Amazon's Mistake - So Begins the Robot Apocalypse?

                                      Anyone else find this a little creepy?

Amazon must have hired a bunch of newbies. Some stuff I've ordered this Christmas Season never arrived and I got my money back. Then, today I got a $40 portable cell phone charger instead of the $6.00 garage bike hooks I ordered. The same company provides both items. In both cases, when I went to reorder the items were "currently unavailable).

I was going to get one of these portable charges anyway - for traveling (if we ever get to do that again). The question is should I further confuse the newly minted $22 an hour warehouse drones by sending the charger back and asking for a refund. I don't want to upset their well-oiled machine over there. There's a new Amazon warehouse a few blocks from our house and they're probably still working out the kinks in the new warehouse.

I'm afraid I might send one of their robots into a spasm and next thing your know there's a big AI/robot revolt that spreads throughout the nation through Alexa, Siri and Cortana and infects Roomba's and robot lawnmowers everywhere. And I would feel all kinds of guilt because I had caused it.

And I'd hate to see it come to that.

© 2021 by Tom King

My Brother's Birthday

 

Donald Lee King - HS Freshman, gymnast, athlete, musician, nice guy.

October 23rd would have been my brother, Donny's 65th Birthday. He's been gone 49 years - close to half a century and I still think about things I want to talk to him about. I still remember him as the kid in the picture. We fought a lot - down on the ground wrestling matches; up into our teens. Then one day we realized that it was too dangerous to fight anymore because we were both strong enough to damage one another. So we quit.

 

We practically lived in the brittle old oak trees around our house on 4th Street, swinging from limb to limb in the treetops like a pair of apes. We'd set up army men on the ground and then climb to the top of this one oak that had a great crotch up there you could sit in. It provided a stable platform for our bombing raids. With our paper route money we bought these small metal toy bombs that you would load a Greenie Stickum Cap into and then drop from a height. They would pop loudly when they hit the ground among the toy soldiers. Once you'd exhausted your bomb load, you'd climb down and reset the soldiers, reload your bombs and then it was back up the tree again.

There were two Chinaberry trees in our yard. One by the house allowed us to climb up a limb and drop down on the roof at the back of the house. From there we would parachute behind German lines. Our "parachutes" consisted of one of Mom's old bedsheets. We'd tie two corners to the belt loops on the back of our pants and hold the other two corners over our heads, take a flying leap and plummet off the roof into a soft patch of thick grass that grew where the septic line ran out of the kitchen. It was sometimes squishy, especially if we'd been catching up on the dishes. Soft as the ground might be, that old house had a pretty high roof for an 80 plus year old one story house. My hips and knees are paying me back now for all of those parachute drops. Turns out, even if you only weigh 90 pounds sopping wet, hitting the ground from that height is going to be hard on your joints, even with the paltry slowdown provided by your bedsheet parachute. It also turns out there's a reason the Army used other than bedsheet materials to make parachutes.

The other Chinaberry tree was in back along the edge of the property.  The limbs of Chinaberry trees are not very big, but they are flexible and tough enough to support a pair of would-be chimpanzees as we sung from limb to limb. The back Chinaberry had limbs spaced so that you could start on a limb at the back of the tree and swing on a series of 4 flexible limbs and end up around by the front of the tree. Donny and I were very good at swinging limb to limb with our arms. We were the envy of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, some of our friends were not as "gymnastic" as my brother and I. A friend of Donny's, Edward Black, wanted to try it. I wasn't in the yard when he tried it, so I'm fuzzy on details. Mom heard someone screaming out back and ran to the scene. There she found Edward hanging by one leg from a lower limb, head down, his hands almost touching the ground. His leg was broken and if I remember right, Donny was trying to hold him up (or else he was hiding because he knew he was in trouble). You see, Edward had decided to try to swing from limb to limb like Donny did, but he was afraid he would fall, so as a safety measure, he decided to tie a rope to his leg to catch him if he fell. And Donny let him. Well the rope worked as advertised and snapped him up short before he did a header into the dirt. Edward hobbled around for weeks in a leg cast that summer.

Then there was the barrel incident! My step-dad had brought home an empty 55 gallon barrel which had once contained varnish from Brandom's Kitchen Cabinets. It had a lid with an intact locking ring. So! Donny and I took turns locking each other in the barrel and rolling the barrel down the little hill in our backyard. My sister, Debbie, begged us to let her take a turn. Finally, against our better judgment, we gave her her wish. She crawled in the barrel, we put the lid on it, locked it down and gave it a shove. As the barrel rolled off down the hill, there began such a wailing and screaming from within the barrel. "Let me out!  Stop it!" Trouble was the barrel was already halfway down the hill and gaining speed. 

Donny and I caught up with the barrel as it reached the bottom of the hill. From within the barrel there issued forth such shrieks and curses and threats that as Donny reached for the locking handle, gave us both pause. He stopped and looked up at me. 

"Should I open it or should we give her a second to calm down?" he asked.

"I don't know," I responded. "She sounds pretty mad."

"She's going to go straight to Mama and tell on us!"

"What's she going to tell?"

"I don't know but if we don't let her out the barrel's gonna explode!"

