Shoveling Air - The Assault on Conservative Memes

I posted this quote by Thomas Sowell. I though it was pretty obvious what it meant, but right away one of my left-leaning friends who claims to be utterly independent took a shot at it. He objected that if you put out a fire, you have to replace it with something after all. Sowell, he said, was "...ignorant if he thinks we don't need to replace an extinguished fire with something."

Air! If a fire is extinguished, apparently we need to replace it with air, according to my "independent" left-leaning friend. He was particularly harsh in his criticism of Sowell's analogy.

• Sowell is stupid. Of course you replace the fire with air. D’uh. Or is he so ignorant that he thinks air = nothing?

He missed the point and actually proves the point on a second level. Sowell's point is that WE humans don't actually have to replace the extinguished fire with air. It happens naturally. Government programs like the Affordable Care Act can be ended and don't have to be "replaced" by some government law or program. You missed Sowell's analogy. You can end Obamacare and you don't have to pass some new government program to replace it. Let the medical community and free market forces take care of "fixing" it. It's exactly like extinguishing a fire. That's all you have to do. Nothing else.

It's not like the firemen have to shovel on some air when they put out a fire. Instead, the air rushes in of its own and restores things to the their previous state. The analogy applies perfectly to the repeal of the ACA. My lefty friends always demand that we tell them what we'd replace the ACA with it if they repeal it. And I keep telling them we don't need to replace it with anything. The free market will revert to its natural state. Air had been there the whole time the fire was burning. Without it the fire cannot burn. Without the energy of free market capitalism, socialism rapidly burns out and collapses. The market returns to fill the space. The government doesn't have to do anything to replace a bad government program.

I posted this second meme and once again was pounced upon. The meme points out that if the prey is armed the predator thinks twice about attacking. My left-leaning buds pounced again, posting a picture of lions hunting down and killing a porcupine and telling me, in essence, that arming the prey does no good at all. I promptly scared up a set of videos of porcupines fending off seven lions and a leopard and escaping, leaving its attackers with noses full of quills.

Lately, it seems that any time I post a good analogy with a conservative message, the loyal opposition pounces on it and nitpicks it to death. Seems to be a new strategy. I guess they're tired of me taking apart their memes.

Someone called what is happening in our country a Cold Civil War. Indeed that's the best description I've heard for it yet. It's a Civil War all right, but it hasn't descended to a shooting war yet. I hope it never does. What we need is a Ronald Reagan to bankrupt the left and end the war.

I didn't think Trump was it, but I was pleasantly surprised when he kept his promises. But the left will be back. They are relentless and unless Jesus comes very soon, we can always hope the resistance finds a way to, well, RESIST.

© 2018 by Tom King

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

Home of "tacky" art?

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

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

Doily "art"

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

Choo-choo "Art"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just sayin'.

© 2017 by Tom King

Hoist by Their Own Petards

I used to hear the phrase "hoist by their own petard" and imagine someone dangling from the end of a rope attached to a particularly sensitive appendage. The phrase with that thought in mind is particularly poetic these days, if not entirely accurate. Actually a "petard" is a bomb of the sort that sappers (military engineers) used to set under under walls to attack fortifications (from which we derive the term "undermine"). To be "hoist by one's own petard" is literally to have the bomb or mine, with which you are attempting to attack your enemy, blow up in your face and send you flying. Thus you are "hoist" by your own petard.

The Democrats have long been using undermining as a way to attack their enemies. One of the favorite weapons has been to attack sexist pigs (pretty much all Republicans) by finding people who have been sexually abused. Hillary Clinton famously argued that all such accusations must be given credibility as no one would ever make such an accusation falsely. She said this after destroying the multiple women who accused her hubbie of groping, fondling, raping, or propositioning them for sex. Even after he got caught getting serviced under the Presidential desk during a conversation with a cabinet official and lied bald-faced to the American people about it, Democrats lined up to defend him saying, "It was only sex!"

Of late, the Democrats are discovering how dangerous it is to attack your enemy with sexual petards while smoking long cigars yourself. The carnage has been spectacular taking down Senators, Congressmen, movie moguls, actors and journalists right and left. Women, apparently tired of being groped in the name of sexual liberation, have come out of the woodwork to accuse dozens of famous men (even one notable gay man) of everything from butt-grabbing and casting couch misbehavior to pedophilia and saying naughty words.

The Democrats should check the quality and stability of the sorts of explosives they are using to build their petards. While they've successfully damaged such notables as Roy Moore and Bill O'Reilly, they've also blown up long-time supporter Harvey Weinstein who has a whole bunch of embarrassing photos of himself with his arms around Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein and other Democrat women who all seem to be smiling and enjoying the embrace of the old Hollywood lech.

The list is getting embarrassingly long including such notables as Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, and Louis C.K.* The latest "shocking" accusation has been a complaint filed with Minnesota Public Radio against lovable 75 year-old liberal curmudgeon and humorist Garrison Keillor, who was terminated immediately by MPR. Kellor, ironically, recently defended Democrat Senator and professional comedian (ah, but I repeat myself) Al Franken over his sexual indiscretions saying that the accusations against Franken were "low comedy" and should be forgiven. Keillor went on to say, "A world in which there is no sexual harassment at all is a world in which there will not be any flirtation."

It is the irony of progressive liberalism that the so-called "party of the people" claims that it will usher in an age of liberation in which a utopia of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll will surely follow the worldwide adoption of the principles of socialism. Yet in every case, almost the first thing the new socialist dear leaders do is ban rock n' roll, make drugs unobtainable (even the pharmaceutical ones) and make sex a dangerous proposition. There have never been more grim societies than the ones that first promised to create a worker's paradise. Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all the rest of them created grim societies based on repression and shared misery. The sex, drugs, and rock n' roll crowd were inevitably the first ones up against the wall.

