The Myth of a Conservative Theocracy

The pigs are not who the media says they are.

I have no interest in a Theocracy. It's odd that so many who fear that conservative persons of faith want to establish some sort of church-run government (which is not true) and yet want to tell me how Jesus would run the nation if he were in charge (which is always some complete Marxist fantasy). All I care about is whether the government is going to abide by the First Amendment and allow me to worship as I please, assemble as I please, say what I want to say, print what I want to print and believe what I want to believe. I've only heard one party boo God at their convention. I have never had a Republican say that I could not speak openly about my faith in the public square or teach my children in a parochial school setting or challenge my right to hang up a Christmas wreath in front of my store.

We are promised freedom of religion, not required to be atheists protected by some kind of misguided freedom from religion imperative to be enforced by government. Government, constitutionally, has no say in how or where I practice my religion. It cannot stop me or a group of us who agree to do so, from offering a prayer in the public square or invoking God's name when we speak. The constitution merely says the government cannot force you to worship in my church or any church. If some of my Democrat friends had their way, I would be forced by government, as Russians were by the Soviet Union, to worship at the altar of atheism.Now THAT would be a violation of my first amendment rights.

We're treated to propaganda constantly that says evil right wing Christian corporations are going to pollute the world and then when it collapses, we'll use the ensuing chaos to seize power. We Christians just can't wait to oppress the masses, exploit women like cattle, brutally murder anyone who disagrees, and cover it all up in religion sauce.  Don't believe me?  Watch a couple of episodes of "The Handmaids Tale" on Hulu. It won Emmy's last year for tarring Christians with a Stalinesque brush. The very methods by which socialism murdered hundreds of millions of human beings in the 20th century are portrayed as something that Christian Conservatives just can't wait to get enough power to do. Leftists use this propaganda technique to hide their own sins. Even Hitler, a socialist to the core who claimed he had a better more efficient form of socialism is supposed to be a model of unbridled Christian conservatism even though he  was a vegetarian, environmentalist who was spiritual, not religious by his own claims. It's the old "I am rubber, you are glue!" tactic from second grade on an international level.

And let me make this clear - Christians despise greed as much as anyone. It's the tenth commandment on that stone tablet leftists have removed from public grounds. One cannot enforce standards against greediness by creating enough government power to protect greed. In a free-market capitalist economic system, greedy people who don't give their customers value for their money, who obstruct free trade and attempt to manipulate the system are punished in three ways. 

1. Customers stop buying their products and they stop making money and the whole bloated edifice collapses.
2. The free market and government fair trade laws punish them for their greed and mismanagement through fines, jail terms and bad bad PR.
3. If they behave criminally, then they get sued or arrested and the law steps in.

When Bears Stern and Morgan Stanley went nearly bust back in 2008-9, George W. Bush, whom I liked as a wartime president, messed up when he agreed with the Democrat Congress to bail them out with taxpayer money. Obama doubled down on it. If Bush had allowed them to collapse, small businesses and entrepreneurs would have stepped in to fill the gap and, while the economy might have taken a hit, it would have bounced back. That is if we hadn't elected a Democrat who, like FDR, hadn't meddled with the economy. The result was an 8 year recession. For many of us it was an 8 year full blown depression.

When we don't allow natural consequences to happen to these greedy people running some of the big corporations, when we protect them by bailing them out, we punish rank and file Americans to prop up bad business practices and greed. AIG should have failed along with all the rest of them. Someone leaner, faster and harder working companies would have stepped in to take over the market abandoned by these bloated behemoths. 

And contrary to the media's narrative, it wasn't conservatives that protected greedy executives' multi-million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes. It was government bailouts demanded by Democrats and Republicans who were in no way shape or form conservatives. Give me a Democrat who is a free market capitalist and I'll vote for him over any Republican who is in the tank for corporate interests. 

Unfortunately, these days when I look at the two parties, I that see one of 'em is by and large way deeper into the corporate pig trough than the other and it's name doesn't start with an R. That doesn't mean Republicans are without sin, but at least some of them are in favor of reducing the size and scope of government power. On the left side of the aisle, I can't find a single one anymore. On the right side of the aisle, it's easier to hold their feet to the fire.

