Little Boxes Filled with Tiny Numbers

I have decided to enter a more productive phase of my life.

Henry David Thoreau once said that he went to the woods to live "deliberately".  Good old H.D. understood that back in civilization, it is the bookkeepers who rule and where the bookkeepers rule, no one lives as he wishes. He lives as others wish. 

I too want to live deliberately. I just have to finish up all this paperwork that the government wants from me. Have I told you how much I HATE paperwork?  Other people seem to relish paperwork - they make paperwork their life's work. Some even get advanced degrees in the art of paperwork. 

For me, however, filling in boxes with numbers makes me a little crazy and a whole lot cranky. I'm not sure why. It could be my ADHD. When I am done with all this paperwork, however, I am assured by those who appear to need this paperwork to give their live meaning, that things will be better for me.  At least it will be better until once again it is not and they demand that I fill out more paperwork.

You see, this is why I'm opposed to bigger government. The bigger the government, the more bureaucrats we have. The more bureaucrats we have, the more little boxes on sheets of paper they create for us to fill in in order. These little data filled boxes apparently give meaning to the pathetic and boring lives of bureaucrats.

To paraphrase Voltaire, "I tabulate, therefore I am."

A Harvard sociologist once suggested that people with ADD served as pioneers in the United States, moving the frontiers of the fledgling country westward and southward till they hit the ocean or the Mexican borders and ran out of places to go. He suggested that this impulse to move away from "civilization" was, in part, due to a powerful desire to escape the tyranny of bookkeepers and bureaucrats. I suspect Thoreau was feeling that pressure of rule by bureaucracy, when he went to Walden Pond. Being a good liberal, he didn't stay very long at Walden Pond, torn apparently between the desire to "live deliberately" and the desire to embrace the collective and make sure the slow-witted of the world were forced to be happy and secure. 

It's a very odd thing that so many on the left claim to hate being restricted in their behavior and desire freedom from various kinds of moral, religious and government oppression. Yet, at the same time, they believe so strongly that mankind should be moving toward some vast form of collectivist government in which smart people tell all the slower-witted folks what to do - a system that gives the masses just enough food, clothing, and shelter to keep the proletariat from revolting against the benevolent so the leaders of said better government can enjoy the well-deserved fruits of the peasants' labor. 

Collectivism is supposed to solve all our problems. If everybody serves the state (another name for the collective), then, we're told, we will all blossom forth as creative productive human beings without the necessity of religion or even the tyranny of morality. So if we will just obey the state, we'll all be free from the need to be good?

Me? I aim to misbehave (just as soon as I get all the paperwork submitted).

Don't kid yourself, there are plenty of slow-witted
voters out there ready to join the "proletariat".

 

 

© 2016 by Tom King

*Just for fun, check out this totally serious dude writing on a Portland-based website about how wonderful all the guys up there in the placards in the picture above are. He does not, however, mention the hundreds of millions of dead people they left behind while creating their wonderful workers' paradises. Funny that.

An Appeal To Global Cooling Deniers

The sun has gone blank - no sunspots

Astronomer Paul Dorian, an actual space scientist, says we may be headed for a new mini ice age as sun spots disappear from the face of the sun. Informed sources say that carbon emissions from Al Gore's private jet have leaked into space from the stratosphere and fallen into the sun, filling up the sunspots and making them disappear.~

For those of you congregated over double shot half-caff, mocha soy latte's in a Rio Linda Starbucks, that was sarcasm bordering on satire. Satire is not by the way bald-faced lying as some of you seem to think, but an obvious exaggeration with intent to ridicule, not for the purpose of masquerading as legitimate news, as is the practice of a disturbing number of fake news "satire" sites run by millenials who never read Jonathan Swift or Geoffrey Chaucer or Mark Twain in school, but drifted toward the National Enquirer and stories about aliens who advised President Clinton when he was president (which, given his record, just might be true enough).

Meanwhile, back to the threat of a new Ice Age: The only solution to save mankind from this new form of nuclear winter is, of course, global socialism.

My good friend Dave Degan, whom I've never heard of before until he came on a Facebook thread of mine to curse me for a stupid lout, objects to the very idea of sunspots as having anything to do with temperatures on Earth. The fact that he sweated through his Tommy Hilfigers one day last summer when his AC in his car broke down during his afternoon commute has apparently convinced him that tiny bipeds drinking beer and watching American football (as opposed to the real kind with the round ball and a distinct lack of scoring), can overcome the effects of an almost unimaginably large nuclear ball of fire equivalent to So the total energy output of the sun in one second could be equal to more than six trillion Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs per second.

So Dave shows up with this stunning bit of reasoning:

• Yeah sun spots my a*se. Of course it would be nothing whatsoever to do with pollution clouds from the billions of oil burnt every day in our cars , planes, liners, power stations blotting out the sun's rays would it? No - never .

I, of course, am completely schooled by his overpowering display of massive intellect (again, sarcasm for the Rio Linda half-calf vanilla triple-ginseng espresso crowd). I did check Dave's numbers, though. He doesn't say billions of what - gallons, barrels of fuel we supposedly burn every day? Lets assume the smaller amount, gallons, which will give us a larger number to be fair to Dave. The world knocks back 94 million barrels of crude a day at current rates. You can make 19 gallons of gasoline from each barrel or 12 gallons of diesel. Just to give Dave the biggest number possible, lets say all of it is made into gasoline. That gives us 1.7 billion gallons of gasoline.  That's billion, singular, not plural.  That said, less than half of crude oil is actually made into fuel. We'll assume it's all gas and not diesel to get Dave a bigger number. That works out to 850 million gallons of gasoline a day at the most. So the billions is not a good number unless you are measuring your gas consumption in pints. It's still a lot of gasoline, but not quite billions, although it does take billions to frighten people these day. Millions just doesn't have the power to terrify that it once did. Congress can burn through a million bucks during their mid-morning coffee break without even being on the floor for a vote.

