The Myth of "The Right Kind of Ruler"

Comedy Central's John Oliver took on the disaster happening before our eyes in Venezuela and manages not to mention the word "socialism other than to specify that it's not socialism's fault". The American left never seems to associate the consequences of creating powerful collectivist/socialist states with collectivism/socialism itself. If anyone points it out, they always fall back on blaming the consequences themselves. It was "greed", "corruption", mismanagement, the "wrong people" were in charge, they didn't do it right. Always there is the assumption that it's something else that's the problem and never socialism itself.

 

The difference between socialism and an actual free market democratic republic like America is that for socialism to work you have to have "the right leaders". Where socialism fails, socialists always chalk it up to not having the right leaders. It's exactly like medieval reasoning - there are good kings and bad kings, but we must have a king!

American style republics don't depend on having a "good" king. We depend on the vote of the people and the checks and balances of our three part government. We don't have to have a "good leader" and we can survive bad leaders (see Barak Obama). The republic, because of it's structure, tamps down the depredations of bad leaders. So long as power in this nation remains diffused and decentralized, we remain safe. But if we create a great deal of political power that is housed in one individual, the corruptible will be drawn to that power like moths to a flame.

That is why socialism inevitably fails. The collective depends too heavily on the "natural goodness" of man. Man is NOT naturally good and because of this, there will always be an abundant supply of evil, power-hungry human beings to rush to seize power over their fellows and it always turns out badly at some point, despite everyone's best intentions.

The checks and balances of our democratic republic assume that too much power in any one man's or party's hands is fatal to the natural rights and liberties of our nation's people. It was an incredible piece of wisdom on the part of our founding fathers and just at the right time as the powers that ruled the Old World were busily trying to root out the sort of troublesome people that actually believed they should be able to speak, write, worship, and defend themselves without the permission of human authority. Scripture talks of a place near the end of time where the children of God might seek refuge from persecution by the powers of darkness. Well, America is it. We are a nation of refugees from religious and economic persecution, As it turns out most of that economic persecution was against people because of their faith. Nothing like America had ever been done before.

I believe the devil hates this place that God has given us and seeks to restore the authoritarian power of the Old World, here in the New. Karl Marx and Charles Darwin offered the Old World elite a justification for a revival of the ruling classes. The fittest were by right our rulers and we must serve the states represented by these smart, special people for the "good of all". 

 

I do not hold to that. As my favorite spaceship captain has said, "I aim to misbehave!"  We must not go gentle into that good night as Welsh poet Dylan Thomas advised his dying father. We must rage, rage against the dying of the light. A fight is coming if we are to hold on to the gains our country achieved. As a favorite president of mine once said, "We are a shining city on a hill."  Someone out there is trying desperately to extinguish the lights.

We know how it's going to go. Revelation is full of the dire warnings as to how badly it will go toward the end of time. We will have to fight with our backs to the wall for what is right and good. And just when we think that all is lost, it is then we will see our salvation coming in the clouds. Remember this. The Second Coming is not a conquest, but a rescue mission. Sin and evil must finally destroy itself. For the first time in history, man has the power to turn the Earth into a lake of fire and destroy himself utterly.

I don't think God will need to kindle the fires of hell. Men like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez and others have shown that sinners are quite capable of wreaking fire and desolation and destroy themselves utterly all by themselves without God's help. But we shall return and upon the ashes of evil, we will rebuild this beautiful world one day, but the end must be what it is, for the wages of sin truly is death and it must come to it's own sorry end if it is never to rise again throughout eternity. The universe must see it for the lesson to sink in. It's the only way to inoculate the future against the disease that is evil.

Just sayin'.

© 2018 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

Progressive Fantasy - All War Banned

All equal should not be all the same - progressives don't get that.

Got some fake news about ten years ago from one of my Paulista buddies out on the liberal conservative fringe out on the edge of reason.  It was titled "Newsflash:  All War Banned".  It includes this link to a fake news story in which Desmond Tutu becomes UN General Secretary and all the peace-loving countries of the world (like Iran, Russia, Egypt, Libya, Venezuela, Chad, The Sudan, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, China and Serbia) vote to " declare America and Israel pariah states."  It goes on with this fantasy about accusing Israel and the US of state-sponsored terrorism and prosecuting Obama, Bush, Cheney (the only non-head of state they mention by name for some reason), Clinton and Netanyahu.  That this drivel comes from a Ron Paul fan is not surprising. The radical right has backed so far from the center that they've pretty much backed round the world and bumped butts with the fringe left and they all find themselves humming Kumbaya without knowing exactly why.

