We American Peasants Have No Betters

 

Here in 2024 we're still getting threats from the Progressive State that if we don't get vaccinations and boosters and lay off the Ivermecting and Hydrochloroquin we're going to lose our jobs and fined and God knows what else. I don't know what else they'll threaten us with us next, but cancel culture has supplied the progressive forces within federal government an exciting (for them) tool for bringing the proletariat into line. Next it will be digital currency, something the Biden administration has already proposed. 

 

Really? Threatening to end people's jobs and businesses the feds believe is "forcing" Americans to do something they don't want to do. Suppose I threatened to throw you off Facebook for getting the vaccination. I don't know where you did your research. If it was off NBC, CNN or The New York times, you might want to check out some actual scientific journals and talk to actual physicians out there in the field treating this disease. I work for myself, so the president can't fire me. I'm lucky in that respect. My wife and I get out very seldom and we do so with medical grade masks and practice social distancing. We both have experienced bad reactions to flu-type vaccines AND we're in the kill zone for this particular virus. 

 

We have carefully chosen our response to this based on risk factors (and there are risk factors with these vaccines). Were I younger and didn't have an underlying health condition, and I were out in public a lot, I might get the vaccine. As it is, my wife and I chose another approach. Others my age and physical health have faced CoVid and taken Ivermectin, Hydrochloroquine and Z-Pack treatments and now with the monoclonal antibody treatments, CoVid has been rendered a rather minor ailment. So on the outside chance I do get the disease, there are treatments available to get you through.

There are "solid" reasons for my choice in this matter not to mention my constitutional right to do what I want when it's my body. Isn't that the pro-abortion argument? How come it's no longer my body. Besides, with the feds telling you that if you've had the vaccine you can still get it, and still transmit it to others, and that it may make it a lighter case if you do get it, it's hard to trust the advice we're being given by so-called scientists who seem dead set on enforcing their own will in the form of what seems more of a political than a medical solution.

 

Then there is the organization of teams of public health officials and Homeland Security Officers up here in Oregon and Washington to go door to door asking whether people are vaccinated, recording it in a database along with information about whether you were flying Revolutionary War flags, had Trump signs, wore "certain" T-shirts or hats described by organizers as evidence that you are a white supremacist and potential terrorist. And don't start with that being a conspiracy theory. I sat in on the County Commissioner's meetings where they discussed the CDC/Homeland Security plans to do just that. When the County Judge was asked if Klickitat County was planning to do that, he turned to his public health director and asked, "Do we have any plans to do that?" 

The Public Health lady went pale and said, "Oh, hell no! You think I want to get shot?"  Southern Washington State's natives celebrate a culture, that I discovered would give East Texas a run for the money for being redneck. They have bears running around loose. Those folks are armed! They might get away with that over in Oregon, but they do NOT want to bring that stuff across the Columbia River. Mt. St. Helens blew up in the middle of south Washington.

That bullying is the reason people are resisting the mandates and quitting their jobs rather than comply. It doesn't help that the same people telling us we must get vaccinated, were the same ones telling us the vaccines were dangerous and not to get them back in December and January before Biden was sworn in. Afterwards, through some sort of magical incantation, I suppose, after Biden became president, the vaccines became miraculously perfect and wonderful and essential to the survival of mankind.

So forgive me if I think that belittling and berating people who choose not to take the vaccine is a small-minded, anti-American thing to do. As Americans we are not averse to giving up some liberties in an emergency or to taking risks where risk-taking is needed. Were my circumstances different my choices might be different. But my choices are my choices and I live in a nation where individual rights are sacred. We don't live in a collective thank God, where people serve the state. The state, in the American Constitutional Republic, serves at the behest of the people.

This high-handed imposition of mandates based on the will of our dear leaders is foreign to American beliefs. Americans don't believe in complying, obeying or submitting to the will and authority of our betters. That's because we don't think we have any betters.