That said, global cooling deniers never trouble themselves with accurate numbers anyway; only numbers which make the case for a global socialist government.

Actually, the sun's rays aren't being blotted out by power plants much these days either. Nuclear plants, for instance, produce no smoke, which is possibly part of the reason global cooling deniers are so against them. Coal fired plants have scrubbers installed which remove most of the carbon pollutants from the plant's smoky fires. Even cars have special attachments to remove the carbon pollution from their exhaust. As a result, on a clear day you can now see Los Angeles, something you couldn't do back in the 60s. You can thank my generation for that one, Dave. Most of the real smokey stuff is found in third world countries, but for some reason, global climate treaties never seem to address the problems in those countries. They only call for draconian measures in successful economies which tend to be capitalist, free market states. Not sure why?.~  (the .~ is a snark mark to indicate sarcasm for the humor-impaired).

Dave certainly has an inordinately high opinion of humanity's ability to affect the Earth's climate. Human pollution pales before the damage Mama Nature can wreak in just a weekend when she's feeling cranky. One active volcano can put out more soot and ash in a month than all the power plants in all the world can put out in a decade, darkening skies worldwide as Krakatoa, Santorini, Vesuvius and others did and as Mt. St. Helens tried to do more recently. 

Early settlers in the Midwest started putting out the great
prairie fires before they got too bad. For one thing all the
smoke made it hard to breathe and for another it killed stuff.

 

Did you know that it used to be, before humans started putting them out before they spread, that forest and prairie fires used to burn out of control in fires that consumed areas the size of midwestern states, pumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere? Mother Nature for her own amusement used to smite the ground with lightning and burn up huge swaths of vegetation with that little trick - at least before humans started to intervene with their shovels, wet blankets, fire trucks and those pesky smoke jumpers.

I'm a little rain forest and I love me some CO2!

The trees and grass, as it turns out, used to love the extra CO2 that all that burning created. It seems the extra carbon dioxide makes the rain forests grow more thickly. Then, when the carbon dioxide is heavier in the atmosphere, all that new vegetation in turn produces more oxygen and it all balances out.

It amazes me at the arrogance of tiny little global warming alarmists who think that something we all can do will somehow overcome the effects of the sun. Wikipedia has this to say about the power of the sun. Located a mere 93 million miles away from our planet’s surface, the Sun is a thermonuclear fusion reaction. Good thing it’s that far away, since nuclear fusion involves temperatures in excess of 5700 °C, (and as high as 14 million °C in the case of earth’s sun). The sun continuously pelts the earth with 35,000 times the amount of energy required by all of us who now use electricity on the planet in our lifetimes.* Sunspots regulate the amount of energy escaping from the sun. More sunspots, more heat. Fewer sunspots, less heat. Right now, the sun has gone blank. Few or no sunspots! That means the old solar furnace is running cooler. Last time that happened this drastically was during the Maunder Minimum, an event that happened in the late 1600s to early 1700s. Ever noticed that not a lot happens in history during that time period. Everybody was huddled under blankets is why. It was freakin' cold! They called it the mini ice age and lots of people starved because the growing season was shortened.

A proper hive city.

It seems obvious that humans are making the planet warmer, at least to political hacks who need a good crisis like anthropogenic global warming to justify turning the human race into a massive insect-like collective so that their betters can rule over them effectively, turns out to be a load of balderdash. By stuffing us into hives, we'd leave the rest of the Earth free for nature to function unmolested, save for the dachas of the ruling elites who work so hard to make our lives all exactly alike and therefore "fair".

Given the political background of Marxist collectivism that these guys come from, one should not be surprised at the arrogance of the global climate change crowd. They somehow manages to count coup every time the weather changes whether it gets hotter, colder or in any way shifts no matter what their computer models have predicted. Remember the poles were supposed to be ice free by 2015. Instead, the polar ice caps are expanding. Apparently the sun decided we needed bigger ice caps and turned down the heat.

Snearing conjecture and appeals to sarcasm don't prove a point, not when those sunspots which Dave and his ilk so casually dismiss, but which seem to cause their collectivist sphincters to twitch for some reason, can raise or lower the output of that big ball of fire in the sky by literally millions of kilo-joules. Ultimately, the most we can do is adapt our farming methods, insulate our homes and try not to make big messes where we have our nests. I know that terrifies the control freaks among the progressive socialist intellectual elites, but it is true nonetheless. If the sun decides to play merry hob with us, there's nothing we can do to stop it except perhaps go to work to save ourselves. The idea of all that labor gives pseudo-intellectual elitists the heebie-jeebies.

I'm not saying we should not clean up after ourselves. We've actually been doing that since long before the Marxists decided to use global warming fear mongering as a political tool to herd people into those human built worker's paradises they truly believe they are smart enough to make. So to all the Global Cooling Deniers out there, I appeal to you. Cut it out! And buy plenty of warm socks. You're going to need those when you travel to your next global warming conference.

