Environmentalist Shaming

I note the youth of those who are the most militant of the environmental lobby. Their behavior reflects their youth. They do NOT want change unless that change preserves things the way they are. If you ever had to make a move because of a new job and had teens in the house, you have heard the lamentations of kids being forced to change to a new school. It's really pitiful. And it explains why, despite some very rational arguments against the leftist position that climate must NOT change, they cling to that idea and resist any notion that their world should be any different in 50 years than it is now. I do pity them if we ever get hit by a big asteroid. Talk about ruining their world. Their instinctive reaction to those who offer an argument that contradicts the heard belief in the doctrines of the First Environmentalist Church of Gaia is, of course, to shame the nay-sayers into submission. After all, shaming works particularly well with people who desperately want to belong to the herd. And frankly, most of these young snowflakes cannot imagine anyone who doesn't want to belong to the herd and accept their shared beliefs. To live outside the herd is unimaginable to a child.

Like children, they tend to resort to some form of shaming to defend their fundamentalist environmental religion when challenged.  I recently posted this little note. Frankly I did it to get a rise out of my lefty buds from the militant environmentalist save-the-world-through socialism wing of the Democrat and Green Parties. Here's what I asked:

CO2 is what plants breathe. So why do you guys hate plants?

It was targeted at the environmentalist narrative that CO2 is bad, which seems to me a little strange. After all, an abundance of CO2 makes plants grow really really well and they, in turn, enrich the atmosphere with oxygen. It's a lovely thing. One of my friends, who I do not lump in with the fanatic progressive left as he debates with a remarkable level of fairness, commented. He objected that he didn't hate plants, it was the people cutting down the rain forests. Of course they are doing that to grow crops and grass for cattle to eat, so they don't exactly hate plants. They just want to grow more of a certain kind of plants. I pointed this out. The discussion is ongoing.

So what I find strange is that the environmentalist true-believers want to preserve dense rain forests and at the same time want to reduce the carbon dioxide gas the rain forest plants need to survive and grow well.  And, as progressives are so fond of saying when we try to end some intrusive government program, "Well, what are you going to replace our program of increased government and anti-people initiatives with if we're going to 'save' the planet."

How about nothing? The question assumes we need to "save" the planet. Okay, make polluters clean up after themselves. I can get behind that, but to return human civilization to some Luddite agrarian pre-technology human civilization would require millions of people to die off because we can't afford them. It certainly explains the progressive infatuation with abortion.

As to what you can do practically to "save" the rain forests, I don't think the environmentalist left has a good plan. Unless the forces of environmentalism plan to invade Brazil and physically stop all those indigenous peoples and their willing corporate allies and Brazilian ranchers and farmers from clearing farmland, I don't see that there's a lot they can do about it. AND if they do plant crops instead of trees, those plants will likely be CO2 breathers like the rain forest trees so it's not a total loss of biomass.

Something similar has happened in the USA. Today there are more trees in North America than there were when Columbus' started the invasion of evil white people. We fight wildfires nowadays instead of letting them burn down areas the size of states like they used to when indigenous peoples were doing forestry management. We plant trees along every street and hedges and green lawns around every house, even in places that were barren save for some barely alive dry grass before we moved in. We have crops instead of grasslands, but, hey, we're feeding people who because they eat better are now living long enough to complain because we don't go back to total wildness and do the decent thing. The "decent thing" is, of course, to go ahead and die off by the billions and reduce the surplus population (defined as mainly anyone who is not a progressive). Of course, what people that are left after the deplorables are sifted out of the populations*, will starve because progressives tend to not be a bunch of hick farmers and protesting doesn't create much in the way of food.

I'm sorry. I get started when someone takes a side track to deflect from the point - which is:

1. A rise in CO2 levels, as science has shown, follows rather than leads periods of warming. So rising CO2 levels are likely a result of a rise in global temperatures rather than the cause of it.
2. A rise in CO2 levels leads to an explosion of plant growth of all kinds, which leads to a rise in oxygen levels due to the plants CO2 scrubbing proclivities.
3. As CO2 levels rise, the rain forests will thicken and spread into areas where people aren't fighting it, so Mama Nature won't be going gently into that good night.
4. Socialism won't fix that. (See the missing Aral Sea, The Caspian and very Black Seas - thank you Soviet Union and Communist China).
5. CO2 is good for the plants. Crops grow better, rain forests grow thicker and your houseplants are happier. God has built into the Earth some amazing automatic climate control mechanisms.
6. That said, no one has figured out how to put a thermostat on the sun and climate temperatures rise and fall at the whim of merry old Sol. Nothing we can do about that. It's a NUCLEAR furnace 93 million miles away. And who is to say that the temperature we have now should be locked in as the one and only ideal temperature. Climate has changed a lot throughout the ages in response to many factors. Volcanoes are pretty good at blocking out sunlight and cooling things off or at pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the air. We haven't figured out a control thermostat mechanism for volcanoes yet either.
7. No one will starve if the temps go up. I know you've heard that we'll have vast desert wastelands if temps rise just a degree or so. Well, what they don't tell you is that a few degrees rise will open up vast acres of farmland in Canada, Siberia, and northern Europe to potential cultivation. We'll just have to move around a bit to adapt, but that is why God gave us two legs and UHaul gave us rental trucks and trailers.

Just sayin'
 
© 2018 by Tom King
 
* Can you say "gulags".

Shoveling Air - The Assault on Conservative Memes

I posted this quote by Thomas Sowell. I though it was pretty obvious what it meant, but right away one of my left-leaning friends who claims to be utterly independent took a shot at it. He objected that if you put out a fire, you have to replace it with something after all. Sowell, he said, was "...ignorant if he thinks we don't need to replace an extinguished fire with something."

