The Constitution's Governmental Cage Match Works

 

Leave the cage alone!

The US Constitution brilliantly created a style of government that resembles, if nothing else in modern culture - the inimitable wrestling cage match. The recent kerfuffle over the Supreme Court has pundits coming out of the woodwork with suggestions ranging from a constitutional convention of states (there's a scary idea) to packing the court, a practice that could go on until there are 40 or 50 judges on the court and nothing would ever get done. The biggest complaint from my side of the political aisle is that allowing the packing of the court would make the court an arm of whatever party that packed the court more effectively.

This would be a very bad idea I believe. The Supreme Court is not, nor should not be an arm of the administration or of the congress. It serves as the arbiter between those two branches and the Constitution. While there is this idealism around how law and judicial justice should be free of contamination by religious tenets and beliefs, that's just not possible, especially since people who consider themselves non-religious bring their own ideology/religion to bear in how they view laws and justice. Marxism, socialism, atheism and other anti-Christian ideologies are as much religion as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. 

The Western legal tradition draws most of its view of what is legal and what should not be from the stone tablets Moses dragged down from Mt. Sinai (and promptly broke). It says something that despite Israel's apostasy and Moses' temper tantrum, God made him climb back up the mountain and this time to carve a copy of the commandments out of rock. Western law is built on the code inscribed on those tablets.

There is a place in Revelation full of symbolism which seems to say that His people would, near the end of time, flee to a wilderness place of safety from rising persecution. I think He was talking about the United States, which in its time became a refuge from religious persecution for all sorts of Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution and more than a few Catholics who were on the receiving end of persecution by both church and state. 

One of the symbols for this refuge to which the "woman" (God's church invisible) flees is symbolized by another beast that was like a lamb but spoke like a dragon. Having confronted a bull buffalo once, I suspect that was what John saw. Don't mess with those guys. The buffalo would be an excellent symbol for a place of refuge. The American bison is pretty peaceful mostly, but threaten the herd or more foolishly, their calves, and they'll flip your car upside down and tramp on it. Later the lamblike beast

The point is that the Constitution was brilliantly designed to limit governmental power. It basically created a cage match arena that pits 3 coequal powers against each other if they disagree yet gives them the ability to cooperate when it makes overwhelming sense to do so. The Constitution surrounds the arena, limiting the fight to the inside of the arena and regulating what comes out of the arena to the rest of us.

As a conservative, I prefer to keep the power of the arena limited. Fight it out all y'all wish, but only let out of the arena what everybody is, if not happy with, at least able to accept with some grace. I admit I prefer my judicial system to lean to the right (Ecclesiastes 10:2), but that there should be some debate, I find healthy. The Supreme Court has made some bad decisions in the past, Dred Scott, Buck v. Bell, Plessy v Ferguson, Roe v. Wade (I know some will disagree violently with me on that last one, but I rather think that a decision that led to the death of more than 52 million unborn infants is one of the more horrible ones since Herod, Pharoah, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and others who took on themselves power to murder millions by government decree.

For closing in on 2 1/2 centuries, the system has worked to stem the tide of evil caused by greed, self-centeredness, lust for power and the odd burst of mass insanity. It's no surprise then that people with an agenda, facing a system that blocks them at most every turn would want to alter the Constitution or simply ignore it and do what they want. So far the venerable document has managed to hold on, balancing power to kind of hold at bay the principal articulate by Frank Herbert. "It's not that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptible." 

So long as we can make the urge to tyrannical power too difficult to accomplish within the arena, we'll be okay. But beware of those who would tear down the cage that holds them in. They are not your friends. They are enemies of America as it is.

© 2023 by Tom King

What's the Actual Number One Cause of Death in Children?

Is the right to bear arms responsible for
being the #1 cause of child gun deaths?
Is it time to abolish the 2nd Amendment?

