Would Regulating the Media Stop Mass Shootings?

Mass shootings should be illegal, except where
the population has been safely disarmed first..

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN PRESENTS GUN CONTROL PROPAGANDA AS "SCIENCE"

A guy who commented on a Scientific American article complained that he didn't get enough of a "reaction" to his suggestion that we create laws to limit media coverage of mass shootings and suicides in order to reduce the number of mass shootings and suicide. To be fair, there is some research that seems to say that coverage of such events creates a kind of "contagion" that stimulates others to emulate the behavior. And it's true. Right after the recent Parkland High School shootings in Florida, police stopped four potential mass shootings and/or bombings aimed at high schools by disgruntled kids. The media pundrity's reaction was predictable. They covered the guns. They didn't cover the bombs. And they didn't give much time to the story if no one died. In the media, if it bleeds it leads they say.

In the wake of the Parkland High shootings, even the venerable "Scientific American" put up a pro gun control article entitled "Why are White Men Stockpiling Guns?" It was a blog to be sure but it lacked any pretense of being anything more than a politically motivated anti-white male hit piece with a lot of gun control and racist talking points. It made little effort to maintain the pretense that the article's conclusions were based on science. Some might object to my calling the article racist, since the racism was aimed at white guys. It could be considered sexist too as it absolved blame from women as well as non-whites placing the blame for gun fever directly on males. The blog was an incredible bit of white guy shaming for having been published in an ostensibly serious scientific journal. It basically intimates that white guys are (1) less intelligent (2) are fraidy cats and (3) racist and that's why they are stock-piling guns, a fact that should make you very afraid. That is to be expected. It's the progressive narrative after all. The guy who suggested muzzling the media is at least closer to a method of solving the problem than the traditional hand-fluttering gun control lobby.

The truly ironic thing about the guy suggesting that media were exploiting acts of violence to get attention was that his big complaint was that he wasn't getting enough attention for his comment, especially from the conservative right. He is, in point of fact, trying to get the same kind of attention he's complaining about the media getting. He utilizes a subtle kind of bullying hoping people will pay attention. Okay, he wanted a reaction from the right? Here I go, though not in the way that he'd probably hoped as it won't get him many likes on facebook or hits on his comments on Scientific American..

First off, mass shootings and suicides cannot be solved by making more laws. Both behaviors are already against the law. No one who commits a mass shooting or kills themselves cares what the law says about it. While I myself have railed against the media for encouraging copycat behavior with their nonstop coverage (i.e. glorification) of those who kill others and/or themselves, writing laws to prevent media coverage of these events will not solve the problem. At least it won't solve the problem without causing a whole bunch of those dreaded "unintended consequences" that central planners almost always cause when they try to create top-down solutions.

As soon as you begin to restrict the freedom of the press, you set in motion some very bad things. The rights retained by the people are not permitted to be infringed by the government. These rights are, according to the Constitution, rights we hold first and foremost. The government we formed is expressly forbidden to touch those inalienable rights. Touch one right and you set a precedent to infringing them all. Remember, lawyers and judges are very big on precedents.

Here's the deal. The US murder rate is dropping steadily in the United States (Except, of course, in stronghold Democrat Party run cities), but we are told we have a "gun problem" and need to "do something about it." In other words make some more laws. But the problem is not a legal problem. It's a cultural one, a social problem and even a religious problem.

In embracing progressivism's assumptions, we've wound up in a trap of our own making. While our attention-starved commentator is right, the media does exacerbate both suicides and mass shootings, if we as Americans (especially millennial-Americans didn't feel entitled to be catered to and paid attention to by our fellow citizens, we wouldn't feel the need to shoot them in large numbers. You could have said romantic poetry in the 17th century led to more suicides. It probably did. It's likely that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet led to more teenage suicides. The Bard went a long way toward making suicide attractive to teenaged star-crossed lovers. 

That said, this would not have been so had the cultures of the time not embraced certain foolish ideas about the relative value of emotion over reason. The old Renaissance romanticism had a pernicious effect on culture. It made us too trustful of our own emotions and far too easily swayed by emotion-based propaganda. Emotion became a tool for adjusting the beliefs of the gullible ignoramuses that make up the unwashed masses - Marx's "proletariat". So now the propagandists are suggesting that gun control laws, which make us feel good and morally superior about ourselves for supporting them, will somehow solve the mass murder and suicide problem.

It won't!  The solution to reducing mass murders and suicides is not to change people's feelings but to restore a cultural that values reason. Restoring reason to its former glory is something today's intellectuals really don't want to do though. Most of our post-modernist intelligentsia seem to firmly believe that cultural attitudes are going the right way. All is according to the progressive plan for re-inventing America. It is no surprise we've raised millions of youth to believe their feelings are of far more value than their reason. Obiwan Kenobi even told kids to "Trust your feelings, Luke!"

Perhaps if we could somehow address the cultural imperative that says your Facebook post needs to have a lot of likes lest your feelings be hurt, maybe kids wouldn't feel so deprived if they weren't the center of attention all the time. Perhaps if we created a culture where truth was valued above approval by your peers, where work yields rewards far better than just showing up for a participation trophy, then perhaps we might eventually get to the point where we have a media that values the truth above ratings.