Air! If a fire is extinguished, apparently we need to replace it with air, according to my "independent" left-leaning friend. He was particularly harsh in his criticism of Sowell's analogy.

• Sowell is stupid. Of course you replace the fire with air. D’uh. Or is he so ignorant that he thinks air = nothing?

He missed the point and actually proves the point on a second level. Sowell's point is that WE humans don't actually have to replace the extinguished fire with air. It happens naturally. Government programs like the Affordable Care Act can be ended and don't have to be "replaced" by some government law or program. You missed Sowell's analogy. You can end Obamacare and you don't have to pass some new government program to replace it. Let the medical community and free market forces take care of "fixing" it. It's exactly like extinguishing a fire. That's all you have to do. Nothing else.

It's not like the firemen have to shovel on some air when they put out a fire. Instead, the air rushes in of its own and restores things to the their previous state. The analogy applies perfectly to the repeal of the ACA. My lefty friends always demand that we tell them what we'd replace the ACA with it if they repeal it. And I keep telling them we don't need to replace it with anything. The free market will revert to its natural state. Air had been there the whole time the fire was burning. Without it the fire cannot burn. Without the energy of free market capitalism, socialism rapidly burns out and collapses. The market returns to fill the space. The government doesn't have to do anything to replace a bad government program.

I posted this second meme and once again was pounced upon. The meme points out that if the prey is armed the predator thinks twice about attacking. My left-leaning buds pounced again, posting a picture of lions hunting down and killing a porcupine and telling me, in essence, that arming the prey does no good at all. I promptly scared up a set of videos of porcupines fending off seven lions and a leopard and escaping, leaving its attackers with noses full of quills.

Lately, it seems that any time I post a good analogy with a conservative message, the loyal opposition pounces on it and nitpicks it to death. Seems to be a new strategy. I guess they're tired of me taking apart their memes.

Someone called what is happening in our country a Cold Civil War. Indeed that's the best description I've heard for it yet. It's a Civil War all right, but it hasn't descended to a shooting war yet. I hope it never does. What we need is a Ronald Reagan to bankrupt the left and end the war.

I didn't think Trump was it, but I was pleasantly surprised when he kept his promises. But the left will be back. They are relentless and unless Jesus comes very soon, we can always hope the resistance finds a way to, well, RESIST.

© 2018 by Tom King

Of Torn Down Statues and Revisionist History

The objection to politically incorrect statues in the public square is that this is an inappropriate place to have statues of "world leaders....., even enemies" according to my left-leaning friends.  I'm told it's okay to have them safely tucked away in history museums where docents can 'splain to heads full of mush how evil these people were, but to have them in public without proper interpretation is, in a word, "ridiculous". 

I beg to differ.

Jefferson Davis & Woodrow Wilson are
removed from the UT Austin campus as
Republicans join in the fun and include
Democrat icon Wilson in the purge.

During my two trips to Washington DC, I enjoyed all the statues scattered around the Capital. You can't throw a cat in DC without hitting something marble or bronze. When I visited , I did find statues of some of the guys memorialized, to be of less than honorable men. But unlike my critical friends on the left, I believe public spaces should be places to preserve history. I may find Democrats like Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and Jefferson Davis to be men I do not admire, but they were a part of our history. Someone felt strongly enough about them to honor them in stone and metal. The statues scattered around New Orleans, for instance, are a part of the city's history. Without them, it's as though the city's darker history is being swept under the proverbial rug. And it is. Look, I have no problem if a neighborhood wants to erect a statue of, say, black communist activist W.E.B. DuBois. It's their business. Should I walk past such a statue, I would be reminded of what I know about him and what he did to set his people upon an unfortunate road and to negate the work of greater men like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.

I'm sorry, but the Robert E. Lee statues I do not disapprove of. Lee abhorred slavery and believed the Confederacy should have abolished it before seceding. He felt it tarnished the cause of state's rights that was ostensibly the motivation behind secession. Stonewall Jackson feld the same way.  After the war, Lee did much to heal the rift in our nation and his example led many Southerners to reject slavery as the evil it was. Lee believed that God had abandoned the Southern cause largely because of slavery. Lee is a tragic figure and his story has much to teach us about making huge mistakes and finding redemption beyond them. 

Vladimir Lenin's statue in Seattle

Sadly, this crop of kids coming up probably don't get the lesson.  The millennial generation has spent little time even lightly perusing actual history, instead drinking in alternative (socialism-driven) history by osmosis - thinking they know the truth because Marxist professors like Howard Zinn confidently assure them that the history of the past supports the eventual rise and victory of the "progressive" socialist cause - an idea that sounds great in your head if you just don't read the actual history of socialism in the 20th century.

Everyone draws from these various monuments to men and women, great and flawed, something personal and that's not always bad. When I see Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and others, put up on pedestals by dying generations of Civil war survivors, I feel the tragedy of the Civil War in my bones. I remember how the Southern elite upper classes deceived millions as to the purpose of that war. They sold the whole "States Rights" narrative to farmers and shopkeepers who did not, nor never would own slaves and the folks Karl Marx would have called "the proletariat" fell for it hook, line and sinker. Even honorable men like Jackson and Lee who disapproved of the institution of slavery were swept along by the tide of secession against their better judgment because of a misplaced sense of loyalty and duty to their home states.