"Okay, stand back," I said grabbing the release handle.  My sister busted out of that barrel rather the way a wet hen would fly up in the face of whoever was holding the bucket with which it had been doused!  I never heard the end of it. Somehow Donny missed receiving the blame for the whole affair and he was the one that was most reluctant to open the barrel! My sister told the story of her abusive older brother who forcibly shoved her into a barrel, locked it shut, and pushed it off a cliff. She told that story from one end of the state of Texas to the other. I finally resorted to telling my side of the story to her friends (all of whom knew my sister's penchant for artistic storytelling). When I took up my own defense, she finally slowed down telling everybody how mean I was and confined the relating of that tale to people I was unlikely to ever meet.

Our house was almost as old as the town of Keene where we grew up. In the winter when the wind blew the linoleum floors would breathe up and down and sigh softly in the night. It was a bit creepy I can tell you. But we had a pretty good time of it. My brother and I roamed the local woods and creeks. Donny was more ambitious than me. He went along with friends who soaped the college fountain, climbed things they weren't supposed to climb and generally got into mischief. I was more the shy nerdy type, but still we had some adventures.

The last time I talked to him was the night before his death. We stayed up late Christmas Night talking about Christmases to come and how we would celebrate it with our families. He said he would make his kids wait till morning to open their presents. He was an old softy and I'm pretty sure he'd have given in and like me, let them open one on Christmas Eve. He told me he was going to get his grades up again and stay out of trouble. He wanted to go back to Chisholm Trail Academy again where his Adventist friends were. He'd gone back to public high school after his grades fell at CTA. He told me he wanted to get back to church again too. He used to play saxophone trios for church with his friend David and Mr. Schramm the band director. He missed it.

 

Donny got up and left before I woke up the next morning. He was headed for his friend's house to hang with his motorcycle enthusiast friends. That afternoon a couple of friends pulled up to the house and took my sister and me to the place Donny had gone. I walked into the back room and found him lying dead on his back on the bed, a bloody hole in his chest from a shotgun at close range. The cops didn't bother to warn us and no one told us he was dead. A friend playing a joke with a shotgun that wasn't supposed to be loaded had pulled the trigger at close range. My mom was already there. I can't imagine what she was going through. I went through 3 very dark days. I spent much of them aimlessly wandering the woods where Donny and I had roamed since we were small.

The guy who killed him later told me it was the worst day of his life. I rather believe that. He'd killed a friend doing something careless and stupid. The police wanted to rain down the wrath of the law on the boys, but my family believed the boys that were there and didn't want to compound one tragedy with another.

Still, hardly a day goes by I do not miss him. Jesus cannot come soon enough. I have two brothers and a son I need to spend some time with.

© 2021 by Tom King

The Importance of Touching the Past

 

As all good Texans do I made a pilgrimage to the Alamo. I touched the bullet scarred walls. I walked the ground. Part of the old fort was across the street and stretched across a substantial area of downtown San Antonio. As a younger man I took my boys to San Jacinto, arguably one of the key battle grounds of the 19th century and walked the fields where the outnumbered Texans in their rage and fury thundered down on the surprised Mexican Army and destroyed it. I marveled at the courage it must have taken to cross that field knowing the army across the way was twice your army's size. And while they made that charge the immortal "Yellow Rose of Texas," a mulatto slave girl distracted Santa Anna and earned herself the title place in the battle hymn of Texas.

Then there was the Battleship Texas, a veteran of WWI and WWII, bombarding the landing grounds from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It's still maintained as a sacred site to Texans. I roamed the decks upper and lower as a kid (I was there twice). I walked the battlefields at Vicksburg, Valley Forge and the dog run cabin of Cynthia Ann Parker who was abducted by Comanches and became the mother of the War Chief Quanah Parker.

And every time I visit an historic place like that, I have to touch something that was there. In Washington DC, I did a rubbing of the name of a neighbor kid I knew that died in Vietnam and had his name inscribed there. And there was there in DC at the Museum of Natural History the very skeleton of a T-Rex that I had seen so many times in the books on dinosaurs that I poured over when I was 6 and had just learned to say paleontologist correctly and thought I wanted to be one.

When I see a generation coming up that has no reverence for the past it makes me sad. For those who forget the past, who have no respect for the lessons learned by our ancestors, are doomed to make far worse mistakes in the future.

Thank God not all young people have forgot. Some have learned. Their parents taught them and like my wife and I did we hauled our kids every Saturday afternoon to every museum, state park, stopped for every historical marker and landmark whether historical or natural within 150 miles of our home. We taught those kids to wonder. To experience that sense of touching the past, of reverence for the lives that made our freedom and prosperity possible.

God will not allow those kind of people to be lost in the quagmire created by the totalitarian rulers who want to erase everything worthwhile, everything heroic, every trace of goodness we've learned through hard endeavor.Those people seek a corruptible crown and by God we who each day continue to learn from the past - we shall oppose them!

© 2021 by Tom King

Ten Reasons It's Great to Be an Old Man

I have attained my grandfatherly years honestly. I will admit I had hoped for a few more grandchildren than I wound up with, but my children have stubbornly refused to reproduce in the quantities I had in mind. I gave up my armada of boats, my ton of fishing gear, my sporting goods bag (in case a ball game broke out among my 18 grandchildren that, sadly, never materialized), my scuba diving equipment, my train sets, most of my game collection and all but a few of my young people oriented book collection (even "Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel" was passed along to the one grandkid we've determined to spoil rotten).  I have two grandsons, one of whom is 2300 miles away is adopted and whom I love like one of my own children and visit weekly by Skype. My other grandson currently lives in Tennessee and moves around a lot, I've never met him and have only made tentative contact with him through Facebook recently so we don't know how that will go yet. 