If they could dig up Ronald Reagan, I'm sure they would have included him on the extermination list as well.  Now Donald Trump would be their favorite bug bear and, sure enough, they are frantic to take him out too, even to the point of encouraging lunatics to try and assassinate the former president. Of course, this radical approach to creating what would amount to the great socialist utopia, would likely leave the US without leadership since all of the people running things would have to be jailed as unreliable - infected with free market capitalism, imperialism and the heretical idea that government draws its power from the people than the true socialist belief that people only draw their freedoms, rights and lives from the all-powerful state. I'm sure, however, the revolution could find someone like, oh, I don't know, Ron Paul? (Except he's closing in on 90 and they just had the embarrassment of mumbling Joe Biden so Ron is no longer a viable dear leader). The progressives would be thrilled to have a turncoat Republican to kind of cleanse their palates after losing Donald Trump's contributions to the DNC. Whoever they might shoehorn into the White House, they fondly believe could save America from it's imperialist ways by teaching us pure Marxism. The whole thing is a progressive socialist's wet dream and a nightmare for freedom loving people everywhere.

It amazes me that anyone with half a brain could support this horror of an "idea whose time has ostensibly come".  This utterly simplistic idea is based on assumptions built upon utterly naive socialist fairy tales designed to deceive the immensely gullible to trade their birthright for an illusion.

This anti-American, anti-Israeli mess of an idea is little more than an exercise in Progressive Socialist masturbation. What amazes me is that the Ron Paul libertarians once loved this idea. It may have something to do with their plans for abolishing the world bank, destroying evil corporations and ending the war on drugs. Free pot for all seems to be an idea my Paulista buddies can always get behind, which could explain some things. 

If "the world" really tried to do this and, God forbid, succeeded, the vast majority of the human race would be reduced to the status of pod people within a generation (except of course for the "Dear Leader" and his cohorts. This whole Utopian fantasy is based on the repeatedly discredited idea that if we just had the right smart person in charge (in this fantasy it was Desmond Tutu of all people) and we gave him ultimate power, we could create a world government "with teeth" with the power to enforce goodness, prosperity and peace everywhere. That phrase "with teeth" keeps cropping up a lot as it is wont to in socialist planning. Pope Benedict in a Christmas encyclical, used it several years ago when he too called for a world government "with teeth" that could force powerful nations like the US to do its bidding. Pope Francis loves the idea and with his Jesuit background, he knows ways of encouraging the masses to behave. Like so many others these days, even this latest Pope has been caught up with the idea that we could somehow create a benign powerful force in the world that could make us all behave ourselves.

Communism promised a prosperous people's state before murdering
tens of millions of "the people"  - particularly those who found
the Communist state to be less than perfect and said so out loud.

It is a sad little pipe dream that crops up generation after generation once a few years have gone by and the horrors of the last round of socialist bloodshed, murder and genocide has been forgotten and the last "perfect leader", reduced in memory to little more than a nursery room bug-a-boo. How quickly they forget what happens when you set up a man as God. Even the mighty Albert Einstein, who escaped the gas ovens of Auschwitz by but a hair's breadth, himself, fell prey to wondering why we couldn't get a bunch of smart people together and figure out how to make everyone happy, safe, well-fed and productive. The problem is that everyone who embraces the progressive socialist fantasy that some brilliant elite human leader could make the world good for the rest of us is falling for an old lie - one that dates back to a garden and a serpent and a gullible woman.

"You shall be like gods."

That lie has led to almost endless suffering throughout history as one man after another attempts to achieve Earthly godhood. The simple truth, however, is that Man cannot perfect himself, the World Economic Forum's Great Reset notwithstanding. It's sad that we've never learned that from all the failed attempts at a Man-as-God Utopia that so-called civilized man has made over the past 7000 some-odd years. It is interesting that whenever you see a picture of someone's utopia, there's always a high wall around it. It's unclear whether the wall is to keep people out or to keep them in. Either way, I don't like it!