I don't think we should blot out that history lesson. Add one of those history markers to the pedestal that explains what a tragedy the whole thing was. But don't pretend the events they were a part of never happened. Don't hide the sins of the party of Nathan Bedford Forrest, James Keith, Silas Gordon, "Bloody" Bill Anderson, William Quantrill, Henry Wirz, George Wallace, and Bull Connor.  Without such reminders, I'm afraid we're going to white-wash it all to the point where kids no longer remember how a political party and it's elite cadre of upper class Americans destroyed the lives of millions of their fellow citizens through deceit and manipulation. I WANT to be reminded of that every time I walk by one of those statues that hundreds of thousands of fools believed the lies and followed these men to their deaths and that every one believed they were doing the right thing.  Moreover, I want to remember that at one time enough people admired these men enough to build statues of them.

I need to be reminded. We all need to be reminded, because it is all happening again.


© 2018 by Tom King

Mutual Respect for Each Other's Custom

A local rajah in India complained that then British Commander-in-Chief for India, Sir Charles Napier, had no right to interfere with their custom of burning widows alive as part of the funeral ritual for their late husbands,  He insisted that the British cease to interfere with widow burnings. Napier replied with classic British understatement.

• "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." - Sir Charles Napier

I like that whole idea of mutual respect for each others' customs.

© 2018 by Tom King

According to Socialists, the Collapse of Venezuela is Capitalism's Fault

A Venezuelan socialist goes grocery shopping with cash....
...and leftists are trying to tell us that's capitalism's fault.

The left really does some convoluted reasoning to defend their ideology. In this article, a young progressive tries to figure out how to say America is worse off than if we'd just go ahead and turn major sectors of the economy over to socialism.  It's truly laughable that he cites healthcare as a prime example.  Premiums for health care were shrinking prior to the ACA reforms by 4.6%, and went UP 46% in the four years after. Since 2013, premiums have jumped another 60% from the inflated prices of the the first four years of Obamacare.

I know socialism sounds like such a great idea, but it has such a giant flawed principal behind it that it never works. People aren't basically good. Nor can people be perfected from without. No combination of law or systemic organization or central planning can make people better. There is no record of a successful human created utopia in all of history. No collectivist worker’s paradises exist. The United States’ founders’ scheme of individualism, personal responsibility, limited government, local authority, free market capitalism and personal property has managed to survive 267 years of human frailty, largely because as a Christian nation, we’ve striven for personal goodness rather than collective good. If you make the people better, the government tends to be better. It never works the other way round. You can’t legislate goodness. It just never works. Even God couldn’t do it. That’s the lesson of the Old Testament. You have to start with cleaning yourself up with the help of God. When He puts a new clean heart in you, the rest takes care of itself.

When I see collectivist progressives gather around the altar of government and swear something like, “All that the collective says, we will do,” I am reminded of the Israelites gathered around Mt. Sinai when they altered the deal God was offering.  Instead they told God, “All Thou hast said, we will do.” There was no recognition  then that the law had no power to cleanse them of their sin — only to reveal it. God offered repeatedly to change their hearts, to dwell in them and make them better people, but the Israelites kept coming back with, “That’s alright, God. We’ll do it ourselves. When that didn't work they decided they needed more human effort.  "Only give us a king," they said. "We think a stronger central government is needed.” And four books of the Bible are devoted to explaining what a bad idea that was.

Satan’s old lie goes on — “Thou shalt be like gods.”

No you won't. You’ll only be a better grade of devil.

Tom King

A Working Solution to Illegal Immigration

Colonia living - the reality of unchecked illegal immigration.

I wrote a blog a week or so ago about how Jesus' version of the Golden Rule was more pro-active than any of the earlier versions.  Suddenly, I was getting comments about how I couldn't be in favor of the Golden rule if I didn't criticize Donald Trump for "ripping children from their loving parents" over the illegal immigration thing. 

So how in the world did this get to be about immigration? If they're challenging my view of the Golden Rule, I've been absolutely consistent about that. I have repeatedly stated my position on the immigration issue. And I have expressed my disgust with our leaders and their policy of putting kids in detention facilities behind chain link fences and bars, I actually worked with groups that sought to create safe places for kids separated from incarcerated parents. We wrote grants and created plans for how to handle children when their parents are arrested. 

I might ask my critics, what have they done about the situation?  I actually have long ago expressed my concern about the situation with undocumented children.............way back in 2014 under the previous administration!  It's a shame that we had to get ourselves a TV celebrity president in order to get anything done to correct the problem. My previous comments were likely unsatisfying to my leftist friends. If you guys don't recall my speaking out on the subject, you haven't read much of my stuff. I can appreciate it that I didn't trash the President as my leftist buds wished me to do. I find that even presidents can't wave magic wands to instantly cure every ill of the nation. I do NOT want to have a president who can do that anyway. Too much scope for misuse of power by such a "Dear Leader".  

Compassion of the sort Jesus asks, takes a lot more than the right sort of political rhetoric and unearned moral superiority. It takes time and effort right where you live. I've helped feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal broken spirits of abused and mentally ill children, provide resources for disabled people to live independently, teach children with learning disabilities, care for seniors with age-related disabilities and provide transportation resources for transportation-challenged seniors and low-income families and individuals.  Did that for four decades so far. I don't remember Jesus saying that making rude remarks about any non-progressive/Democrat that gets elected President of the United States was one of His commandments. I think he did the right thing closing off undocumented immigration. It strangles the wage-slavery racket and THAT is a good thing

So, why not go after the farmers and Tyson Chicken and other employers who hire them for cheap wages? Why not correct the Social Security, Drivers License, and other such vetting systems that are already in place in order to better detect forged ID’s? Why not remove the ability to make money if they aren’t in the proper status? Ants don’t come in droves unless you leave the sugar bowl out and open. That is something Trump has been touting since the campaign trail. He knew of this caravan a month before they arrived. What did Trump or Sessions do to fix the systems currently in place....nothing much yet. But if you pay attention, you know that changing government policy and practice moves at a glacial pace so the slowness of change should not be terribly surprising! 