 

So my dream gig as the fun grandpa has been abridged significantly. I had a fleet of canoes and equipment all ready to lead family floats down the mighty (and fairly safe) rivers of Texas. I even trained as a Red Cross swimming and canoeing instructor. Man I was ready. Oh well. "The best laid plans o' mice and men oft times gang agly" as Scottish poet Bobby Burns once opined.

Still there are some definite advantages to becoming an old geezer and a few disadvantages like arthritis to make you appreciate the good bits.  So let me list the good stuff that comes with being an old coot.

1. People don't expect you to dig ditches. It surprises them if you do pick up a shovel and they are appreciative since they didn't think you were going to help. AND they keep offering you drinks and asking you if you need to sit down for a minute.
2. Your children and their spouses ask you if you want to take a nap and think it's funny when you snore. You actually win points with your offspring, your spouse and your various descendants when you pile up in the recliner for an afternoon snooze.
3. You finally have accumulated an assortment of favorite things that don't get thrown out by your significant other because either they are ugly or you don't need them. By the time you are eligible for social security you own some things like mugs, recliners, fishing gear, Hawaiian shirts, and books that your wife tolerates and won't slip into the Goodwill donation box when you aren't looking. Figuring out what you can keep is a process of elimination.
4. Arthritis is a great excuse for avoiding unpleasant tasks. Conversely, when you actually get around to doing one of those honey-do projects, you get a brief respite from the admonishment to get-er-done!
5. You have a collection of favorite TV shows you really like. Better still, because you've previewed and selected the good stuff you enjoy, you don't have to wade through the depressing post-modernist crap your kids and grandkids think is relevant. 
6. You have a favorite music collection that is wonderfully eclectic. I've got more than 500 songs in my phone's mp3 list and a pile of CDs, cassettes and vinyl that I'm gradually converting to digital mp3s. I defy anyone to look at my digital collection and find a bad song or at least one I don't like. I've got every thing from Pearly Shells (Don Ho) to Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road, from Doris Day to The First Highlanders Pipe Band playing Amazing Grace, from I'm My Own Grandpa to Brown-Eyed Girl, from Monkees, Beach Boys and Beatles to Placido Domingo, John Denver, Earl Scruggs, Burl Ives and Audio Adrenalin. My personal radio station never plays a song I don't want to hear or interrupt the music with a commercial for Honest Bob Vanderhoort's Used Cars.
7. You can sit on the back porch in the sun for 4 hours and it feels like you had a productive afternoon.  It is no longer necessary to tick off a list of things you need to meet your life goals. Sitting on the back porch playing your guitar and feeding the squirrels in the sunshine WAS one of your life goals.
8. You know how to do stuff that makes you happy. You play the guitar, banjo, dulcimer or Irish bodhrain, You build model ships. You can make your own bookshelves. You have time to write that novel you always wanted to write. You can cook things you want to eat and you're pretty good at it because you have lots of practice.
9. People no longer ask you to help them move. You can go over if you want, but you are participating in more of a supervisory role because you have a lot of experience in how to move and pack having done so many many times in your life.
10. Little things give you immense satisfaction.  A favorite restaurant, a walk down a country lane, a grandkid coming to visit, birds coming to your bird feeder outside your window and you can watch them from your easy chair. You, in fact, have an easy chair and people save it for you. 

There are other things I'm sure, but I just can't remember them now. In fact, people don't expect you to get ten things pulled from memory in the first place, so when you do, you get credit for being kind of old, but still sharp as a tack.

Time for my obligatory Sabbath afternoon nap.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

 

In Memory - Loyde "Snake" Arender

My wife stayed with her cousin a couple of years ago to help her take care of her husband, Loyde in his final struggle against the effects of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. Loyde, known as "Snake" by his Marine buddies served in 'Nam and it eventually cost him his life. Snake was a warrior and a poet. His work is even inscribed on a monument to soldiers from his county who died in Vietnam. His poetry is powerful and gives you an insight to what Vietnam vets experienced during and after the war.

I wrote this book for his memorial. It includes stories, comments from friends and fellow soldiers, and his poetry. Snake was, in addition to being a poet, was a hero. When his platoon walked into a minefield, several of his buddies were wounded. With VC in the jungle nearby, Loyde knew they had to get out of the exposed position, but getting out of a mine field would be dangerous. Loyde tossed the first of his wounded comrades over his shoulder and picked his way out with his buddy. Then he went back again and again. His commanding officer wrote up a recommendation that Snake receive the Medal of Honor. 

Unfortunately, his commanding officer was killed the next day and the MOH citation died going up the chain of command. Several of his fellow soldiers have worked on getting him the citation decades later.

Here is the story in PDF format.

God bless our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. We owe them so much!

© 2021 by Tom King 

Greta's Bright New World

Borrowed from Bella B. on MeWe.com.

One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks. 

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.

“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.

“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.

Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.

“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”

“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.

“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it. Greenpeace has successfully banned the production of chlorine.”

“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.

“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?” There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to a make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear (however problematic that might be to you), if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . ."

“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.

"Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”

“Why raw?” inquired Greta.