We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic
system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its
unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being
according to wealth and property instead of responsibility
and performance, and we are all determined to destroy
this system under all conditions - Adolph Hitler

They always mean well, the progressives, socialists, utopians and advocates of the new religion - scientism. Every government ever established had the intent of making the world a better place for the people of whatever nation-group, tribe or city-state they created. The God-kings always promised that the lives of the people would be perfected. And the same thing always happens. Creating a government creates power.  Power attracts corrupt men who seize that power and in short order start plundering the citizens, enslaving and abusing them once "the people" realize that the whole thing isn't working like they said it would. To maintain his power, the God-king must then silence any voice that dissents and control the flow of information lest "the people" discover that their human god is a false god and his ideas don't work.

The world's oldest profession isn't what you think. Seizing power and murdering people to maintain it is the real world's oldest profession. The Devil got the ball rolling a long time ago  with Cain and the whole nasty mess keeps rolling on through history, gathering more weight the longer it keeps rolling. Every generation that uplifts a God-king, be it Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Desmund Tutu, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as the various fantasy scenarios propose, in the end creates a slightly worse monster.  One day we will create a monster who will roll over us completely and in so doing, destroy the Earth. We now have the nuclear weapons to do just that.

Remember, this. The Second Coming is not a pat on the back to mankind for writing laws that ban war and legislate universal peace, prosperity and health care.   The Jewish leadership expected that the first time Jesus came and they were wrong. Christ's coming this second time is also not a conquest. It's a rescue mission designed to pluck the remaining loyal children of God from the Earth before all that's left are the ashes and wreckage that man has made of the Earth in the process of trying to prove on behalf of Lucifer, that he was right all along; that mankind can't be trusted with free will and that we need the firm hand of the former director of the angel choir. Turns out he merely thought that he should be the god of this planet without any help from He who made the Earth in the first place.

Tom King
© 2013, 2024

In Their Own Nest

More Gloom & Doom for the One Percenters From the New York Times.

A Libertarian Friend sent me a link to the New York Times.  Reporter Chrystia Freeland believes the top 1% of income earners in the U.S. are so busy protecting their own piles of wealth that the rest of us can no longer rise in the world and escape our own class. Predictably, she tells us that it’s much better in Europe if you want to rise into a higher class.

The temptation is to abandon ship.

Well, duh? Europe has more classes than Carter has liver pills. The place is a monument to the class system. A 15 cent raise will get you in a more elite social group over there. She goes on to quote champions of free market capitalism like Karl Marx and several of Barak Obama’s advisors and concludes that America’s 1% oligarchy is destroying the very system that created them. Why she should lament that puzzles me as I thought Progressives wanted a classless society. So where's the need to rise from your class unless you're in a hurry to get one of the higher class statuses BEFORE the Progressive Apocalypse freezes everyone in place.

Surprisingly, I agree with Ms. Freeland with regards to the 1% oligarchy protecting it's own butt. That's what I've been saying for years. What I don’t agree with is who she and the pundits of the NY Times see as the saviors of the middle class.

The Dems had every opportunity to do something about the often pitifully low tax rates enjoyed by the super-wealthy, simply by closing loopholes in the tax codes. They don't. They never do. They spout all this crap about the unfairness of it all and then they sell their souls behind closed doors for campaign contributions, weaving elaborate money protection schemes into the tax codes to protect the very people they castigate publicly. Oh, yeah, they’ll bump up the tax rate all right, but it won’t affect the 1%. They will continue to buy protection for their own fat piles of money.

The ones that will get hammered are the working wealthy – the ones trying to break into the upper income brackets. It’s the job creators that will become the actual victims of all the Occupy/Progressive symbolism. The Dems are not trying to end the class system. They’re trying to make it fair!

And the tea party, the group that most opposes the elitist sweetheart deals the giant corporations get from the government and who believe that abusive financial giants should be allowed to come crashing down instead of getting bailed out by the rest of us when their card houses come fluttering down – we are the ones who get castigated as extremists by both the left and the so-called` moderates in our own party. The Libertarians aren’t any better. They offer us legalized marijuana, conspiracy theories and isolationism and not a snowball's chance in hell to win an election.

The heartland is increasingly left with nowhere to go, politically.

I think we may be at the fall of the empire. The mainstream media and academia all believe we should trade the corrupt wealthy elitist manipulated mess we have now for a big bloated elitist government spouting progressive rhetoric while continuing to support the exact same corrupt wealthy elitist manipulated mess we have now.

The only hopeful thing going in American business right now is a burgeoning free market space industry. I think a lot of people would like to get off the planet, go somewhere and start over and leave Earth to stew in the vast swamp of its own corruption.