So far, Republicans have talked a lot about border security, but so far not much has been done by the right, except tout a fuzzy idea that Mexico is gonna pay for their wall.  I am disappointed in them for their continued waffling on that. One liberal friend tried to accuse Republicans of being behind the exploitation of illegals, despite their having consistently been in favor of tougher illegal immigration enforcement. Another asked, "Why do you suppose Allis Chalmers or John Deer haven't come out with some kind of celery or strawberry combine by now?" hinting that evil Republicans were suppressing this technology. Baloney! The only reasons a machine pushed around by a tractor can't pick delicate vegetables is because it's not yet cost effective (too much waste of the crop) and the technology for that kind of picking just isn't there yet. We still need human pickers. We just ought to pay them what they are worth for doing it is all I'm saying. 

And the "What would Jesus do?" argument doesn't hold. Christ would definitely NOT continue a policy that results in Hispanic laborers living in squalor and fear and THAT is exactly what "catch and release" policies of the past have done.  We need to close the border hard. Then, and only then we can deal with whatever needs to be done about undocumented workers and refugees so that they are documented and need not live in fear and subjugation on company plantations.  

Okay, NOW YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU GUYS ON THE LEFT WOULD DO ABOUT THAT. The president has already addressed the family separation issue. How about closing the border and a decent guest worker program for farm laborers and such. The companies and farmers that need such workers should have to sponsor their guest workers. After all they are the ones making all those vile profits off of undocumented workers. Of course, supporting such a system would likely cost a whole bunch of politicians a whole bunch of campaign funds from those businesses that profit off the illegal immigration status quo.

Now I will close by kindly asking my leftist buddies to stop telling me I never offer any solutions to the problem.  Note:  This is a solution.

Just sayin'

© 2018 by Tom King

Global Climate Change Not a Conspiracy...........Really!

It's not about science. It's about power and the deception practiced
by those who crave power. As Daniel Webster said once, "They
promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."

Global Climate Change (aka global warming) is NOT a big conspiracy. It's a scientific controversy that has been co-opted and propagandized by political ideologues to create a narrative that says we humans should give up our liberties to socialist central planners in order to save the planet. Tragically, in the middle of all the politics, the real science that should be happening has been obscured, repressed, and funded out of recognition as pure science. When scientists' careers depend on their not challenging political dogma, science suffers.

Climate is an incredibly complex subject which has been emotionally charged because politics, religion and economics have all become entangled in what should be a strictly scientific issue. So instead of seeing computer climate models for what they are (theoretical guesswork), we've made them prophecy and enshrined the rhetoric of ideological profiteers like Al Gore and other so-called "climate warriors". Instead of healthy debate, we see dissenters silenced, ridiculed and marginalized n favor of a narrative dictated by globalist "progressives" who mean to be our masters.

We are currently in a cooling period thanks to a solar minimum that has reduced sunspot activity dramatically. The last big one of these we had, The Maunder Minimum, led to a period of climate change that, in Europe, was called "The Little Ice Age" and caused whole crops to be wiped out in some northern countries. England once had thriving vineyards that were killed out during the Maunder Minimum. Until someone hangs a thermostat on the sun, that great nuclear ball of fire in the sky will have far more to do with climate change than anything a scrabbling handful of people can do.

Should we clean up after ourselves? Sure. Should we minimize pumping smoke into the air? Probably, given the climate effects we see every time one of those big old volcanoes goes off and pumps the atmosphere full of dirt and smoke.

Should we enact draconian environmental laws, frighten children and place vast power in the hands of a gang of elitist central planners. NO! Unequivocally, no. That always turns out to be a very bad idea. Not that it won't happen. We could reach a tipping point soon where, thanks to relentless propaganda and fear-mongering, the citizens of Earth might well hand themselves and their futures over to what promises to be a wildly repressive oligarchy of progressive socialists.

Just look at how they go after anyone who opposes them by digging up dirt from their past, twisting the truth, and demonizing even their own people. Now imagine the global government secret police and how that's going to work out for anyone who complains about the universal low living standard being proposed by the very people who would cut the world's population in half to "save the planet".

We've seen how population controls work and the genocide that follows it as troublesome folk are removed because they threaten the power holders. The Beast thus created will be terrible to behold and this is the first time in history that we have the technology and the weapons to successfully manage a world population according to the dictates of an elite few. Now that we troublesome types can be hunted down with infrared trackers, our movements monitored by computer, our ability to buy and sell controlled by government agencies, and every word we've ever said online pulled up to be used to prosecute us using the over 2 million laws on the books in the United States alone, the end is coming sooner rather than later. In a way I'm glad I'm getting old. I weep for my children, though. It's not going to be pretty.

But, hey, Jesus is coming, so it'll be okay, no matter how badly the human race screws itself up trying to create a utopia for themselves without Him.

© 2018 by Tom King

Why I Dislike the Word "Compliant"

A word that pops up disturbingly often in education, social service and health care paperwork is "compliant". It seems everyone who has anything to do with helping people seems hell-bent to make sure their charges are "compliant".  Even my doctor monitors "compliance" with his orders. Cooperating with my doctor is, of course a good thing, but I prefer "cooperation" to "compliance". I think "compliance" is a dangerous goal for any society. Americans are not a compliant people, thank God. My progressive friends seem to think more compliance would be good. The idea is that the government would make laws and then everyone would comply with them and then utopia would be achieved. The government could redistribute wealth and suddenly everyone would be "equal".  

