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

World History for Dummies

A self-described "...keen follower and an avid reader of World History" posted this claim. He said that if Columbus hadn't discovered America and the Europeans had never come there'd be no United States and therefore the following amazing things would have happened (he even includes "links" to prove his point:

We would have more of:

1. Oil because US tops the list of Oil consumers of the world.Top Oil Consumers 
2. More electricity because US is the 2nd largest consumer of electricity. Electricity - consumption - Country Comparison - TOP 10 
3. Hopefully more money because FRS (that's the Federal Reserve System for you non-conspiracy theorists) wouldn't exist.
   

..and less of

1. Wars .. don't ask me why. 
2. Obesity because 32% of general american population is obese. 
3. Weapons of mass destruction. Countries with the biggest nuclear weapon stockpiles 
4. Oh, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have have never happened and generations of victims wouldn't have been suffering.

He's kidding right?

This simple soul (we'll call him Vishal Gorgia) pretty much figured out from his keen following of world history that history and economics is a zero sum game? If one bunch of folks have more, they must have taken it from someone else.  Let's look at his points

1. We'd have more oil because the US wouldn’t be using it? Really? Well if you follow actual history instead of that stuff you got in Marxism 101, you'd realize that the US wouldn’t be drilling and refining oil either, so actually - less oil. It would be safely stored underground and we'd still be exploiting horses, mules and camels as beasts of burden and with the crappy transportation system, lots more people would be starving and poor.
2. There would be more electricity for everyone? So, Vishal, without the United States, all those power plants that generate all the electricity we have today, would have what? Magically popped up out of the ground and started generating electricity. Then the magic transportation fairies would ship free buckets of electricity to the third world in their little wooden boats? 
3. We'd have more money?  How exactly? Would the magic money fairy have kept printing it up and sending it to where exactly? I guess the magic transportation fairies could have bundled it up and shipped it along with those buckets of electricity in their little wooden boats to all the poor people of the world for free instead of hoarding it up the magical Federal Reserve caves like we do now.

So we then would, without a United States we would have less of the following:

1. Fewer wars? Don't ask him why, Vishal says. He just knows since, as we all know, the United States starts most wars for no reason at all.  And by default the peaceful natives of the Americas (or whatever they wound up calling it), would live peaceful lives, sitting around campfires and eating Vegan burgers and smoking peace pipes full of pot. Even a cursory study of history should have given Mr. Gorgia a little actual history. The peaceful fantasy Native Americans he imagines were, in fact, professional warriors. Why else did all the men call themselves "warriors". It's not because they were community organizers. These warriors were busily murdering each in vast numbers vast numbers long before Columbus showed up. So, fewer wars? Probably not.
2. No obesity? Hey, Vishal, you did finally get Michelle Obama's hobby horse into the discussion.  And you’re probably right. The native Americans would likely have been much thinner. Famine and slow starvation will do that for you and there was a lot of that in Meso-America and on the plains, mountains, and in the forests of North America.
3. And no weapons of mass destruction? Okay, maybe there would not have been nukes (unless some arms dealer shipped them over from Nazi Germany). As to mass destruction, it's unlikely the New World would have been safe from that. They already had a good start on mass destruction techniques before Columbus got here. Next time you run down to Mexico take a look at the Aztec pyramids around Mexico City. They have channels cut in them just to carry off all the blood from their highly efficient human sacrificial system. It’s estimated that 250,000 people were sacrificed on the Aztec altars in just one year on the altars in Tenochtitlan. The Incas weren't much less bloodthirsty. They killed one in five of their children by abandoning them on cold mountainsides, tossing them into holes or burying them as sacrifices to their gods. And the Mayans, the calendar guys, made bloody human sacrifice and cannibalism into a religious art form. 
4. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki would never have happened? Instead, invading armies would have fought long and bloody wars, destroying innocent civilians and their goods and property, raping, pillaging and committing genocide without fear since no one could put a stop to it. The world would have belonged to the thug with the most soldiers and weapons and war would have been even more hideous a thing. Actually, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all out war has become an unthinkable thing, leading to the most peaceful half century in human history (unless you lived in a communist country where they starved, executed, tortured and imprisoned you if you argued with the dear leaders).