The truth is that next to Nature and Nature's God, you guys are really tiny little fellows in a wide world after all.

And I've also noticed a lot of you have really small hands.

Just sayin'

© 2016 by Tom King

* From a Wikipedia article on the sun and sunspots and NASA data on the recent sunspot decrease.

 

Back Seat Solutions and the End of America

©  by Tom King

The Apartheid Solution to the Back Seat Unrest Dilemma

Remember when you were a kid and you went on one of those long rides with your parents. You were stuck for hours in the back seat with your brother or sister (or both in my case). Remember what happened when you ran out of things to do back there? Inevitably, one of you began to do the favorite thing that bored kids in the back seat of a 1963 Rambler do. One child always starts poking the others because it is vastly entertaining to hear them squawk. Next comes your sister going, "Mama, he's touching me!"And as the unrest in the back seat escalates, one of several things happen.

In one response scenario, the wise mother and seasoned-traveler-with-children pulls out her magic bag, tells the back seat bully to cut it out if he knows what's good for him and gives each child his or her choice of new somethings-to-do from the bag. With something new to keep their attention, soon everybody is busy and quiet again. The wise Mom smiles and settles back to enjoy the ride, knowing she's got more stuff in her bag and can keep the youngsters entertained for the whole trip. Notice that she gave each child a choice from the bag rather than arbitrarily assigned them a toy of her choice. Remember this. It will be on the quiz.

In the alternative response scenario, the ill-prepared mother turns around and tells the children, "Stop it!" The ensuing quietness lasts maybe 30 seconds if she looks sufficiently stern. Then, because sitting still is not a natural state for a human child, someone starts poking someone again. Invariably, the persecuted child demands, "Mama make him stop!"

The first response to the alternative response scenario is an escalation of the mother shouting tactic. "Do you want me to stop this car?" She asks. This is a stupid question because if she did stop the car, at least that would be something new. When this response fails to elicit a terrified spate of obedience, she issues alternative response scenario first response, part 2, "Don't make me turn this car around!" When this doesn't work, because this tells the children they have the ability to make mom do something and what child can resist that power, we quickly move on to...

The final response scenario: Mom actually stops the car (hey, it works). She gets out, drags the kids out alongside the road and commences to whip them till they squeal, or, more likely, she gets Dad to do it because his arm is stronger. Then everyone gets back in the car and drives on with much snuffling coming from the back seat. The snuffling continues until someone gets bored again, stops snuffling and begins poking someone else and then the cycle repeats.

"Now, of course," you say, secure in the knowledge that Doctor Spock has taught us better parenting skills than that, "Nobody these days would do anything that barbaric."  Yeah? Well I bet I'd win a lot of money on that wager.

What an angry mama looks like!

Now lets look at the progress of civilization juxtaposed against the back seat scenario. The country grows, reaches the limits of its borders and settles down to become more and more crowded. As the frontiers disappear and there are ever fewer new horizons to explore and conquer, the natives settle down and get restless as natives are wont to do when they're all piled cheek by jowl in the back seats that are modern cities.


Someone starts poking someone else. Maybe someone's not being "fair". Someone's picking on or exploiting someone else.  Inevitably, these restless souls appeal to the one entity they perceive as everybody's "Mama" - the bureaucrat-soaked, unimaginative, busy-driving-the-country-into-the-ground-for-its-own-purposes, government.

The government generally reacts in one of two ways just as the Mom driving the car does. Like Mom, the government is busy driving the car or telling the people who are driving the car how to drive it. She does not want to be bothered by the noisy children in the back seat (who are not driving the car).

Rarely, a wise government reacts by finding something for people to do. Whether you liked FDR or not, his Civilian Conservation Corps and Rural Electrification Project at least gave restless unhappy people something to do. President Kennedy, at the beginning of the restless 60s gave us the collective goal of going to the moon which took at least some of the edge off the back seat tantrums that would characterize the next decade. JFK also implemented another keep-them-busy project that at least served to keep people working and to thin out the number of restless young men - the Vietnam conflict. FDR had WWII, Woodrow Wilson had WWI, there was the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War and the War of 1812 to valve off a little steam. The Civil War was an example of what can happen when you delay dealing with problems in the back seat too long. The Great Westward Expansion of the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution kept people busy and relatively quiet back there in the back seat despite the fact that the back seat was often a pretty uncomfortable place to be while it was going on.

Typically, governments react by telling the people to stop being brats (going straight for the alternative response scenario). When ordering folk to stop misbehaving fails as it surely will, they move right along to making empty threats and from there straight on to paddling the miscreants in the grader ditch alongside the car (or in a nice gulag or concentration camp).

Often, the children in the backseat will help insure their own forthcoming flagellation by demanding that the government "do something".  By demanding that the government fix the problem and to do it NOW, the children give tacit assent to the government's assumption of even greater power over them (in the name of doing something about the problem, of course). Government, which firmly believes that you should never let a good crisis go to waste without using it to increase the power of those who hold the reins, passes laws ostensibly to protect the kids in the backseat from themselves. In the process, wherever possible, the folks in power will use the opportunity of creating laws to "protect" us ll, to also make sure that the folks, who are in charge at the moment, remain in charge. After all, who loves you more than your Mama. Certainly not those nasty Republicans. 