The trouble is that "sameness" is not necessarily "equality". And redistributing wealth only redistributes wealth. It does not redistribute character or talent. There's nothing wrong with redistributing wealth. In fact there is no way to avoid doing that. Capitalism does that by its nature. Socialism does that by force. The question is can we intentionally spread wealth around in a way that is mutually beneficial to all. Must wealth be spread so that it is the same to all no matter how hard they work or what risks they take. Surely, there must be a way to gather enough wealth to allow (the few) enough rewards for risk-taking to create new economic activity. There also must be enough wealth spread around for (the many) people to be able to afford to buy new products or services. Turns out there is. It's called free-market capitalism.

Henry Ford contradicted conventional capitalistic wisdom (and angered fellow capitalists) by more than doubling the wages of his factory workers. Instead of going broke, Ford thrived because that act essentially created a new middle class who, for the first time, could afford to buy cars. Sadly, Ford mistook wise business policy for equally sound political policy and supported Hitler and Mussolini's ideas of socialism. World War II was an eye-opener for Mr. Ford. Mr. Ford got too big for his britches in thinking he could apply what he did voluntarily, but do so by force through government authority. He was desperately wrong.

If we think the economic pie is finitely small, we can't do things like Ford did. Even Ford seems to have missed that. Giving your workers more money in a zero-sum game would mean the business owner makes less. Progressive idealists love the idea of picking wealthy pockets, the politics of envy being essential if you're planning to use the proletariat's greed to foment a revolution. My point is this.

Time and again members of the progressive left keep hitting me with this argument in favor of me coming over to the progressive side: 

• "I don't understand why you would support a policy that is against your own interests."

So, supporting political policy simply because it would increase my welfare check would be in my own interests in the short term? Well, maybe, but such a policy might not be good for everyone in the long run. That very appeal to narrow self-interest reveals the piratical nature of the strategy behind the progressive agenda. In a moment of rare clarity, one leftist wag reminded me that if I were to vote for progressives, then they would take money from people I envy and give it to me.

They did a lot of that in Detroit and for a while the people of Detroit enjoyed the vast influx of public largesse from the federal government.  Detroit was to be the showcase of liberal planning and a demonstration of the benefits to be gained from big government spending, central planning and wealth distributions. The People's Republic of Detroit, however, proved to be an unsustainable house of cards and it crumbled to ruin, leaving behind a wasteland, where once stood the most vibrant industrial city in America once stood - at least before Progressives tried to fix it..

I believe the short-sighted thinking of the progressive movement stems from an almost desperate need by the leaders of the movement (most of whom reject religion in general and Christianity in particular) to prove that man can create a heaven on Earth by writing laws. The folly of perfecting people by passing laws has been demonstrated already. In the early days of Israel, God showed the Israelites that even He could not create a perfect world by making laws - not in a world where humans have free will to obey or disobey those laws. Laws only reveal what is evil in man. Changing man's heart that he may obey those laws on his own steam must happen in the human heart, transformed by time spent in the presence of He who is love, joy, peace and harmony incarnate.

The Progressive movement falls into the trap very quickly of deciding that if writing the law doesn't work, then what's needed is strict enforcement. Then, a perusal of history shows that the harder they try and enforce the law, the more rebellious people become. Under government coercion of its citizens, resistance to the law tends to increase until finally, the whole thing deteriorates. At last tyranny comes to open warfare with the people who must live under the laws. Such governments pass more and more laws thinking to make people more likely to obey. But hedging people about with an abundance of law is inevitably fatal. Too many laws and obedience becomes more and more onerous and the more it becomes evident that the laws are not working. Finally, the "dear leaders" find themselves strung up by their feet from a nearby telephone pole or cast into their own gulags.

It's why socialist nations eventually take up genocide as their national sport. They try to eliminate anyone who might not be compliant. It's why Hitler killed Jews and gypsies. It's why Stalin starved 1.8 million Ukrainian Kulaks, the best farmers in Russia. It's why the bishops of France drove out the Hugenots - Protestant shop-keepers who were the backbone of business in France. It's why Chairman Mao slaughtered Chinese teachers and intellectuals and landlords. A landlord to Mao was anyone who owned more than one ox. Pol Pot murdered 3 million professionals, intellectuals, Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities. The "reunited" Communist "People's Republic" of Vietnam murdered some 2 million South Vietnamese after the Democrat US Congress abandoned their agreement to support the South Vietnamese after the peace accords were signed. 

Those who will not obey must be eliminated. It's such an elegant solution. Kill anyone with any spunk and leave only the compliant behind. It's why the leaders of revolutions tend to kill off their own comrades once they've seized power. All threats to their power must be removed, leaving only "the compliant". Hitler turned on the Brownshirts - the citizen thugs that supported his rise to power. Can you say ANTIFA?. Stalin assassinated his fellow Communist, Leon Trotsky and anyone who was his friend.

The devil's first lie was an empty promise.  "Thou shalt not surely die." His second was that "You shall be like gods."  Then, every time we try to be like gods we somehow wind up enslaved and dead. It is the nature of lusting for power. The wages of sin," says the Apostle Paul, "is death." And when we dabble in it, the wages always get paid.


God on the other hand does not demand compliance. Obedience by our own free choice to obey laws we believe in, is not knuckling under to an oppressor. That's what non-Christians don't get about us. We obey because we agree with the law, not because we fear the consequences. Over the years some have created tools like hellfire and excommunication and guilt and the power of priests to forgive in the same way Karl Marx tried to use revolution and enforced collectivism.

