Freudian Attack Dog Puts Bush on the Couch

The lecture reminded me of a bunch of kids getting
together for a hate club meeting about a classmate.

On occasion I listen respectfully to the loyal (?) opposition. This afternoon I listened to a brief lecture by a psychiatrist who wrote a book in 2007 claiming to analyze George W. Bush. I shall not mention the author of the book or its title as I have no confidence in the author and have no interest in promoting this sort of public group masturbation. The book was written in the run up to the 2008 election and was designed clearly to sabotage the American trust in George W. Bush and to tar conservatives for voters. 

The entire thing was filled with Democrat talking points and paraded the entire panoply of logical fallacies. The appearance was a love fest for leftists, stamped as authentic by the author's medical credentials. At one point he called Dick Cheney George W. Bush's penis! Listening to this guy confirmed for me why I find Freudian psychiatrists to be such lovely quacks. Anytime a Democrat wants to criticize a conservative, all he has to do is trundle out a Freudian psychiatrist to call the conservative "cruel" and "mean" and claim he's insane and should be locked away.

When I was studying psychology in graduate school, I attended a lecture by a Freudian. The subject was basically a two-hour whine-fest about the difficulty of keeping patients coming for years-long analysis (and by the way paying huge fees for "analysis"). The Freudians still make a tidy living stroking sick people's egos, helping them blame things on their mothers and fathers. The audience responded with leftist adoration of the author and hatred for the president whom the author called a sociopathic, megalomaniacal, narcissist. All without ever seeing of even meeting the president personally. He claims he doesn't like the DSM IV and doesn't make diagnoses with his patients and then goes on to rattle off his own fantasy of Bush being incarcerated in a psych facility to deal with his cruelty, sadism and the hateful things he has done to the country. If anyone should be looked at by the AMA for malpractice. At the very least, George W. Bush should sue the man for slander. He even trashed Laura Bush for good measure. The audience kept giggling like a bunch of naughty children, totally safe to do so because no one there was going to disagree. It was like a kindergarten level echo chamber.

With all we've learned about the human brain since Freud's day, I think Freud went way off the rails. He did so because he didn't understand how the brain actually works. Freudians have an almost magical approach to how the brain functions. Knowing what I know about brain function a century after Freud, I, like a lot of people, believe Freud's theories to be thoroughly discredited.

As brain research continues, I come to believe more thoroughly as time goes on that Freud barked up the wrong tree and was pretty damned screwed up himself. Unlike most Freudians, I believe in free will. I believe in God. Freud believed in neither. The Freudian analysts I've encounter on the other hand seem to believe that they are God.

If this is the kind of crap our college students are hearing, it's little wonder that the millenials coming up through the university are so thoroughly leftist and so thoroughly vapid. I kind of need a shower after listening to all of that lecture. It was pretty much 100% hate-speech and made up crap. I couldn't believe it. This man admits he was afraid of President Bush and recommends that the whole country needs analysis to recover from the damage he did to our delicate psyches.

Just my opinion,

Tom King © 2018

PS: The good doctor wears a massive handlebar mustache under a bald head which I think is compensation for something. I wanted to smack him. I really did. This supposed "healer" was cruel, nasty, and arrogant. Shame on him.

How to Stop School Shootings Now!

"Why does God allow school shootings?"

Everyone asks that question when we have a school shooting or any mass murder. We want God to stop it now. Since He doesn't appear to want to do that, we look to governments to stop the killing. The question is answered in the Book of Job. Not a lot of people like that answer though. Few take the time to even read Job.

In the meantime, Christians can, however, offer up a way to stop such things from happening. Simply do this

• Love your children better.
• Stop rewarding despair and desperate acts with publicity. 
• Thoughts and prayers should come before school shootings happen, not afterward.

It's not an easy answer. It involves creating no laws or government programs. It involves giving your kids an anchor in the storms of adolescence. It means introducing them to God and encouraging them by example. It means spending time with them when you'd rather be doing something else. It means paying attention so you don't miss the signals when they are in distress.

