You Can Have My Dr. Pepper When.....

Well Philadelphia, the home of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, struck a blow against freedom yesterday by passing a 1.5¢ per ounce tax on soda pop. So that buck and a half 16 oz soda down at the 7-11 is now going to cost you an extra quarter. A 32 oz Big Gulp is gonna set you back an extra 50¢. The Philadelphia city council's eyes are glazing over at the thought of an extra 386 million dollars that they count on coming into their coffers. And they did it all to save you from catching the diabetes.

Of course part of the argument for the new tax was that it would REDUCE consumption of sodas by Philadelphians and protect the people's health - the people being too stupid to protect their own health. So if the tax actually does succeed in reducing consumption of Coca-Cola by the citizens of Philadelphia, then they ain't gonna get no 386 million in additional revenue. The trouble is they've probably already spent that money in next year's budget, which is why Democrat-run cities are always in debt. With hundreds of cities outside Philadelphia's city limits, Philadelphians will likely consume just as much soda only they'll buy it in nearby cities and suburbs, that don't have the tax. There will soon be a black market for soda pop in Phillie with pop junkies roaming the streets of quiet leafy neighborhoods. Your kids, instead of playing down at the park will be searching back alleys looking to score some Dr. Pepper or a nice A&W Root Beer.

The argument for such Byzantine laws is that it will help prevent diabetes which kills 70,000 people a year. This is considered horrific by many nutritionists and diet nazis who say that if we make sugar illegal or at least prohibitively expensive to obtain, those diabetes death rates will come right down. As one wag put it, they didn't have diabetes in Bible times, coz they didn't have soda pop.

It's a specious argument, of course. People did die of diabetes in Bible times. Just nobody knew what the heck it was. People's' body parts would rot off and they would die of infections. They often would just drop face first into the honey pot one morning with a diabetes related heart attack. Then, people would carry them out of the kitchen and into the yard where they buried them. Nobody kept statistics. Nobody knew it was a messed up pancreas behind it, especially since they didn't know what a pancreas even was in those day.

Besides, diabetes doesn't always come from sugar consumption. Of course you should be careful not to eat too much sugar. Fatitude is unhealthy. But trying to write laws to force people not to eat sugar is stupid - as stupid as trying to stop gun violence by taking guns from all the people who don't commit gun violence. 

Also, why is it always the people who say that marijuana laws don't work, who then want to turn around and ban cigarettes and sugar? Kind of hypocritical if you ask me. But that lot really do love their Big Friendly Government and those taxes on everybody else. 

I don't eat much processed sugar at all. I'm not a big dessert guy. Never have been. But I got type 2 diabetes. I was doing okay till a massively stressful job gave me high blood pressure. Turns out that certain blood pressure meds have type 2 diabetes listed as one of their side effects. Should have checked that sooner. I've switched to one that actually protects against diabetes, but reversing that stuff is really difficult. My numbers are coming down, though, but I have to watch my diet now - especially sugar intake. 

- Prostetnik Vogon Gelz, "The Benefits of Bureaucratic Inertia"
© HHGTTG Publishing, PDG 22321

But let's face it, laws against sugar aren't going to prevent obesity. Our world is too stressful. Reading the Facebook thread that got me started on this and arguing with everybody probably put a fat load of stress hormones on me; on all of the argument's participants really. These stress hormones are eating away at our health say the docs. So, are we going to ban Facebook next? Tax it? Somewhere some Senator is already salivating over that prospect you can bet. Are they going to charge us 1.5 cents to post a comment? Two cents if you include a photo?

We're grownups for crying out loud. We worked hard to become grownups. Just because a few of you are still smoking wacky baccy and living in your mothers' basements, doesn't mean you should treat the rest of us like infants. Grow up. Be a man for heaven's sake.

Why in heaven's name do we want to turn our entire nation's government into everyone's Mommy. You didn't like Mom being all up in your bizness when you were a teenager. What makes you think you'll like it anymore as an adult? Take some responsibility, people. You want to avoid diabetes? Easy. Stop stuffing Twinkies and Twizzlers into your pie-hole. Don't wait for the government to try and make you. Though if they do, I plan to become a black market Twinkie dealer and make a fortune.