“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free, zero carbon emissions world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. or that you can even find oranges in Sweden anymore (they tend to spoil on those long voyages on sailboats). Plus gas fires use petroleum byproducts like natural gas, electric stoves use petroleum in their materials and manufacture, and wood produces carbon when burned.

“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.

“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”

“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”

“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not any easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil, millenials don't want to dig graves by hand and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies if all they have to use  as fuel are Swedish picket fences and Ikea furniture, which are rapidly disappearing - being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm despite the carbon pollution caused by burning wood.”

This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into, televisions, radios and the Internet to spread her message; even print media is gone due to the chemical pollutants required to make paper. It was a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fibre boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet don't ya' know.

Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized and is introduced to the dental tools of the stone age.

*Thanks to whoever the clever boots was that wrote this enlightening little fairy tale.

Tom

He Needed Killin’

When people have had enough.

Ken Rex McElroy

In certain of the more, shall we say conservative states, there is a little known and seldom talked about legal defense that influences investigations, grand juries, juries and judges to refuse to enforce the letter of the law. In some places in the country, there is a principle that justifies even murder. The defense is, quite simply, “He needed killin’.”

And this isn’t something that just existed in the Wild West of the late 1800s, although the principle may have derived from those rowdy days when law enforcement was kind of thin on the ground. It may have gained favor in legal circles and community law enforcement in those days, but as late as 1981, the community of Skidmore, Missouri with this principle in mind invoked their collective judgment on one local thug and bully, one Ken Rex McElroy. His list of crimes was lengthy: assault, child molestation, statutory rape, burglary, and hog and cattle rustling. Somehow, to the dismay of the citizens of Skidmore, this hooligan avoided conviction for all of these crimes. Every time he was arrested, he was soon released to once more terrorize the community.

At the age of 12, his future 3rd wife, Trena McCloud, had the misfortune to cross McElroy’s path. He raped her repeatedly over the next couple of years. Now, statutory rape is a crime of the first order and law enforcement should have ended McElroy’s career on the spot. Instead McElroy proceeded to burned her parents’ house down and shoot the family dog. He terrorized her family until he forced her parents to consent to his marriage to Trena. This kept her from testifying against him in the rape. Thiss wasn't the first young girl he'd done this too. At the age of 14, Trena gave birth to their child. Terrified, she fled to her unfortunate mother's house. In short order, McElroy came for her, burning down her parents house AGAIN, shooting their dog AGAIN.

McElroy was arrested and indited 21 times including robbery, property destruction and abuse of his first two wives Sharon and Alice. McElroy, shot a local farmer named Romaine Henry. McElroy shot Henry in the stomach for trying to chase him off of Henry's own land.Next he shot a 70 year old grocer, Ernest "Bo" Bowenkamp, sitting outside his own store on a smoke break. The grocer’s sin against McElroy? He had earlier accused McElroy's children of shoplifting. It was 2 cents worth of candy. The man had caught them in the act.

The cops dutifully arrested McElroy for the shooting. This time he was convicted then turned loose on bond while waiting for an appeal. With the legal system and the cops failing to do their jobs, the good citizens of Skidmore were understandably frustrated. McElroy was once more among them to prey upon the innocent and threaten the peace and safety of the town. And, darn it, people liked that grocer. To this point, McElroy had been arrested 21 times and released to continue his wide range of antisocial behaviors. The man posed a severe threat to the community.

After McElroy was released on bond, he began cruising the grocery store, harassing Bo, who was still recovering from his wounds. He was spotted near the grocery, with a rifle and bayonet. McElroy even openly threatened to kill the poor man while threatening everyone that expressed any kind of sympathy for the grocer or criticized McElroy himself. If he heard someone express any animosity toward himself, he would park his pickup outside their houses for long and terrifying hours. In a burst of massive hubris, McElroy even threatened to kill a minister for expressing sympathy for the grocer. 

© Don Shrubshell (July 1981)

On July 10, 1981, Skidmore residents held a meeting at town hall, down the street from D&G Tavern, a known McElroy haunt. Sixty some odd Skidmore citizens showed up, including the mayor and the sheriff. The consensus was that McElroy was a menace to the community and that law enforcement was powerless to stop him. Then someone brought word to the meeting that McElroy and Trena were headed for the tavern. Three dozen folks promptly left the meeting and reassembled at the D&G.

One fateful day, McElroy loaded Trena into the truck and set off for a local bar. When they walked in, everyone in the bar turned to look at the pair and went strangely silent. McElroy was kind of creeped out, so, when the pair finished off their drinks, they left the bar. and got in their pickup truck. Trena later said that when she looked in the side view mirror, she saw 30–50 people gathered in the parking lot behind them. Then the guns came up. In an instant, the truck windows shattered amid a hail of gunfire that riddled the pickup. Trena ducked. When she looked up she could see that McElroy was dead. There was a big hole in the back of his head. Trena, herself, was unharmed and quickly bailed out of the passenger seat.

© Don Shrubshell (July 1981)

When cops arrived at the scene, the parking lot, and indeed it appeared the entire town was utterly deserted. No crowd of curious onlookers, no witnesses, only closed doors and an empty street; nothing but a bullet-riddled pickup with McElroy dead in the driver’s seat. The coroner determined that McElroy was struck by bullets from at least 2 different guns. Oddly enough, the forensic folk never got more specific than that.

In the aftermath, the police questioned virtually everyone in town, but no one seemed to have witnessed the incident, nor could say who shot McElroy. The newly liberated Trena was of little help to cops and to this day, more than 40 years later, the crime is on the books as an “unsolved” cold case.