Take the White Men story in Scientific American. The author makes this startling statement:

• A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight.

Okay, let's examine that. FBI data show that while 500 black-on-white killings and 229 white-on-black killings were reported in 2015, 2,574 homicides were committed by whites against other whites, and 2,380 by blacks against blacks. Somehow the author made it look like black-on-white killings were "extremely slight". And few of us will notice this pretty heavy shading of the truth. This is truly remarkable given that more than twice as many black men shoot white men as the other way round. The author leaves out the fact that these kill rates he dismisses as "extremely light" are not adjusted for the percentage of the population represented. Black men make up less than 8% of the US population. White men make up a good 31% and total white people more than 60% if you don't count Hispanics as white, which they kind of are.

So black men murder white men at a rate of more than two to one in actual numbers while being less than 1/4 as numerous in the population as white men. The narrative our kids are getting from the media, though is that white men are cowards (that's why they have guns in the first place), that they are slaughtering black people with their nasty guns and that they are pretty much more dangerous and more stupid than anyone else, especially if they own guns.

The truth is that it's the education system that needs to be "fixed", both at home and in schools. In CS Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", old Professor Kirk complains, "What are they teaching in schools these days?" Lewis himself pointed out the dangers of teaching young people that truth was about how they felt about it in his essay  "Men Without Chests". In looking at "modern" education Lewis complained that while the old system was a kind of propaganda, men teaching boys to be men. The new system is entirely propaganda, substituting a subjective standard of "whatever I feel about a thing" for objective reason. “Another little portion of the human heritage," says Lewis, "has been quietly taken from them (children) before they were old enough to understand.” 

If parents and educators will not teach children to think for themselves as individuals, if we role model slavish devotion to the herd in our own daily lives, we raise children to be lemmings and not American individuals. When that process becomes complete, the proletariat will become a tool for government to manipulate as it will. We will have exchanged one form of relatively ineffective mass murder for another form far more powerful and effective at slaughtering people in large numbers. Check the history of collectivist proletariats in just the past century. It's not a pretty picture. The rate of slaughter in these progressive collectivist states puts American school shooters and mass murderers in the shade. And I bet the Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Venezuelans didn't think it could happen in their countries either.*

© 2018 by Tom King

* And by the way, in all those nations the media was regulated BEFORE the mass executions got to rolling along and usually after the citizenry had been disarmed.

Which is the Greatest Nation in the World?

This question gets posed all the time by angry millenials and Democrats, armed with talking points hoping you'll say "America" so they can bury you in misinformation to prove how bad the USA is.  Usually, they can't give you a very satisfactory answer when you ask them which one is the greatest if not the United States. You'll likely get some mumbles about Sweden or Denmark, both of which are crumbling socialist economies - something progressives don't like to talk about. 

If by greatest, our questioner means “The nation that best suits my political opinions” then he has given us an impossible task because he demands an answer based on a private definition of greatness largely based on the worthless standard of his own feelings. If I base my answer on my feelings, my interloculator doubtless would take exception to my use of my own feelings as a measure of what he calls “greatness”. If, however, we are talking about objective statistical measures, then we need to specify the statistical measure by which we are to judge America’s greatness.

For instance:

GREATEST POPULATION - Not us, probably China

GREATEST ECONOMY - Neck and Neck with China with the U.S. probably the most flexible and resilient of the two. If China's economy collapsed, we'd be alright, but if the U.S. goes down, China goes down with us.

GREATEST MILITARY STRENGTH - U.S.A. without doubt. Nobody really wants to take us on head to head except the truly suicidal.

GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT - In science, technology, medicine, invention, industry and innovation, the USA holds the high ground. The US leads in the aviation, medicine, space exploration, entertainment and communication technology, military power and economic dynamism. Everyone else is pretty much playing catch up because we either led the way or passed them up.
 
GREATEST CULTURE - I would say USA given we’ve pretty much appropriated the best bits of every culture in the world and melded them into a richly varied crazy quilt of traditions, beliefs, art, music, food and religion.

MOST ORGANIZED GOVERNMENT - Not us! The US Constitution deliberately created a system of checks and balances that prevents the government from being too organized or powerful. Organized government requires socialism, communism or an outright dictatorship.

BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM - While certainly not free, if you are talking quality, it’s the USA. Leaders of world governments leave their own countries and come here to have work done on their hearts or brains. The best and brightest young people come here from all over the world to study medicine and stay here to work. That’s why there’s likely a 60% chance your doctor has a foreign accent if you live in the USA.

GREATEST FREEDOM - USA hands down. Our constitution is the model for every truly democratic nation in the world. We are the original. Pretty much everyone else is a copy.

GREATEST FREEDOM OF SPEECH - USA bar none. Yakov Smirnoff once said, "In Russia we have freedom of speech. In America you have freedom AFTER speech."

GREATEST FREEDOM OF RELIGION - USA without question. Even people from oppressive religious countries come to the United States to practice their religion - even religions whose practitioners in their home countries chant "Death to America" have members of their faith freely practicing their religion here in America.