I don't want the government going after my Dr. Pepper, even if I don't drink it. I actually drink Diet Dr. Thunder mostly (all praise to Walmart for that one by the way), but if I want a Dublin, Texas bottled real sugar Dr. Pepper, I want to know I can still get one. It makes me happy to know I have that option. That's freedom for me.

The reason our nation is at loggerheads over issues like this is that we all tend to get stuck in our own political ideologies. It's the old "If all I have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" conundrum. Essentially, we have two "hammers" in our political system - the "all government is bad" and the "all government is good" ideologies. One says we're all rotten sinners and can't be trusted with power. The other says man is basically good and if we find the right leaders to tell us all what to do we can create a man-made Utopia on Earth. I admit I'm drawn to the first position. Probably being a Christian predisposes me to that, what with the whole Original Sin doctrine. That doesn't mean I can't work with those who believe the opposite. The issues affect us all and need to be solved. The first thing we have to do, though, is everyone must lay down their hammers..

Given the state of our culture, I don't see that happening. We're probably going to end up beating on each other with our ideological hammers until we've killed enough people to get it out of our systems or have worn ourselves out beating on each other.

Just one man's opinion.

© 2016 Tom King

On Oil, Trolleys, Windmills, Spacecraft and Buggy Whips

When the subject of government meddling in the growth and development of industry comes up, people tend to fall into one of two camps — the folk who thought giving almost a billion dollars to Solyndra was a good idea and those who didn't. The pro-government folk inevitably talk about protecting American industry and jobs. Somehow the government is supposed to protect workers when buggy whips go obsolete.

It's always buggy whips. The buggy whip argument doesn't work very well, however. The buggy whip industry didn't die until the automobile developed to a point that the technology was affordable for the majority of us. Buggies gradually disappeared from city streets and with them, buggy whips (although many parents kept the leftover ones in the woodshed for disciplinary activities). 

Along with the buggies disappearing, a lot of jobs went with them. The number of horses declined in cities and with them the guys that ran around town with these little trash cans on wheels scooping up horse poop. Those guys lost their jobs as did buggy builders, buggy whip makers and used horse dealers. It would have been stupid to try and preserve the buggy whip industry and all those other jobs that went along with it.
What happened was that industry adapted to what American's needed. Technology changes were adopted as they become affordable and the market was able to pay for the new technology. We didn't stimulate the auto industry to create jobs. The auto industry created jobs and workers moved from buggy whips to automobile plants gradually as the market for personal transportation shifted.

The government in the 30s famously tried to shift the public transportation industry from electric trolleys to rubber-tired, gas-fueled buses thanks to a deal between House Speaker Sam Rayburn (who wanted more markets for Texas oil) and FDR. We wound up overly reliant on fossil fuels and personal automobiles and systematically dismantled our cheap reliable public transportation system in the process. Look at all the political misery that's caused, not to mention wars. We're still trying to fix a public transit system that wasn't broken until FDR and Sam Rayburn with the help of GM, Goodyear and Standard Oil tried to "fix" it. The old Interurban rail tracks are long buried under layers of asphalt under downtown city streets.

What we're doing wrong now is creating an artificial panic over fossil fuel-based energy before the next technology is ready for prime-time. It will wreck the economy at the worst or at least make us dependent on a more expensive and less convenient energy source.

Politicians worry that without their wise guidance, we'll face a collapse some day when the oil wells all run dry.

What a load of self-important rubbish!

As oil becomes scarce, whenever that happens, capitalists (if there are any left) will find new energy sources and deploy them as they become profitable. By profitable here, I mean self-sustaining. People can always shift to new jobs. It's been done before as old industries die and new ones rise to take their place. New markets replace old ones. Companies shift to new products as old ones lose market share.

Where we get into trouble is when we decide a certain job or a certain type of product should be artificially propped up and preserved in situ as though our economy was some sort of museum for fossilized businesses.  Capitalism is a dynamic process - always shifting, changing and adapting as the realities of technology, consumer needs and tastes inevitably change. Capitalism's willingness to cast aside the old in favor of something better in the name of profit is why capitalism survives where more rigid, centrally planned economic systems keep collapsing under the dead weight of their own out-dated practices.