Newsweek attempted to blame it all on Republicans claiming the Democrats had borrowed the technique of claiming sexual misconduct against political opponents from Republicans. "They did it first," is the liberal journalist's talking point, as though Bill Clinton boning the interns was the first time any politician was ever called out on sexual misconduct. Even Bill Clinton isn't safe now as both sides have opened fire with all their guns. Clinton, himself, the poster boy for "it's only sex", is currently being fed to the journalistic wood-chipper by fellow Democrats who, as Winston Churchill famously described it, "...are feeding the crocodile hoping it will eat them last."

CS Lewis more than a half century ago pointed out the danger of allowing ourselves to be governed by "omnipotent moral busybodies". The great danger in seizing for yourself the unearned moral high ground is that the morally superior almost inevitably morph into grim, judgmental, iron-pantsed hypocrites and if you've given them any power over you, they will be determined to exercise that power over you. Robber Barons, as Lewis pointed out, may eventually be satisfied and stop robbing you, but those who boss and bully you with the approval of their own conscience never get tired of it and always become progressively more oppressive.

Just sayin'.

© 2017 by Tom King

 * I've begun to think it's all part of a feminist plot to take over the world. Men are getting scarce anymore on news programs and the ones that are left have been very polite to their female colleagues lately. I'm noticing male journalists wear a kind of hunted look lately, sitting there alone, the only source of testosterone on a long talk show couch that reeks of estrogen and anger from one end to the other.

The Left Continues to Ramp Up Its Frantic Attacks on Ride Share Companies

 

 

And the liberal left continues it's attacks on the Uber and Lyft ride-sharing services. It's amazing to watch how "progressives" defend the status quo, especially when it's their status quo. And wouldn't you know it would be the city of San Francisco leading the charge.

These new ride-sharing services having expanded rapidly, capturing a consumer market long ignored. It is a market transit has been trying to figure out for a long time. In some parts of the country, especially in rural areas with aging populations, up to 20% of citizens over the age of 16 cannot drive a car or do not have access to one.  It's too expensive to run buses around to pick them up. Most live too far from bus routes for that to be a viable option. What Uber and Lyft have done is create a clever way for regular folk to make a little money hauling their neighbors who cannot drive around on errands they cannot accomplish with fixed public transit systems.

I'm one of those customers Uber was designed for. Without them I'm left with unaffordable, often unpleasant choices for purchasing transportation services. So, of course the left wants to take Uber down. They are hoping to force people to move into town next to bus lines. You think I'm kidding? I've sat in on the meetings and that's precisely the goal. 

Politically, I can see why the left would want that. They keep losing elections to people living in small towns and rural America.  I guess they figure if they can force us to move into human hives, walled up in cities, we'll just naturally become liberals.  It seems to be working for the Democrat party certainly.

"So, why don't you just call a cab?" Uber detractors ask. Okay since you asked:

(1) Cleanliness - I've never ridden in a dirty Uber car. I've seldom ridden in a clean taxicab.

(2) Cost - Taxi rides cost half again as much. I can give the extra to the driver as a tip and it's clear profit for him. Uber doesn't require or even encourage customers to tip, but I usually give 20-25% or more to my driver because the service is really really good. I give it to him in cash and since he doesn't have to report it to Uber, well, the IRS doesn't have to know either. I'm a big fan of the black market. Cab drivers meanwhile demand a tip for rides in unclean vehicles, that take too long and are overpriced.  So I have to tip drivers who often don't earn it AND the cab company and Uncle Sam take a piece of it from the drivers.

(3) Atmosphere - I have never had an unpleasant ride in an Uber. The last two consecutive cab rides we had with the taxi service, our driver yelled at someone on the phone in Farsi all the way to our home. My wife said it felt like being abducted by terrorists. I kept waiting for him to yell "Allahu Akbar!" and drive into a crowd of people. Honestly. It was an unpleasant trip.

(4) Drivers - I've never had a driver who didn't like his job with Uber. And I ask them how they like their jobs. Most are doing it as a second job or using it to make their car note. They choose their hours and pick their customers. Our cab drivers don't seem nearly as happy. Though some cabbies seem to be making the best of it, I don't detect a lot of joy like I do with the Uber guys.

(5) Satisfaction ratings - With Uber you get to rate your driver and the quality of the ride. I've yet to give anyone less than 5 stars with Uber. Also my driver rates me as a passenger. Since my wife and I are already nice people by nature, we seldom have any trouble getting a ride. I suspect I've got a five star rating too. The Uber drivers see that and are more comfortable picking me up than a customer who is nasty to drivers and gets a consistently low rating. With taxis, you take what you get, both driver and customer. That explains why the Uber experience is better I think.

(6) Availability - I've waited for hours for a cab to come and find me. I think with Uber my longest wait was 20 minutes on a busy late Friday afternoon. It's usually under ten minutes.

 

So the killjoys in San Francisco and other liberal cities want to take Uber down. They are under the mistaken impression that if Uber goes down, customers will accept less attractive transportation options - options that pay a piece of the action to the city. What they miss is that if customers don't have an easy affordable way to get around, they don't patronize shops and restaurants and other businesses in town that DO pay taxes to the city. Transportation done right can feed local business if you don't try to gouge people for a piece of the action. Liberal city leaders remind me a lot of a criminal syndicate in the way they operate. I can imagine the council meeting where they hired Arnold "One Ear" Giovanni to "....make 'em an offer Uber and Lyft can't refuse."  Except they can refuse and have already abandoned more than one unfriendly town, much to the dismay of merchants and consumers, between whom, business has since fallen off.

© 2017 by Tom King

Progressives Aren't Liberals - Really? You're Kidding Right?

Woodrow Wilson - Godfather of Progressivism

A friend recently told me he would rather be a "progressive" than a "stick in the mud".  If he's referring to conservatives as "sticks in the mud", I would challenge that idea.  Then my friend added that "progressive" didn't mean "liberal".  Well if that's true, then progressives need to work on their advertising because in common parlance "progressive", "socialist", "liberal", and "Democrat" all mean practically the same thing or at least are as closely matched as "conservative" and "Republican".