.
© 2018 by Tom King

Two Million Laws

A Very Educational Holiday

Resisting the New Normal

The New Normal?

As the leftist propaganda machine ramps up its efforts to "fundamentally change" American culture and values, it becomes increasingly dangerous to be a member of the resistance. Defending common sense and traditional values can cost you your job, your reputation and even get your kids taken from you. And, if you are the president of the United States, it can get you impeached - at least that's what the united progressives of the world are hoping. The latest flap over efforts by Donald Trump's INS to protect the US border is an example.

Yes, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service removes children from adult detention facilities and places them in Dept. of Human Services facilities while their parents, who have committed a crime by crossing the border illegally are being processed. Contrary to the narrative progressives are promoting, there are not a lot of "Family Jail Cells" at the INS where families can be kept together. Adult Illegal aliens are kept in what facilities there are while names are checked. This is a difficult process because undocumented aliens are, well, UNDOCUMENTED.

So instead of keeping them incarcerated with people who claim to be their parents (again no documentation) along with smugglers, sex traffickers, drug cartel enforcers, terrorists and drug mules, INS puts them into the custody of the Dept. of Human Services, an agency experienced in protecting children. DHS keeps the kids safe until their parents can be found or the adults they came across with can be identified as their parents (instead of child sex traffickers). Once everyone is identified and processed, the families are reunited and sent home to their respective countries. And the UN Human Rights Council, which condones massive assaults on the Israeli border by waves of women and children acting as human shields for terrorist assault forces, gets it's panties in a wad because we don't leave the kids in adult jail along with potential adult abusers.

The UN Human Rights Council is the same body of politicians who remain silent when authorities jerk kids out of happy homes because their parents don't want them to be propagandized by LGBQT propagandists in public schools. In Canada you cannot adopt a child unless you're willing to support a sex change operation for a four year-old. Quite frankly, in four decades of working among abused and emotionally damaged kids, it looks to me more like LGBQT advocates are more interested in increasing the numbers of potential sex partners in the coming years than protecting anyone's rights. 

I know that sounds harsh, but when you've seen fresh-faced kids come to town on buses with a piece of paper inviting them to come to the gay bars of the big cities, I have a hard time not doubting the motivation of the folk trying to "normalize" deviant sexual practices. There are, after all, only about 3% of Americans who embrace alternative sexual lifestyles. They must have a hard time finding partners. I sometimes wonder if the drive to encourage "alternative" gender identification in impressionable children is more about trying to grow the numbers of young sex partners than it is about protecting children from bullying.

After 40 years watching this sickness being pushed on us by government bureaucrats, the media and progressive activists, and seeing the horrors being perpetrated on innocent children and confused people with mental illness by these sexual bullies, I am frankly sickened by it all. People who casually go along with this kind of "fundamental change" in American values and culture, haven't seen the parade of victims of those promoting it. I have and I can tell you, you don't want to see the human wreckage left behind.

I love my friends who struggle with sexual identity issues. I spent years helping sexually abused kids try to come to terms with family's and friends' acts of perversion perpetrated on them when they were little. The trouble with trying to help these kids is that the LGBQT advocacy folks have convinced mental health professionals who ought to know better to go along with their efforts to force everyone to agree that sexual perversions are "normal".  Therefore scientists and counselors are forbidden to explore any possible treatments to help kids and adults who do not want to be slaves to their "alternative sexual proclivities." Why would people who write books like "Free to Be You and Me" object to folks who have homosexual proclivities, trying to get some treatment. People with bipolar are not forced to "embrace" their craziness, just because a lot of important celebrities have bipolar. And by the way the suicide rate among people with sexual issues is up there with that of people with untreated bipolar disorder. The only difference is that the political establishment of our country and a medical profession which has embraced politically correctness denies treatment to homosexuals, lesbians, trans-sexuals et al.

It's a real struggle to achieve some level of recovery from sexual deviance it's true, but don't let anyone tell you that you have to act on your impulses. Having everyone pretend that sexual deviance is normal and healthy isn't going to help the suicide rate any more taking guns away from law-abiding citizens will cause a mass shooter not to act on his impulse to mow down a row of school children. Impulses may be controlled, but it's difficult once they have found a seat within the mechanism of our brains. If you are denied any help for impulses you don't want, don't like and think are wrong, it's little wonder there is so much despair among those who suffer with this sort of mental illness. And, yes , I said mental illness. I have ADHD myself. It's a mental condition. I deal with it. I got some help. Everyone should be able to get help if they want it.

Thank God that He loves us and saves us from our sins. It's the last bit of hope in a world that devil wants to be as confusing and contradictory as possible. As an old rock song once opined, "Satan is my name. Confusion is my game." Look, if abused little girls can find peace after what they've gone through, so can other victims of sexual perversions. I've seen the horrific damage done to women in their childhoods and watched the heart-breaking struggle they go through to find peace and recovery. So why by all that's holy do we deny that healing and peace to those who are the victim of other forms of deviant sexual bullying?

Just sayin'.

(c) 2018 by Tom King

False Equivalencies, Logical Fallacies and Memes That Work "Too Well"

A friend posted this complaint about the plethora of memes defending President Trump's immigration policies, particularly putting immigrant in protective custody of DHS while their parents are being processed. Note I didn't use the words "atrocity" or "humanitarian crisis" as my leftist friends do. My friend claims that every one of the memes he's seen uses a "false equivalency" logical fallacy as "proof." This approach, he says, has become the go-to method of influencing public opinion. People simply pass these memes along with no regard as to whether or not the information is factual or misleading. And the frightening thing, he says, is that it seems to be working!