Obviously, Vishal thinks the USA is the fount of all things bad in the world. I don’t know what history you are reading, but I suspect it should be relegated to the fiction section of the library. The United States is pretty much the only powerful nation in history that didn't use it's power for empire building. Instead we rescued Europe from tyrants twice. We protected South Korea from a brutal North Korean invasion. We tried to do the same in Vietnam, but the thing was run by Democrats, so that got botched. We rescued Grenada from Cuban invasion, Panama from a corrupt dictator, Kuwait from invasion by Iraq, and pretty much everybody from an insane dictator who wanted to find a way to blow Israel off the map if he could and reestablish the Babylonian empire. We also went after the people who attacked us on 9/11.

And the United States didn't build an empire though we had the power to do so. We didn't keep Kuwait after we liberated it. We didn't keep Iraq after we defeated them. We left the Koreans and even the Vietnamese with their own government. We took the Philippines from Spain and then we liberated them again from the Japanese and gave them their independence. Even when we annexed the American Southwest, we paid Mexico for the privilege. We're still paying reparations to the Native Americans in the USA. There is hardly an appropriations bill that goes out that doesn't have millions earmarked for the tribes. And some of those wars were started by Native Americans so there is blame on both sides. The territories we gained in stray wars throughout our history have all chosen to stay with us. Some we'd like to get rid of but they won't go. We could have a world empire by now and exploit the heck out of them. Instead we let them rule themselves and send them billions in aid.

We've been the most peaceful powerful nation in world history (you know Vashal, that stuff you so keenly follow). We have stopped a lot of bullies from conquering and killing their neighbors. Some of them were as evil as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas. Had the Meso-Americans had better killing equipment, they might have done as well as the Nazis. They certainly tried.

I think Vishal needs to go back and read some more history. He should probably read something outside of the fantasy section, though.

© by Tom King

Canines, Felines and Political Preference

Cats are socialists. Dogs are libertarians.

• - A dog will die to protect you. The cat will hide till it's all over.
• - Your dog is glad you're home. The cat wonders why it took you so long to get there and why his supper bowl is still empty.
• - Your dog will bring you your slippers. The cat will pee in them if you still haven't filled his supper bowl.
• - Your dog will fetch the ball. The cat plays with the ball till it rolls under something and then will sit and wait for you to fetch it.
•  - Your dog wants you to feel good about yourself. Your cat wants you to make him feel good about himself. 
• - Dogs have family. Cats have staff.

 © 2017 by Tom King

The Great Deception - The "Progressive" Version

I love my liberal friends. They are an unending source of material for my blogs. The other day I said that it looked to me as if the Democrats had mistaken George Orwell's cautionary tale, "1984" for a how to run a government manual. My friend corrected me and said that I must have meant the Republicans. Sadly, this lovely honest man really believes this. 

I am reminded of how the devil is able to lie outright and usually tells us he's going to lie to us before he even does. Somehow, we get so wrapped up in the details of the lie and allow our good feelings about what we are being told and our strong desire that what we are being told should be true to over-rule our heads in the matter. When Satan told Eve that she would be like a god, she was so excited about that idea, she missed the first lie (Thou shalt not surely die). With the consequences of disobedience clear out of her head, she followed her feelings. Her feelings over-ruled the logical part of her thinking so that she also missed the ethical problem that should have got in the way of her trying to be a god.
 
My friend has perhaps forgotten some things we learned about Democrats and their agenda over the past eight years.

1. It was Democrats who were using the IRS to punish churches and conservative organizations which disagreed with the president? Locally we had mayors and city councils punishing conservative groups and demanding to see the sermon notes of local pastors to insure they weren't speaking ill of certain new local bathroom ordinances, the mayor and council had passed. These local officials partnered up with the Internal Revenue Service to threaten church's nonprofit status for daring to dissent.
2. It was Democrats who passed the Affordable Care Act (a misnomer if there ever was one) and told us we couldn't see what was in it until they passed it. The ACA, as we discovered after they passed it, not only gave the IRS access to our health care records, but also gave them the power to fine us if we didn't buy health insurance even if we couldn't afford it? 
3. It was the Democrat administration that sent in government agencies to arrest ranchers and private citizens (and in one case actually shoot private citizens) in their attempts to appropriate more land into federal ownership. 
4. It was Democrats in Oregon, whose very Democrat state government staked a claim to the very rain that falls from the sky and has fined and imprisoned people who use such rain on their own land. Oregon and other Democrat states have threatened people who even try to catch some rain as it runs off their roof into a rain barrel.
5. It was Democrat president Obama who wanted to create a domestic military force with weapons, tools and power to equal that of the US Military for the purpose of policing citizens who might become unruly? Barak Obama, during his administration, actually started putting a couple of battalions of soldiers into training groups for this purpose - to intervene domestically in a president-declared "emergency", something that is in direct violation of the Posse Comatatus rule put in place by Congress over 100 years ago specifically to prevent the Army from being used as a domestic police force (for obvious reasons).