AND conservatives are NOT stuck in the mud. We were once considered liberals. When the country was founded, the founding fathers were very much liberals. It was the American Tories (conservatives) who opposed the Revolution, even serving in the British Army to put down the rebellion. The liberal authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were heavily influenced by the philosophy of noted 18th century philosopher, John Locke, and others of the time. They believed in small government and that all men are created equal. They were against setting up a "noble" class, all except a few Federalists, who thought they ought to become a ruling nobility. Thanks to Jefferson and Washington and others, the idea of creating an American noble class was shot down. 

Later in the 1800s, upper class Americans came to consider themselves a breed apart - a new nobility if you will. They seized on the ideas of Charles Darwin to try and make the case that some folk were genetically superior to others and that those traits were passed down to their progeny. They latched on to socialist ideas propounded by Marx and Engels to justify the idea of an elite ruling class and a classless society or more accurately a single class proletariat which served the collectivist state ostensibly for their own good. Of course, it was clear to these earlier "progressives" that they should rule such a collectivist state, given their genetic intellectual superiority. This was, of course, for the people's own good. 

The Democrats seized on this because it fit the Southern notion that certain folk were naturally inferior to the upper classes and that these societal elites were chosen by God to rule. Actually, most of the upper classes didn't believe in God anyway. As American theologians more and more challenged that notion of the natural superiority of any particular class, the Democrats soon openly pushed aside the notion that God had anything to do with anything anyway and became the socialist, elitist, paternalistic, and damned near atheist political party that it is to day.

Early progressives under Teddy Roosevelt were well-intentioned and actually did some good for the working class. Unfortunately, the very people who were responsible for the exploitation of working Americans seized upon the movement as a means to convince the very people they exploited to embrace socialist style collectivism as a means to achieve freedom for all workers. The slave masters simply adopted a new racket to maintain their position and profitability. It wasn't long before progressives adopted the ideas of the eugenicists and began sterilizing the "mentally feeble" and passing laws to prevent certain immigrant races from owning land, putting quotas on certain racial immigrant groups and discouraging black migration from the South to the North. Progressives built statues of Mussolini at Rockefeller Center and praised Hitler and Stalin's policies and then smoothly morphed into patriots and New Dealers and tried to pretend they'd had nothing to do with their previous "progressive" ideas once it became clear that those were the ideas had bred monsters like Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.

Democrat/progressive/liberal propaganda links these three nebulous ideologies into a single unified whole in the public mind. Conservatives and Republicans (at least up until the age of Trump) have been defenders of the idea of decentralized, limited government, individual rights and equal opportunity for all. Just because they call themselves "progressives" doesn't make them progressive. The ideals spelled out in the Declaration and the Constitution are as progressive now as they were then. Modern so-called progressivism is, in point of fact, entirely regressive, seeking to drive society backwards to the old feudal system of a one class peasantry (Marx called them the "proletariat") ruled over by an elite class of self-identified "leaders" who live in their dachas and mansions and rule over the human hive that socialism always tries to mold a society into.

The term "liberal" has come to mean the polar opposite of what it meant during the time of the Founding Fathers. In those days liberals believed in the rights of all men and women, equal opportunity, and the elimination of rule by elites. Today "liberal" according to its own advertising means a strong central government that doles out housing, medical care, jobs and opportunity as determined by central planners and a leader class which takes care of the proletariat while the proletariat collectively serves the state.

Like I said, if that's not what liberalism means, then they need to get themselves some new PR guys. What I hear from the left is that liberalism is about feeling good because you give your responsibility for your neighbor over to the government. To me it seems that all that does is make you feel okay about walking past your injured neighbor like the Pharisees of Jesus' parable, secure in the knowledge that he can go to a dot-gov website and apply for government aid if he needs help and you don't have to be bothered about his difficulties. 

© 2017 by Tom King

To My Liberal Friends on this Merry Trump Christmas

At this blessed season, I feel compelled to warn all my liberal friends who might have received an "official Red Ryder Carbine Action, 200 shot, Range Model Air Rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time" for Christmas or who might have purchased one to protect themselves from the ravening hordes of evil Trump Minions (not to be confused with actual conservatives) who are sure to descend upon them to take away their pot, food stamps, National Endowment for the Arts Grants, or to tell them who they can have sex with.

Guys..................

"YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT!"

© 2016 by Tom King

States People Don't Want to Move To

This seems to be the reason so many people are leaving California
Fat guys surfing - oh the humanity!

More Liberal Nonsense Disguised as "News"

You see ads on the Internet all the time for articles listing the Top 10 This, the Top 13 That, 8 Most.......whatever. You go there and it's a slow drag through 18 or 20 screens, each with a veritable blizzard of pesky pop-up ads and annoying videos for things you should NEVER eat, Dr. Oz's latest miracle cures and sleazy "dating" sites. These articles are time-consuming and carefully designed to put your eyes on as many advertisements as possible to generate ad revenue for the website.

THEY ARE NOT LEGITIMATE NEWS. Nor, for that matter, are they in any sense accurate. Once in a while I go to one of these sites, just to keep abreast of the genre. I do my own occasional top ten blog on my site "Listing to Starboard" in case the mood strikes me to judge something or someone unfairly by my own personal standards.

So I boot up my computer and catch a title on my home page sidebar that says "Top 13 States No One Wants To Move To Anymore". I smelled a rat. Looking for blog material, I click on the link. Sure enough, most of the states listed were actual liberal hell holes like California, New York, Illinois and Michigan, but in the interest of fairness, it seems they also included several popular conservative bastions like Arizona, Texas and Florida in the list. For good measure they included Georgia, and Mississippi in the batch, apparently because Georgia is getting too crowded and Mississippians are a bunch of racially prejudiced rednecks.  Now they don't actually use any statistics, relying on breezy "facts", in Arizona's case, where they cite the state's "anti-immigrant laws" as a reason why "people" (whoever they are) don't want to move there. Apparently attempting to stem the tide of drug runners, terrorists and assorted illegal aliens pouring over it's borders somehow makes Arizona unattractive to college graduates who may worry that bong supplies may be difficult to obtain in such a repressive environment.