When it get's to the "Don't make me turn this car around" stage, you know you're in trouble. In turning the car around, the government takes you out of the public eye and takes you where nobody can see what's being done to you to shut you up and make you behave. Isolation is the prelude to particularly nasty things happening to the kids in the back seat. Examples of these nasty things that happen to naughty children include China's great cultural revolution that resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths, purges of "enemies of the state" under Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Adolph Hitler and ethnic cleansing under Slobodan Milosovic, Hitler and Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Every dictator in history came to power believing their job was to bring order to their beloved nation and that order was best achieved by making people compliant. Most of them believed or at least said they believed that they were making things fair for everyone. The started out to make people stop poking each other and ended up in that grader ditch flailing away with the nearest switch they could find because they would not. If the United States winds up a police state in the name of hope and change, remember.....


YOU asked for this!

Disturbing image from a law firm's advertisement

If your government ever comes to believe it's purpose is to make sure the people in the back seat comply with all its orders, we are well and truly in trouble. There is a bit of advice that the old sailing ship captains used to give to their helmsmen (these guys who actually steered the ship).  It applies to how we ought to empower our governments to steer the ship of state. The captain's advice?

"Steer small."

It's not big changes we need, but small course corrections. We don't need to bring out the lash and start lashing any sailor who complains. We need to choose a course and keep to it. A straight well-plotted course is far more inspiring than one that wanders aimlessly whichever the way the wind blows. Useful work for the sailors to do (or for that matter, the kids in the back seat) keeps both the quarterdeck and the back seat a happy place. You get there by having a government that meddles as little as possible, sets a clear course and allows the children plenty of stuff to keep them busy and content.

Not a terribly progressive idea, I admit.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

Is There a Correlation Between Poverty and Crime

Yes, but it's probably not what you think.

I hear a lot from the liberal left and the libertarian right that there are these malevolent forces in the world who are determined to keep poor people poor. They cite a statistical correlation between high levels of crime in areas where poverty abounds. From this many people assume that poverty causes crime. That exploitation by the evil corporations, the Illuminati, the Jewish bankers or other such nefarious characters are responsible first for poverty and that crime is the result of poverty. I do not hold with this idea.

The only use you can make of poor people for profit is by forcing them into an enslaved condition. We do not allow slavery in this country and still we have poverty, albeit at a much lower rate than in other countries. The correlation between crime and poverty does not necessarily "prove" that poverty causes crime. It is just as likely that crime causes poverty and not the other way round.

I, myself, am currently living well below the poverty line through a series of unfortunate circumstances. Under no circumstances would I steal from someone, assault or kill simply because I can't have everything I want or see that my neighbor has. There are plenty of places I can get food and places and people who would help me if I asked for it. There is honest work available and I am doing my best to live within my reduced means by living a much simpler lifestyle and working hard to overcome my circumstances, but I find that the government programs, which seek to alleviate my poverty, are not very effective at doing that. The government actually tends to limit my ability to rise from poverty - at least that's been my experience.


What I've found is that drug use and crime tend to create poverty all around them. Have you not noticed that criminals in poverty stricken areas tend to prey off the poor and lower middle classes far more than they prey on the wealthy? It's wealthy criminals that prey on the wealthy. The libertarians and liberals keep looking for a villain who is keeping the people down. They are looking in the wrong place. While the wealthy classes do have their own kinds of villains, these people have little to do with keeping poor people down in this country. We keep ourselves down. Jesus said, "The poor you will always have with you."  He said that because he understood the roots of poverty. That is not to say poor people are inevitably sinful or that they are guilty of some sin that makes them poor.  It is, rather that sin and crime creates the kinds of fear, discouragement, physical and social devastation that allows poverty to gain a foothold and to catch the innocent within its clutches.

It's useless to try and figure out a "system" that makes everyone good and happy and middle-class. Man-made utopias are a fairy tale. Man has been trying to create them on his own hook ever since The Fall. 

Were we all instead to make an effort to lift each other up and encourage each other to be better people instead of vying for power, claiming we will, if given enough power, use it to create a better world by external force, we might get somewhere toward actually making a better world. To make a better world, we need better people to inhabit it. Change the people and poverty and misery will vanish. 

Trying to stop the sin, degradation and crime which creates poverty and want by feeding the beast, what it heretofore has been stealing and killing for, is like feeding a tapeworm. You only make it bigger and hungrier and give it the power to do even more damage to its host.

One cannot change the world by writing laws upon tablets of stone or upon the pages of books of law. One can only change the world by creating in every man upon this spinning globe, a clean heart, upon which is indelibly written the Golden Rule.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King © 2014

Is Melting Pot a Misnomer?

What 69 years of the socialist melting pot looks like.

The Coca-Cola Superbowl commercial this year cranked up a lot of conservatives who claim that it is divisive and some sort of evil liberal plot to promote communism through soft drink commercials.

I didn't get that from it at all. I saw it as an affirmation of America as the melting pot. Remember, the song returned to English at the end as all those languages once again became melded into one. The English language and especially American English is the sum of many languages.

Don't believe me?  Sit down to supper.  Are you having jambalaya, barbecue, burritos or pizza?  Maybe you'll schlep down to the deli for a bagel. You could sit out on the patio and play your banjo, eat a banana or dip some tortilla chips in guacamole made with fresh avocado. Maybe eat a frankfurter or polish sausage. English borrows its vocabulary from the best of every other language there is. I think what we should see from this commercial is not that people come to this country speaking other languages, but that they all contribute to the beauty that is the American language.