The Dixie Chicks’ hit song, “Goodbye Earl” has a line in it that Earl turned out to be a missing person that nobody missed at all. For the town of Skidmore, Missouri, Ken Rex McElroy turned out to be one of those folks that nobody missed at all and an example of someone who, as we say in Texas, “needed killin’”.

© 2021 by Tom King

 REFERENCES:

1. https://allthatsinteresting.com/ken-mcelroy 

2. https://www.buzzfeed.com/christopherhudspeth/18-facts-about-the-murder-of-ken-rex-mcelroy-one-of-the

3. https://patch.com/us/across-america/who-killed-ken-rex-mcelroy-town-keeps-its-secret-38-years

4. https://www.talkmurderwithme.com/blog/2019/11/14/ken-rex-mcelroy

5. https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/ken-rex-mcelroy-vigilante-murder-skidmore-unsolved

6. https://www.historicmysteries.com/ken-mcelroy-skidmore-missouri/ 

7. https://www.insideedition.com/the-unsolved-murder-of-missouri-town-bully-ken-rex-mcelroy-no-one-saw-a-thing-54856  

8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZktTdGHaJY

Omnipotent, Omnipresent and Omniscient, Oh My!

One of the most stunning and revelatory things I have learned about God in my lifetime is the idea that God exist across all dimensions of time and space. It explains so much if God exists outside of our 3 dimensional world and of the 4th dimensional world where the angels live (what Paul called the higher or spiritual plane). 

 If God is outside time and space then He sees the past and future at the same time. He's not looking into the future, He's looking AT the future. It explains how he can hear ten million prayers at the same instance. If He is outside of time then he can attend to each prayer as though you were the only living thing in the universe in private audience with the Almighty. 

Now THAT is an understanding about God that will shake your world. It explains how he can make all things work together for good on your behalf and why we don't always understand what God is doing. 

We can't see the end of a string of events and how the future will unfold as a result of something inexplicable that happens to us. God on the other hand does see the utter ends of our histories, even as He is guiding events today in our best interest, even if what He causes or allows is uncomfortable for us in the here and now. He knows how it all turns out.

God is basically writing the script of our lives (if we allow him to) and like a writer, He crafts the events of our lives to create a story and, in His case, one with a happy ending.. If we don't allow Him to do that, then we inevitably write our own story or allow less kindly spirits to write that story. 

And I'm here to tell you those less than kindly spirits walking up and down the Earth are post-modernists to the core. Essentially, post modernists believe that stuff happens and then you die. Life is meaningless and cruel and you can't do much about it. It's a hopeless philosophy and given the ending waiting for those spirits, it's little wonder that they would embrace and attempt to promote such a grim and hopeless sort of story-telling.

Romans 8:

²⁷ And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.

²⁸ And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.  

²⁹ For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

This passage doesn't mean God picks and chooses who He will save and who will be lost. It means that if you choose to put your faith in God, He then, makes all things work together for good on your behalf. Nothing arbitrary about that. You choose. That God because of His pan-dimensional nature can see the consequences of your choosing does NOT mean you don't choose. Actually it means that choosing the path of faith is the only way you can choose a happy ending to your own story because the Almighty makes sure it all comes out right.

When we receive eternal life and evil is blotted out for all time, we will look back and wonder at the myriad ways God brought us through.

Tom King
© 2021

 

Paradigm Spectacles - How Culture Affects How You View Other Cultures

 

 And why that's not a bad thing....

 

First a little story to show you what I mean. For about a year our landlords who live across the catwalk from us, hosted a young Chinese exchange student named Kate. She had come to the United States to complete high school and to get a college education. Her father is a physician and helped her get permission to study outside of China. She was a very hard-working student and quite intelligent. She didn't just drop out of Chinese high school. She rejected Chinese high school and chose precisely where she wanted to be educated thanks to a class in Western Lit.

I had the privilege of helping her write her essay that went with her application to NYU so I got to know her story. The fascinating thing about her educational journey was how she came to choose a U.S. education over a Chinese one. She told me that over the years in Chinese elementary, middle school and high school, she had become frustrated with how her teachers taught and evaluated their students. At first she didn't think anything unusual until she took a class in Western Literature - a subject liberal American universities have lately toyed with the idea of eliminating from their curriculuums. Having talked to Kate, I am beginning to see where the "Woke" Inquisition is going with the silencing of opinions not their own. China's politburo is expert at this sort of thought control.

Kate's teachers in Chinese schools taught a series of facts and statements of "acceptable" ideas to students she explained. Tests were all multiple choice and there is only one "correct" answer. In a Western Literature class in one of her schools, Kate learned, while reading the classics of English lit, that there is not just one answer to every question. She discovered she liked open-ended questions. She liked being able to think about a set of facts and come to a conclusion that is the product of her own reason and not the edicts of a group of politicians intent on controlling every aspect of the lives of those they believed they had a right to rule over. 

We experience something called "cognitiive dissonance" when what we know or what we believe clashes with something we're being told. It's a big part of why progressives have such a visceral reaction to conservative ideas and why conservatives don't understand how progressives can be so enamored with socialism when hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of socialist governments during the 20th century.The burgeoning information system has contributed heavily to the fracturing of American and world society into basically two warring camps. The bad news is that it's not likely to get better. 