My favorite "reason" no one wants to move somewhere is the one they give for "Texas". The author admits Texas is in the midst of a population boom, attracting college graduates and those same illegal immigrants that Arizona insists on passing laws to keep out. But apparently Texas "tops the charts" as the "least desirable place to move" so the article confidently predicts Texas will soon experience a "drop off". They don't say what these "charts" are or where to find them, but we can trust them. After all, they are Answers.com. Laughably, they later cite the attractiveness of hipster places like Austin, (which happens to be the capital of Texas) as one of the reasons these mythical "people" don't move to New York where high cost of living, traffic, trash and noise has reduced the "quality" of life. They don't mention New York's ludicrously high tax rates, high crime rate and growing number of embarrassing incidents of official corruption in the article.  But then, I suppose, they didn't want to appear too harsh lest New York readers, in a fit of pique, stop clicking on "next". 

Florida's alligators and hurricanes and spring breakers are what are apparently spoiling Florida's attractiveness to "people" (whoever those creatures are). Not that Florida's population is decreasing mind you. Oddly enough the reason that California, the #1 state people don't want to move to, is not explained at all. The author may have hinted at a reason, perhaps, in the picture which illustrates the state - a photo of an overweight, middle-aged surfer (see above). Apparently the beautiful people ain't so beautiful anymore but they still insist on appearing in swimsuits on California beaches. The only excuse in the writeup for California's #1 status is some vague something about California's population growth mysteriously having slowed to a crawl after doing so well for so long. No reason why. No mention of taxes, floods of illegals, high taxes, insane laws, higher taxes, restrictive business climate, more taxes, astronomical cost of living, luxury taxes, and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots are the "proletariat" for you UC Berkely graduates in case you are confused or too busy packing to move to Austin or Portland to pay attention. There is no mention of the fact that the number one place businesses move to when they leave California is..............Texas!  Sort of a Wagons East proposition. Imagine moving from liberal heaven to conservative hell. It must be terrible for "people" (whoever those are).

You will notice I didn't include a link to the article. I do that because the point of this article is to help you not to waste your time with stuff like this. Answers.com apparently isn't worried about giving you accurate answers, just a reason to keep clicking "NEXT" and running up someone's advertising bill.

The folk advertising there should know that the bombardment of ads on the site only irritated me and I don't remember a single one of them, so they wasted their money.  Which is why I don't go to those top ten lists.  If you want to go to a top ten list, you can go to mine at Listing to Starboard.  It's not often that I add a new entry and I don't pretend it to be straight news. It's my opinion and mine alone.  That said, my blog also doesn't have a lot of pop-up ads and you will find it difficult to actually open a loud and obnoxious advertisement. And you can comment your head off. So far the Top Ten Hardest Musical Instruments To Play has been the busiest comments-wise.

Just so you know.


© 2016 by Tom King
 

I Aim to Misbehave: The Myth of the Unbiased Media

I kind of went off on an old friend today. A Ph.D. who apparently took the left path at some point, he posted the poem about "you tired, your poor and your huddled masses" and basically indicated that the concern of the right over the whole immigration issue wasn't "American". In a follow up comment he expressed a desire for a return to the days when reporters were taught, "...that a good reporter never showed his/her personal bias."  Sadly, he said, those days are gone.

Sadly, my friend, those days were never here. Every reporter, even good old Walter Cronkite came to the task with his own personal druthers. Cronkite was an old leftie and everybody knew it. I used to watch him. I liked him, but I was never in doubt about his slant on the story. My friend pointed out that 28% of Fox News viewers also watched MSNBC as though that somehow diluted Fox's influence.

The reason people watch both Fox and MSNBC is because they are pretty much the only two news outlets that are clear as to what their reporters biases are. Fox is at least honest about it. With MSNBC, it's just so blatant you can't miss it, whatever they claim about being unbiased. What I like about Fox is that when a reporter is a conservative, you know it. When he's a liberal you know it. And Fox has both varieties of reporter. More importantly and the reason for their dominance of the news market is that Fox gives conservative viewers the chance to hear a reporter ask the questions that they would like to ask for themselves.

I, for one, do NOT long for the good old days when we got fed whatever the top 1 or 2 newspapers, television or radio stations thought we ought to hear. There was no conservative media, then, except possibly for William F. Buckley whom the stations kept around and trotted out once in a while when they wanted us to know they were being fair or when some politicians on the left weren't living up to their potential and they wanted Buckley to spank 'em. They crucified Barry Goldwater in the media and they had no shame about doing it. The only way Reagan got himself elected was because he was able to bypass the news media and appeal directly to heartland America.

I actually studied journalism back in them good old days and what the books were teaching was how to diddle stories to reflect a Marxist agenda. It was that open. Marxism was what the cool guys believed. The assumption was that if you were a journalist, you were a liberal. I withdrew from graduate school psychology because my professors demanded that I not only not believe in God and stop being a Christian, but also that I give up on all this silly monogamy stuff. The three top department heads had all wound up divorced during grad school and thought that if you didn't get a divorce while in grad school, that you weren't working hard enough. Not wishing to abandon my marriage in order to collect my degree, I left higher academia.

I am left with a deep and abiding mistrust of the motives of the left. I have good reason. I have seen them in action and however much most claim to be altruistic and want peace, love, sex, drugs and rock n' roll, underneath it all, the most ardent of leftists have a profound lust to exercise power over those they consider beneath them - the fabled teeming masses. The self-appointed great thinkers of our country think they are superior intellectually and that we cannot manage our lives without them. They think of us in nice statistical groups that, if only they have enough data, they could manipulate us like so many puppets - for our own good, of course.