Sorry for the long post, but my leftist Facebook friend's original post had a snarky tone to it and I'm kind of angry about that. He ridiculed those of us who have carefully chosen through research in medical studies, journal reports, our own observations and consultation with our physicians (each one of whom holds a doctorate and is a scientist in his or her own right). I find that more than a little condescending. 

 

And as I said, we don't much care for rule of our betters over us masses, peons, proletariat or whatever you want to call us regular ordinary schlubs! A whole lot of us would take umbrage if you came to our house, banged on my door and presumed to classify me a terrorist because I wouldn't mindlessly fall in line quietly and knuckle under to the latest attempt by Marxist progressive government bureaucrats to test to see just how much we'll tolerate and how quickly we can be bullied into submission to blatantly illegal and unconstitutional executive orders.

Not smart, Joe. We will not kneel to Moloch and his ilk.

Just sayin'.

© 2021 by Tom King

I Aim to Misbehave!

The great debate of our time appears to be over how to make people better. One side believes that you make people better by passing laws. The other side believes you make people better by changing hearts. One side believes you can coerce goodness from without. The other side believes you can only create goodness from within.

There is a book that clearly documents the inability of law, in and of itself, to make people better. It's called the Old Testament. The long march of history has confirmed time and again the impotence of law to make people better. 

Law can help define what is and what is not good, but it cannot make people better - even at the point of a sword or through the barrel of a gun. 

Goodness comes from an indwelling of the spirit of God which inexorably changes hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. It works no other way.

Utopia cannot be legislated. Goodness cannot be forced, however many legions of stormtroopers you bring to bear upon the matter. Every time a government arises "for the good of the people", history shows us that those who assume the leadership of those governments and take upon themselves the task of forcing their subjects to be well-behaved inevitably become monsters.

The United States is, essentially, a backward country compared to other countries of the world. Instead of our protection and our rights coming from government, our forefathers recognized that these things were our inalienable right and rather than needing kings and emperors to give its people these rights, instead it should be the people from whom the government should derive its privileges, powers and responsibility.

The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence marked a stunning change in world affairs, arresting for a time the power of princes and potentates. Unfortunately, those who would make themselves kings did not go away. They are still out there, chipping away at the great American Experiment, relentlessly seeking to regain the power to tell us all what we may do and to force us to obey.

I do not hold to that and when America falls back into totalitarian darkness once more....

I aim to misbehave.

© 2014 by Tom King

My Thoughts Are Free - My Data, However, Is Not!

I use both Box and Dropbox for sharing files with my clients, friends and family. Got a note from Dropbox clarifying their policy toward providing information to the government. That the new "policy" likely reflects a response to government snooping in their customers' data is, to say the least, troubling.

One could get upset about all this, but given the rather grim picture of the world's end given by the Christian and Hebrew prophets, there seems little point.  I've therefore decided that since the world is evidently going to hell in a progressive handbasket anyway, I'll just not worry about it, live as though I were free and wait for Christ to come.

I'd rather be fearless and trust in God, than live in terror of what the government might do to me. As the old German saying goes. "Sie gedanken sind frei."  Your thoughts are free.

Here's Dropbox's new policy regarding government data requests. Dropbox says it's going to tell customers when the feds have been snooping around in their data. I'm betting they won't be allowed to.

© 2014 by Tom King

Gun Control: The Afghan Conundrum

A liberal blogger recently made the statement that the death of Chris Dorner demonstrated once and for all the fallacy that a person can resist the government, so we might as well go ahead and give up our weapons.  She roundly criticized all those "nutty" pro-second amendment, knuckle dragging rednecks who resisted the perfectly rationale belief that if you take away everyone's guns it would put an end to gun violence.