Some people I like today said on camera that the number one cause of death of children was guns. First off, I would think that the number one cause of death was shooters. Secondly, it's a deceptive, manipulative lie. That's because the statistics are manipulated by changing the definition of "children".

Benjamin Disraeli, 19th Century Prime Minister of England, once opined, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In this case, the number one cause of death in children requires some serious manipulation of the numbers and definition. If you look it up in most anti-gun websites, gun related deaths in children top motor vehicle accidents, other sorts of accidents and individually each other cause of death such as illness, poisoning, murder, and manslaughter. Here's how you do it.

Infants seldom die of gun violence, so
they are not included in the child death
rate by guns statistics to avoid bringing
down the "numbers" of child gun deaths.

If you define a "child" as aged from one to nineteen, you arguably get somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand children's deaths. The reason they don't include age 0 to 1 numbers is because it would remove gun deaths from the number one spot. The death from natural causes is significantly higher as babies are fragile creatures and we caregivers don't get a lot of training before they are born. Meanwhile, even with the age of children being extended to include 18 to 19 years old the 0-12 month death rate from "other than guns" is pretty significant and not many babies often die from being shot. 

These guys have inordinate numbers of gun deaths,
so they are counted as children to inflate the
child gun deaths numbers.

The reason the definition doesn't exclude 18 to 19-year-olds from being counted as children is that leaving them out would cut the number of child gun death numbers in half. Including murders and suicide by depressed teens and teenage gang members from Chicago, LA and Detroit, runs up the numbers of so-called deaths by gun violence. The inflated numbers glommed onto the child death stats makes no allowance for kids killed in mass shootings in "gun-free" zones by 18 to 26 year olds using illegally obtained guns nor for the cops shooting the shooter. He gets counted as a child gun death. I don't know about you, but "children" age 18 and up don't seem much like children at that age. If you can be tried as an adult, I believe you ARE an adult. Don't be blowing smoke up my skirt by telling me that someone who shaves (face or legs I don't care) is a child. 

And yet well-meaning people get all in a twitter because they believe that toddlers are shooting each other in droves based on this statistical picture being painted by the anti-gun lobby. This is the picture such statistical manipulation is supposed to create in your mind. It's the same with adult gun death statistics. When our progressive friends talk about "victims" of gun violence, they cite statistics that are deliberately skewed to make you believe these are people who died at the hands of criminals or in gun accidents. What they don't tell you is that whenever a cop shoots a criminal caught in the act, when a homeowner shoots a home invader in self-defense, when a citizen with a gun puts a stop to a mass shooter, or when a father shoots a farm hand who is raping his daughter in the barn (true story), it is recorded as a death by "gun violence."  No one records statistics when a Florida grandmother chases off a pair of home invaders by waving her shotgun at them or when a young mother with toddlers fires a shot at thieves ransacking her home or when an 89-year-old man is charged by a 20-year-old thief intent on looting the house next door and cops are an hour away according to the 911 operator. In Texas, charges against the old guy are dismissed automatically based on the "he needed killin'" principle.

The thing is that half of the gun-violence-against-children gun death numbers are created by "kids" who look like the picture above on the right. It's not a true picture of those "gun deaths" but it certainly distracts Mom & Pop America from the true purpose of all the talk about massive gun confiscation going on in the halls of power and in the media these days. 

It's important to note that every tyrannical government in history first finds an excuse to disarm the citizenry. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The Communists disarmed the proletariat, the Chinese under Mao disarmed the peasants. Then they piled up the guns and burned them and came back the next day and piled up anyone who owned more than one ox and burned them. 

I'm not mad at the people who believe the lies, though. They think they understand and are appalled, accepting the lies that the politicians and media spoon-feed them. Who can blame them for  trusting that they are being told the truth? The sad thing is that the political party that has long claimed to be the party of the people, the party of the working man, has made common cause with wealthy individuals and corporations and conspired to dump the rest of us into a heap they call the collective. And they want to make sure we won't be troublesome or able to resist when our betters decide they need to visit a "reeducation" facility because they disagree with the new order and won't shut up about it.