Just sayin',

© 2018 by Tom King

Trump Catches Flack for Potential Johnson Pardon

Jack Johnson in his prime

President Trump is getting flack from the left for considering a pardon of black boxing great Jack Johnson who was convicted of transporting a (white) woman across state lines for immoral purposes under the Mann Act. Although the law was created supposedly to stop forced sexual slavery of women, the phrase "immoral purpose" in the statute allowed an extremely broad application of the law. A later United States Supreme Court ruling in Caminetti v. United States (1917), held that "illicit fornication", even when consensual, constituted an "immoral purpose."* Johnson had beaten white opponents and even married a white woman, unforgivable sins in the Democrat South. So when he crossed a state line with a white woman (the woman he later married), he was arrested and prosecuted. Johnson was convicted by an all-white jury in June 1913,^** despite the fact that the incidents used to convict him took place before passage of the Mann Act., eventually serving time in Leavenworth. Several Republican congresses have sent bills to various presidents urging a pardon for Johnson, even after a movie about him came out. Even Democrats urged President Obama to pardon Johnson posthumously, but he refused. 

The ever-progressive New York Times at the time wrote this of a fight between Jack Johnson and a white opponent. "If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors."

Johnson was hardly a moral man or a terribly admirable man. He grew up in a mixed race community in Galveston, Texas where whites and blacks mingled freely. White moms gave him cookies and he failed to learn as a child that he was inferior to whites. This put him at odds with much of society during the Jim Crow era during which he regularly beat white opponents. Perhaps Trump should pardon him for that. It is, after all, difficult to accept being abused and looked down on because you believe you are as good as Democrats and white folk and refuse to step and fetch-it for "progressives" who think people of your color are racially inferior and need to be "taken care of" (See progressive movement founding father HG Wells' "History of the World").

Johnson's conviction was certainly racially motivated and I agree with Sylvester Stallone who has urged Donald Trump to pardon Johnson. The law was not kind to uppity black folk in those days and Johnson's pardon is long overdue. Someone should have done it a long time ago. It was a monstrous miscarriage of justice

© 2018 by Tom King

* https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/congress-passes-mann-act
** "Cleveland Advocate 2 October 1920". Dbs.ohiohistory.org. Retrieved September 30, 2014.

Marching For Feelings

Lots of emotion. Very little substance!

Getting a wee bit tired of gushy articles praising the "emotional impact" of "March for Our Lives". This “spontaneous” march was little more than a heavily organized propaganda effort funded by Progressive political organizations who want to, as President Obama so delicately put it, "fundamentally change America,” as though the most civilized, wealthy and safe nation in the world needs to be made into something else. Like what? China? The Soviet Union? Cambodia? Vietnam? All those worker’s paradises built on lakes of blood?

These kids are given a microphone and coached to espouse a “solution” that, so far, has never solved the problem they want solved. These kids believe gun control will stop people shooting up schools. They cite places like Britain and Australia where massive gun confiscation ostensibly made things safer by reducing “gun deaths”. Mass killings and gun deaths are two different things. Will eliminating guns stop the killings is the better question. Let’s look at that shall we?” 

I've written two books on the subject, Give Guns a Chance (available on Amazon) and They Shoot Rednecks Don't They? (currently completing publication).  Great Britain's ban on guns in the 1920s is often cited as an example of how taking guns away from citizens makes them safer. That's deceptive. Britain’s gun confiscation was a thinly disguised effort by the upper classes to maintain control, because they feared a progressive socialist peasant revolution such as happened in Russia during the Great War. Several things happened as a result of the confiscation.

• Gun deaths did decline slightly. 
• Murder by other means like bludgeoning, strangulation, poisoning, stabbings, drowning, vehicular homicide, arson and bombing rose more than enough to cause the murder rate to continue rising more than making up for the decline in "gun-related deaths." 
• Criminals lives were saved and their profession was made safer.
• When the Nazis threatened to invade, the Home Guard was practically unarmed.

When Churchill made his brave speech about “fighting them on the beaches, fighting them on the landing grounds," he was bluffing.  After the speech, he reportedly turned to someone on the stage and said, “Of course we may have to fight them with broken beer bottles.” Had not America shipped millions of guns to the Home Guard (many donated by American private citizens), the nation would have been unarmed had the Nazi invasion come. About the only useful thing about Britain's gun ban is that mystery authors like Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle had to come up with more inventive ways to murder the characters in their novels. Criminals did likewise.