Where governments, industrial associations and trade unions get into trouble is when they try to anticipate future trends and force them to come early on an artificial timetable. It doesn't work. Change happens when change happens, no matter how much the comrades down at central-planning might wish to slap the process into some type of orderly progression.

Progress is not orderly. It's messy and rowdy and breath-taking. Anal retentive, obsessive control freaks really hate that and they think it's their duty to clean it all up and make it work properly — smoothly. Not a one of them have a clue how to do that. Economists are about as accurate at predicting how to meddle with the economy of a nation as weathermen are at predicting what the weather is going to be anything more than a week from now.


One government agency that is finally doing it sort of right is NASA. By contracting out its space-taxi business, it's stimulating an incredibly rapid new space race. Instead of racing the Russians, who are basically still operating with 70s era technology, we're racing ourselves - private companies innovating, introducing new technologies and taking risks for the prize. Ironically, they all may actually win, even those who don't get NASA contracts. The "losers" may actually wind up selling in other markets. It will be nice to start making things like spaceships in America to sell to other countries. It will certainly help balance our trade deficit if we do. And how many other industries will turn all that innovation into new products and services?  


I'd don't believe American excellence is dead yet by any means. The only thing in the way is a raft of dim-witted politicians who believe they are smarter than all the rest of us put together. Really, the best thing they could do for us all is to get out of the way and let Americans work. 


There's still time to save ourselves.


Just sayin'


© 2014 by Tom King

Throw the Bums Out - Why It Won't Work.

Every election that comes around we get mad and threaten to throw the bums out for the good of the nation. The problem is that we talk about it, but never do it and it wouldn't do any good if we did.

All this talk about throwing out the congress and replacing it as though that would do any good is little more than hot air. It wouldn't work. There's only one cure for the bloated, chronically ineffective government we've saddled ourselves with.

We'd have to fire literally millions of government bureaucrats to accomplish such a transformation and that isn't going to happen. Not ever! Bureaucrats are a persistent parasite on the backside of society. They accumulate like barnacles on the bottom of a ship. Over the course of years they become such a huge mass that the ship of state inevitably sinks under the dead weight of too many "officials". It's why even a benign government that starts our lean and effective, inevitably collapses under it's own weight. 

So why don't we do something about it? There's no effective way to rid a society of its bureaucrats. Even if the people realize what's going on and pressure their leaders to do something about it, the politicians will try to solve the problem by first appointing a commission to study the issue and then, "surprise", the commission hires more bureaucrats to study why there are too many bureaucrats.

And if the ship of state does sink, if it blows up or burns down, the bureaucrats will survive, like the proverbial cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust. They will rise from the ashes and seek out new masters to serve them.

Reminds me of what Tolkien said about "fighting the long defeat".

Just One Man's Opinion,

T.W. King

Governments React Badly to Truths That are Really Inconvenient

1945 photo by James Gaussman, Army Pilot

I saw a post yesterday about efforts by the Chinese government to hide the fact that there are pyramids in China, complete with mummies, many of which have inconveniently Caucasian features. The Chinese government has planted forests and briar thickets over them and knocked parts of the structures down in order to obscure them.  The party line for ages has been that they do not exist or that only a few of the more "Chinese" ones - emperor tombs covered in the official histories. The photograph to the left was taken in 1945 by an American pilot, James Gaussman, of one very large pyramid that no one has quite been able to find since.  There are a lot of esoteric theories about the Chinese pyramids.  The Chinese government only says they have not been studied yet. Despite evidence of their existence, the Communists aren't much interested in talking about them.

Someone who read the post I saw had the temerity to ask, "Why?"

Since that person was an avowed progressive socialist, I thought I might answer the question and perhaps provide enlightenment as well.

So what is the point of the Chinese government hiding their ancient pyramids? Wouldn't it be a great archeological find and gateway to the door of their past as a nation?