Someone I respect described these collectives or "unions" as bound up in bundles to be burned at the end of time. Statistics like the phony gun death statistics are the matches and make no mistake. They will not hesitate to light the pyres.

And the number one cause of death for children 0 through 17 is motor vehicle accidents by a good bit. Oddly, enough no one has called for private citizens not being licensed to drive cars an activity demonstrably more dangerous to actual children 

As I'm wont to say, "I believe Jesus is loading up the bus to come get us from this crazy place and take us home."

© 2023 by Tom King

Peter, Paul & Mary Banned on Facebook?

 

You may not recognize the three folksingers above if you were born after the Bicentennial. They are Peter, Paul & Mary, three left-leaning folk singers who sang Woody Guthrie songs, songs by Gordon Lightfoot, Pete Seeger and even such radicals as John Denver. They were big during the great folk-music scare of the 50s and 60s. These guys waltzed the line between being patriotic Americans and card-carrying communists. I loved their music. Their hearts were in the right place and I could actually play along with their songs as a fledgling guitarist. 

Imagine my shock when the Facebook Gestapo (FBG) took down my post in which I linked to one of their songs on Youtube. They said the post violated "Community Standards" and could pose a danger to the delicate sensibilities of Facebook readers. The song was about playing right field in elementary school. I suppose they thought if you played right field, a baseball might fall on your head and give you a concussion or predispose you to grow up to be a conservative. To be fair, I did play right field and did grow up to be a conservative. Best to avoid such dangerous and patriotic pastimes as baseball, then. And Baseball is undoubtedly a racist and fascist sport.~

After much searching I found the secret "notifications" page where I was "informed" of my violations of "community standards." Below is a list of my posts that the FBG took down over the past year. Apparently, these posts were so egregiously shocking that ordinary members of the Proletariat could not be safely exposed to this material. 

My posts that Facebook has blocked in the past year:

1.  Glen Campbell - Playing the Theme From The Lone Ranger ( aka “The William Tell Overture) on guitar.
2. Steve Martin & Edie Brickell  -  Pretty Little One
   The Martins – Out of His Great Love
3. Peter, Paul & Mary – Right Field
4. Mercy Me – Just As I Am
5. The Minions – YMCA
   Riders in the Sky – The Cowboy Yodel
6. A picture of me and my daughter singing
7. The Blues Brothers – Theme from Rawhide
8. Jill Paquette – Sometimes Yes and Sometimes No
9. Burl Ives – Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown
10. Kathy Ryan – The Coal Quay Market Song
11. Wendy Francisco – God & Dog
12. Steve Goodman – The City of New Orleans (he wrote it)
13. Connie Dover – Where Shall I Go (cowboy folk song)
14. Anthem Lights – My Jesus I Love Thee
15. John Fogarty – Center Field
16. Lizzy Hoyt – V’la L’bon Vent (French voyageur folk song 150 years old or so)
17. Clip from Junebug – I Surrender All
18. Picture of Hillary Clinton on the phone calling the suicide hotline to place an order (ironically when I demanded a review on the grounds that it was satire, they reposted it, and I’m sure the fact checker on that one isn’t working for the FBG anymore, probably doing time in whatever passes for Progressive Siberia).
    

I noticed in going down the list that the FBG not only blocked the song "Right Field", they also blocked John Fogarty's "Center Field". Apparently the snowflakes working for the Book of Face, believe the game of baseball must only have left fielders. 

It would be interesting to watch them play a team with only left-handed batters. What with no one in right or center to field the barrage of hits sent into that part of the outfield by left-handed batters, the final score would be all kind of lop-sided. My bet is that the League of Communist Athletes would have the all-lefty team canceled.

It must be confusing to live in that headspace.

© 2023 by Tom King

21.