GREATEST OPPORTUNITY - In the USA, the rags to riches story is standard because it happens so often. The majority of our millionaires are first generation wealthy. You can start out in abject poverty and become a multi-millionaire or even a billionaire.

EQUALITY - Depends what you mean by equality. If you mean equality of opportunity, the U.S. wins hands down. If you mean equality or sameness of outcomes, you need to go to a nice communist country or one of those dictatorships with the two class system - the rich and the poor. Sharing of misery is the closest anyone gets to sameness of outcomes.

SAFETY - It’s been a long time in the USA since a marauding army has overrun a town or village, much less a fair-sized state and slaughtered people willy-nilly. If you check the actual murder rates (note that gun violence and actual murder rates are two different things), we're pretty safe in that way. Death by being murdered by your own government doesn't get counted as "murder".  Some nations with low rates of “gun deaths” have commensurately higher rates of death by bludgeoning, strangulation, arson, poisoning, rape, drowning, electrocution and stabbing. Killers will kill. They don’t stop simply because they don’t have guns and people without guns can’t defend themselves so the innocent tend to die more often because they can’t defend themselves.

Ask yourself which country you feel safest wandering around in? Me? I do my touristing in the USA. I’ve been out of the States twice and both times found myself in places where I felt threatened. Doesn’t happen much here in the USA except in cities run by Democrats.

The question that makes up the title of this blog entry is one of those that the self-flagellating precious snowflake generation likes to throw up in order to set you up. They have a cut and paste snowstorm of carefully manipulated facts and figures prepared, designed to make you look stupid for claiming the USA is the greatest nation in the world.

Well they’re wrong and I’m right. The United States is the greatest country in the world.

Just so you know.

© 2017 by Tom King

The Habit of Slavery

The British Civil Service is perhaps the world's most
efficient organization for maintaining bureaucratic inertia.

Why Cultural, Religious and Political Inertia Shackles Us to the Mistakes of the Past

Habits are hard to break, especially when those habits are the habits of a nation or a culture. Railroad companies the world over lay their tracks so that the rails are four feet, eight and a half inches apart because that’s the width of a standard Roman oxcart. The standard was, of course, carried forward through several iterations including mine carts, streets and railroads – all using the standard grooves in old Roman roads. Caesar set the standard, probably based on something the Greeks were using or for some practical reason based on how far apart people put cart wheels a thousand years before.

It goes to show you the power of habit in determining the way things go. That’s how, for instance, Christmas became “Jesus’ birthday”. The church fathers, concerned because the people who, according to the emperor were all supposed to become Christian had this big party around the winter solstice where everyone would overeat and drink and party. By this time the church had become a ginormous bureaucracy and, thinking like bureaucrats, they decided that if the people had the habit of drinking, eating, and partying at winter solstice already, why not just make use of it for “holy” purposes. So the church proclaimed December the 25^th Christ’s Mass, thus appropriating a holiday that goes all the way back to the Babylonians and used it as an excuse to take up a collection as protection from God’s wrath for all that drinking, overeating and partying. We still do it to this day, with, of course, the vestiges of the old pagan practices - Yule logs, Christmas trees, angels stuck up on trees (that one’s from a particularly grisly practice no on wants to think about) and boozing.

A lot of the inertia in our culture is, of course, for the convenience of government. Radical change is always bad for corrupt old governments. Should it sense a profound cultural shift among it's subjects, governments tend to suppress any new and disturbing ideas. Lots of folk get banished or financially ruined or imprisoned at this stage of any revolution.

The tax-collecting habit is also pretty well ingrained in the government bureaucrat segment of any nation's population. The old proverb about "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" reminds us that those with limited tools tend to respond in the same way to any situation. The bureaucrat mind is so fixated on what it's always done that it sees everything in terms of how it can be profitable to the bureaucracy. The more bureaucrats, the worse bureaucratic inertia becomes. Soon, anything that is fun or obligatory is fair game for them to take a piece of. Taxing becomes their reason for existing. The Romans were wonderful bureaucrats. They made tax-collecting (or as I call it – demanding protection money) into a fine art. I’m not surprised that modern organized crime has its roots in Italy.

Another example of how governments use cultural inertia occurred when Roman emperor Constantine had a nightmare and woke up with the novel thought that if he made his whole army Christian they might win the upcoming battle. So he marched his troops through a nearby river, proclaimed them “baptized” and went forth to kick his enemy’s collective butts. After that, the church quickly became a quasi-government bureaucracy and started busily searching for ways to tax its members. Of course, after all the persecutions, membership was kind of down, so they all met to decide how best to recruit new members.  The Councils of Nicaea and Laodicea eventually established that the official Christian day of worship would henceforth be Sunday.

This took advantage of cultural inertia in a couple of way. 

(1)  The Church fathers switched the traditional day of worship. Some Christians had already begun worshiping on Sunday to avoid trouble with the pagans. Romans by and large were used to going to temple on Sunday (called the venerable day of the sun” by Catholic bishops). There were much fewer Christians than there were pagans at the time, so it was easier to change the habits of the smaller group, especially if you rewarded them by making them popular and therefore less susceptible to being thrown to the lions or crucified. So folk still went to temple on Sunday, the theology was just altered a little.