So, let me pose one question. I'm a reasonable man and I have changed my opinions on things, so give me your best argument.  And my liberal friend's argument was nowhere near a "best argument". It was name-calling at best.  But give it a go, somebody.  I do listen to rationale arguments. That's how I went from being a leather fringe, moccasin booted, headband-wearing long-haired youth to being a member of my state's public transit advisory committee at the head of a massive bipartisan local rural transportation initiative.  Here goes:

My friend's argument as best I understand the argument, goes something like, "None of us could resist the government with private weapons if they want to take us down.  The Chris Dorner case proves it and proves we're nutty for thinking so, therefore there is no reason for us to cling to our guns."

So let me ask my pro gun control friends something.  Why did the Russians, arguably a very powerful nation, fail to subdue Afghan rebels armed with personal weapons and smuggled small arms?  Why also have American forces, arguably the most powerful in the world, failed to eliminate the Talaban resistance in Afghanistan.  If government can always subdue privately armed citizens, why haven't they done it?

For that matter, why did we retreat from Vietnam?  It wasn't the massed forces that beat us there.  We won every single military engagement we fought with Communist regulars.  It was the guerrillas that we couldn't beat. The citizen soldiers with private weapons (the kind that we would make illegal here if the President has his way.)

Are you saying that the United States government wouldn't have considerable trouble rolling into, say East Texas, and disarming or subduing the millions of armed East Texans living out in the woods there?  That it was only the Taliban that was capable of resisting government forces?  Americans, who whipped a nation ten times its size (TWICE) largely with private weapons, couldn't provide a creditable resistance?

I'm here to tell you that the only way the government could suppress a real rebellion in East Texas would be to nuke the whole region and what American soldier would willingly press the button to wage that kind of war against his own kin and his neighbors. How many would join them?  The only reason there hasn't been such a war is because these armed citizens are honest, hard-working law-abiding citizens. So why would you want to disarm the good guys is what I want to know?

An armed citizenry gives the government pause when it decides to use even what the president called for in a campaign speech "a constabulary force as powerful as the US military" to suppress disagreement.  That ability to suppress citizen disagreement with government policy is a two-edged sword.  It threatens both Democrats and Republicans, Green Party and Tea Party. 

It's all been done before.  In post-Tsarist Russia the citizens were first disarmed in the name of public safety and then they went for mental health-based crowd control solution.  If you disagreed with the Communist authorities, you were dubbed mentally ill and sent to the gulags in Siberia to get some fresh air and exercise. If you pulled out your old rifle from your days in the Army during WWII, you could be declared insane and off to the gulags you went.

This is not paranoia.  This is history. What conservatives fear, and rightly so, is a steady creep toward full-fledged socialism and historically, full-fledged socialism has never ended well for anyone.  We believe the President and his advisors when they say things about what they want to do.  We don't dismiss them as liars just because we can't really believe they're saying when they talk about collectivism, nationalizing industry, and collapsing the economy deliberately to provide an avenue for the establishment of socialism as the law of the land. When they talk about redistribution of wealth, getting rid of guns, universal housing, healthcare and taking over the energy industry for our own good, we conservatives believe them.  We think the insanity is not to.  We recognize the pattern we see here and we look at societies where the things they are talking about have been done.  Russia - 56 million dead, China 160 million dead, Cambodia - who knows how many million dead and the list goes on and on. 

"Ah, but..." the socialists argue. "We'll never choose leaders like Stalin and Mao and Pol-Pot.  We'll choose wise leaders like Obama, Biden and Clinton."  They can be trusted.

Is that right?  Remember, the Russians trusted Trotsky and he wasn't a bad guy.  Stalin had him killed.  They trusted Lenin and he was only a bit more dictatorial.  He died rather younger than expected and Stalin maneuvered himself into place and started making deals with Hitler and later, slaughtered anyone who disagreed with him.

"Power does not corrupt," wrote Frank Herbert. "Power attracts the corruptible."

I've never understood how the left can talk about how our government cannot create democracies nor deliver justice at the point of a sword everywhere else in the world and yet be so eager to take away our own swords and deliver them into the hands of the government in our own country.