So many liberals really don't understand conservatives if they think we favor an Orwellian society. In 1984, Orwell posited a large centrally planned collectivist government that spied upon its citizens, altered history, news stories, and even the language in order to preserve its power. I'm a conservative and sometime Republican. That's anathema to me. Like my fellows, I believe in these principles:

• Smaller government
• Individual rights and personal liberty
• Free market capitalism
• Local control of schools, charities and infrastructure (other than interstates and similar essential national infrastructures.
• I believe in the first amendment including free speech, religious liberty
• I believe in the second amendment which guarantees personal gun ownership rights
• I believe parents should have education choice. In that respect I am pro-choice.
• I believe that no one has the right to deny another life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. This means I cannot legislate another person's morals. I might however resist attempts to legally change the meaning of words for the purposes of deliberately altering culture. I also don't think you should be able to murder a human being for your own convenience. I define a human being as any creature with human DNA and a beating heart.
• I and other Conservatives are strict Constitutionalists. We believe the Constitution limits the powers of the state for good reason.

Having associated with Democrats and talked to them, sat in on their councils, read their books and listened to them speak, here, I have learned that this seems to be what they believe, at least according to their own public relations:

• Democrats espouse collectivism, or the idea that the individual should serve the state which, in progressive ideology, IS the collective.
• Democrats support population controls and the right of one person to take the life of another person so long as that person hasn't safely left the womb of its mother. Some Democrats don't even stop at birth, espousing infanticide up to two years old. It's a different definition of what a person is than the one I have. That's a tougher issue to address than most, but I'm certainly on the other side of killing humans just because they haven't got themselves born yet.
• Democrats have and do support limits on free speech through things like the Fairness Doctrine, which didn't guarantee fairness at all by the way. It simply forced the media to artificially balance their programs so that things nobody wants to watch or listen to were given equal time or better no matter what the public itself preferred. It is significant that the only media the US government now supports is NPR and NPTV, both of which lean hard to the left. This is an artifact of years of Democrat rule. The Democrats have long used government programs as a propaganda tool to support the progressive socialist agenda. The DNC even got caught manipulating the election in favor of one of their candidates over the other. The also got caught colluding with mainstream media journalists by handing them talking points for their news stories that supported the Democrat narrative. Obama even tried to shut down the Voice of America because it was too conservative and said nice things about our American culture and system of government to other countries.
• Democrats favor federal control of charities, schools, healthcare, the economic market, education, speech, religious liberty, and rights to assemble for redress of grievances, unless said group agrees with the state.  One federal agency even got caught trying to manipulate the appointment of church officials. 
• Democrats support doing away with the second amendment and initiating a massive gun confiscation program. I know they haven't been able to do it so far, but it's definitely on their ideological wish list and that troubles me. 
• Democrats complain that the Constitution only tells the government what it cannot do and doesn't say what the government ought to do. Many advocate adding the above mentioned functions to the Constitution as a kind of "Government's Bill of Rights". 
•  Democrats dream of building walls around cities to keep the citizens from roaming around freely, but not around our borders to protect them. I have sat in on meeting of Democrats and environmentalists who dream of building walls not around our borders, but around our cities to prevent anyone from going into wilderness areas (to take pictures and stuff) without the proper government permits. What is being planned by Democrats is truly Orwellian,

I draw every word of this from things Democrats have said to me and done, written (I read their stuff), or speechified about. I've sat in their meetings when I was doing transportation advocacy. They were very honest about wanting gasoline to become unaffordable so that the majority of Americans would be limited to public transportation. One Democrat in the group, in a sudden burst of honesty, commented that if people had to use public transit, their movements would be easier to track by authorities. Big Brother is precisely what the progressive Democrats want. What that inevitably works out to in states where government is powerful and highly centralized is a return to a virtual monarchy (see Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin). The progressive ideal is a massive oppressive government by elite party members and a single class proletariat. A worker's paradise may sound pretty in theory and feel good to talk about, but so far, every one of them has worked out to be collective misery shared equally.

I think the free market system and the Constitution's almost obsessive support of individual liberty has done a good job of treating its citizens fairly, outstripping almost any other nation on Earth. Nine out of ten Americans have an income that is in the top 50% of incomes worldwide. The biggest health problem our poor have is obesity.