I think the private space race may be a manifestation of this feeling we all have that we need to get out of here before it all blows up in our faces. Look at the people that are driving it – working wealthy entrepreneurs like Paypal billionaire, Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson working with aerospace cowboys like Burt Rutan and Robert Bigelow. Those are the guys that will get squished by the progressive’s misguided efforts to “make ‘em pay”. I think most Americans are beginning to suspect that all this is going to end badly.

Look at all the dystopian, post-apocalyptic TV shows and movies lately. Hardly anybody thinks things are going to turn out well. I certainly don’t. As a Christian I figure Jesus has already loaded up the bus and is comin’ to get us. All I can do is pray daily, "Even so, come Lord Jesus."
It would be kinda fun, though if He had to pick some of us up off the moon or Mars, though when he does come.

Tom (c) 2012

It's Not About Race; It's Not Even About Politics.

Good vs. Evil on the Eve of the Apocalypse.

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Hiroshima 1945 - US Archives

It's not white people vs. brown as some claim.  It's not progressives vs. conservatives, East vs. West, Christian vs. Muslim, Jew vs. Gentile or even left vs. right..  It's a question of good vs. evil pure and simple. The agents of Satan are among us, insinuating themselves into every corner; using every means available to confuse, agitate and sabotage every decent thing we try to do. Left, right, Democrat, Republican and Libertarian, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, atheist and Jew. The devil has his representatives everywhere.

We are told by prophets of every stripe that the whole thing is coming to a bad end and we are at best fighting a holding action.  Throughout history we have seen the tide of the Great Controversy come to a bloody head in vast explosions of violence.  In the 1800s we had the Civil war.  In the 20th century it was two world wars. We've held off the coming orgy of killing that is the wages of sin now for more than half a century.  Small wars (by modern standards) have bled off some of the urge to violence, but not nearly enough. Organized mass murder in Russia, China, Cambodia, Rwanda and throughout the third world has reduced the population for a time, removing the meek by and large, apparently for the purpose of guaranteeing they do not inherit the Earth - at least not while it lasts.

You see it's a geometry not arithmetic.

If you have one person you have relative peace although that person may resort to suicide.
Two people and you have two possible vectors of aggression A against B and B against A
But add a third and you have 12  possible vectors of aggression

1. A against B
2. A against C
3. B against A
4. B against C
5. C against A
6. C against B
7. A&B against C
8. C against A&B
9. B&C against A
10. A against B&C
11. A&C against B
12. B against A&C

(c) public domain Striking workers circa 1922

For every extra person you add to this overcrowded world, you geometrically increase the number of vectors of aggression and possible combinations of aggressors.  Think about billions of people on Earth today and how much worse it gets when you add more people. Add into the mix the fact that many of those people choose to be evil and are thus unscrupulous about who they attack and periodically the whole thing builds up to an orgy of killing.  So far most of those orgies have merely reduced the number of trained killers along with slow-moving or slow-witted noncombatants who didn't see it coming and get out of the way in time - at least enough to take some of the pressure murder their fellows off the survivors.

Paul in Romans said, "The wages of sin is death." I think he was being literal.  I think the apostle was trying to tell us that choosing to serve yourself first (which is the essence of sin) leads inevitably to death. Every notice how vigilant self-lovers tend to come to a bad end rather earlier than one might expect.  Sadly and too often they take good people with them. The innocent may die. They may even fight to defend their home or loved ones, but it is inevitably the sinners who are behind all the death.

As Creedence Clearwater Revival once sang, "Two hundred million guns are loaded. Satan cries, 'Take aim!'"

It's not religions or political parties that do evil. It's people. Parties and religions are merely the tools bad people use to accomplish their aims.  To those who reject political parties, churches or even families, your withdrawal from these institutions won't help. They will do their bloody work without you if evil men are allowed to take them over. You can never change a church or an organization or party from without except by destroying it altogether and doing that makes you just another killer and robs you of your soul. If you abandon these institutions which may have been established for quite noble purposes, you merely hand them over to evil people.  You by your abandonment are as guilty as those who stayed and cooperated in the heinous actions of their leaders.

It remains best for us, I believe, to trust in God and treat our neighbors as we would wish to be treated and to stand for what is right wherever we are called to stand.  "They that wait upon the Lord," says the Psalmist, "shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles."

So wait and be strong. Help where you can. Do good so far as you're able. It'll all be over soon.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King