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