Since the Garden of Eden it's been all about "being like God" for these people. The only real reason the progressive left has for feeding the starving, clothing the naked or housing the homeless is to relieve their own guilt and to pacify the rabble so they don't rise up and murder the privileged classes in their beds.

Progressivism is nothing less than the ancient idea of the divine right of kings morphed into the divine right of the smug and self-serving pseudo-intellectual wealthy upper classes. America undercut the notion of inherited nobility. The new would-be nobility must undermine America to restore what they see as their right to rule, to look down on a passive motley rabble and order them about as it suits them.

I know that sounds harsh, but every time I bore down into the progressive argument, I find the same creepy smug sense of entitled superiority. I could get along with these people. My IQ is in the top 2%. All I'd have to do is buy into the idea of the elite class and adopt the same ideas they all share for managing the ignorant proletariat and I'm in.  Trouble is, I've thrown my hat in with the proletariat. I'd rather be free with regular decent people than one of the cool guys who think they ought to run things because, according to Marx and Darwin, smart people can make us all better and happy.

Once in a while the proletariat does rise up and reassert its right to not be meddled with - like in the 80's. Trouble is, then we all go back to work and the meddlers start it all back up again. They think that somehow if they pass enough law, hand out enough bread and circuses, they can make people..................better. By better, they seem to mean more submissive.

Maslow was wrong about the whole hierarchy of needs thing. Altruism and productivity doesn't inevitably come as a result of being fed, clothed and housed adequately. Sometimes altruistic is just who you choose to be.  People often stand by their principles even while the priests are piling up wood about their feet and waving torches.

The progressive left believes we smart people can somehow make people better. 

As my favorite spaceship captain, Malcolm Reynolds once said, "I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'.  I aim to misbehave."

© 2014 by Tom King

Glenn Beck and Ron Paul Say "It's Not Obama's Fault!" - Welcome to the Apocalypse

Apparently Glenn Beck and, now, Rand Paul have decided that all the misery in the Middle East  was probably Bush's fault to for getting into the Iraq War in the first place. If this keeps up, Hillary Clinton will be the next president because conservatives will be fractured into two groups.

The new meme with the Libertarian fringies seems to be "It's NOT Obama's fault!"  Why not? After all, they agree with Obama's foreign policy so long as it conform's to Ron Paul's get-out-of-everywhere isolationist foreign policy. Even more disturbing, I'm hearing a willingness to punish the Israelis from the Paulistas. Not from Glenn, yet, but it does make me wonder and worry.

Are we so focused on guarding our pet pots of money that we're willing to let the world go to hell on the grounds that "After all, people always get the government they deserve and besides it's too expensive to protect the innocent."  I've heard that a lot lately. It's another new propeller-head mantra being used as an excuse for standing by and watching ISIS slaughter its way across Iraq. After all, the theme goes, the Iraqis get the government they deserve!

And now we've got the pope calling for a world government with teeth. Protestant charismatics are lining up to rejoin the Roman church at the pope's invitation after the pontiff declaring "Martin Luther's little protest is over." in a video message to Kenneth Copeland and his bunch. Francis says they finally got the wording right on the whole pesky salvation by grace doctrine so that we Protestants can all come back to Mother Rome now. No word on the other 95 thesis Luther nailed to the door, but Copeland apparently agrees that 1 is enough. Presbyterians are going full progressive socialist this week. They declared that God, in fact, does approve of gay marriage and wants Presbyterians to conduct the rites on his behalf. If Billy Graham were in his grave, he'd be rolling over in it.

We found out early on in the Obama adminstration that all the high churches (Presbyterians included) were receiving sermon suggestions from team Obama. So, now we've got so-called conservatives chiming in with leftists and excusing the president's blundering in the Middle East because it was Bush's fault?

Fringe Libertarians and fringe Liberals are becoming so close politically that now they are finishing each others' sentences.

Welcome to the Apocalypse. I hate to say "I told you so," but........................

© 2014

The Libertarian/Liberal Alliance and the Mistreatment of History

Got another email from a friend of mine today. It was a link to a Lew Rockwell post that was supposed to show me I was a neocon and wrong about Ron Paul and libertarian isolationism. Apparently Robert McNamara was wrong about Vietnam.

Well, duh! 

And that's supposed to convince me that withdrawing from the world militarily and sitting behind our borders, legalizing pot and abolishing the world bank is a good idea? First, I take Lew Rockwell's correspondents with a grain of salt (and a small grain - I have high blood pressure) The Lew Rockwell gang are every bit as adept at twisting history to suit a narrative (isolationism) as McNamara and his ilk ever were. The libertarian/liberal alliance of today is beating the drum for the US to pull out of the world as a miracle cure for national aggression and they never tire of calling you a neocon for not supporting them.

Vietnam was a mistake, not because we were trying to save South Vietnam from North Vietnamese conquest, but because we weren't, no matter what MacNamara said. Vietnam was about ginning up paranoia in order to prolong what was essentially a massive weapons testing spree by the military/industrial complex. There was no thought of winning the war, just keeping it going so they could work out the kinks in all those expensive new weapons they wanted taxpayers to buy. And no article about how China was too poor to overrun Southeast Asia anyway is going to convince me they wouldn't have done it if we'd taken our troops home and not made it too costly for them to extend their "Sphere of Influence". Vietnam was badly handled. We could have ended that war in six weeks if we hadn't handcuffed ourselves before we went into it. 

My foreign policy would be this instead. 

• Rule 1: The United States never fights a holding war. If we go to war it's in, win and gone. We'll even help the people of the miscreant nation clean up and rebuild. We're nice people like that. Ask Japan and Germany.

•  Rule 2: No nation may henceforth march into another nation and conquer it. Period!

