Republican and that voting for a Democrat is a mortal sin.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Rejecting First Victimhood

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.

© 2016 by Tom King

Exploiting the Injuns - Again!

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.

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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?

God bless you all.

© 2016 by Tom King