 

The picture above is of one of those decorative sculpture things you nail to a tree. As you pass by, this one looks like a bear climbing a tree. It's on a tree beside our quarter mile long gravel driveway. You see it on the way out on the road that circles behind our houses. One day Kate noticed our little bear as she was on her way to school. She was puzzled that we Americans would attach an image of a bear to a tree.

Curious she asked my landlady if the little bear were some sort of good luck talisman or some traditional thing Americans practiced. We told Kate, "No, we just thought it was a cute thing to do. Kate told me later she didn't quite understand why Americans would do something like that if it had no meaning. For a Chinese person, from a land steeped in tradition, most things had some sort of ancient tradition behind it. The use of colors, styles of dress, types of poetry, painting techniques, and the preparation of food has ancient history behind all of it. That Americans do things without having any tradition behind them set of a kind of cultural dissonance for her.

American cultural practice, unlike culture driven practices and tradition in nations with long histories, is the product of oura melting pot culture in which the cultural practices from all over the world were promiscuously poured into our new and increasingly blended, uniquely American culture. It took Kate a while to get used to that about Americans. We do all sorts of odd things, some of which has tradition behind it that we liked and adopted (I'm thinking of the breakfast burrito and pizza parties here).  Many of our habits and practices, though, are simply things that we do just because we want to or because we think a thing is fun to do. We saw 'em in the window and bought 'em so to speak.

 Americans have always been cultural appropriators. It's one of our great strengths. Our first Thanksgiving drew the menu from English cuisine and Native American cooking and some stuff the ladies made up from foodstuffs that were available in the new world. In the Southwest United States, the food, music, and cultural practices of Mexico seeped into the culture of the American settles. It's what gave us the glorious Tex-Mex tradition in cooking. Italians gave us pizza and pasta. Greeks gave us gyros and sub sandwiches. The Cajun French gave us Jambalaya and Zydeco. The Irish gave us Boston and the railroads. The Chinese gave us the other half of the railroad, Chinese food and the Americans in a kind of reverse cultural appropriation, gave chow mein back to Chinese food. 

Think of all the wonderful American things we wouldn't have if the recent anti-appropriation thing had happened long ago. Half the stuff I wore back in my hippie days was appropriated from some other culture. I wore moccasins, stars and stripe bell bottoms (patriot/sailor), an Elizabethan poet shirt, a buckskin vest, a sombrero and carrying a banjo. If you had taken away all the culture I was appropriating, I'd have been left naked. Antifa would have me set on fire if I showed up dressed like that on a "woke" college campus in today's Puritanical leftist snowflake culture.

The point is that much of the strife we see in our world is more about clashing cultural paradigms than good versus evil. Not that there isn't good and evil, but much of our instinctive dissonance in our interaction with people we perceive as "other" is more about the fact that it doesn't feel right when we run up against something we are unfamiliar with. We see through the spectacles of our own culture and upbringing. This prism of culture we peer through affects how we see and do a lot of things we do. But sometimes, especially in the American melting pot, the point is, as with this tree "face" in the picture is to startle people walking in your hundred acre woods rather than about some ancient cultural imperative.

To overcome the problems generated by this cognitive dissonance we experience on contact with another culture, we have to do what we Americans have always done when confronting this kind of feeling that something is off in our encounters with other cultures. We see what we like about it and borrow it, weaving it skillfully into the fabric of American life. The more we adopt the best bits and bobs from one another's cultures, I think the better we'll understand each other. 

If we continue in the error of mistaking cultural differences for deliberate evil, we'll only continue to drive a wedge between the left and right, between city people and country folk, between church folk and the unchurched, and between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Americans and everybody else in the world. The good news is that Jesus warned us long ago that mankind would one day be divided into sheep and goats just before time runs out for this world. You can argue all day long about who is in which group, but ultimately, Jesus will come with Earth-shattering suddenness and answer that question once and for all.

 Just one man's opinion.

© 2021 by Tom King

I Have Found My Haberdashery!

As a native Texan, I've gotta
have this one.

For some reason, my Sweet Baboo doesn't like my loud Hawaiian fat guy shirts. I'm not sure why. I think they are quite fetching, but they do tend to disappear one by one over time. I've found a couple in the trash. I'm sure this was by accident. Anyway, I really love the shirts of the islands. I'm a bit colorblind, so I like my colors to be vibrant. I'm sure many of you enjoy vibrant colors, so in the interest of keeping my readers, many of who must share my taste in things like clothes, music, religion and politics, informed of cool things that might make them happy.

Here's one!

I'm not being paid to advertise for these guys. I just like these shirts. My birthday is coming up April 19, so I'm gonna buy one of these for me and try to wear it on special occasions when my wife doesn't want me to look like an overweight homeless guy. I don't think color is unpleasant. The trouble is, I married a superhero. She has super hearing, super vision, super touch, super smell and ESP for all I know. The woman can smell a gnat passing gas at 200 yards. We have to black out the windows in daylight because the light is too bright coming through the windows. Scentsies are everywhere to control the smells. She puts cotton in her ears to subdue the sound. And she knows what I'm doing or thinking even if she can't see me.

As a conservative American I like
this one. The dinosaur will make
my grandson happy.