In Australia, the same sort of thing happened. Mass murders continued. Regular kinds of murders went on apace. The killers merely changed weapons and tactics. Mass murderers resorted to arson and bombing people when they wanted to pump up the death count up. In both places the actual murder and crime rates rose. The only class of people in that statistic whose death rate declined was that of criminals. Gun confiscation in both cases protected the lives of criminals while increasing the vulnerability of people to strong on weak crime like muggings, beatings, rape and strangulation.

During the Carter administration two studies were commissioned designed to show what kind of gun control best reduced crime. They chose two groups of reliable scientists who were liberal and supported gun control. To their horror Dr. James Wright’s study found that no gun law or combination of gun laws ever passed could be shown to reduce crime. To their horror he released the results of the study in a book titled Under the Gun.

A second study was also commissioned by the Carter Justice Department hoping, I suppose, for a more agreeable result. Florida State University criminologist, Gary Kleck, another self-described “doctrinaire liberal” conducted that study and found that two million crimes per year are foiled by citizens armed with privately owned guns. In most cases the guns were never fired. Kleck published Point Blank, a book that argued against the efficacy of the trademark gun legislation of the liberal left that had funded his research. The left was NOT happy!  Both studies showed in painful detail that gun control laws do not, in fact, reduce crime in any way that can be shown to prove a direct cause-to-effect link between gun control and crime rates. And yet these kids blithely claim that gun control will do precisely that.

Ultimately, these kids are tools in the hands of people who seek to disarm the citizens of the United States in order to make people "better" by writing laws. The assumption is that guns themselves are somehow, responsible for making people want to kill and that if you take away guns from everybody, and let the government protect us from bad guys, everyone will be safer. People believe this despite the government's notorious lack of zeal for enforcing those laws. But the kids believe the narrative. Gun laws will make them safer. The government will protect them if we just have the right laws.

Ironically, these are the same kids whose government failed them 39 times at the sheriff’s department, multiple times at the FBI, repeatedly at the school and by local authorities who failed to report the shooter’s previous history of violence so that his background check came out clean. There were plenty of laws on the books that could have protected these kids. The very people who are supposed to protect them failed massively and yet these are the guys they believe will somehow protect them from a determined killer who could just as easily have built a bomb or brought a couple of swords or a compound bow through the front door and done as much or more damage and death to his fellow students.

 

It wound up that the only protection they got was from people on the scene, not government. An unarmed football coach shielded kids with his own body as he tried to stop the shooter. He died in the process. A fellow student kept his head and held open a door under fire so his classmates could escape and was severely wounded for his courage. The government they want to be responsible for their protection, meanwhile, was waiting outside, guns drawn, but under orders from their commanders not to enter the building. Deputies had to listen to shots being fired inside knowing that kids were dying. That government failed them at every level.

And yet we are treated to a spectacle, organized and financed by progressive socialists who wish to disarm us all in order to safely create what CS Lewis describes as the “tyranny of omnipotent moral busybodies”.  This easy cure they devoutly believe in, despite the fact that the system they propose to adopt has failed everywhere it’s been carried out to its full power. In places where this system has been tried, like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Venezuela where citizens were disarmed for their own safety in order to create worker’s paradises. The cost of those "paradises"?  Hundreds of millions of lives. 

The herd instinct is powerful in people and if you notice in the flood of articles being written in praise of "March for Our Lives", the appeal is not to reason and logic. Instead the articles talk about the good emotions and the sense of belonging to a great movement like all the really cool kids. The theme of marches like this is that somehow, if we just have the right laws, people will become “better.” To quote devout liberal Joss Whedon’s creation, Malcolm Reynolds from “Firefly”, “I do not hold to that…………I aim to misbehave!”

Liberals seem to be confused about guns, especially the leaders of this so-called grassroots movement. They buy into the feel good narrative, but down at the ground level the liberals know that for people who are not Jedi masters with their own light sabers, there’s nothing quite like a good blaster when you’re threatened by a corrupt government like the Empire or the Alliance………or by a criminal like Jabba the Hut.

….or Greedo.

If I’d been Han, I think I’d have shot first. He already knew where that conversation was going….