Yup!

Aerial view of Chinese Pyramid network

That's precisely why they're hiding them.  The reason is simple. The existence of pyramids and Caucasians in ancient China, perhaps even as partial ancestors to the Chinese people, does not fit the narrative of the Middle Kingdom, an idea fostered in Chinese culture. Unforseen new "history" could be extremely inconvenient for the government and such governments as that which runs China have an almost pathological need to control the flow of information. China's bosses have a solidly set narrative about how things are and ought to be and they don't like surprises, even archaeological ones.


Henry Kissinger called this narrative "The Middle Kingdom Syndrome".  Chinese civilization has evolved into something like The Matrix.  While China is notorious for stealing ideas from other nations, they do so without any guilt about it. They don't see it as stealing. The Chinese do not merely copy external ideas or even external realities. They use these ideas and resources to create an ongoing reality that serves the notion of the superiority and privilege of the Middle Kingdom (China). The Middle Kingdom believes they have a right to anything they want or need, whether it be stolen satellite technology or a permanent trade imbalance in their favor. They believe the universe supplies the Middle Kingdom with what they need be it goods, technology, money, land or opportunities and see no problem with reaching out and taking these things when they obligingly present themselves.

Chinese leaders, the rightful rulers of the Middle Kingdom as they see it, believe this implicitly.  This is not propaganda, it's an article of faith with them.  China does not, for instance, see itself as "catching up" with modern technology.  Modern technology is simply providing itself to China in service to the Middle Kingdom's rightful destiny - as is only right and proper that it should.


Such delusional thinking is a problem with ANY large and intrusive government with vast power. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell both covered this problem in their books, "Brave New World" and "1984".  When you concentrate power in the hands of a few, those few, in order to cling to that power, must create a narrative - even a false history if necessary - to justify their continuing hold on all that power. This narrative must support their right to intrude on the lives of their subjects.  Anything which does not "fit" the narrative must be suppressed. 

The problem for them in the modern world is that people are not naive enough to let them get away with setting themselves up as gods with the divine right to tell the rest of us what to do. Stalin and Mao were probably the last to get away with doing so. President Obama's supporters would like to make him a Messiah figure, but most Americans are having none of it.  We know too much. We have too many different faiths for any leader to misuse religion to bolster his own power as the pharoahs and the Roman emperors used to. 

An alternative path to god-like power, then, is to destroy faith in anything except government and its more charismatic leaders.  They may allow a few religions which make a minor deity of government, but faith in something greater than themselves must be beaten down and made a mockery of.  As I've said many times, the problem with this world is not religion.  It's government.

These pyramids loom unmistakably real over the Chinese landscape

The first thing a government which has achieved great power must do is either suppress or co-opt any existing system of faith which does not acknowledge the government as supreme.  Any theology or philosophy which might ask awkward questions about the government must be suppressed or ridiculed into impotence.  That's why communist governments are so militantly atheist. If there is no God, then there is no one greater than themselves and thus, none to challenge the powers-that-be.

So it's no surprise the Middle Kingdom would react badly to the news that history might be rather different than the historical doctrine taught in their carefully constructed textbooks. Nations like the Soviet Union and Communist China, as well as WWII Japan and Germany, had to act as ruthlessly as they did against anyone who challenged the right of their leaders to exercise power as they did - no matter that it might be their own citizens they had to ship off to gulags, internment camps, "mental" hospitals and prisons.

A government serves its people so long as its power is limited.  As well-meaning people try to extend the power of government in order to make the lives of all citizens "better", the process inevitably reaches a tipping point - a point of no return if you will. You can see it approaching. The signs look something like this:

1. A movement begins that promises to change the world for the better - usually to make the lives of a powerful bloc of citizens better.
2. True believers in the movement worm their way into public office with promises of rewards for "the people" if they support them.
3. The movement co-opts the universities and turns them into propaganda machines, teaching students how to think properly; training more true believers who train more true believers and on and on.
4. The media, trained in pro-movement universities, chooses sides with the government which is by now heavily pro-movement.
5. The media supports government programs and initiatives uncritically. 
6. Education is altered, textbooks revised to support a pro-government narrative.
7. With the support of the growing number of pro-movement voters, vast new programs are initiated that promise to end hunger, to conquer poverty and to give everyone a job.
8. The number of poor does not decrease, unemployment climbs and hunger and homeless become rampant.
9. A segment of citizens are vilified, singled out as "the problem", in order to focus attention away from the fact that the government is failing. 
10. A lot of speeches get made about duty, service, collective action and collective responsibility.
11. Internal "security" forces are beefed up.
12. Pretty soon, it's off to the gulags for anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes.