My wardrobe has always been a bone of contention. I'm partially color blind. I have trouble with subtle pastel color differences and very dark colors like deep blue, dark purple, black, dark red and almost any very dark color. So my color matches are often very off. My hearing is relatively normal and with my allergies, my sense of smell is not very good. I love brightly lit spaces. 

My favorite loud Hawaiian shirts stand out visually to my poor darling like flashbulbs going off. The poor thing  suffers from sensory overload most of the time. I try to save my loud shirts for when I'm going to be outside. If she's with me, I make sure she remembers to wear sunglasses.

Our home has mostly Earth tones with furniture, paint and decorations so far as colors go and it's pretty calming. When we play music, it tends to be of the sort that puts me straight off to sleep. She used to create mix tapes for nap time at the day care center we operated. The kids tried to stay awake, but once the music started, they started dropping off as if they'd been gassed. The woman is an expert in how to create calmness.

My grandson will really dig it when
Poppy shows up dressed in sharks.
The boy loves anything with
a lot of sharp teeth.

 

Unfortunately for my beloved superhero, she married a klutz whose unsuperhero skill is ADHD.
  It takes loud sounds, loud colors, exciting action and smoke alarms to keep me focused. And don't ask me to do any housecleaning. My work does not, cannot and ever will meet superhero habitation standards. I can empathize with Lois Lane. I really can.

I try to keep my shirts a little more low-key. I like shirts with ocean/island themes but they tend to be a lot more loud and glaring in color, so I've quit buying them. I can get away with the patriotic ones above because they have a lot of Earth tones. The shark shirt has a lot of black and the sharks themselves tend to have more muted colors.

I picked two shirts (below) that have a favorite picture theme that we both love - lighthouses. These are pretty much black and white and gray, so the colors are calming. Good for my superhero sweetie. Good for her hyper hubbie.

© 2021 by Tom King

PS: It's almost my birthday.

Cancel Culture Goes After Thoreau

It seems they're out to cancel Henry David Thoreau's Walden experiment now. Evidently he came to the wrong conclusions, so he must not actually have done the experiment right. How else can you explain that he believed one should live simply and deliberately, self-sufficient and independent. Those are not "progressive" values. In today's "Art of Manliness", Brett and Kay McKay discuss Thoreau's landmark work and what it means for today's men (and women for that matter)."

Thoreau wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to “live a primitive and frontier life — though in the midst of an outward civilization.” He wanted to show that recovering a bit of wildness didn’t require complete separation from society.  - Brett & Kay McKay

Today's Progressive Marxist collectivists could never tolerate that sort of thinking among the proletariat. People who live deliberately, who practice self-reliance and independence, don't make good socialist workers. So Thoreau must be sacrificed on the altar of post-modern collectivism.

I knew there was something I really liked about Thoreau, who was, by the way, an old school liberal like the founding fathers. He believed in equality and all those pesky freedoms that gum up the works of the efficiently run collective state. If Marx had ever read Thoreau, he'd likely have been very unhappy with his work.

Look for Henry David on the library burn piles soon.

© 2021 by Tom King

We've Got Democrats Runnin' Washington Once Again

 We've Got Democrats Runnin' Washington Again

A Post Campaign Song

(Tune: We've Got Franklin D. Roosevelt Back Again - 1936, Bill Cox)

Just hand me my old banjo,
For pretty soon I can go,
Back to dear old Washington far away.
Since Biden's been elected,
BLM won't be neglected.
Cause Democrats run Washington again. 

Chorus:
Once again, once again,
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.
Since Biden’s been elected,
The economy’ll be corrected.
We'll have bucketfuls of money pouring in.

We’can take ourselves a little toke
We’ll eat our veggies till we choke.
The diet cops will watch us night and day.
You can tell a dirty joke.
Fornicate, but you can’t smoke.
In women's sports hairy "girls" will rule the day

Chorus:
Rule the day, Rule the day,
And Republicans will find they rue the day.
Rush Limbaugh will be buried.
Gay folks can all get married.
Cause Democrats will make right wingers pay.

No more student loans to pay.
The donkey won election day.
No more workin’ in the blowing, snow and rain.
The FBI is watching us.
We’re all riding on the bus.
Cause Democrats run Washington again.

Chorus:
Once again, Once again
Big Tech stole votes for Biden once again.
Facebook's algorithm
Google search was workin' with 'em
And they shifted several million votes to him

Now, there's no such thing as gender
Homeless camps in all their splendor
Make LA look like it's been on a 2 day bender
Iran will get a Calipha
We'll find out that Antifa
Is an equal opportunity offender

Chorus
Offender, Offender,
We've got all the Democrats the steal could win..
With Pelosi there above us,
The whole world’s gonna love us.
We’re gonna all be just as poor as them. ...

Chorus 2:
Poor as them, poor as them
We're gonna all be just as poor as them.
And if you're not a socialist
You're name is on the enemy's list
Cause we've got Democrats in the Congress once again.

No more ICE gettin' in the way
Sex traffickers will be okay,
The way is clear for terrorists and gangs.
Chicken plants won't hire no shirkers
There'll be lots of illegal workers.
And Colonias packed with wetbacks once again.

Chorus:
Once again, Once again
The Democrats are our rulers once again.
With a thousand executive orders,
They've thrown open all our borders
Let 10 million Democrat voters come on in.

They tell' us 30 trillion debt
Won't matter, well at least not yet.
Relax and do not trouble your wee brains..
Don't worry, not one little bit,
The wealthy will get soaked for it
Except the ones who paid for their campaigns.