That can start happening tomorrow. No law need be passed. No billion dollar program need be started. The question is, are we as a nation willing to do what is needed, or would we rather let mother government solve the problem for us so that we don't have to make any effort other than perhaps going to a march or rally to signal our moral superiority?

The truth is that waiting for some big authority figure to come along and solve our problems, is exactly why our kids are killing themselves and their classmates at such an appalling rate. And this generation's parents are exactly the ones who taught our kids that someone else is responsible for their problems. We taught them that by running down to the school with lawyers every time our kid got in trouble. We've blamed everyone and everything but ourselves and our unwillingness to pay attention to our kids, to take time with them and to lead by example. We've taught teachers that they are not to hold our children responsible for their actions, but to blame something or someone else for their misbehavior.

Most of all, this generation of parents has provided little opportunity for their offspring to meet God or to study at the feet of Him whose grace can actually make us better men and women. Until we stop looking for a human utopia, made by man and perfected by man, we shall continue to have these unintended consequences. Our kids will continue to give up in despair and blame others for all their woes. 

And they'll continue to shoot, stab, blow up or bludgeon those whom they blame for their misery, hoping the television will vindicate them somehow.  It won't do that for them, but since when have kids ever paid attention to outcomes that didn't suit their fantasies?

© 2018 by Tom King

Divide and Conquer in the EU

Sunday Law lobby group

How Adventists and Jews could be caught in the political crossfire:

Given the threat to Catholic Christendom from the current Muslim invasion, we can expect more aggressive confrontation in the future by Catholic, Protestant, socialist, and environmentalist groups in Europe. My lineal ancestors Vlad Dracul, Charles the Hammer Martel and St. somebody or other were involved in the three major pushbacks of earlier invasions by Muslim forces. The socialists have tried to buy off Islam, but Islam is not grateful.

At some point the environmentalists, socialists and social justice warriors will find themselves outnumbered, losing power and threatened by the Muslim mass migration. Actually, Europe already is. The birthrate in EU countries is falling while the birthrate in Muslim countries is exploding. The economies in Middle Easter countries, however are not exploding and their legions of unemployed workers are pouring out over their borders headed for Europe.

I expect the political powers that be, once they wake to their peril, will look to anyone who has been friendly to them in the past - preferably some group that has been favorable toward them in the past. Roman Catholic authorities and High Church Protestants are already pretty much in the tank for socialism. Trade Unions, international political parties and industrial trade organizations are also being threatened and are united in common purpose with socialist leaning governments and the increasingly socialist Roman Catholic and high church Protestants. The papacy under Frances has already extended its hand across the gulf to evangelicals and high church Protestants (Anglicans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists by and large tend to lean left these days). 

War is coming. It should be exciting times when all of those guys get together and start passing laws and perhaps even enforcing them. There is an old curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times!"  It is in interesting times that those in power take the opportunity to clean house of unwanted populations.  The socialists of the twentieth century wiped out Jews, Gypsies, political rivals, Ukrainian Kulaks, entire native tribes who weren't politically sound, Hutus, Christians, and more.  There were the killing fields of Cambodia, Vietnam and China, the Russian gulags and African race wars. Earlier centuries have seen the mass murder of Waldensian Christians, Hussites, pagan tribes, Hugenots, and too many smaller groups of politically undesirables to count. 

If we look at the impact of the current Sunday laws in the EU we already see who is getting short shrift and being handed an economic disadvantage. Muslims who worship on Friday and Jews and Seventh-day Adventists who worship on Saturday have had their work weeks effectively reduced from six days to five. One can see how a couple of groups who are not a political and existential threat to the European power structure can easily get lumped into the threat matrix. Efforts to reduce the economic impact of one group also impacts any other group that gets lumped in with them.

It's happened before during the Crusades. My own ancestor, Saint something or other, got his sainthood for killing not only Muslim invaders, but also a nice assortment of Jews that he ran across along the road to Jerusalem as well. The Pope made no distinction between Muslims and the sons of Abraham apparently, and lauded Saint somebody or other for his genocidal activities.