Coke's behind-the-scenes video points out that, though we come from many countries with many different languages, we become one country out of all that. Rather than seeing our differences in that brief bit of film, why is it that we are not seeing the things that make us one.

It's little wonder we are called racists so often. There are racists among us as conservatives, though by no means are all racists conservatives. The liberal racism, anti-semitism and cultural paternalism is no lest pernicious.  It is time that Christians and conservatives seize the narrative and interpretation of things like this Coke commercial.  While it may be true that liberals try to make a point and use things like this to damn conservatism as a racist philosophy, it does not follow that these things are inherently racist in and of themselves.

Diversity is not a bad thing. If we as conservatives embraced diversity and made it an essential part of our own narrative, we would defang those leftists who treat people from diverse backgrounds as "groups".  As a conservative, I embrace our differences and believe we should lift up people of all backgrounds. We should point out what we have gained from every single culture we have absorbed into the American stew. I think melting pot isn't a particularly good metaphor.  A melting part makes a homogeneous liquid of everything put into it - everything the same everywhere.  That's a Communist idea.

The reason I put a picture of Moscow at the top of the page is to show what happens when Marxist socialism makes everything "fair" for all people. It created a melting pot that turned the very city of Moscow, once a colorful vibrant city into a bland, smoky gray and dull misery. We do not want that. Free market capitalism doesn't do that. America has never done that before except in places like Detroit where the socialist, central-planning experiment has been conducted with vigor. The consequences are obvious to anyone who looks hard at the historical evidence.

Freedom of opportunity, freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the right to self-defense have allowed us to become a vast stew (note I did NOT say melting pot). We have chunks of this and that and flavors that mingle throughout the broth. We are a banana split, not a milkshake. We are a five course meal, not a smoothie. The conservative ideal that raises the right of the individual human being to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over everything else can be seen in that Coke commercial.

Let us not let the liberality of the framers of the Constitution be relabeled again. What was liberal in 1776 is now the ideals of those labeled "conservative".  We have seen a shift over 200 years of the opposition as well.  Those who supported government by the elite, central planning and rule by the powerful were once conservatives and sided with the British during the revolution. These same elitist; the same people who once defended the divine rights of kings have simply redefined the nobility as the hereditary smart people. They have appropriated Darwin's "survival of the fittest" to justify the rule of the nation's elite families that for generation after generation attended Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton and went on to become senators, congressmen and presidents.

They have toyed with idea of eugenics to weed out the lower classes, then with Marxism as a tool to pacify the ignorant masses so they would not revolt again as they did in 1776 and endanger the preeminence of the new nobility that the liberal chattering class have fancied themselves to be. They've used Planned Parenthood as a tool to reduce the number of black people and poor people in America through the promotion of abortion generating a death toll of unborn children of more than 57 million. They've used a welfare system that's rigged to discourage the poor from rising above their station where they might make trouble.

They've pounded the middle class with taxation and regulation because the middle class make a disproportionate amount of trouble for our would-be overlords. The don't want to ever see the middle class elect another Reagan as president - someone who threatens change that would derail the steady march of socialism and give hope to the American people again. So they substitute the hope of bread and circuses today for the hope of a better future tomorrow. For the restoration of traditional American values, they substitute change that undermines our lively free-market capitalist economy and turns it into a dismal, over-regulated gradual and seemingly inevitable slide toward socialism.

These are not toy boats. These are full-sized fishing boats.
The Soviet government managed to dry up an entire sea.
That's what a centrally-planned economy will do for you.
Amazingly, we do not seem to be able to learn from this.

Sometimes our fans are our worst enemies where American bedrock conservatism is concerned. The racists, the conspiracy theorists, the paranoid and the ignorant cling to our flanks and weigh us down. We should not fear to shake them off by speaking truth to them. We need only one rule to give us the power to take back our society. It is a golden one and if we practiced that one rule above all others, we would be irresistible. We could take back our country; put it back on the right track.

Sadly, I think it may take the Second Coming to accomplish that. I am not discouraged by this. On the contrary, the more people who come to understand and embrace, freedom, diversity, opportunity and honor, the more fun heaven and the New Earth will be.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King © 2014

Keeping Score: Does It Damage the Precious Snowflakes?

We live in a society that increasingly exalts the individual as supreme in the political, social and religious realms. We exalt, what Bill Whittle calls the "precious snowflakes" to preeminence with the new iron doctrine that everyone is special and everyone must have certain things or be able to do certain things he or she wants to do regardless of their ability. This new system of belief that is being foisted upon us by politicians, educators and (sadly) religious leaders has sprung up in an age where, as C.S. Lewis put it, "There is a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of ceremonies, whose lives are devoted to destroying solitude wherever solitude still exists.  They call it 'taking the young people out of themselves' or 'waking them up' or 'overcoming their apathy'."   

(c) by William Wetmore

We see this most clearly in the physical education classroom. Gym teachers, once the tough, no nonsense, hard-drivers of the education system have increasingly bought into the precious snowflake philosophy of teaching. Many have not only stopped keeping score, but have also stopped even teaching kids how to keep score on the grounds that scoring sends a negative message to children that some of them are better than their fellows and, as we all know, each of us is the same - individuals to be sure, just not too individual.  In this system there are limits to one's individuality.  We are all equal members of the team only in the sense that we are all the same, except, of course for our leaders.  On that issue Lewis further complained that, "If an Augustine, a Vaughan, a Traherne or a Wordsworth should be born in the modern world, the leaders of a youth organization would soon cure him."  The precious snowflake version of individualism is useful if you're planning to dump a lot of six-sidedly uniform individuals into a snowdrift or a socialist collective somewhere. Doing away with scoring of athletic competitions in the name of protecting the feelings of "individuals" is an essential precursor to creating a collectivist state.