"Insanity," pointed out Albert Einstein, "Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Under the US Constitution, our nation has become the wealthiest, most powerful and free nation on Earth.  People risk their lives to get here for the chance to live in freedom and to have the opportunity to make their fortunes.  We are the last refuge for them.  If we fall, the free peoples of the Earth have no place else to go.  If we fall, I believe human liberty falls.  The corruptible are lurking at the gates waiting for the first opportunity to seize power over their fellow man.  If we fall, it will be a long time before we can win it back our freedom.

Just one man's opinion...


Tom King

Liberty and the Wrath of God

(c) 2011 by Tom King

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?”   - Thomas Jefferson, 1781

Wrath of God?  From Jefferson the deist?  You're kidding, right?

Nope.  Jefferson like others of the founding fathers counted on Americans to understand that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was a God-given and sacred thing and that if we denied that right to any man, God would be angry about it.  And that has proved the case over and over. 

Jefferson points up a fundamental difference between God's system of government and man's. God looks to change the heart.  Obedience to the law proceeds from the heart outward.  Man's government forces obedience from above. What TJ was saying was that when we believe that liberty is a sacred thing which God Himself defends, then liberty is safe from us. No external human law or threat of force from outside can insure liberty. In fact, external human control (as with a powerful government) only insures the loss of liberty. The paradox is that trying to "protect" liberty by mustering out the Gestapo, doesn't work very well as a means to preserve liberty. The only practical government for a free people is one in which the people value liberty above all and understand its importance - where liberty is preserved because the people value it.


Okay, so people are uncomfortable with the idea of God's wrath. Try looking at WHY God gets wrathful.  Notice that when Scripture talks about God's wrath, if you look at the historical events, you can kind of see why He might be angry.  Considering the provocation, most of us would agree that He had a reason to be angry.

Take God's insistent that Israel rid itself of the trappings of pagan worship and the temples and shrines in the land. Someone asked me once why God couldn't have simply allowed "freedom of religion" in ancient Israel as He did in America - let the worshipers of Baal and Molech peacefully coexist with the Jews in Israel? Why would that hurt?

Some background information clears that right up. During the early days of Israel, an estimated 22,000 infants were annually tossed into pits of fire as part of the worship of Molech. In Baal worship, all girls, starting around age 13 had to go to the temple of Baal and could not leave or marry until a certain number of the area's dirty old rich guys paid to screw them. Submitting to beatings and abuse were often part of the services they had to perform. Women were not allowed to marry until they had "served" in the temple.There was much worse. I don't blame God one bit for refusing to protect the Children of Israel from their enemies when they tolerated such evil to continue in their midst. It would have made me angry that they tolerated mass murder in their midst.  God simply backed away, removed His protection and let them see the consequences of doing it on their own.

I'm kind of glad God gets wrathful sometimes especially when His wrath is protecting our liberty

If you tell God you want no part of Him, then you have no reason to complain when evil befalls you. If you want God to leave you alone, He honors your wishes. We've have stopped teaching our children to value liberty and taught them to value bread and circuses. Our culture - at least a large segment of it - teaches that there is no God anyway. Of course, they immediately complain when disaster strikes and want to know "Where was God?" 

Hey, if you send him away, God actually goes. It's like the guy who sued the city to keep his restaurant business outside the city limits so he wouldn't have to pay city taxes.  Then he complained that the city's fire trucks didn't come to put out the fire when his restaurant burned to the ground. The volunteers eventually got there to put it out, but it was too late. If you reject the protection, you really have no excuse to complain.

God's wrath over the issue of liberty protects our liberties. But if we tell God we don't want Him or His wrath, then what protects our liberties. Sadly, our liberties are, without our respect for the sacredness of those liberties, in the most danger from ourselves.
Do you know why, no matter how many revolutions they have, so many countries in Central and South America can't seem to fundamentally change their governments. It's one corrupt banana Republic after another. The tenacity of corrupt dictatorships goes back to Spanish rule.  They've always had corrupt bureaucracies in Latin American governments. Revolution only changes the faces of the leaders. The bureaucracy itself, and thus the nature of the government never changes. The system simply molds new leaders into the sorts of corrupt tyrants the system expects - despite their good intentions.