(2)  The Romans didn’t like Jews and because both Christians and Jews worshiped on Saturday instead of Sunday the two groups were associated in the minds of Romans. The Jews, having been scattered, did what they do – went into business. They were already doing well by this time, which really made people resentful. So to make Christianity more palatable, the church fathers removed a major impediment to a move from paganism to Christianity and shared the weekly day of worship with the pagans rather than the Jews.

(3)  They also removed another impediment to pagan conversion by quietly removing the second commandment (the one about graven images) from the Ten Commandments. After all, they had done pretty well by revising the fourth one, why not remove one altogether. Then the enterprising folk working for the Bishop of Rome went around swapping out the plaques on statues of Roman gods and making them saints. An edict calling for the veneration of the saints and pretty soon out of use idols all over town became apostles. When they ran out of apostles, the Bishop just made other folk into saints. A couple of my own ancestors were made saints for various reasons including genocide of Muslims and Jews and for the miracle of the bottomless beer mug. Just like that the statue of Jupiter in the main square became St. Peter. Venus became the Virgin Mary. And it worked so well that every few decades the Vatican has to replace St. Peter’s foot from where all the pilgrims kissing said foot have worn it away to a nub.

Public inertia is a truly powerful thing; bureaucratic inertia is worse. George W. Bush once said that once you become president and start receiving the security briefings, the economic briefings and all, that there really is very little you can do that’s a major innovation. He knew from experience. Bush started out with the intention of trimming the fat from the budget. I remember the horror with which the federal bureaucracies reacted. The weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth by federal life-long bureaucrats was epic .

Bush even had the audacity to demand that the CIA actually give him all the facts and not their interpretation of the facts or just what they thought he wanted to see. A relative who works for the CIA was beside himself that the President didn’t want his briefings filtered. Before Bush could rein the intelligence services in and get the straight poop, however, 9/11 happened. People talk about how Bush benefited from 9/11. The terrorist attack's benefits accrued primarily to Congress rather than the president. With Bush forced to mobilize the military, suddenly budget cutting was forced off the table by Congress. Terrorist fighting funds were held hostage to everybody's favorite pork. By the end of the Bush administration Congress was spending like a drunken sailor and the economy went bust. Sadly, you can't take away Congress's credit cards.




A lot of the inertia in our culture exists for the convenience of government, of course. Habits are encouraged. Change is suppressed - the real kind, not the feel-good kind that is no change at all.  Every president faces such bureaucratic inertia. It's why, thankfully, none of them accomplish much in the way of change, whatever their campaign slogans. People don’t like to change. They prefer the appearance of change. Bureaucracies have learned to use cultural inertia to their advantage. To bureaucrats, change is like sunshine to a vampire. It’s why every time some Latin American country overthrows its corrupt government, it replaces it with one that’s just as, if not more corrupt than the one before it. The revolutionaries always forget on thing. When they take over a government, they fail to replace the bureaucrats.

© 2017 by Tom King

They're Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine

Conservatism is under attack and it's not who you think. Turns out we are our own worst enemy. Trump has carved off a segment of conservatives, mashed them all up with angry white people, angry black people, angry Hispanics and other fringe elements that look to Trump for salvation, but Trump isn't the whole problem.

I just spent an unpleasant hour listening to Stefan Molyneux and a guy who calls himself Vox Day explaining what the alt-right movement is all about. Apparently the term "cuckservative" originates with Mr. Day and loosely means "race traitor".  The alt-right movement claims it's better that people stay in their own cultural enclaves - the nations that bred them in other words. They further claim that the US is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation and it's time we should make it that again. So now we have the Republican Party broken up into Trump minions, alt-right race loyalists, neo-cons, country club Republicans, Tea Party folk and a confused bunch of the rest of us who believe in the Constitution, free markets, small government and every one of the Bill of Rights.

There is an old military tactic known as "divide and conquer" that seems to be the primary strategy being used against the conservative community. Together people who identify themselves as conservatives make up 65% or better of voting Americans. Together we are a terrible roadblock to the conquest of America by progressives.  Separated and fractured into factions, we're relatively harmless.

Ironically, progressives, those advocates of multi-culturalism and promoters of non-assimilation have used the very techniques they use to create "voter groups" against Republicans and conservatives. Sadly, they have a lot of help from us in doing it. Apparently conservatives are more than willing to help out.

At any rate, I've never seen good-hearted well meaning Americans so divided in my lifetime. I've read about it in history books. It never ends well for nations that have a divided populace.

Somehow we need to find common ground for all of us. We're more Americans than we are anything else if you get right down to it, but thanks to the media, entertainment industry and the political jabbering class, we've been convinced to huddle up in our own little homogeneous groups.

It's not easy to hold a nation together when it divides itself into narrow ideologies and political ghettos.  Create those divisions along cultural and racial lines and it's even worse. We've got to cut that out or the America we know is going to be taken from us by a smug set of conquerors, who have figured out the Achilles heel in the American melting pot. Ironically, it's the same thing that is our strength - our differences.