Historically, once populations begin to be divided into "Us" and "Others", it only goes downhill from there. The Biblical book of Revelation predicts a union of forces at the end of time. It calls them "unclean spirits like frogs" which come out of the mouth of the Dragon, the Beast and the False Prophet. I think we are beginning to see the appearance of these frogs in the world, a harbinger of what will potentially be the worst mass killings in the history of man.

Every one of these people died while I was in college.

What is interesting is the way we can all sit in our living rooms and convince ourselves that we modern men and women are the most civilized in the history of the world. All the while, out of our site bloodshed on an epic scale is occurring. I grew up in a relatively peaceful world in the latter half of the twentieth century. While I was enjoying a better standard of living, out on the other side of the world, people were being slaughtered in the millions. While I was in college earning my degree in English-Communications, two million Vietnamese and three million Cambodians were slaughtered in the name of communist purity. It didn't affect me. Russia starved the Kulaks in Ukraine by the millions. China disarmed, starved and murdered millions of it's own people. Africans murdered other Africans because they belonged to other tribes. Muslims slaughtered Christians and Jews as fast as they could get away with it in their own lands and we did nothing except stop taking tours to the Middle East because it was getting dangerous.

In Europe, power is coalescing into two major groups - European Christians, Atheists, Environmentalists and Socialists on the one side and a massive Muslim refugee population on the other side. Something will give and when those two sides come to blows, as always, those who do not line up on one side or the other are going to be purged. That's how it always goes. That's why Jews are always a target. They never quite assimilate. They are always "different" from the mainstream. And they get hunted down and killed for it and nobody says much about it.

Even today, Israel with the most vibrant economy in the Middle East and a record of fair treatment of its non-Jewish citizens, is hated by pretty much everyone in the mainstream of modern political thought (i.e. Progressive Socialists/Democrats). It's not going to be any better for anyone that gets lumped in with them. In the coming reunification of the Christian church being proposed by the Vatican and Protestant leaders, the church that has the second largest parochial school system, the largest Protestant hospital system, the largest mission work and the fastest growing membership both in the United States and outside, is going to be lumped in with the more traditional of undesirables like Muslims and Jews.

You can cruise Youtube and see the hatred already out there against Seventh-day Adventists (my church) and conspiracy theories about Jews. It reminds me of the kind of rhetoric you saw about Jews in Germany in the late 20s and early 30s.  We never think such horrors can happen to us, though and we go about our business pretending it can't. We do not want to see the devil that is in the details of smooth-sounding solutions to our problems.  I mean who wouldn't want the government to make sure you get a day off every week?

Can you see the storm coming? Jesus said we would be able to. Me? I think I hear thunder.


Recent Popes calling for legal enforcement of Sunday-keeping:

1. http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
2. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_15051961_mater.html
3. https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1998/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_05071998_dies-domini.html
4. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

© 2017 by Tom King

Tacky Art vs. True Art - Critical Snobbery at Its Finest

Home of "tacky" art?

"I find people who do "crafts"so annoying . Either make art or just chew your fingernails. Kingsville is opening a Hobby Lobby store and I cringe to think of all the dreadful fake flower arrangements and crocheted doilies and other undreamed of wretched things that will come out of that place that I will have to pretend to admire. "

- Liberal post-modernist Facebook pundit
(who shall remain nameless in order to protect her from her own jackassery.)

Doily "art"

Let me say this up front. I AM OFFENDED! To dismiss the handicrafts that ordinary people make, whether they meet your criteria of ART or not, as "undreamed of wretched things" is impossibly arrogant and I was thoroughly disappointed in the person who posted this. It still is a free country, for the time being. We are not required to approve of anyone else's work, even to be polite. Politeness is a choice (at least until political correctness becomes enforceable law with penalties). Not everyone is a @#$% artist! Some just want to put together a puzzle or make a simple craft to sit on a shelf to decorate their house. Hobby Lobby offers supplies to would-be artists without requiring them to present their degree in impressionist painting or neo-modern sculpture to some bureaucrat, art critic or other arbiter of what is tasteful first. 