Yes, it is frightening that the left can't make this horrible situation stick to Trump. The trouble with my friend's argument is that the false equivalencies that I have seen are heavily on the rabid anti-Trump side. The media and Democrat side would have you think that suddenly Donald Trump started ripping children from their parents for no reason other than to be mean. This is not true. 

Here's why:

(1) The policy was started under Bill Clinton and expanded under Obama. Bush tried to close the border and create a guest worker program, but neither party was having it.

(2) It was a good policy to place kids in custody of DHS (which does the same thing if American parents are arrested). Trump started processing illegals as misdemeanor offenders. You don't leave kids in detention facilities with adults who may be smugglers, sex traffickers, drug mules, cartel enforcers or terrorists. It's not safe and ICE doesn't have enough family-friendly facilities to handle the surge of illegals.

(3) The kids are only kept until the parents are processed and then they are reunited and returned to their home countries. I think it's that "returned to their home country bit that's causing the Democrats to have the flutters.

(4) The hyperbole about kids whose mothers are in Mexico and the kids still in the states? That kind of thing happens when you write a phone number on the kid's forehead and send him across the border alone or you bring a whole undocumented family across illegally and can't prove the kids are even yours. Sometimes kids are over here along because Mom never crossed the border in the first place but came alone or with a "friend" or was abducted by traffickers. That's one of those things where you need to know the rest of the story. I know ICE agents and they aren't cruel people. 

Children of illegals thrown into "jail".  This was 2015 in
California. Want to guess who was president and
over the ICE at the time. Want to guess. I'll give you a
hint:  Big ears, goofy grin, wants to fundamentally change
America? How did that work out for you anyway?

(5) One reason kids get separated from "parents" is because they are "undocumented" and DHS is reluctant to reunite kids with adults who may not actually be their parents. An immigration attorney in Texas just got through sending out the word through the Associated Press that if you have a child with you, ICE won't prosecute you. She just encouraged drug mules, cartel enforcers, terrorists, sex traffickers and such to grab a random child before they cross the border to protect themselves from prosecution.

(6) ICE is overloaded because after 8 years of catch and release under Obama, Trump is talking a border wall. Illegals are rushing the border to try and get across before he builds a wall. That's why the facilities for detaining illegal immigrants are overcrowded and inadequate.

(7) If you want to talk about false equivalency, check how many of those pictures of kids behind chain link were taken back in 2014 under the Obama Administration. The mainstream media did a spate of investigative reports on ICE separating kids from their parents and tried to pin it on the GOP. The stories died very quickly when the blame didn't stick with Republicans but started to fall on President Obama. Obama "solved" the problem by transporting illegals and their kids north and deeper into the US and then releasing them with instructions to come back for "processing" later. Guess how many showed up with their kids to be processed.

(8) Trump is being blamed for a problem he inherited from Obama. And the left is busy wailing about Trump refusing to take responsibility and that conservatives are blaming Obama. Takes a lot of nerve when Bush blaming got so bad under Obama that it became a joke that every time Obama had a problem he would blame George Bush for it. Sad really.

(9) The left is mad at Trump now because he's announced an Executive Order to "handle the problem" of separating kids from incarcerated parents. Have you read the order? There are all these phrases like "as far as possible"; loopholes salted into the thing that leave the President and ICE free to continue incarcerating parents and putting the kids under the protection of DHS as they should be. That's an old Democrat trick to issue some fine-sounding paperwork to make people feel better and then leaving yourself an out to do what you want. Trump learned that when he was a Democrat.

(10) Democrats like Chuck Schumer are advising Democrats to oppose any attempt by the House and Senate to deal with the problem, lest it make Trump look good. That's the real humanitarian issue here. Immigrant kids being used to try and unseat a President and to seize political power.

Colonias in America - no water, sewer or electricity.

This is about memes alright, but it's not the relatively tepid memes defending Donald Trump that are the worst offenders here. I'm sick of the exploitation of the misery of those seeking to escape the horrors of life south of the border. We could do something but the political parties are too busy struggling for power.

Actually President Bush had the answer but he couldn't get either party to come together on the solution. The solution is simple and powerful and frees illegals from what is virtual low-wage slavery her in the US.

(a) Close the border tight. Until we stem the flow, we're fighting a losing battle.

(b) Create a guest worker program. If we need workers for jobs Americans won't do, let's make a legal way for them to come over and do those jobs.

(c) Register illegals already in the country. If they're obeying the law and willing to work put them in the guest worker program. If not, deport them.

(d) Make companies, farms, dairies and others which depend on migrant labor pay a fair wage, taxes and it should at least reach minimum wage for even unskilled labor. That takes care of the whole "jobs Americans won't do" argument.

(e) Close the colonias and arrest the people who profiteer off the fear and isolation illegal immigrants face trying to dodge ICE. If we make them legal through a guest worker program you solve the problems that promote poverty, crime and disease in immigrant communities. Once they are no longer illegal, they are protected by the American justice system from exploitation.

(f) Cut off all aid to nations sending their surplus populations north until they stop it. Let them participate in the guest worker program and let them receive an economic boost from the money that guest workers send back to their countries. The money will got to poor families rather than being filtered through corrupt governments that take 3/4 of all aid money to cover "administrative costs" so that only the tiniest trickle ever gets through to the people it's intended for.

East Texas colonias look like this. Rose growers, dairies, and
chicken plants send pickups to bring the men to work.