© 2016 by Tom King 

Hoofbeats of the Pale Rider

When people in this country believe that being too nice disqualifies a man from being president, we see but one of the many signs that Jesus told us would herald his coming. I weep for what kind of nation we are fast becoming - a nation of coarse, hateful, cold-blooded, self-centered narcissists only capable of understanding and appreciating that which is most like themselves.

We no longer look up to the good, the kind, the brave, the resourceful and decent. Instead we look inside ourselves for enlightenment; we make ourselves our own heroes and our own gods. We worship our own egos and we sacrifice those who live by the Golden Rule as virgins upon the altar of smug self-satisfaction.

God help us, but the apocalypse is coming. I can see the sparks in the distance as the fires are being kindled.

© 2015 by Tom King

The Perils of Embracing Everyone Else's Stories

The stories we embrace define us.

Movies and novels in today's world have taught us that almost all disagreement must end in some sort of emotional, verbal or physical violence. Pay attention to the next book you read or (more likely) the next movie or TV show you watch. There is a fairly consistent message in the stories we tell each other in our sadly post-modern culture that says that disagreement must always end badly.  

As a result of this endlessly repeated "moral of the story", we find ourselves in a culture in which we are unable to talk to one another unless we all agree; usually with whoever has the most authoritative manner. More than anything else, I think this probably explains the Donald Trump phenomenon in this election cycle and why his supporters react so violently to anyone who opposes him within the ranks of conservatives.

If we don't agree with the leader of the group or if we're the odd man out in the consensus of opinion, we will almost inevitably find ourselves cast into outer darkness by the group or shouted down into silence. And that's the preferable result. In some discussions, you can find yourself pounded into submission with physical intimidation and/or physical violence. 

We have a really difficult time "agreeing to disagree" these days. In the days where our conversations were longer and friendships more highly valued and resilient, friends often had disagreement. In the "life sucks and then you die" social environment of the post-modern social media driven world of today, however, if someone disagrees with us, we simply block his Twitter feed and be done with him. After all we have a pool of 988 "friends" and we'll very likely find someone among those friends who will agree with us all the time - until he doesn't and we cut him off. 

Even if we say we agree to disagree, these days that's usually a signal that we are going to cut off that relationship if they ever fail to conform to our worldview again, whether we actually "agree to disagree" or not. Our stories that we share among ourselves in a culture - the ones we like and return to in our minds at least - determine how we see ourselves as part of the mob, the herd or the community. So long as we remain submissive to the herd, those narratives hold a powerful sway over us. Deviate from the herd and it becomes a lonely world very quickly.

One of the reasons Christians like me and my real best friends are such a sore thumb in today's world is that we have chosen a different set of stories - Abraham and Moses, Joseph and Jesus as opposed to Star Wars, Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead. Not that there aren't some good stories outside of Scripture, but you have to separate stories you simply hear or witness from stories you embrace at least if you want to retain your own individuality. If you accept the stories that flow into your head through the media as "what everybody knows", it does not take long before you are manipulable by leaders who are loud and authoritative. Those guys are difficult enough to resist in any case without us programming ourselves in advance to blindly follow our fellow buffalo in stampeding over the cliff.

We were once taught in our youth, the value of thinking for ourselves. One wonders what they are teaching in schools these days. I suspect it is not independent critical thinking or logic. That's a formula for creating individualists and that would be a real problem for "progressive" collectivists. The last thing those guys want are buffalo who think for themselves. A buffalo with a mind of its own can be a very dangerous beast.

Tom "Buffalo" King © 2015

Sharks and Snow and Chicks in Bikinis - The Decline and Fall of the Film Industry

Avalanche Sharks?  

Really? I don't know what they were smoking when they came up with this abysmal idea for a movie, but it proves my point about drugs and brain damage.  The movie is directed by Scott Wheeler and written by Keith Shaw whose credits include such works of cinematograhy art as Sand Shark, Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Dracano, Dragon Wasps, Boa vs. Python, Mega Piranha, The Thing Below and Malibu Shark Attack.

Here's the scene:

Scott says, "What we gonna make a movie about?"
Keith says, "I dunno, how about sharks?"
Scott says, "Sharks is good, they could eat some chicks in bikinis or somethin'."
Keith says, "Yeah, but we need a twist cause cause just plain sharks eatin' chicks has already been done to death. After Malibu Shark Attack, I couldn't sell another plain shark script for nothin'"
Scott says, "Somebody did tornadoes and sharks already."
Keith says, "Yeah, Sharknado.  All the good shark ideas are gone.  Two-headed sharks, giant sharks and dinosaurs, dinosaur sharks...."
Scott says, "Giant sharks vs giant octopuses (I did the visuals on that one), Sharktopuses, sharks and crocodiles, sharks in lakes, sharks in sewers, sand sharks...."
Keith says, "Yeah that was a good one, the sharks like pop up out of the sand and eat chicks in bikinis..."
Bill says, "Yeah I did the visuals on that one.  Hey, I just realized. Nobody's done one with sharks and snow..."
Ted says, "Dude, I get it. The sharks swim around under the snow and pop up and eat chicks in bikinis."
Scott says, "How do we get bikinis into a movie about snow."
Keith says, "Easy dude. Haven't you ever been to a ski resort, man? They got hot tubs full of chicks in bikinis and even sometimes the chicks go skiing in bikinis.  Oh, wait...........skinny skiing!"
Scott says, "Brilliant Keith! We put in some danger, what's dangerous about snow?"
Scott and Keith together, "AVALANCHE!"
Scott claps his hands.  "We call it Avalanche Sharks. In the trailer we show these shark fins cutting through the snow and a couple of chicks in bikinis being chased on skis and eaten by giant sharks."
Keith says, "That's a hit there man. Pure cinematic genius!"
Scott says, "You gonna finish that joint?"
Keith says, "Naw. I got three more lines I'm workin' on here."