God gave us a country without a history - a clean slate. He helped us win our liberty from arguably the most powerful nation on Earth. We haven't always done well with our liberty. We often tolerated things we should not have like slavery, the Robber Barons, the mass murder of native Americans, the Mexican War, the forced sterilization of people with mental illness by eugenics laws in the early 1900s. And God has punished us for our missteps.  The Civil War, I believe, was God's wrath on us for tolerating slavery so long - both North and South. Because we tolerated robbing people of their liberty as we did with black Americans for so many years, God stepped back his larger protection of this country and let us go to killing ourselves.  Notice how the tenor of the war shifted after Lincolin issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It was the start of the Union victory march.

Though we've made mistakes, all through the history of our country, we have taught our kids the principles of liberty as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We've taught our kids that God values liberty and it was given to us by Him at America's founding. Generation by generation we have become a better, more just and righteous people.

It's been a messy process, but we are the better for it. We didn't do everything right and did many things wrong, but we struggled and still strive, generation after generation to achieve the ideals of liberty. And we have made gains: women's suffrage, freeing the slaves and civil rights most notably.

That's why this country is so sharply divided these days. There are those who would fundamentally change our system from a God-centered respect for liberty to one that is a human centered, enforced from above system that forces people to all think and behave the same way. There is a movement to change "Every man has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to "Every man has to buy free universal health care, to buy energy efficient light bulbs and to believe the way everybody else does or be shut up."

That's what I see coming. It's the same people over and over trying to enact laws that control what we say and where we say it, what organizations we can belong to and who knows what else.  They say the government should be able to tell us whether we can own a gun, write a book, hold a meeting or speak on the Internet, TV, in print or on the radio. They make no secret that their purpose is to make everyone conform to what they believe "everybody believes". They have no problem removing troublesome dissenters in the name of "peace".

As C.S. Lewis said, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."   — C.S. Lewis

There are people who think the government should be able to tell people like me to shut up - for my own good, of course. They say we have no right to say what we do any more than we have a right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

Really?
 
Well, what if the theater actually is on fire?
 
Just one man's opinion.
 
Tom King

Preparing for the Coming of the People

Soldiers and barriers were everywhere for the 4th of July weekend at the National Mall according to some reports.  This is something new.  Movement through the Mall was rather restricted and soldiers were checking for weapons at every checkpoint.  You wonder whether the administration is trying to set a precedent for showing a tough front before the August Rally.  I don't think they want the upcoming Restoring Honor event to go well and may use "security" as a barrier.  I hope not.  I hope they are better than that, but I don't think this administration wants to meet up with this many of these kinds of people - not in their worst nightmares, let alone in broad daylight in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Can't wait to see what they put up for the Restoring Honor event Glenn Beck has been organizing for August 28. At one point, last winter, the park service had said they would allow no more Martin Luther King type gatherings of the people on the National Mall anymore after this rally.  If it's still true, it's a sad thing.  I can't find any mention of it in the Park Service website.  I hope they've changed their mind.  The National Mall is the great forum of the United States where free people can gather on the property they paid for with their blood, sweat, tears and taxes to speak their mind.

Even if it makes us targets for terrorism, we should have the right to assemble in defiance of those who would crush liberty. We mustn't start another civil war as some of the goofs on the radical right and left would if given half the chance.  We must exercise the rights given us in the constitution and make ourselves heard in a powerful way.  We must make the arrogant lawmakers and bureaucrats peek out the blinds from their office windows in terror of the throngs of ordinary Americans peacefully assembled with nought but their votes as weapons.  We must make them see that we mean business - on 8/28 and on the first Tuesday in November and on every day after that.

As world history teaches, freedom is a fragile thing and more than once has been sold for the proverbial mess of pottage.  We're a representative democracy. Let's not let our representatives make it a representative autocracy.

Tom