Choo-choo "Art"

Hobby Lobby sells art supplies for the people. Remember the people, dude?  That vast unwashed proletariat you progressives are supposed to be saving from themselves and their own ignorance. My building a train set in my den using Hobby Lobby's collection of tiny trees, little people, track, trains, and buildings is a labor of love on my part and as worthy to be called "art" as anyone else's. You may not like my "art", but then I don't have to like yours. Myself, I'd rather look over someone's model car collection or their crocheted doilies than wander through a gallery of paintings where someone artistically threw a mixture of paint, blood and feces at a canvas or some twisted jumble of artistic welded metal oddments. You have your "art" and I have mine. I like folk art and I think that ordinary people should be encouraged to do crafts. It's a whole lot more uplifting to the soul than listening to a lot of high-tone, hoity-toity self-appointed arbiter of what is and what is not good taste and worthy of doing.

Hobby Lobby provides a lot of people with at least some kind of creative outlet for the "workers" that progressives are so found of saying that they are "for". And by the way, in the interest, not of political correctness, but politeness, I don't use the word "tacky". I think it's a trigger word that denigrates the artistic taste of someone who may not have the advantage of another's education and high culture.

Don't mean to go off on snooty self-appointed art critics, but I used to help our art therapist at the residential treatment center where I was rec therapist. I watched kids abused, mentally ill and physically and mentally disabled, work their little hearts out on those "tacky" crafts that Hobby Lobby donated to us and I saw the kids self-esteem lifted up as they mastered macrame, paint by numbers, cross-stitch and other "crafts". Some went on to produce independent art, drawings, sculpture and modeling as their skills improved. I had my own corner of art in my office filled with things the kids did. Those were better than some of the crap I've seen in art museums and of far more intrinsic value to me and to the artists.  The Facebook art critic responded:

• That is awesome. But does that mean that I am required to think there is no difference in quality between Danielle Steele and Milton, and if I do I am a snob?

So-called "real" art by Jackson Pollock
(You don't want to know what he "painted" with)

I responded:  Does that mean that Danielle Steel is of less value with respect to her contributions to human life, given that she has given pleasure to arguably a lot more humans than Milton ever did. Though I value Milton a lot. Snooty English writer, Samuel Johnson hated that Milton championed freedom of speech and freedom of the press and called Milton's politics those of an "acrimonious and surly republican". I really like that about Milton. In the same way and for equally personal reasons, though, I find Danielle Steele's prose effective and engaging, but I also find her stories disagreeable to my own particular sensibilities. That said, I would not raise a hue and cry against bookstores being built in my town, simply because they sell Ms. Steele's works. Just because Steele doesn't suit my tastes, doesn't mean I'm going to complain because the lowbrows like her. I grew up among those who were educated, uneducated and in-between. I learned to appreciate people for who they are and for the stories their lives tell. I have yet to find a human being too tacky for me to befriend.

 I'd prefer not to call anyone a snob, but much of what my Facebook friend wrote in her original post is indistinguishable from the same thing if it had been written by an actual snob. It's one of those "if the shoe fits wear it" kinds of things. That's why it surprised me, given this friend's liberal "power to the people" rhetoric. It didn't fit the narrative of her life as she would have had me to believe it to be. I found it disconcerting that one who travels the world to ostensibly steep herself in the culture of all nations, including some quite impoverished ones it appears, would adopt a negative stance toward the arts and crafts of ordinary folk (obviously those in the mid and lower strata of the intelligence quotient bell curve). 

Why is it that self-identified (usually white) people of culture can go to Mexico and remark on how wonderful are the vivid colors favored by Mexican artists, but if a regular American person, particularly a white person, decorated his house in the same vivid colors, those same cultured neighbors would have the homeowner's association on him in a heartbeat demanding he repaint his house in something more like the rest of the neighbors.  I, myself find a kind of beauty in so-called tacky human expression. I've sat in on many a bluegrass or country music jam sessions that would have been appalling to the ears of many a trained musician, surrounded by  talking mounted fish and Budweiser lampshdes. I've been to one man's home whose backyard was built like a Western town, complete with a lifesize cutout of John Wayne standing in front of the town jailhouse. That was really fun. Fascinating guy with a collection of really cool antiques. Tacky to some maybe, but art to him.