George Bush was right in liberating Kuwait and returning its government to its original state. George W was right in going to Afghanistan to root out state-sponsored terrorism. He was right in taking down Saddam for violating the original Gulf War cease fire which saved his fuzzy butt to continue mass murdering his own people. No fly zones were a poor substitute for taking out that madman in the first place.

And we should have got nose to nose with Putin over the Crimea. If the populace wanted to go back to Mother Russia as Putin said, let the UN go in and conduct elections and make it a peaceful transfer. Other than by the will of the people no outside nation should be allowed to change the national borders of another (and yes, even borders in Africa). By acting on principle to stifle aggressor nations we can avoid a whole lot of the kind of bloodshed the libertarian/liberal alliance never seems to get upset over - mass murder by conquerors.

I think both parties have it wrong because both are cowardly. They fear losing power so much that they are afraid to wield it properly when the time comes. I also think the libertarian/liberal alliance is wrong-headed on many levels in its naive belief that the US can bring about peace simply by withdrawing from the world stage and that our trading vessels and commerce will be able to go unmolested about the world.

No matter what Country Joe and the Fish might have to say about it, you can't put down your guns and pick up your hookah and make everything magically okay in the world. There is good and evil. We may have failed in a big way in the past, but that's no excuse to wallow in our guilt and curl up in the fetal position behind our leaky borders with bong to comfort us.

Our guiding principle should be the Arthurian one - "Not Might is right, but Might FOR right." Who decides what is right? Well all we've got is electable and fallable human leaders. I'm not saying trust them without question. I'm saying that as a people we should be telling them what is right and expecting them to do that.

Unfortunately we have a press that's busy trying to convince us that we're on our way to a socialist utopia and a political class that only cares about maintaining its power. Without an unbiased, open and fearless press, we're pretty much screwed. You have ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN singing the liberal anthem. You've got Lew Rockwell and Alex Jones marching the unstable conservatives off the cliff and the country club Republicans trying to beat Democrats at their own political games. Center moderates and mainstream conservatives are left with little more sanity than Fox News and the exhausting struggle to sift through the crap to find the truth.

As Ronald Reagan showed, the American people recognize the truth when they hear it and will get behind it. Unfortunately, we only had 8 years of that kind of principled leadership, then the politicians took it back. They're bad enough. I see no advantage to giving it to the nuts.

And don't ask me about the revisionist history lesson I got last night about the evilness of Israel from a liberal university history professor. History is such a messy business, especially when libs (of both stripes) get hold of it.

© 2014 by Tom King

Shaking Hands with the Devil - The New Far Left/Far Right Alliance

I've been saying that the far right and far left have been merging for a long time. Now folk as politically diverse as Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader are saying it. Liberals and libertarians are seeking to forge an alliance on the issues they share: pro-isolationism, pro-drugs and a curious sort of anti-corporate anti-capitalism that promises to leave us isolated, stoned and economically fractured; a useful state and easy pickings for that big "world government with teeth" the pope, trade unions, eco-activists, progressive socialists, the international communist party and the newly invigorated high church/ecumenical/charismatic "Christian" coalition have been calling for of late.

Such a world government has long been seen as necessary by the Old World, if only to keep the uppity Americans in line and to at last bring them back into submission. Better to end the 2 century long American experiment in human liberty that has for so long impaired the rights and privileges of the world's natural noble classes, than to endure the continued existence of such a place as America. The very existence of a land of liberty and opportunity in the world disturbs the masses and makes them discontented, restless and unwilling to submit to their natural lords and masters. It's little wonder that the "rest of the world" hates us. We make it so hard for the nobles to govern. I am certain they would be very happy for this new liberal/libertarian coalition to succeed.

All they need is for the United States to reject its warlike ways, disarm and isolate itself. Then America can sit on our hands, quietly behind our leaky border fences, till the envious world can build its alliances and military strength, infiltrate, undermine us and finally force us to surrender to the "inevitable". Then they'll loot us and make the world fair (i.e. all the same) - the masses all equally poor and compliant save for the dictators and elitist royalty.

If anybody thinks the far left is going to hold hands and march happily off into the utopian sunset with the far right and forget all about disarming the American populace, reducing them to a contented stupor with sex, drugs and rock n' roll and then ringing down the curtain on our American experiment with liberty, I've got a couple of bridge investments I can sell you. One day the political stoners that make up this bunch is going to wake up in an Orwellian 1984/Brave New World with Big Brother watching, medicating and finally euthanizing us when we aren't "useful" anymore.

The devil has been setting us up for this for centuries, but in the last 150 years, he's been ramping his deceptions up to a fever pitch; sending us Darwin, Marx, Progressivism, Socialism, Communism, Nazism, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam and the Ayatollahs. And he's not done yet. He knows he's running out of time. It's just a matter of watching for the next big thing that calls us to collective sacrifice for the so-called "greater good".

I have little doubt that this exciting new left-right coalition will succeed. It includes all the people I've feared the most and while most of them probably mean well, so do the folks who will use them for their own purposes. After all, they truly believe they are special and should shoulder the terrible burden of deciding what the rest of us should do, how we should live and what we should believe.

The Second Coming is neither a conquest nor an occupation. It's a rescue mission - in, out and gone before the world destroys itself in flames. Before you libs (libertarian/liberals) start gloating about how many are "coming around" to your version of "truth", you probably should take a hard look at what your new partners really want before you sit down at the campfire with them for a chorus of Kum-Ba-Yah and a pull at the hookah!

Tom

That's all I've got to say about that.  - Forrest Gump

© 2014

One More Time: The Koch Brothers Aren't Paying Off Tea Party People.

"Dangerous" Tea Partiers - tough looking group, huh?

I'm sick to death of progressive socialists and liberals claiming the Tea Party is being run by the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch.  That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Maybe they support some conservative think tanks, some TV programs or whatever, but front line Tea Party people aren't getting a dime to support conservative cause.  We truly believe this stuff.  That completely befuddles liberals.