The frantic efforts by progressive Democrats to convince us that we need massive change in how our government works is nothing more than a power grab by a socialist elite class, seeking to create a kind of political version of the old European nobility. The Republicans are not without sin in this regard and are as tempted by power as their colleagues across the aisle. This is why I formally left the Republican party when they allowed the Democrats to force them to nominate Donald Trump.

Turns out, Trump may actually turn into a conservative after all. If that happens, well and good. Trump may buy us time to finish the work of spreading the gospel to the entire world. By challenging the forces of international Marxism perhaps the forces of global socialism will be stalled in their advance. That could be a very good thing. I am praying that Trump continues to do the right thing and that Americans of both political persuasions can refrain from shooting and suing one another until we see how this will all work out. Obama had his chance and he left 19 million Americans pushed out of the workforce and not even counted among the unemployed. So much for the worker's paradise. Trump deserves his chance at policy-making too. Who knows. He may show us something better than collective misery.

God go with him.

© 2017 by Tom King

Postscript:  It is 2021 and Trump has been ousted by what I can only describe as a Democrat coup de' tat. What with vicious media attacks, racial attacks, coordinated riots, looting and violence, election fraud, and a propaganda campaign against the president not seen since 1930s Germany, it appears the Cloward-Piven idea that Obama loved but failed to successfully accomplish, is being revived. Francis Fox Piven, co-author of the Cloward-Piven proposal was a regular visitor to the Obama White House. Her idea was to do so much government spending that the American economy collapses and under cover of this "emergency", to institute hard socialism, theorizing that Americans will accept it if they are afraid not to. Obama failed, but the Dems never give up. We now have a senile old Democrat as our figurehead president; one whom the leftist Democrats manipulate like a puppet on a string; a president that can hardly complete a coherent sentence, and whose only agenda seems to be undoing the gains we made under President Trump. We've once more got rampant inflation, massive gender confusion, open borders with hundreds of thousands pouring in without visible means of support, unemployment, an epidemic gaining new life, businesses (and buildings) collapsing, and an economy teetering on disaster, all the while his party is spending money in a manner that would shame a drunken sailor. And they are calling it progress. Jesus needs to come soon or he may owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.

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.

 

The Soon-To-Be Lost Art of the Gentleman's Disagreement

Sometimes best friends are united by their disagreement over politics and religion. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a culture where old friends could sit on the porch and argue politics like gentlemen, share a tall cold glass of sweet tea and enjoy the back and forth of friendly verbal sparring.

One wonders who it is that has convinced us all that anyone who disagrees with us is our enemy. We live in a nation founded on the recognition that each of us is different.

We have fifty states so that you can find one that suits your political, social and economic clothes simply by moving a few hundred miles or so. We put limits on our government and balanced the three branches so that none of them may declare themselves absolute power and that we all might agree to disagree, preserve the right to be who and what we are and continue to live in peace.

The greatest threat to peace and liberty today is the insidious belief that anyone who disagrees with me needs to be shut up. Storm's a comin' folk!

Tom King
© 2015

SNL Pokes the Gun Culture Bear

Saturday Night Live took a poke at the pro-gun culture last weekend. I don't watch Saturday Night Live anymore. It stopped being funny ages ago as this video demonstrates. I knew about it because it kind of blew up on the social media site Banjohangout.  Now we have a strict, no politics or religion policy on the Banjo Hangout, but because banjo players range politically from hard left liberals like Pete Seeger to serious conservatives like that kid from "Deliverance", it's kind of hard to enforce that rule, so if we keep it relatively polite the moderators don't kick us off for the most part.

Mostly where I come from, guns reside quietly in gun cabinets and gun safes to be taken out for hunting or practice at the range or in case a burglar breaks into the house. Hardly anybody thought about carrying a pistol around on their bodies when they go to Walmart until fairly recently. After all, the Wild West was over we thought. At least that's how it used to be.

When I was in high school, some of my friends used to carry rifles and shotguns displayed in plain sight in gun racks behind the seats of their pickups. I don't remember anyone being militant about it. It was just something guys did out in rural areas and small country towns. Then, when that became illegal, things started to change and gun owners started getting more defensive.  Then, as the number of holdups, muggings and robberies we saw on TV seemed to skyrocket, it felt like the Wild West had come back with a vengeance. Then, as the anti-gun movement became more aggressive about "getting guns off the street", I noticed that all of a sudden there's a lot more ammo being stored in those gun cabinets and gun safes than there used to be. Kind of like everybody's expecting something bad to happen.