Davinci's masterpiece might have continued
to look like this without restoration, if he'd
been able to go down to Hobby Lobby
and get some Liquin, gel medium and a
nice oil clear coat for the finish work.

I don't have to go to a concert hall or art museum (been there and done that) in order to find value in the artistic expression of another. Their choice of "tacky" crafts helps me understand and appreciate them for who they are. And no, I do not find them inferior to the work of artists who are sacred cows to the elite of society. I find Jackson Pollock's art, for instance, to be ugly and would have to sell it or fumigate it, not necessarily in that order. Someone may find value it it, I do not. That said, I don't feel that Mr. Pollock was a person of less value because his art work doesn't suit me. I just wouldn't pay 3 million bucks for it. 

I know liberals say they believe in constantly challenging their perceptions and beliefs. If they did, they'd probably not get off on putting down Hobby Lobby just because fellow feminists are mad because Hobby Lobby won't fund employee abortions. Challenging your beliefs inevitably involves a little walking in others' shoes for a bit.

I just thought I'd toss out a little challenge to my friend's way of thinking, here. I'm not calling for any sort of political correctness initiative where we rename what she calls "tacky crafts" and call them  "commercial folk art" in order not to offend the rubes. I think it's just wrong to use language to try and identify the work of others as less than worthy to be called "real" art in ways that let you off the hook for being arrogant and mean-spirited toward your perceived inferiors. Just a little less judgment is all I ask, please. I think it would be in order to assign some value to anyone's art who takes the time to produce it. And how about a little more tolerance of Hobby Lobby and other businesses that provide these ordinary artisans the tools they need to express themselves artistically.

After all, Leonardo da Vinci could have obtained everything he needed at Hobby Lobby to produce the Mona Lisa. And he could have picked up a few art supplies that would have preserved his work and kept the painting from fading and needing to be restored every century or so.

Just sayin'.

© 2017 by Tom King

What Do I Think About "Trump's Broken Promises?"

A buddy posted another "Occupy Democrats" meme about how Donald Trump has broken all these promises he made to his supporters in this first year. Good cow! The Dems are really grasping at straws now. When are they going to learn that the whole "repeat a lie enough times and the public will believe it" tactic doesn't work that well if you can't bury the actual truth.

Did Trump do everything he promised? Nope. There's still work to do , but hey. Give the man a break. It's his first year and given that Democrats and their allies in the media have been obstructing him every step of the way it's bloody miraculous he got as much done as he did. 

Meanwhile:

• Unemployment has reached historic lows especially for blacks, Hispanics and women (AND WITHOUT ARTIFICIALLY REMOVING MILLIONS FROM THE WORKFORCE AS OBAMA DID). Wages are going up. Conservative judges have been nominated. Stock markets at new highs. 
• Taxes have been reduced. 
• I won't have to pay a fine to the IRS if I accidentally make an extra hundred bucks this month and lose my Medicaid insurance. 
• Our allies and enemies have been put on notice that there's a new sheriff in town and we're not going to be bullied anymore. 
• ISIS is nearly defunct and has lost most of its leadership. 
• North Korea has returned to the table for peace talks with South Korea, something they haven't done in years. 
• Illegal immigration has been reduced by 70% even without a border wall and we are working on that. 
• Democrats have been reduced to impotent babbling buffoons, 
• Democrat collaboration with the FBI and foreign powers in an attempt to rig American elections has been exposed.
• Corruption at the Clinton Foundation has been exposed. 
• Trump is cleaning house at the FBI and justice department.
• We have a firm conservative majority in the Supreme Court. 
• Oh and my wife got a nice raise on her Social Security this year - something we haven't seen in years.
• And did I mention that Democrats have lost their minds and even the mainstream media is turning on them? This makes me smile!

I'm okay with all that he has done. Sounds to me like a pretty good first year. I can give him time to work on the rest of it. Heck, I didn't even vote for him and he kept promises I approve of. So, things aren't so bad here in the US of A, except for all that whining noise coming from the left side of the House and Senate chambers. That's getting really irritating.


© 2017 by Tom King