As we look around us and see a heavily biased core media in this country, the federally mandated "Core Curriculum" movement, a faltering economy, polarization of our country and the president making state of the union address calling for "collective action", I fear we are rapidly approaching a tipping point.  It will be interested to see what a nation, built upon the principle that all men are created equal, does when it becomes apparent that their government not only no longer believes in that principle, but actively is working to insure the permanent superiority of and rule by a privileged elite class.

When they start telling you that you're not smart enough to understand why the government is doing to you what they're doing to you, and to shut up and go along with it, you'll pretty much know the tipping point has been reached. Unless I tip over face first in my soup pretty soon, I fear I'll live to see it.

© by Tom King

Government Inherently Good? Are You Kidding Me?

Harry Reid says, "Government is inherently good."

Let's take a closer look at that claim.  Government is inherently good,huh?

• Tell that to the six million holocaust victims and six million German citizens exterminated by Adolph Hitler.
• Tell that to the 43 million plus victims of Joltin' Jo Stalin and the overall 62 million for the Soviet Union 1917-1987.
• Tell that to the 40-70 million executed, starved and worked to death by Chairman Mao.
• Tell that to the untold millions killed in the Hundred Years War, The 30 Years War, The War of the Roses, The Crusades, The uncountable jihads, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, the Gulf Wars, terrorist attacks and brush wars everywhere.
• Tell that to those who lived under Napoleon, who were slaughtered by Ghengis Khan and who died at the hands of twisted emperors like Nero, Caligula, Commodus, Domitian and Elagabalus. 
• The 75,000 Muslims massacred by Ferdinand Marcos
• The one million killed in Ethiopia by the Marxist Regime in the 80s.
• The 600,000 ethnic Chinese killed by the Indonesian government in the early 60s.
• The 2 million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot in the killing fields.
• The 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu "dissidents" slaughtered by Rwanda's Hutu government in the 90s.
• The 200,000 Muslims murdered by the Serbian government in the 90s.
• The 2 million Armenians exterminated by the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the 20th century.
• The 10,000 people who hurled themselves from cliffs as ordered by Japanese Emperor Hirohito because he was afraid US forces would treat the so well after the conquest that it would be bad PR and lessen the "fighting spirit" of Japanese mainlanders.
• The 300,00 Chinese men, women and children brutalized, raped and murdered by Japanese troops in Nanking China.
• The 40,000 Frenchmen who died on the orders of Maximilien Robespierre.
• The 30,000 Iranians executed for having incorrect political opinions by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
• The 500,000 killed by Idi Amin Dada, the lunatic that ran Uganda for many years.
• The 3 million Congolese killed, maimed and tortured by King Leopold II of Belgium at end of the 1800s and early 1900s.
• Oliver Cromwell's extermination of one fifth of the entire population of Ireland.
• The 10,000 Romanians that Vlad III, King of Romania impaled for his amusement on large pointed stakes round his castle.
• The one thousand citizens of Novgorod who were daily executed in front of the castle while Ivan the Terrible and his family watched the festivities.  The people were suspected of being about to run away from Russia.
• Saddam Hussein's gassing and mass murder of some 600,000 Iraqi citizens.
• Kim Il Sung's genocide which took 1.6 million victims.
• And that's the short list.....

Now, once again, Senator, tell me again how a big powerful government is inherently good.