Liberals really do think we're all being paid off by evil corporations.  So where do I go to get my check? I don't know one single person who's ever been paid by a corporation to support the Tea Party.  

First of all there is no organized "Party". We're a loosely disorganized gang of cranky old conservatives who have a few get togethers once in a while to gripe about the liberal agenda. We all drive ourselves to those meetings on our own dime. We don't get bussed to Washington by anybody, much less the evil Koch brothers. It's such an unbelievable load of BS. 

The last time I was in Washington, however, I witnessed about 5000 people marching on the capitol with nice printed signs and everything. They were served meals by union sponsors. They rode free buses into Washington for the Rally. I went back later that day and the National Mall was a mess where they'd been.  Want to guess where their funding came from?

I also saw a "Tea Party" rally in Austin. Everyone car-pooled or drove themselves. We brought our own lunch, made our own signs and I sure as hell never saw anybody issuing paychecks to any of us. and we cleaned up after ourselves.  The Union guys left the place a wreck after the Washington rally.  The bankrollers of the event paid to have it cleaned up.

But that's how progressives do it, so they assume, since they're being bankrolled by billionaires, we conservatives all must be too. I could care less what the Koch brothers do. You can check my weblog. I've been howling about this stuff for years. I have hundreds of blog posts supporting conservative causes. Nobody EVER paid me to write them. People read my stuff because they are interested in the subject matter. I make a few bucks on Google advertising, but writing this stuff is nowhere near worth the time and effort I put into it. That's what liberals don't get about the Tea Party. We're not shills from some corporate hedge fund crook who broke the Bank of England and bankrupted small Eastern European countries after a career in WWII of collaborating with the Nazis. We're just regularly raggedy people who want to be left alone to do our business and take care of our families without interference from the government.

This Koch brothers nonsense is nothing but a smoke screeen to cover how deeply beholden the leftist organizations in this country are to funding from the likes of George Soros and his ilk. The corporate cronies of the president get all kinds of favors from him, from massive government loans to bailouts to businesses that claim to be too big to fail.  Those evil corporations pull his strings far more thoroughly than any right wing "agitator" does with conservatives.  Some of the worst of them sit on his cabinet or act as his "advisors". 

Conservatives are not, as a rule, very obedient people. Not good citizen candidates for the socialist utopia the progressives are planning.  We've been pitching the damned tea in the bay for more than 200 years now -- whenever the government gets too big for its britches. And we will not go quietly into any socialist utopia you care to design. We've seen the gulags and the gas ovens at the end of that road thank you very much.

© 2013 by Tom King

Should We Shun Political Correctness?

by Tom King  (c) 2013

I just got jumped on with both feet by a conservative Facebook Friend. She was not happy with me because I posted this in response to another poster who stated that "If I had a nickel for every 'retard' who thinks he can stop the climate from changing......"


I responded with this.

• "Retard" Really? Dan, it's not people with developmental disabilities who think we can stop the climate from changing. I wish you wouldn't use that word as an insult. I have a Down's Syndrome nephew who doesn't believe in global warming either. As President Reagan said, "It's not so much what our liberal friends don't know as it is what they do know that ain't so." IQ has little to do with it. First, let me make it clear, I never said I was offended.  I simply addressed the use of an easy to use insulting expression that I see a LOT of shrieking liberals use that is kind of offensive. They call US that. What I wanted to express was that it is not actually the  low IQ folk who are pushing this. We need not be afraid of ordinary folk or even developmentally challenged people.  It's people with just enough intelligence to think they are smarter than everybody else that think they can run the world. 

Then it got ugly with another commentator jumping in and claiming I was stupid to be "offended" by every little thing and that I was the reason the world was in the shape it is.

So I thought I had a little 'splainin' to do.  I've made this comment to several conservative friends lately with regard to using the word "retard" as an insult.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not arguing political correctness here.  What I'm arguing in favor of here is the Golden Rule.  It's got nothing to do with political correctness, just kindness.  I think if we're going to argue in the public square against socialism, global warming hysteria, big government or excessive taxation, that we ought to we beat them, not with name-calling, but with logic, reason and facts.

To his credit, Dan did apologize for using the word as an insult and I respect him for that.  It really is frustrating to get pounded day after day with this stuff and to not lash back.

Those of us who are Christians are under orders with regard to the whole name-calling business.  Christ said that he who calls another a "fool" is himself in danger of hell fire.  That's pretty serious and calling someone a "retard" seems awfully close to doing what Jesus advised us not to do.  I say better safe than sorry.


I'm not without sin in this.  I've used words like idiot and moron before and I'm not terribly proud of it.  Sometimes, when frustrated beyond endurance we do resort to name-calling. It's not something we should ever do casually and something we should always be willing to apologize for instantly.  Name-calling is niether a reasonable, rational nor particularly effective argument on behalf of your opinion.  Your ability to put down other human beings on the basis of their disabilities, race, creed or color does not factor into whether or not your ideology is correct.  Usually it only makes you look less credible. After all, if you're reduced to name-calling, how good can your argument really be?


Good manners used to be important.  I miss civility and I believe that, as conservatives, we should embrace a return to civility, lest we find ourselves down in the mud with those who would make our society harder, nastier and more thoroughly enslaved.

My proposal is that conservatives like me and you at least act MORE intelligent than our opponents.  Name calling makes you look like you have a weak argument.  Liberals do it to us all the time and the truly self-centered herd-follower types clap in approval and fall in line behind the name-caller.  Do we really want to encourage that sort of behavior on our side?  To win in the court of ideas, we must be better than our opponents; smarter, kinder and wiser. 

I do understand the frustration with political correctness. But I would argue that good manners is not political correctness - not if you exercise your free will and choose to be polite.  Scripture counsels let your yes be yes and your no be no. The willingness to argue a point on merit alone instead of on mere rhetoric is something else that has been, sadly, rather lost in this debate. 