There is a time to score and a time not to score according to Solomon.  What he actually said was, "To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven," but it means the same thing.  I worked with abused and emotionally disturbed kids for almost a decade as a therapeutic recreation director at a residential treatment center. I taught the kids to play games like baseball where there was plenty of scoring.  We even fielded a team in the local youth league. We kept score. The kids lost a lot. Some of my colleagues thought this was a bad thing for kids with already low self-esteem.

The kids thrived on it. While on the ball field the kids held themselves to a higher standard of language and behavior than any other team out there. They measured their performance by the scores, yes, but as they improved, they also knew they were making real progress because nobody was playing down for them.

The telling moment one day was when the scheduled team confused their schedule and only half of them showed up for the game. We had the field for a couple of hours, so those that showed up decided to play anyway.  We mixed up the teams and played a joyful game of softball for two hours. The good players were helping teach the poorer players (mostly those on my team) and we had such a blast that we totally forgot to keep score.

I started an equestrian program for emotionally disturbed children that everyone said was insane. They were certain the kids would run away on the horses or get themselves hurt or abuse the animals.  What people don't understand about horses is that they teach their riders as much as their riders teach them.  Horses score you on how well you ride and the consequences are immediate and more than a little disconcerting. 

So, if our best game was unscored and our most therapeutic activity didn't post numbers to a scoreboard, am I saying there is no value to games that have no score?  Not at all. The unscored pickup game I played with my treatment center ball team was probably the most therapeutic of the year, but it would not have been so without its having been set within the framework of the scored games. I'm saying there is no value to games that have no point.  The score of a game may well be whether or not you accomplish a task.  The score for the unscored game was mutual understanding and helping each other learn the game.  The score for horseback riding was a successful ride in which the horse went where you wanted it to.

I took a group of kids out once to the woods to build a trail.  We cut the trail, cleared the brush, lined the trail with logs and then wheeled in sawdust to fill in the trail between the logs.  It took weeks to cut a two mile trail. The "score" was riding down the trail on horseback and knowing we'd built that trail with our own hands. No one got paid. Everybody did what they could. The stronger guys pushed the wheelbarrows. The smaller kids spread the sawdust and pitched branches aside. Those of us who could use machete's and axes cut the branches and brush back.

My kids trying out the new trail.

That's actually a pretty good metaphor for how a team or organization of true individuals actually ought to work. Paul (the apostle, not the Beatle) compared it to the organs of the body.  The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you."  The eye also cannot claim to be the hand for it is not at all the same thing.  Each has his part to play. Each is an individual, distinct and whole, but without whom the rest of the organism would be unable to work.

In the opposite way, the athletics departments of our schools have gone too far by making the individual all important and reducing the lesser players to a supporting role. We elevate our stars to a lofty and privileged stature and in the process the stars forget that they are, or at least should be, part of a team. This also is an essential precursor to the formation of a collectivist state in that this teaches that some should be elevated in status over the mere rabble (Marx called them the proletariat) because of their special and genetically superior genes.  These elevated special people then become the privileged caste who are charged with managing the snowdrift.

"There lies the maddening ambiguity of our faith as it must appear to outsiders," says Lewis.  "It sets its face relentlessly against our natural individualism; on the other hand, it gives back to those who abandon individualism, an eternal possession of their own personal being, even of their bodies."   When at last we renounce both the collectivist's "precious snowflake" notion of "individualism" and the equally destructive notion that some of us are superior by birthright, we may then move on to achieve a state of true selfhood.  When we submit our will to God, we get it back from Him, scrubbed clean of all the old grime and with all the psychological entanglements we've accumulated over a lifetime pruned away. Everything that has all along prevented us from achieving our true individuality is removed and we may, by our own unencumbered free will choose to fit ourselves snugly into the very place in the universe for which we were all along intended.





(c) 2013 by Tom King

Christ and the Collective

by Tom King

One may become a member of the Body of Christ with almost embarrassing ease.  It requires but one act and one small symbolic ritual.  The act required is repentance.  Repentance is not in any sense some sort of self-flagellation. It is not a trip to spiritual boot camp nor even 40 days in the wilderness, although that may be part of your spiritual journey at some point.  We need to be careful not to postpone taking up membership in Christ’s church in order to perform some great work of contrition or some great ritual of joining.  Joining the Body of Christ differs fundamentally from joining the Masonic lodge or the Communist party.  The Body of Christ is not in any sense a collective.

In the Body, we are members, not subjects.  We are, if you accept the idea that we are all created beings, already children of God and called according to His purpose.  We are organs of the Body of Christ, not all copies of one thing.  We are not called to sign up to join as soldiers. We are not called to be trained to sublimate ourselves to some collective state and be turned into another  identical egg in a stack of boxes of eggs all destined to be scrambled in service to the aims of the chef. We simply assume the place in the body that we were created to occupy.  It is not so much a process of molding so much as it is a process of restoration.