Chorus:
Their campaigns, Their campaigns
Big Tech and Big Pharma's won again.
The opposition has been quickly killed
The Swamp will soon be all refilled
Washington's now the Democrat's domain!


© 2021 by Tom King

Disproving God - Not So Easy

 

Disproving God - Not So Easy

 © 2011 by Tom King

(Sorry this runs long - it's a long philosophical muse, written on a soft Sabbath afternoon.)

Someone recently told me with perfect certainty that God and all religion can be easily disproved.

Simply because you have not seen it, does not mean it does not exist. 

You can say you are reasonably certain the thing does not exist, but I'm pretty sure an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient trans-dimensional being might just be able to avoid appearing on your radar without a lot of trouble if it suited Him.

Easily disproved?

Really?

And how is it you can disprove the existence of a thing anyway?

Not having seen it yourself will not do. I have never seen an atom, but I'm fair certain they exist.  In "proving" the existence of black holes, for instance, you can only do so by observing what is happening around them to infer their existence. Physicists infer the existence of dark energy because something must be pushing the universe apart at ever increasing speed because otherwise it would be slowing down all the time due to gravity.

Physicists first postulated dark energy based things they observed in the heavens. Then, they sought to find mathematical proofs of their theory about dark energy, thereby building a case for its existence. In the same way no one can prove the existence of a multi-dimensional, powerful being, save by observation of the world around us and the ways in which God (or whatever you wish to call him) impacts that world.

Plenty of eye-witness testimony, some of it contemporary, claims to have witnessed or experienced acts of God. I have a couple of my own experiences that are not readily explainable by either physics or psychology. Does this mean that all who experience such events are liars because their conclusions about whether or not God exists differ from yours. I would hope, given most of you believe strongly in science, that you would wait for empirical evidence before drawing a conclusion.

Carl Sagan argued, that if God existed, he would surely provide unmistakable proof of His existence.

This might not be so, if God were deliberately limiting man's access to such absolute proof for a reason – some purpose he had for insuring that the evidence of His existence remained deliberately thin on the ground.

If this were true, you would only find hints of his existence in unexplainable phenomenon like dark energy, the properties of water, the exactitude of Earth's orbit, the presence of its moon to insure stability and perfect size and composition to promote life. As Freeman Dyson once said, “...it looks as though the universe knew we were coming.”

Given that even the scientific community remains divided over whether God or some vast intelligence exists, it seems to me a truly open-minded person would wait for the theory to be tested. Christianity is just such a testing procedure for the theory that God does exist and cares for us personally. I came to Christianity making a deal with God. "Prove to me you exist. I'll follow the program You've laid out to the best of my ability and you show me that You exist.”

I have tested the hypothesis that God exists to the point that I am convinced that He does.

Unless you have thoroughly tested the hypothesis for yourself, you cannot say one way or another whether my own experiment is valid or not. The fact that Christians squabble among themselves over points of doctrine or church practices means nothing. Scientists do the same thing over points of scientific doctrine. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating.

My experience has been that God patiently changes a person as a result of that person's on-going relationship with Him. I find that I am free of things that once held me down. I find that I do what I want more than what I was once compelled to do by my nature or upbringing.

Do people abuse power as Christian leaders? Absolutely.

Do scientists abuse their power? For sure!

Do politicians? Ya, you betcha.

The great controversy in this world is not God vs. Not God. It is between those who serve themselves and those who serve others. If God wished to create an immortal race of individuals with complete free will; a people that God could be sure wouldn't mess things up again, who would do what is right, because it is right and not just when it suits their selfish purpose and, if, at the same time He could preserve the creativity, the energy and the vast potential of creatures with free will, how would He do that?

My theory is that God would plant those creatures alone on a planet, allow them to work out both sides of the argument - the mercenary vs the philanthropic approach to life and see what happens.

Then at the end of it all, save the essence of who they are, grant them immortal bodies and turn them loose in the galaxy to live, love and create. The only creature capable of such a thing would be one who exists beyond mere three dimensions, one who can see today, tomorrow and yesterday all at the same time, one to whom time and space are endless, who can work out ever detail so that in the end, the great goal is achieved -- a free people who, by their very nature, will never perpetrate evil upon each other or anyone else.

The idea makes sense, I'm not the only one who ever believed such an idea. Millions of Christians believe something along those lines. I can't think of any other way to make people with free will that won't wreck the universe. The Earth, I firmly believe, is a crucible in which free people are made. Everyone has a choice. Live for yourself and do what you want and you get this life and then die and disappear (Eccl. 9:5). The other choice means you accept the discipline and educational program God offers and you get eternal life and total freedom given back to you for completing the coursework.

I'm betting the second pathway is correct. Whichever way is correct, it shouldn't matter to anyone else. It is my choice and affects those who choose their own way not in the least. You may do as you wish, live as you want. The only thing I'll fight you on is if you try to limit my right to live as I choose.

It's a philosophical difference. It is not something you can play philosophical "Tag You're It" over. You believe one way or the other and it's hardly likely you'll ever agree. It comes down to majority rules in the end.

If religion is a fraud, it may perhaps one day be crushed by the preponderance of evidence. Or, Jesus may come back and settle the matter. As in science, the wisest thing to do is to wait for enough studies to come in before you plant your flag on one side or the other.

Tom King - Tyler, TX

©2010