After the last two presidential elections, gun stores all over East Texas sold out of a lot of basic kinds of ammo (shotgun shells, 357 magnum, 45 caliber, and 38 caliber and most popular rifle ammunition) in just a few days. You literally couldn't find the most popular sizes of ammunition for weeks at a time and when new stuff came in, it sold out overnight. A lot of gun stores put people on a list and took a deposit on ammo in advance of its arrival from the manufacturers. Gives you an idea of the climate created by the militant anti-gun movement.

My neighbors may be mocked by Saturday Night Live, dismissed as kooks by the press and characterized as gun nuts by politicians, but they are well armed, especially in rural areas. Choosing which home to rob is kind of a crap shoot and given the shortage of anti-gun folk in the region, the odds are really pretty poor that you're not going to walk into a hail of gunfire if you're burgling a place. And after you are shot, there's not a lot of love for you in the legal system as it's really tough to seat a jury of 12 people who have any problems shootin' outlaws.

A couple of years ago, an 80 year old man noticed that two guys had pulled up to his neighbor's house in a box truck and were emptying the place of valuables. He'd been asked to "watch the place", so he went over, got the drop on the boys and got on the phone to 911. Then on the recording, you hear him tell one of the young men to put down the gun and promising him if the gun came up, the young man was going down. The gun apparently came up and the young gentleman and his friend both went down.  The grand jury refused to prosecute the old man under the East Texas tradition that there are some folk that just need killing.

All that to say this. The "gun problem" is going to be tough to solve even in areas where there is a heavy concentration of anti-gun activism. I moved to Washington State, thinking I'd be surrounded by unarmed anti-gun progressives. I'm an easy-going, tolerant sort, so I didn't mind so much.  What I found was that outside of Seattle and Olympia, the denizens of rural Washington are armed quite as heavily as East Texans, if not more so. There are a lot of AR-15s and home built/modified weapons out there in the Washingtonian hinterlands. Many of these are of a firepower that would give anyone pause about getting aggressive with one of these sweet-tempered, church-going folks.  

The thing is, they do love their families and are well-prepared to defend them. Gun control is going to be a hard sell with them. Given the number of drug-related multiple murders and famous serial killings in this area, it's hard to blame them for wanting to have a handy means of self-defense. I went to a men's prayer breakfast just after I started going to my church up here and after the amens had been said, me and an assortment of church deacons and elders went over to the gun show at the fairground. Apparently the head deacon was building a fully automatic AR-15 and needed some parts.
 
We also have some unhappy bears up here too. They sometimes come into neighborhoods and have been known to eat the family cat or dog on occasion. We are fond of our dogs and kitties, so we need to be able to scare the bears off sometimes.  A fully automatic AR-15 would just about do that!

Just sayin'

Tom
© 2015

So Who Owns the Rain?

Gary Harrington, of Jackson County, Oregon was jailed and fined a couple of years ago for collecting rainwater. In court, Oregon officials declared unequivocally that rainwater is considered the "property of the state." Libertarians, conservatives and more than a few permaculturists (sustainable gardening/farming enthusiasts) are outraged. As it turns out they are more outraged by the government claiming to own the rain that falls on your property than they are by Mr. Harrington's treatment, but, after all, it's the principle of the thing.

Admittedly Mr. Harrington was collecting rather a lot of rainwater and it wasn't in barrels behind his house. Harrington had constructed 3 ponds on his 170 acre land which among them hold 13 million gallons of water. None of these ponds are situated on streams. The water comes from rain which actually falls on Harrington's property and from snow melt - also from snow on his land.

The big deal that sent everyone through the roof was the statement in court by Oregon officials that the State of Oregon owns all the rain that falls on your property and that if you want to use any significant amount of it, you have to get a permit from the state.  Given that streams and rivers and town water supplies depend on runoff from the land, one can kind of understand why the state or county might want to not lose 170 acres of it. But of course, in trying to make everything fair, the government almost creates more problems than it solves.

The way the law reads, you can only collect rain off of hard surfaces like concrete driveways, rooftops and such, but once it hits the ground, it's no longer yours to do with as you please. According to director of the Oregon Water Resources Department, Tom Paul, "Oregon law says all of the water in the state of Oregon is public water and if you want to use that water, either to divert it or to store it, you have to acquire a water right from the state of Oregon before doing that activity."

Always fearful of government overreach, people on both the right AND left wonder, "What's next?" Sunshine falls on your property. Are they going to charge you a fee for the sun that you use if you put up solar panels? How about the wind? Does Oregon own the wind? Will they charge you a fee for wind usage if you put up a wind charger? 