I worked for 40 years with kids, adults, the disabled, seniors, poor families and immigrants - illegal and otherwise. I saw the conditions in the colonias firsthand, the exploitation of illegals by chicken processors, rose growers, farmers and dairymen (all good Democrats contributing regularly to their congressmen, senators and such to buy protection for illegal immigration and what amounts to slaver labor and exploitation of illegals).

The Democrat party claims to have undergone this big change back in the 60's and renounced white supremacy and slavery utterly. I don't see it. They just changed their tactics for keeping minorities enslaved and on the plantation. I saw too much over the past 4 decades to buy the memes about Democrats being for the working man. I served during the time the Democrats were in power in Texas and watched the rise of the Republicans. Things got better under Governor Bush and his successors, let me tell you. And like with Trump, the Democrats ran the most shameless disinformation campaign trying to discredit the GOP in Texas that you ever saw. I was part of efforts to disrupt the Democrat good old boy networks and for a time I had to check under my truck before I started it up in the morning to see if there were any funny wires under there. I was warned. 

Don't kid yourself, the movement behind leaving our current system
in place is about cheap labor and keeping migrant workers living
in fear of ICE in order to keep them submissive to the bosses.

Democrats, I found in my years working in human services, are about accumulating power above all else. They will tell you it's all about having the power to "make things right". But they never do. Things always seem to get worse. Too many country club Republicans, though, have become afflicted with the same lust for power and are afraid to do what's right lest it cost them an election. Shame on them too.

It's time someone really helped these people for a change. I just don't hold out a lot of hope. Slavery is too handy a tool for hanging on to your wealth and power. And I am here to tell you, that what unrestricted illegal immigration is all about is virtual enslavement of minorities, particularly Hispanic "undocumented" immigrants. The term "undocumented" is kind of revealing. If they aren't documented, you don't have to pay them much and they can't complain because ICE might catch them and send them back to where they were starving or being murdered in their beds. The workers may earn a pittance for their very hard labor, but they are still slaves in my books.

That's the humanitarian crisis. Remove the fear and create a legal means for refugees to cross the border and you'll solve the problem. The trouble is, if you remove the fear, you remove the necessity to vote Democrat and if you're a good Catholic or Christian and a documented worker so you don't have to be afraid of ICE, you might just vote for a party that shares your family and Christian values, opposes abortion, disapproves of gay marriage, promotes religious and family values and espouses greater opportunity to rise in the world if you are poor.

No wonder Dems support catch and release. It keeps the fear in place and makes it easier to keep "undocumented" workers down on the farm and subservient.

© 2018 by Tom King

Humanitarian Crisis - True Lies?

Detained illegal immigrant kids circa 2014

My leftist friends say there is no justification for separating children from their parents like this. Let me give them some justification then:

(1) The parents are being detained with other adults in detention facilities wholly unsuited for children - e.g. adult jails. It takes a few days to process them, after which their actual children will be returned to them and the reunited families will be returned to their countries of origin. This is standard procedure when cops raid a meth-making house and arrest the parents of children in the house. DHS takes the kids and puts them someplace safe. Same thing INS is doing.

(2) Among these "parents" who have no documentation are drug mules, smugglers, cartel enforcers, sex traffickers and terrorists. Because they are undocumented, it is not possible to definitively identify whether the adults arrested are the "parents" of the child (see Stockholm syndrome). For the child's safety he is placed in the custody of the Department of Human Services, one of those government agencies you guys on the left are so fond of, which has extensive experience managing displaced children and the children of incarcerated parents. So what are you saying? What DHS does with the children of American criminals is okay, but not good enough for the children of people arrested for violating our borders?  Interesting?

(3) Detention facilities are overloaded because the former president's open borders catch-and-release policies has attracted so much illegal immigration during his administration. When Trump started talking about a wall to shut down illegal immigration, it triggered a flood of illegals attempting to cross the border before the wall goes up.

So what are you Democrats proposing? Should we go back to ignoring the problem and signing up illegals to vote Democrat? Ultimately, illegal immigration is a form of slavery. It provides chicken processing plants, dairy farms, rose nurseries and farmers with a cheap source of underpaid labor and Democrats with a voting block that works even better than copying names off headstones.

President Obama did the same thing Trump's INS is doing. Obama (and Bill Clinton) actually wrote the policy that separates children from adult detention facilities. While the mainstream media did react to the issue back in 2014, the furor over it was much muted. Now, President Trump is dealing with a sudden flood of illegal immigration and is stuck having to protect children with the DHS resources he has. Suddenly, in 2018, the mainstream media is howling.

The difference? They liked Obama. They don't like Trump

 And I've got to hand it to Snopes on this one. They accurately reported that the claim that Obama's INS separated kids from families is true. I know they didn't want to say this claim was true, given Snopes' liberal proclivities, but this piece is pretty honest. While the conservative counter-hyperbole does play loose with the facts just like the ongoing liberal hyperbole over the family separation issue, the true story is still damning. And hyperbole wars are notorious for stretching the truth on both  sides. There was some mainstream media coverage in 2014, but that paled beside today's media hysteria. The media, back when Obama was president, stopped reporting on the situation when it started to blow back on their beloved leader. Up beside the howl of despair coming from the MSM these days, the media was relatively careful in 2014 about using terms like "atrocity" and "humanitarian crisis" when a Democrat was president.

They've taken it too far, though, in their efforts to unseat Trump over this issue, to the point of proposing policies that seriously endanger innocent kids.  The media coverage is far more vocal about the situation these days, than they were back in 2014. And its not about a humanitarian crisis. The kids are being protected actually. It's about politics. It's about unseating a kind of conservative president that the progressive left hates because he used to be one of them.
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© 2018 by Tom King