 C.S. Lewis* argued that “true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective”.  He compares membership in the Body of Christ to the structure of a family.  A family is made up of unique individuals.  They are not units of “homogeneous classes”.  You cannot interchange one for another.  If grandpa were to die, you couldn’t replace him with a Labrador retriever.  Grandpa has one role in the family. The family dog has another.  Brothers can’t be swapped for sisters as though they were all just “children” with identical functions.  You can’t even swap one brother for another.  All members of the family are unique; almost a species unto themselves.

We instinctively recognize the family structure as the “way things ought to be” – the ideal way to organize human beings.  Look at the myths and stories we tell ourselves.  The best ones are always about groups in which each individual is a separate, unique, but essential part of the whole.  The Wind in the Willows unites a Badger, a Mole and a Water Rat.  Star Wars unites a princess, a Jedi-in-training, a pirate, a stuffy robot, his comical sidekick, a teacher and a “walking carpet” that communicates by howling.  Every member of the Dirty Dozen has his own unique function.  Even Christ chose as his disciples, not identical acolytes, but an incredibly diverse band of fishermen, fanatics, theologians, tax collectors and accountants.  In none of the stories, that so appeal to us, does any member sublimate him or herself to the collective.  They simply work together in service to a common goal.  Each has his own part to play. Not one could be easily replaced.  None are members of a class. If you remove one member, as Lewis puts it, “You have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.”

The Body of Christ is a unity of individuals.  This idea of the unique individual as part of a motley crew of rugged individualists is enshrined in the US Constitution and in Scripture as the model for all human endeavours.  We are not designed to be trained to robotic sameness, pumped full of ideology all spouting the same talking points and shoved into whatever box the collective deems appropriate for us. We are not part of a class that can be treated as though it were a chunk of cheese or a block of wood.  We are not blacks, Hispanics, conservatives, “the” poor, “the” rich or the ruling class. The central planners would put an end to individualism for individualism is seen as a threat to progress.  Individuals make for too many pieces on the chess board to push around.

By progress, the great leaders of our day mean the evolution of the people of this world into a vast homogeneous soup. The collective is a soup in which every man, woman and child is a bit of the broth which can be seasoned, stirred and heated into whatever flavor the planners happen to favor this week.  Individualism is anathema to the collectivist.  

The very existence of the solitary, independent-thinking individual is a threat to the collectivist ambition.  That is why membership in collectives requires extensive prerequisites.  There must be relentless training to subdue any tendency to think independently. Art, music and writing are encouraged, but only such art, music and writings which reflect the talking points of the collective.  To remain a member of the collective, one must perform frequent ritual obeisance to the collective throughout his life. The almost comic displays of “patriotism” and devotion to the great leader that one sees in places like North Korea are not an aberration, but are rather the logical conclusion of the collectivist vision.  

Where Christian faith is all about faith and trust and being secure as to one’s place in the universe, one is never really secure as a member of a collective. Someone is always looking over your shoulder, searching for telltale signs of individualism that must be rooted out.  The threat of being cast out or punished by the collective for unorthodoxy is always there hanging over your head.

The only ritual required to join the Body of Christ is baptism.  It is a once for all ceremony. It is a public declaration that I am unclean and would be washed and made new by Christ. It is submission, not to a denomination, a particular church group or even to a set of doctrines, but to Almighty God Himself and no other.  Anyone who says differently is organizing a collective with himself and not God as its head.

Christ did not die for a society, a political party or for a nation-state, nor even for a church.  He died for each individual soul, whether that soul chooses to accept the gift or not. To the secular-collectivists, communists, progressives, socialists and statists, Christianity would have to seem like an almost militant assertion of individuality.  To defeat this pernicious movement toward uncontrollable individual liberty, the collectivists must accuse the Body of Christ of their own sin, that of suppressing individuality.

In this the collectivists are having some success, because without experiencing it for oneself, it is easy to misunderstand what it means to be a “servant” of God.  Christianity must seem “maddeningly ambiguous” C.S. Lewis pointed out.*  Christian faith seems to come out against our own natural individualism in that the practice of that faith requires that we abandon our own “natural” will to God. The Apostle Paul described the natural will as doing what you do not want to do because you are compelled to do it by your old nature.  

What the secular-collectivists do not and cannot comprehend unless they experience a relationship with God themselves, is that, in exchange for our giving of our old “self” to Him, God cleans the old self, repairs the damage, polishes it up and gives it back to us.  We then are true individuals as we were meant to be; free from all the old urges, compulsions, terrors and cravings that living in a corrupt world had placed upon us and once used to control us. We become, in Christ, new people who can freely choose to do what is right because they want to and because they are no longer bound by fear, no longer deluded by old programming and no longer weak and able to be manipulated.  

To the leaders of the collective, the existence of such people must be terrifying indeed. 

© 2013 Tom King – Puyallup, WA

*From “Weight of Glory” by CS Lewis.

California Declares for Governor Moonbeam!

California has definitely proved it is the land of fantasy.  As business and people who actually want to work for a living by choice flee the land of pixie dust politics, the rats rejoice as the ship goes down. The only thing that would have made it perfect would be if Prop 19 had passed.  The resulting mass immigration of pot-heads would have been spectacular and sent the state into an even more massive downward spiral, if such a thing can be imagined.

If you have recently fled to Texas from California, welcome.  You have found your weblog in Texas!