The really sad thing that I think signals the end of society as we know it is that the stupid thing will probably make money.

© 2013 by Tom King

So Tell Me What's Wrong With This Shirt

Available at Apocalypse Gear

Alright, I admit it. This design is supposed to be provocative. I would feel a wee bit uncomfortable wearing a shirt that says "Cracker American" across the chest in certain neighborhoods (and not all of them in America).  What I'd like is a reaction from my friends who read this. Tell me why this T-shirt (yes it's a "hoodie") should be offensive?  We'll start with my reasons as to why it should not.

Reason 1:  Sauce for the Gander

Apparently it is okay for a racial slur to be used by a person of the race in question to refer to himself or his fellows of the same race.  It is not okay for someone of another race to use that term.  Therefore if the term "cracker" is a disparaging term for white people, is it not okay for white people to use the term to refer to themselves?  If not, why not?

Reason 2: Neutralizing Hate

If someone uses hate speech against you and you turn such speech into a joke, does this not neutralize hate speech. So if someone were to use an ugly racial epithet against me, what if I ignored the hatred behind the word and made the word mean something else more benign. What if I embraced the word with pride.  Then, isn't the only reason anyone ought to be at all angry about that is because it robs the word of the power of hatred against my race; a tool they wished to retain?

Reason 3: Racial Disarmament

If I am not hurt, but rather am amused by the racial epithet "cracker" does that make certain people angry because I am not hurt by the racial epithet? Is this not why, when you ignore an insult or a slur, the bully using it inevitably screams at you, "Hey @#$$%!  I'm talkin' to you!" Is the source of their anger at the message on the shirt above because it shows that calling me a "cracker" doesn't bother me? I'd like to know.

Reason 3: Managing Agreement

So if I wear a shirt proclaiming proudly that I am a cracker, why should that make anyone mad? I am agreeing with them. I am quite obviously of the race called "cracker" by certain people.  I am proud of who I am, although I'm really Scotch-Irish-English-German-Cherokee, but "cracker" is far shorter. Shouldn't any person of any race be entitled to be proud of their race. If I agree with you that I am, in fact, what you say I am, (a cracker) should that not make you happy instead of making you want to get three or four friends and beat me senseless in a back alley?

These are questions that trouble me. If you have answers, I'd like to hear them. Really. And before I go, I want to point out that I do not think being a cracker makes me superior to anyone. Just equal as it says in the Declaration of Independence.

Only equal.

© 2013 by Tom King

Is Walt Disney Responsible for America's Slide to Progressive Socialism?

I blame Walt Disney.  Let me get that out there first.  Don't get me wrong I love everything the old man did and he's not the only one that's done it.  He was just the best at it.  His movies were the themes of my childhood.  We had him on movie screens, on TV and even in those Friday afternoon educational films we watched when I was at Keene Public School in the room where we pushed back the desks, set up projector and screen, opened a curtain and set up chairs to make a makeshift auditorium.

And I don't think Uncle Walt intended to be a shill for the progressive elitists.  He was always a great one for promoting talent, for recognizing ability and he had a real problem with unions.  He was a capitalist of the first order.  He built amusement parks that were of the highest quality and, by example, taught the American ideal that the product with the finest quality will outsell cheap crap. For that I revere the man.  When he told stories they were always finely crafted and he wasn't afraid to alter a story to make it better.  That is in the finest tradition of American craftsmanship.  It's the reason we're the most powerful country on the planet.

So what went wrong?  I think it was the stories he chose. Admittedly, he chose wisely.  The stories were familiar - Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. Disney turned them all into "underdog triumphs" stories that appeal to American audiences. There was nothing morally ambiguous about a Walt Disney picture while Uncle Walt was alive.  It was the deep core idea behind the old fairy tales that was the fatal flaw I think and it would have been hard to root out.  Generations of children before and after the Disney era had heard all those fairy tales from the days they were children.  Disney cleaned them up some for the 20th century, but the core theme of the stories was still there, full of kings and queens, nobles, princes and, most importantly, princesses.

In so many stories the hero is the true prince or princess that somehow becomes lost.  Then through a combination of hard work and magic, the heroine or hero overcomes and takes his or her true place as king or queen over all the realm and rules wisely and everyone lives happily ever after.  All those fairy tale princesses and princes inadvertently taught generations of American kids that there were certain "special" people out there who were the only ones truly fitted to rule. This was so because they had "royal blood" in them. Walt chose stories that would appeal to children.