Political correctness comes from fear of what others think; fear that you might be spurned by the herd.  If you are not afraid of the herd's collective opinion and I am not afraid of the disapproval of the herd, then why don't we choose not to act like them.  Name calling is a technique used by thugs and bullies to keep the herd in line.  It's just not something people with as good an argument against global warming and socialism as we have should dirty our hands with.  That's all I'm saying.

Tom

I've decided to stop humoring the lunatic fringe - both the liberal ones and the conservative ones.  They're two peas of a pod.  I am deeply conservative in my politics, but not that deep.  I'm not liberal phobic either.   Some of my best friends are liberals (in the classical sense). Actually the term "liberal" used to mean one who believed in the equality of all men and that human beings had inalienable rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is very different from the "progressive" socialist or the manic facist right-winger who believe there are special people endowed by their genes with special privileges, among which are the right to tell everyone else what to do, the right to being richer than the rest of us and the right to take for themselves anything they think they need to in order to manage the rest of us. I even leave that stuff up if they want a nice clean debate. I'm talking about the slavering paranoid racist supremists that try to sell themselves off as "real" liberals or conservatives and only make us people with sense look like idiots.

What I find particularly distasteful is the rise of the new antisemitism, particularly when it comes from Europeans who ought to know better.  I've seen a spate of attacks recently on Jews that trouble me. They are disturbingly familiar in theme, dwelling on Jewish conspiracies, Jewish bankers and alleged stealth-Jews in positions of power.  These new attacks claim the poor innocent Muslims are victims in all the recent unrest and not in any way the cause of it, despite the overwhelming amount of in-your-face evidence to the contrary.

The only Muslims I see as being victims in Europe or anywhere else are those who actually do seek peace and freedom (and there are plenty). Unfortunately, jihad is built into traditional Islam and it is VERY dangerous for any right-thinking Muslim to speak out against them. If you are a "good Muslim" you're a dead Muslim in many Islamist dominated countries. 

The Jihadis I have no sympathy for. The guys like the one in London that took off the head of a British soldier and then rambled on about on camera telling us how the guy deserved it and threatening to bring this down on the rest of us if we didn't submit to Islam was evil. And that seems to me to be the real threat. 

I believe there's a shell game going on here that relies on moral cowardice to be successful. It's easy to accuse the Jews of all sorts of evil. I've not seen crowds of Jews drag someone out of their car and behead them in front of their family because the weren't Jews. It's easy to blame it on Tea Party members. Have you seen the old geezers who show up for those.  They even stick around to pick up their trash afterward. These are not people to fear, unless you're afraid they might not watch your TV channel or they might vote you out of office.  I've not seen Jews OR Tea Party folk attack or kill people because of their race, religion or political opinion.

I have seen Muslims do just that and do it with malice aforethought. It's little wonder people are afraid to say anything negative about them. Poor old Salman Rushdie has had to spend the rest of his life in hiding because he wrote something  Islamic sensibilities because an Iranian mullah put out a Fatwah (death order) on him. It troubles me that any religion would even have a special word for "death order).

Muslim rebels in Syria have exterminated whole villages of Christians just in the past few months and we remain silent about it. We don't even talk about it on the mainstream news channels. Muslim Brotherhood supported groups have attacked and murdered Coptic Christians in Egypt. We are silent. We even had Muslims kill a couple of Coptic Christians here in the US and chopped them up in parts. Not a word on the ten o'clock news. The Boston Marathon bombing was the work of Muslim terrorists. They killed a nine year-old kid. Jews didn't do that. But the news and the president tried to blame it on Tea-partiers, mysterious homegrown terror groups and George Bush until it became obvious it was an Islamic terrorist act. Then they went silent.

It's as if we hope that if we don't criticize Islamic terrorist outrages or if we blame all the trouble on someone else and we show the Muslim fanatics that we also hate Jews (and, by the way, all the conservatives who criticize Islamists), then we think that somehow, maybe they won't hurt us. The Jews are under attack by people who want them dead and gone and the sooner the better. The Jewish people have decided not to go quietly. I applaud that, even when they get a little testy with me. You can hardly blame them for seeing a growing threat to them in this increasingly antisemitic world.

If we don't wake up to the fact that Islam has declared war on the rest of us, we're going to wind up precisely where we were in the Autumn of 1939. The Poles of all people should remember how that went and who their friends were and yet there are increasing rumblings against Jews even in the land that saw the horror that was Auschwitz built on their own soil by the Nazis.

13 year old girl, gang-raped by Muslim males,
is stoned for "fornication"

The guys I've started boycotting are the folk are largely those whose constant, unremitting claim is that the Jews are to blame for how people treat them. It's like saying to a woman, if you were raped, it must have been your fault. And that IS is common practice in Muslim countries. A woman who is raped and complains about it can wind up stoned to death. I've seen the video. What I want to know is where in the world is the moral outrage about that????

If a conservative had denied the same woman the right to an abortion, you could have heard the howls of outrage across the planet. It would have been the subject of special news reports on the network channels and a flurry of new laws designed to put an end to the Tea Party menace. This solves two problems for our cowardly ruling class.  It allows you to attack people who are not likely to strike back by blowing you up or kidnapping and beheading you and at the same time appeases people who WILL blow you up or kidnap and behead you.

If a redneck Tea Party Patriot had showed up at Fort Hood and shouted "Praise Jesus" and started shooting people, the government would have had 500 conservatives arrested by sundown and we'd still be seeing Michael Moore documentary retrospectives on how terrible the Tea Party is to this day. Instead, the Fort Hood shooter, a Muslim psychiatrist who went into an area crowded with soldiers, shouted "Allahu Akbar" and gunned down 35 people, was arrested and to this day sits in jail, still drawing his full military pay ($275,000 to date).  He isn't even scheduled for trial.  And his crime has been reclassified as "workplace violence" to boot.

Now that gets my attention. 

The fact that there are some bankers out there who are Jewish bothers me not at all.

Tom King
(c) 2013