I'm just sayin'

Tom King - Tyler, TX

Divide and Conquer: Why Progressives Are Suddenly "Getting Religion"

I do hate to come off like the gloomiest prophet ever, but anyone who really believes that Jesus is coming (as do 44% of Americans including Nancy Pelosi, if you believe her recent speech to the Catholic Community Conference), knows that things will get very bad before that happens. When I was younger, I used to wonder how in the world some of those woes and disasters forecast in prophecy would ever come to pass in an enlightened Unites States.

It's looking to me more and more likely, that our country will soon become a very different place and that we will lose the liberties that we Americans have long cherished.

So, how will it happen?

How will we become the socialist nation the progressives in our current government wish to build, especially when Republicans have an historic lead in the polls? At the risk of giving progressives ideas, I think this is how it can happen - indeed, I think it may already be in the works.

The progressives have a major problem. They don't have enough voters to survive in power after this upcoming election. The problem is how to win more supporters.  The answer?

Get religion!

Nancy Pelosi, at a Catholic Community Conference recently, made an emotional speech in which she claimed she governed according to "the Word". She said that  ‘'The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.’ And that’s the great mystery of our faith. He will come again. He will come again. So, we have to make sure we’re prepared to answer in this life, or otherwise, as to how we have measured up.” In the video, she is obviously uncomfortable saying all this religious stuff in public, but she goes on later in the speech to challenge Catholic bishops and cardinals to preach in favor of the administration's policy on immigration reform.  She said, we can't just send the 12 million illegal immigrants living in this country home or put them in jail. She said we need to make citizens of them.

Why?

"So they can vote Democrat" is the unspoken reason for creating 12 million new Americans. Simple Christian charity is the public excuse. Maintenance of power is the real reason.

Unfortunately for the Dems, even if they passed new immigration law today, the progressives couldn't have those new voters on-line in time.  So what's a progressive socialist to do in order to maintain power?  Here's what I think will happen. They will have to give something to a significant voting block that will win them votes.

• They have the liberal Protestants.
• They have the trade unionists.
• They have the environmentalists.
• They have the anti-Christians, academics and pseudo-intellectuals.
• They have Hollywood. 
• They have the progressive/socialist/liberal coalition.

The holdouts?

• Roman Catholics
• Conservatives and The Religious Right (The Tea Party coalition)

What can progressives give these two groups that won't alienate the groups they already have?  I think there's an answer.  Both the Catholic Church and the Religious Right have a real problem with the abortion issue, one not likely to be compromised on by either side.  BUT, there is one thing that both the Roman Catholic church and the Religious Right have both been calling for that the progressives could give them. I think Nancy Pelosi's sudden religious fervor is a hint at the left's willingness to reach across the gulf to exploit a perceived weakness in their opponents.


I think the blue laws are coming back. 

For those of you too young to remember the blue laws, back in the nineteenth century, state and local governments passed laws forbidding businesses from operating on Sunday. Though so called blue laws were clearly designed to support Christian sensibilities of the time, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they do not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Although most Sunday closing laws have been repealed in the past 50 years, there are still some laws on the books that ban the sale of alcohol on Sunday with no more justification than to appease the Christian community's sense of propriety. Two groups recently have called for the reinstatement of Sunday laws. Want to guess who?

• Roman Catholic Leaders - the Pope no less!
• Elements of the Religious Right - led by the likes of Pat Robertson and other evangelicals.

Pope John Paul II released an encyclical in May 1998 calling on all nations to enact national Sunday Laws. The encyclical, "Dies Domini" was written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI and enjoins Roman Catholics to work toward such laws. The Encyclical further explains that Sunday observance is a mark of the Catholic church's authority to change the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday. How better to skirt the abortion issue than to enforce Roman Catholic ideas of the ultimate authority by the church by making Sunday observance the law of the land. 

Evangelicals like Pat Robertson and members of the National Council of Churches have for years been calling for dropping the whole idea of separation of church and state in favor of enacting "Christian" federal laws like Blue Laws, which establish Sunday as a national day of rest. A recent backlash on the Right against the principle of separation of church and state sets the stage for the President and progressive supporters to "reach out" to conservatives.


At the same time, support for blue laws by trade unions, law enforcement groups and workers rights groups, can be appealed to on the grounds that "blue laws serve valid secular purposes, such as providing a uniform day of rest and reducing workloads on police departments, since most blue laws restrict alcohol sales, reducing law-enforcement problems". Supporters say blue laws, though religious in origin, are now justified by secular and economic purposes. Trade unionists and progressives would probably agree.

Not all Evangelicals agree with Robertson's calls for Sunday laws. Dr. James Dobson says such legislation would be " unconstitutional and an offense to millions of Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists in our nation."  Hard conservatives would never move left on an issue as essential to preserving religious liberty in the US as is the ability to purchase ammunition to preserving second amendment rights).  Note that a Sunday closing law would also appeal to anti-Semitic elements on both the left and among racist crackpots who claim to be conservatives, because it prefers the Christian to the 'Jewish' Sabbath.

The offering of Sunday rest legislation at the federal level would delight a solid core of the Religious Right who favor establishment of "Christian principles" in government in the U.S..  It would also appall economic and constitutional conservatives and, I fear, could successfully fracture the loosely organized coalition that exists in the Tea Party movement today.  "Divide and conquer" as the Romans used to say (Divide et impera).

Now, wouldn't that be special?

And boy, do I hope I'm wrong about this! Sort of.....

Tom King - Tyler, TX
(c) 6/1/2010