What little girl doesn't want to be a fairy tale princess?  What doting parent doesn't want to convince her she is one.  To Walt's credit, his fairy princesses were all decent girls, kind and brave to a fault.  They had been mistreated, beaten down by evildoers and evil circumstance.  They triumph on their own merits and if he'd stopped there, he'd have been okay.  But there's always the discovery at the end that the hero or heroine is a real prince or princess after all - one of the elite ruling class by blood - that is the problem.

It's in most children's films of the time and even lingers today.  The ultimate rags to riches story of this generation, "Shrek", falls into the trap. Shrek was by no means an elitist.  He was not of noble blood. He was an ogre. He even marries above his class and she elevates him to the kingship.  But in the Shrek film cycle, old Shrek is not comfortable in his new role as ruler of all the kingdom.  His is a rags to riches to rags again story.  Shrek gives up the throne he had won, but was never comfortable with, in favor of cousin Arthur who is of the real "royal blood".  Once he shows Arthur he really is king material, he slips back to the swamp WHERE HE BELONGS! And there, my friends is the real message. If you're not one of the ruling class, you need to stay quietly in your swamp, play in the mud and let the nobles do the really tough work.

Do you see what I'm getting at. I'm not big on vast conspiracy theories.  I don't think human beings are that organized. I think people act in concert because they share similar selfish interests.  Too many of us have bought into the idea that there are some that are called to lead and others who are, by nature, merely followers.  We tell stories to this effect because people like those stories. Those stories sell books and movies because, secretly, we all want to believe we are special; that we secretly have noble blood and should be in charge of things by right of birth.  Disney's tales and those of his imitators also taught us that true princes and princess always have magic to help them - a fairy godmother, a genie, a magic unicorn or a crusty old sorcerer who would help save the day at the crucial moment if you only believe. This belief that magic serves the ruling class would explain Obamacare and the bailouts.

We want to believe that there is an elite "special" group of genetically smart and capable people that are qualified to rule over us all who can make magical things happen. We were raised on this idea and, because we are convinced this is so, we defer to those people who present themselves with confidence and authority as our heroic princely rulers, even though these guys really are as cowardly a bunch as you'll ever find anywhere.  And, if you study history, you'll soon discover that most of the so-called "nobility" have always been a pretty cowardly lot.  That's why nations have risen and fallen for thousands of years.  If one of the noble class accidentally has even a modicum of real courage, he will run rough-shod over the others and create for himself a bully boy's empire.

The nouveau nobility that has arisen in the past century and a half is a rag tag assemblage of politicians, journalists, university professors and corporate barons. They believe that their willingness and ability to bully, cajole, manipulate and buy their way to power makes them genetically superior to the huddled masses who just want to go quietly about their own lives and not bother anyone.  And most of us who are contented to go about our lives in peace defer to these ego-maniacal narcissists and, thanks to all the Disney movie and fairy tale propaganda to that effect, some of us believe that this is as it should be.

And these guys get away with that because it takes a great deal of abuse by our betters to get us farm folk and working stiffs riled up enough for us to risk the little we do have by taking up our torches and pitchforks and throwing out the bums.  We do it once in a while, though and that's what terrifies the new noble classes.  They live in constant dread that we're going to rise up and take away their privileges.  Anytime they see peasant unrest, they toss the proletariat some bread and put on a few circuses hoping to quiet them down.

Appeasement soon becomes the diplomatic technique du jour for our betters and cowardice becomes ingrained.  Then we declare an end to the war on terror. We try to demonstrate to whoever happens to be the scariest most threatening people around that we are really harmless lovable fuzzballs in the vain hope that they will not harm us.

And what's truly outrageous is that the great and noble leaders of the planet all treat it like it was a big game and we ordinary folk are mere pieces on a chessboard.

I love Walt Disney, but his movies should have carried warning labels.  Something like this:

• Warning!  Characters in this film are in no way intended to reflect reality.  There is no such thing as a "real princess".  You're all princesses and princes and no one has any divine right to rule over you and if anyone tries it, you should pitch them into the nearest ice cold body of water - preferably something with icebergs.

Jesus said, "The meek shall inherit the earth."  Fortunately, He's bringing a large army of angels with Him when He comes to make sure that happens.  I don't think the princes and princesses will go quietly.

I'm just saying.

Tom King  

Mark Zuckerberg and The End the World

What are the odds that Facebook will

bring about the Zombie Apocalypse?

(c) 2012 by Tom King

I love all the pundits that are busily predicting the end of Facebook with a note of sadistic glee in their word processors. Yeah, the IPO didn’t go as well as everyone hoped (presumably including the inimitable Mr. Zuckerberg). So what? Why should Facebook’s hiccups make so many intellectual snooty persons happy?

I think it’s all the ordinary raggedy humans on Facebook that bug them - all those ignorant masses trolling around on Facebook telling their friends all about themselves. Here we have a publishing engine that allows people to present themselves in a deceptively attractive online format, their ruminations completely unedited and uncensored. And all these untrammeled thoughts and ideas, pictures and art just flow through Facebook’s pipes like either some sort of gigantic sewer system or like the vascular system of some amazingly vast unpredictable fun beast.