Tom King (c) 2013

The Bigger the Government, the More Petty Its Tyrannies

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Paul Gleiser, owner of KTTB radio in Tyler, Texas wrote an interesting piece in his regular column "You Tell Me Texas" about the petty tyranny of big government.  Paul experienced the joy of getting past customs officials and talked about how everyone submitted to delays and officious behavior from officials whose sole job was to check your papers and stamp your passport so you could get on to your connecting flight. When someone started to complain everyone hushed him up lest the official punish the whole group for its insolence by making the line go even more slowly.

I've spent nearly 4 decades in the nonprofit sector working in education and mental health. It was my experience of government during that career that turned me into a small government conservative.  I can't tell you how many times I've witnessed petty bureaucrats playing the game of "officiousness" with citizens they were hired to serve. 

You go to a desk or window, behind which sits a sour-faced career bureaucrat whose entire job is to take a piece of paper that you fill out and process it, add a stamp or something and tuck it into a file drawer somewhere.  With the advent of the computer, it's only gotten worse because now this bureaucrat has to type your form into a computer before he can file it.  They often leave you standing there waiting impatiently while they slowly and carefully type the entire form.  They do not dismiss you until they are done with the retyping the form and it has been accepted by the system. If some tiny little thing is wrong with the way you filled in the little boxes, you will likely be treated to a lecture regarding your weakness of character in having written out the full name of your state in line 22, paragraph 3, subsection 255A, when Section III, subsection 2, Line 5 of the "Instructions for Filling Out Request for Department of Administrative Affairs Approval to Install Widgets on Websites with Links to Official State Archived Documents" clearly states, "State names shall be entered on line 22, paragraph 3, subsection 255A as two letter United States Postal Service standard state abbreviations in all capital letters"

AND You will not be released to return to your actual real life until you have made the required obeisance to this priest of the temple of government bureaucracy and satisfied his lust for relevance. They do not like it when you laugh or sneer at them or express your frustration or anger in any way and can and will find a thousand ways to punish you for any perceived disrespect.

In a sane world, bureaucrats would soon become an endangered species.

Tom King

Sandy Hook "Conspiracies" - The Crazy People Are At It Again

And it's not just who you think...

(c) by Tom King

In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, the paranoid schizo-phrenics are hitting the Internet with increasingly bizarre government conspiracy theories.  But they aren't the only mentally unstable folk who are hovering around this story like so many pirahna.

The conspiracy guys will tell you that the story of Sandy Hook was inconsistent.  It kept changing throughout the day.  They pluck "facts" out of thin air and present them as evidence. They spin speculation and present it as solid reasoning. They harass witnesses, call them liars and even threaten them.  Sadly, it's one of the hazards that goes along with free speech.  Free speech applies to the mentally unstable as well as rational folks. I remember sitting in a Wendy's in Cleburne, Texas listening to a guy talking to himself about government conspiracies and Waco.  This was during the Branch Davidian hostage crisis and he was on his way to Waco to join the Davidians apparently.  I think he was the guy that tried to climb through the window to join them. And he wasn't the only mentally unstable individual drawn to the scene of that tragedy.  They came from everywhere like flies to crap.

The fact that the news reports at Sandy Hook changed throughout the day of the tragedy is better proof than anything that the story was developing just like a thousand instant news stories throughout the history of television.  The TV reporter's need to get in front of the camera earliest with any scrap of information works against them in the accuracy department.  I'd doubt the story more if the stories were consistent from network to network, from reporter to reporter or from moment to moment.  Reporters grab any confused report and throw it up on the chance it might be true.  A fabricated story would be more consistent.  I'm not saying the media wasn't trying to use the incident to tell a story. They obviously were, but they were making up that storyline as they went. You can bet, for instance, that virtually every reporter had a producer checking the NRA roles looking for Adam Lanza's name. They would have dearly loved to portray him as a card-carrying gun nut. They practically drooled over his mother's being a gun enthusiast. 

But don't the confuse mutual shared interest between media and the administration (in this case to promote gun control) with a conspiracy.  The 9/11 truthers did that and looked stupid for it  The birthers did and discredited other conservatives in the process and the, shall we call them, "Hookers?" are doing it as well.  I suppose there's a place for articulate paranoid schizophrenics on the web.  I remember well how they flocked to Waco, trying to get into the middle of that mess and prattled on for years about conspiracies there.  The Oklahoma City bombing was timed to "commemorate" the Waco disaster which should give you some clue as to the mental stability of conspiracy theorists.