Here's one issue where we can hook up with the sustainable permaculture people, not a notably conservative lot and give them a little love and maybe get their votes next election. After all, it's liberals that are pushing this kind of thing, not conservatives. We think your home's your castle and rain, sun and wind belong to you. We don't like government overreach either.

If it had been a matter of Harrington arbitrarily blocking up a stream and depriving those downstream from free access to water, I can see the state's getting involved. In the Harrington case, Gary is a cranky old guy who blew off orders by the county to destroy his ponds and kept refilling them. This is more about government authority than it is about water. With his ponds full, Harrington's land is likely putting as much or more water downstream than it was when the pond acreage was covered in water-absorbing trees and grasses. Over time, the pond bottoms develop a kind of seal that holds water from being leaked out too quickly.  Water still percolates through to the water table, but even more goes downstream through overflow when the ponds are full.

Ironically, if Mr. Harrington had paved his land with concrete, destroying plants and trees and THEN collected the runoff, he wouldn't be in trouble. It's allowed for you to collect water from nonpermeable surfaces. So, since Mr H continued to allow much of the rainfall that hit his property to  to sink into the soil and down into the water table, he isn't allowed to collect any of what's left for his own use without paying for a permit and receiving permission to build his ponds, Actually Harrington did get a permit, but after the ponds were built, the state rescinded his permit.

Okay, so answer this question for me:  "If Oregon owns the rainfall, and if excessive amounts of Oregon State's rain falls and floods my property and destroys my home, can I sue the state for damages?"  After all, if my property, say my car for instance, crashes into your home, I have to pay the damages. I can do that because the state of Oregon forces me to buy car insurance in exchange for the privilege of driving Oregon's lovely roads.  Should Oregon then, be forced to buy flood insurance for the whole state, just in case THEIR rain wrecks my house?

This might be a fun case to present to the Supreme Court.  A more sensible ruling would be to allow the state to control streams and established waterways and prevent irresponsible damming up of shared water sources and leave rain which falls on your property to the property owner.  If you have a stream on your property, you wouldn't be allowed to dam it up, but in Oregon, with as much rain and annual flooding as they get, it seems likely they could use all the flood control ponds they could get. Harrington has even built three of them at his own expense.  

Oregon is not alone in claiming the rain as government property. Colorado does Oregon one better, claiming a right, not to just the rain after it falls, but to all the moisture in the atmosphere. There you can get in trouble for collecting rain off your roof.  The Colorado Division of Water Resources makes it clear:  “Colorado water law declares that the state of Colorado claims the right to all moisture in the atmosphere that falls within its borders and that ‘said moisture is declared to be the property of the people of this state, dedicated to their use pursuant’ to the Colorado constitution. Interestingly, in Colorado some folk have "senior" rights to the people's water, which, I think, means they acquired them before the Colorado legislature turned into a politburo. If only you have junior rights, you're just out of luck.

It's an interesting issue to say the least. I should think it would provide some real entertainment if it took a run through the Supreme Court.  But then what do I know. I'm just waiting for Jesus to come, tear it all down and start over with a New Earth, where God gives to all freely and we don't have junior and senior water rights to fight over.

(c) 2015 by Tom King

Dystopia or Utopia: How's That Working Out for You?

© 2014 - The Giver

Have you noticed who the villains in the latest dystopian books and films for young people have been - Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, Maze Runner, Elysium, et al?
Each of these films casts a large intrusive, control-everything, would-be utopian government as the bad guys. As the Meryl Streep character said in "The Giver", When we give people a choice, they always choose wrong!" Free will always gives those who would rule problems. So the solution virtually every government comes to eventually is to remove all choice from people whether by laws, repression, drugs or brainwashing. Humans can't seem to come up with any better cure than brute force for the problem of free will - at least not those humans who tend to make up governments.

I've only found one solution that cures the problem of free will and it does so by giving us a choice. Joshua articulated that choice to the children of Israel, "Choose you this day, whom you will serve......"

Making that choice leaves you changed. Making the right choice leaves you changed to a better person; one fit to live forever, free and able to truly choose without prejudice, habit, ignorance or confusion to get in the way.

It's an incredible thing, but I think our passage through the crucible of Earth where self service (also known as sin) is allowed to work itself out to its inevitable conclusion, is the only way such a change may be wrought in creatures with true free will. Lucifer thought the Earth needed a prince. Turns out, all it really needed was love. Nothing more complicated than that.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Tom

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