Which you see it as, rather depends on whether you are a regular raggedy human being or one of the legions of self-appointed arbiters of taste and culture who think that information flowing to and from “the masses” ought to pass through them to be cleaned up and made presentable first.

One good professor argued recently that Facebook and its social media compatriots, the smart phone, laptops, tablets, podcasts and eBooks threaten to make us all narcissistic slaves to cultural group think. He joins a tiresome procession of pundits who have predicted the end of civilization as we know it if some technology or other becomes widely adopted.

The telephone was supposed to make us slaves. And for a time, it did keep us hopping to answer the thing every time it rang. So, we invented the answering machine and voice mail so we didn’t have to get up from our movie or our book or our supper to answer its jangly summons. Email was supposed to chain us to our computers answering a vast flood of trivial communications. We invented the spam filter and learned to block obnoxious communicants the way we learned to throw out junk mail without reading it.

Now Facebook has changed our concept of friendship. Not to worry. Facebook and other social media have only freed us from geographical proximity as the end/all be/all basis of friendship. Facebook and its ilk have, instead, replaced geographic proximity as the primary determiner of friendships with social proximity through electronic connections. Facebook became as an expander of human relationships. With it and the modern array of tele-communications tools available, it is more than ever the kinship of ideas, beliefs and interests that form the basis for friendships. We may have 1200 Facebook friends, but we still effectively communicate within only a relatively small circle of active friendships.

We are no more slaves to the temptation to narcissism and groupthink than we ever were. Used to be we all accepted what the newspapers told us about the world. Later it was two or three radio networks, then pretty much it was Walter Cronkite on the six o’clock news. Now, you can find both sides of any story if you don't mind cruising around the cable news networks. You can even subscribe to a plethora of newsfeeds that send the news of the day in all its conflicting forms directly to your cell phone.

All this technology has NOT led to a melding of the minds or robot people with no will of their own. Au' contraire. The explosion in communication technology, far from drawing us all together, has confirmed us in our differences. Arguably better communication with our peers has led to near anarchy in places like the Middle East and to a looming civil war between the right and left in our own country. It’s not the smart phones that will destroy us. The technology itself is benign. If the world rings down to an end it will be because we surrender ourselves to the same old impulse to greed, lust and power that’s haunted the human race since time immemorial. It wasn’t cell phones that started the Crusades, the Holocaust, The Cultural “Revolution” or the Inquisition. If anything, improvements in communications technology have dragged such nastiness out from under its rock and killed it with light.

Let’s face it. Most of us realize our hundreds of "friends" on Facebook are just a network of acquaintances with no more influence over us than mere acquaintances ever have. Our circle of true friends still remains rather small - limited almost entirely by our inability to cope with more than a finite number of close relationships anyway. It's just that some of our new "friends" live halfway round the world. Thanks to social media, we are free to choose our friends these days unbound by the constraints of geography.

I think I’ll Skype my buddy, Martin, in Poland this weekend.

How cool is that?

Tom King
Puyallup, Washington
Now you know someone you can worry about if you ever hear that Mt. Ranier has blown up.

The Civility War - 2011

A friend wrote me a note chiding me for calling the president, "President Obama".  He suggested a particularly nasty string of epithets as an alternative.

While I might have my differences with the president, I will not use that sort of language in referring to him or to anyone, no matter his politics or religion. I unashamedly believe in the Constitutional process that elects our presidents. Our guy may lose the election, but respect should be shown to the office whoever holds it. However much I might disagree with the policies of the man holding it, I will not resort to cheap name-calling.

Every president is limited in what he can do while in office by the two other brances of the government and by the voices of the people which cannot be silenced without abolishing the constitution. I don't think that will happen any time soon.


In the meantime Mr. Obama is the president and I will speak respectfully to him. I was taught growing up to be polite to the least child of God out there....or the most powerful.

And one more thing. People who are black have asked me not to use the n-word, so out of respect for their wishes I don't. It's always been a crude word and I have always instinctively avoided it's use. My friend's use of the world is shameful if, as he seems to be, he is claiming to be a Christian and Conservative.  He blocks access to his profile information, so, for all I know, he may be a liberal. There has been a lot of race-baiting by liberals in disguise lately on the Internet. I think they are trying to lure vocal conservatives into revealing their "true racism". I don't think they will succeed. After all, we're not racist, no matter how many times the left keeps telling us we are.

Scripture warns that by beholding we become changed. The danger of obsessing over our enemies is that we are in danger of becoming like them. I will not stoop to the level that many of my liberal colleagues do when they verbally abuse me. Jesus said treat others the way I would like to be treated, not the way they deserve. That's God's business and I'll leave it to him, thank you very much.

And I appreciate my liberal friends who also believe in a polite exchange of ideas over name-calling and ridicule.  There is a fascinating debate going on between Americans of good will on both sides of the political fence that is being completely missed by extremists on both sides who prefer to flail at each other verbally to little effect.

The righteousness of your cause can often be demonstrated by the decency of its adherants. While it might feel good to "let 'em have it" verbally once in a while, it is morally wrong to do so.

At least that's what my Commander says.