Just one man’s opinion.

© 2018 by Tom King
author of “Give Guns a Chance”
Coming soon,  "They Shoot Rednecks Don't They?"

A Problem of Perspective

About The "Injustice" of God

They write songs and poems about it on the Goodread poetry group to which I belong. There are few professionals in the group. Mostly angst-ridden amateurs pouring out their pain and confusion into the digital ether hoping someone will feel sorry for them. Lots of poetical words. April's a favorite month, dawn or sunset the favorite time, misery a favorite subject, and God the favorite whipping boy.

One that was recently posted claimed that the Earth was so miserable a place to live that God must surely cease to exist if He ever existed at all. I was struck by how narrow is our perspective in all of this and how confused. I understand the pain so many of these would-be Lord Byrons. They look around them and see so much unhappiness, tragedy and woe that they can hardly stand it. They turn around looking for someone to blame because they have been taught that if there is unhappiness, there must surely be someone besides themselves to blame. And since God is supposed to be the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, who better to blame for the fact that you're miserable?

To do that, however, you need a completely myopic perspective for it to hold water. It's as if a tadpole looks round his puddle and cries out in anger against the rain that filled the puddle with water and provided him a place to live and breathe. There is much the tadpole doesn't know and if he doesn't think outside the puddle, he will become a most unhappy little frog.

1. The tadpole does not understand that there actually is a world beyond his puddle. This might give him hope if he did, for if there is a universe beyond the edges of his puddle, then perhaps his destiny lies beyond the puddle. If he cannot comprehend that, then the puddle is all there is to life for him.
2. The tadpole does not know purpose of the puddle. He does not understand that the purpose of the puddle is to provide him a place to grow. Without the puddle the most he would ever have been is a dried up egg lying dead and desiccated on the ground. 
3. The tadpole does not realize that one day he will either grow into something greater than he is now or die a tadpole, his future unrealized. One day he will add legs and hands to his body and lungs that can breathe air. All of this growth will one day allow him to leave the pond and go out into the broader universe. He believes instead that the puddle is all there is.

Unlike tadpoles, humans have been given a gift essential to seeing beyond our puddle. We are given free will. There are reputable scientists who believe there is no such thing as free will. They don't believe there is a God either. Like the tadpoles, they are too narrowly focused on the puddle they live in. They look at the mechanisms of their own brains and discover how things work and how things can go wrong with the mind. They do not allow for anything to exist that is beyond their own comprehension. Like the frogs we dissect in high school biology, we seek the universe with a scalpel while dizzied by formaldehyde fumes.

God is in the details. I know the old maxim goes "The devil is in the details," but that only applies to contracts written by lawyers. You can see God in the minutiae if you allow yourself to connect with the infinite as you examine what is in your tiny puddle. The intricacies that give us life point to something greater than what we can see in our world. Is there pain and misery. Of course, and like children we want someone to make it stop right now..

The trouble is that at the same time we want the freedom to cause some of that pain and misery ourselves. If we think of children as our tadpoles and ourselves as children, it's not hard to see how we might have difficulty understanding how God can allow us to hurt ourselves the way we do. Because most of the pain and misery we experience in this puddle of a world is caused by us tadpoles ourselves. War, famine, pestilence, murder, poverty, all of these plagues upon our world are caused directly by us. We pick fights. We hoard food and do not share it. We choose to live in filth. We harbor anger and kill each other. We hoard wealth and do not deal fairly with our neighbors. We refuse to work and expect others to take care of us.

We even demand that there be no reference to God in our schools and our public life. We even forbid that private prayers  be offered where others can see them. Then we are shocked when God doesn't show up to prevent disasters, mass shootings and other tragedies? Really? Like spoiled children, we throw a fit when God gives us a pop quiz designed to teach us things we need if we are to become frogs instead of tadpoles.

My poetic friends only see that God is not giving us what we want and protecting us from our own foolishness. They demand that He prevent us from feeling any pain while at the same time demanding that He not interfere with how we behave. God tells us not to be faithful to one companion and we sleep around and then complain about the diseases that strike us when we do. We lie, cheat, and steal from our neighbors and wonder why others do the same to us and why God allows others to do it. We throw a tantrum when an accident caused by the carelessness of another human causes us hurt.

As it turns out, our anger at God seems to be more about why God doesn't meddle in our lives to make us comfortable and happy without actually meddling in our lives to prevent us from doing the very things that make us uncomfortable and unhappy. We want what is not possible. CS Lewis once pointed out that it is impossible for man to be perfectly happy without God because we are not made that way. In the same way a child cannot be happy without some sort of parent to keep him fed, watered, sheltered and disciplined. Feral children do not survive for long in the wild, no matter what the stories say. As it appear from the state of our world, things go badly everywhere we've gone feral, distancing ourselves from a God we cannot see because our vision does not extend beyond the edges of our puddle.

Grow up tadpoles. There is more beyond this Earthly puddle than is contained within the philosophies of those who cannot see beyond the puddles edges.

© 20018 by Tom King

Compassion or Promoting Slavery Lite

Saw this in the San Diego Union Tribune by one of its lefty cartoonists.And shame on him for promoting slavery. It's like I keep saying about Democrat leaders. These guys are still the party of slave labor after all these years. There was no great party switch in the 60s in which racists Democrats became racist Republicans. The party still likes to keep a few million workers on the plantations for the benefit of big Agriculture. They get paid a pittance so we can buy cheap produce and agricultural products and at the same time, the commercial Ag companies can make bigger profits.

For that is what suggesting that we have to have illegal immigrants in order to harvest our crops is all about. This badly distorted policy in essence supports the exploitation of migrant workers as what is essentially cheap virtual slave labor. I've seen the colonias where the pickup trucks gather up ragged fathers and sons in the predawn light and carry them off to the fields for the day and home again in the failing light, For, you see, the growers and factory farms don't have to worry about paying illegals the "living wage" Dems say they are so fond of. Not only that but big agricultural operations, chicken processors, rose growers and commercial dairy farmers can treat undocumented migrant workers like crap and they won't complain for fear of being tossed out and reported to ICE. I saw it in the colonias of Texas and I see it in the illegal immigrant camps and miserable ghettos of California.

At least my home state is trying to cut off the flow of slave labor from the south. By doing that they force industries that exploit illegals to hire actual legal workers at living wages to do the work. Legal immigrants cannot be exploited in the same way because it is safe for them to report your Colonel Beauregard, plantation owning, upper class butt to the authorities.

There's a reason they can't get Americans to work those jobs. We expect not to be treated as slaves and to be paid decently.

We in America are free Massa Bob!


© 2018 by Tom King

Youtube Shooter NOT a Conservative!

No name/no face to help make
this lunatic famous!

Well, it wasn't one of those nasty conservatives that Youtube has "demonetized" lately. It wasn't Prager U, Alonzo Rachel, Bill Whittle, Andrew Klavan, Ben Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh or Steven Crowder that shot the place up today. It was a woman of Eastern extraction who was a militant vegan whose Youtube channel had been demonetized by the social media giant.

 

She was apparently mad as hell and wasn't going to take it anymore. This person whose name I will not mention had been posting videos of animals being skinned alive on her Youtube channel while she made wild accusation against nation states like the U.S. that she claims does this stuff all the time. Youtube reacted to her success (she claims 300,000 hits per month), by cutting off the money and closing down the site. They left her personal site up, though. Long enough for her to say nasty things about Youtube. Police had found her sleeping in her car and called her father, who advised the cops she might be headed for Youtube headquarters.

As usual, the cops dropped the ball and she was able to stroll into the building armed to the teeth. You remember the cops. The ones we should give all our guns to so that we will be safe in gun-free zones like schools and Youtube's HQ. The shooter apparently ended her life standing in the middle of Youtube's courtyard screaming at the cops to come and get her. She got her wish. If she was looking to go out like Butch and Sundance, she definitely got her wish.

It seems that Youtube deems clips showing animal torture and mutilation right up there with videos by prominent politicians, academics and public figures covering such dangerous topics as the ten commandments, the morality of the Israeli Army and the Bill of Rights. Youtube has suppressed both types of videos or at least kept them from the eyes of those under the age of 18 or at the very least kept anyone from making any money producing such videos.

In censoring videos and websites, the Google-Twitter-Youtube-Facebook Digital Complex would do well to be wary of militant vegans.

Just saying.