Waco was a badly botched government operation, no doubt.  It was driven by the need to look good for the media and run by people who did not understand what a deranged person would do when they came after David Koresh and his people.  David, (aka Vernon Howell III) went to my church.  The church recognized him as a dangerous, deranged person and we booted him before he could damage the kind of emotionally fragile and mentally disturbed he burned alive in that compound along with him. Anyone who knew him, at least anyone who wasn't twisted all out of shape by his shared delusions, would have recognized that.

The problem is that the Government does a poor job of "handling" people with mental illness. For the same reason that people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder should never become psycho-therapists, government does a poor job of dealing with mental illness.  It either boxes them all up, destroys them or turns the all loose.  This is because government service attracts people with OCD; people who like to put stuff in little boxes (including people). Not everybody in government is OCD, but I'd be willing to bet it's the most common mental illness among government workers. I maintain this tendency toward compulsivity is the reason government has virtually no ability to prevent things like Sandy Hook from happening however many laws they decide to pass. People look to an institution that waltzes on the edge of insanity to fix the problem of people with mental disorders.

I've observed at close range how government agencies run. There are good people there trying to do the right thing, but the government, because of its very nature, has become so obsessed with control and data collection that the system itself has confused order with compassion; control with freedom.  It's not merely a case of the blind leading the blind or the lunatics running the asylum.  It's worse.

It's asylum itself that's deranged.

I'm just saying,

Tom

No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition

I've had it up to here! Now, imagine me holding my hand horizontally just below my chin to indicate where I've had it up to. Everybody's got a pet conspiracy theory to flog or some new "shocking revelation" in their latest book  WELL, THERE IS A CONSPIRACY GOING ON BUT IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK.  The conspiracy theories and wild talk are little more than a smoke screen to divide us, to confuse us and to hide what's really going on. My favorite book says this:

• For our struggle is not against human opponents, but against rulers, authorities, cosmic powers in the darkness around us, and evil spiritual forces in the heavenly realm.  Eph. 6:12

Just quoting that text like I seriously believe it makes me one of those "fundamentalist" Christians that the Georgia chairman of an atheist group, which I shall not dignify by naming here, claimed ought to be "exterminated".  His words not mine. So much for a kindlier tone.

As we engage our brothers and sisters in debate over the issues that face our nation these days, let us remember who it is that seeks to confuse and divide us and for what purpose he wishes to do so. If that confusion and division leads us, in the name of safety and security to accept a huge, intrusive and powerful government as a necessity, then we get what we deserve.

When the children of Israel wanted a powerful King like the other nations had, God warned them that a king would take their daughters for his concubines, take their sons for soldiers, their food to feed his armies and their money to pay for weapons.  He warned them that the kings would take their liberty, their land and their labor and return them only illusions of safety and security. We stand between two belief systems that offere us clear choices - small government or large; freedom or imagined security; independence or dependence. 

That we as a nation are still standing despite the determination of the forces of "hope and change" Progressivism, is a tribute to the tenacity of the American people and the quality of what our forefathers wrought. Voices on every side call for compromise, for acceptance of the inevitable and for handing over our freedom in exchange for promises of security and safety that Paul Simon aptly described as a "pocketful of mumbles".

Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, famously said, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."  I fear the folk who are buying the rhetoric of "hope and change" thinking the kindly government is going to make their car payment for them are going to be in for a nasty shock. Palin was right. No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.*

Tom King - Puyallup, Washington

* And, in case someone wants to draw a link between fundamentalist Christians and the Inquisition, remember please that the Inquisition was a policing arm sponsored by the Roman church and government authorities and they were punishing "heretics" many of whom were convicted of believing the same things fundamentalist Christians hold as principles of faith. If you wonder why fundamentalist Christians fear government, look to what the government sanctioned to be done against us under the Inquisition. And, like I said, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition."