Must Be That Common Core Math They're Teaching Our Kids Now

Democrat Math at it's finest!
Do the arithmetic and show your work 

This thing is going around the left-wing social media. I think it must be a low IQ test! Either that or some common core nightmare. Here's the deal; the straight poop if you will.

1. Common sense - 180 billion minus 172 billion equals 8 billion to give away. If you give a billion to each person you could make 8 people billionaires. That's all.

2. Regular Math - 180b-172b=8b
    8b(dollars)/8b(people) = $1 (each)

3. Real World Application -  Suppose you did send everybody in the world a dollar. Unless they gave you their bank account number you'd have to mail the dollar to them. In the US alone that would cost 75 cents last time I mailed a stamp. That leaves everyone with a quarter. In other parts of the world, international mail rates would require much more than a dollar to send the dollar AND think of how many people on how many computers would you need to find addresses for all those people. Admin costs alone would require billions. Sorry folks, Elon can't afford to give you all a billion dollars or for that matter split it up among you all.

4. Economic Reality - If everyone had a billion dollars, there would be instant economic disaster. Who would go to work for anything like what they are being paid now? Instantly there would be no workers. Why go to work if you actually were a billionaire? Truckers would stop trucking. Farmers stop farming. Factories, grocery stores, police departments, defense industries, the military and everything else would grind to a stop. Inflation would be nightmarish because you have billions of dollars chasing virtually no goods or services. A Big Mac would run you millions if not tens of millions of dollars even if you could get someone to serve you. If everyone had a billion dollars, the dollars would be worth nothing.

Time grows short.
The signs are there to see!

How stupid do the leftist propagandists think we are? It's obvious from the traction this is getting in social media from the progressive fan base that if they just are hanging out with their own people and judging the rest of us by that standard, the left clearly thinks we are all stupid based on the average intellect of their own supporters.

Lest anyone think I'm calling them stupid, I'm not. Marxism/socialism/progressivism/Democrat philosophy is a religion of sorts and it's adherents take this kind of thing as an article of faith especially if it comes from their cardinals and bishops in government and the media. For many of us we kind of switch off our brains where articles of faith are concerned. It becomes all about the feelings and far less about the truth. And our leftist acolytes immediately post this sort of thing to Facebook without another thought and then dutifully hate rich people like Elon Musk who is actually doing things that benefit actual people.

I'm glad I got through school while they were still teaching the old math.

Just sayin'
Tom King © 2026 

Is There Really a War on Christmas?

Several well-meaning, left-leaning friends posted this on Facebook recently. And I kind of get it. There's a lot of hyperbole about a "War on Christmas" that's going on. And I agree, there really isn't a war specifically on Christmas. It's more of a war on Christians. The atheist left would be quite content to call it the holidays and drink themselves stupid at office parties and sleep with co-workers and get expensive presents. Just so you don't talk about Jesus or express your gratitude to Him. He's such a party pooper!

Yeah this meme makes it sound like the idea of a war on Christmas is all completely imaginary, the nightmares of a paternalistic oppressive religious right that's just looking for something to complain about. The thing is,

When people sue your town to make you take down a manger scene that's been put up every year by the town council for more than a century, you get the idea that your faith is being pushed out of the public culture. When you, a supposedly free citizen get told by the arbiters of culture that  as a free citizen that it's rude to say anything more than Happy Holidays, then you get the idea that something is amiss. Lots of folks these days are being so instructed by their bosses to go neutral with their Christmas greetings. Yeah some of it is silly hysteria by certain jumpy souls in the church, but some of the anger over the issue is not coming from their own imagination. It's being generated by the snowflake generation that gets triggered over every little thing and thinks it's their turn to oppress somebody for doing things they don't like.

Many mainstream Americans (non-leftists anyway) are a little tired of being told (as we were in the above meme) to "shut up". Sure we can say Merry Christmas and "God bless you" and we can put up mangers and wise men in our own yards, but in practice, we do so at our own risk. There is an actual element of the post-modernist progressive Marxist atheist anti-Christian culture that will come into your yard and vandalize your nativity scene. You take a risk that some thin-skinned leftist/enviro-terrorist is going to pull down your tree, set fire to your manger or harass your kids. It DOES happen. It's in the news a lot.

True it doesn't happen very often, but that's the thing with terrorism. Its effect is far more widespread than the few incidents. The idea that some random thugs have shot up schools, makes parents worry about their kids' safety and makes schools set up metal detectors and have armed off-duty sheriff's deputies walking the halls with guns on their hips. It makes nervous snowflakes want to confiscate everyone's guns.

So it's not some fake thing Christians are trying to gin up any more than calls for gun control are a fake concern and aren't the product of actual terrorist attacks on schools, theaters and shopping malls. If you don't believe there is hatred for Christians and conservatives, try wearing a What Would Jesus Do? hat or (worse) a "Make America Great Again" hat downtown to the mall or a farmer's market or the park. It may not happen, but once you've had some anarchist spitting and screaming in your face, it does make an impression that some folk out there genuinely hate you. Now I've always thought America was already pretty great so I don't have a MAGA hat, but if I did, having someone snatch it off my head makes me think we as a society are headed in the wrong direction civility wise.

I was on a bus a couple of weeks ago and had a strange person sit down beside us dressed in black with chains and a dog collar and demand that my wife acknowledge that his gender was "puppy". He can be whatever he wants to be I suppose. I don't care, but I got the strong impression from him that I shouldn't disagree with his view of his own sexuality or he might bite me.

I guess some of the "War on Christmas" paranoia (and it is paranoia to some extent) comes from the general and increasing war on Christianity as a whole. Currently, if you are persecuted for your religion, the odds are it's because you are a Christian. The murder of Christians for their religion currently leads the statistics when it comes to people being murdered for their religion. Jews would probably be ahead of us, but they've learned to go heavily armed into places where Christians go armed only with food and medical supplies and the odd Bible or two.

I wouldn't be so quick to judge people as unreasonably anxious over the anti-Christ in Christmas rhetoric we see - mostly from lawsuits against our towns and businesses and schools. President Trump took some heat from the leftist media for his speech at this year's (1919) tree lighting ceremony the other day. And he actually said Merry Christmas at the end with a note of something like defiance in his voice, but then he's not afraid. He has secret service. Us ordinary Christians don't and when that rare random angry leftist jumps us in the grocery store because we triggered him or her or hir or Fido, it tends to make us believe that someone is definitely trying to marginalize us through (so far) mild to moderate terroristic threats.

I think that behavior should be firmly dealt with. The Cleburne, Texas Police once put a high school football player in jail for three days in his jogging shorts for flipping off a 63 year old English teacher. She was stopped at a stop sign and he was jogging past. He flipped her the bird and called her a f@$#% b@#$#. A nearby neighbor on his front porch witnessed the incident and called the cops. They picked him up three blocks away and cuffed him. The charge was terroristic threat. The judge wasn't amused later and let him think about his behavior in a cold jail cell. I think that's appropriate. I also think it's appropriate to put a religious fanatic in jail who tries to disrupt a funeral of a gay person or a soldier and uses threatening language.

What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I think it would help us all to require that we be more civil to one another. To threaten harm to someone or to deliberately cause them to fear for their safety should be punished to the letter of the law. If we did that with consistency, I think we'd create a more civil society, and that's something we can definitely stand to have more of - civility. Especially at Christmas.

And of course we can say Merry Christmas or "God bless you" or whatever. It just seems that we should be able to do it without some angry snowflake shaking their bony fingers at us. You know it used to be cranky old Sunday school teachers that did that. Now it's 22 year old lesbian feminists, Marxist political science majors, and militant anti-facists with the bony fingers. Ironically it's the supposedly tolerant left that is using the same techniques to battle "perceived" facism that the actually facist National Socialist (Nazi) brownshirts did against the Jews.

As Christians I suppose we should be honored to be the target of Antifa and other global socialist progressives' hatred as the Jews were targets of the national socialists in Germany. Having actually read chapter 22 in our World History books, however, it makes us a little afraid. People like that tend to go after the harmless - those who they can bully and intimidate and who won't shoot them for it. And we Christians are peaceful people by nature. We'd rather avoid that sort of conflict. 

We have homeless and hungry people to feed and shelter, the sick to heal and the lost to find. And we do it ourselves. We don't wait for the government to get around to creating a program to do it. We've seen the gaps in the government welfare system. I spent 45 years creating nonprofit organizations to address the monumental gaps in the government welfare system.

Sometimes, when I get verbally assaulted by these people, I want to just shout, "Hey, we're doing some good here. Leave us alone!"

Merry Christmas,

© 2019 Tom King

You Just Always Got a Story, Dontcha?

A friend of mine made the argument that it was better for government to run things because the government doesn't have to make a profit. If they run out of money, he opined, they can just make more. And besides government does that sort of thing better than the private sector BECAUSE politicians and government workers don't have to worry about making a profit. That sounds like it makes sense, but it doesn't work out in the real world. My friend is dead wrong about that.

The government is very much a profit-making concern. The government makes a profit in two ways - directly through graft and indirectly through the accumulation of power. As anyone who has ever had dealings with government knows, power always, if it does not equal cash, it certainly opens the spigot to vast amounts of it. How do you think politicians come out of office many times wealthier than when they went in. It's certainly not the paycheck they get.  Whether one is writing the checks for the wild parties in Vegas or the taxpayer is writing them, the person with power enjoys the fruits of access to money with only the minor inconvenience of having to pretend he or she does not. 

I'd give examples, but in deference to a Democrat friend of mine  who actually reads all this junk, I won't this time. He recently complained that I always know somebody or know something about whatever he has to say and can tell all these stories and name names when I disagree with him. His implication was that I was making stuff up just to win the argument and I was being unfair.

Basically he called me a liar because he couldn't believe I had all those stories that exactly debunk his points about the joys of progressivism.  What he doesn't take into account is that I'm 64 years old. I spent my entire career dealing with mental health issues, working with government agencies, organizing bipartisan community stakeholder groups, working with actual government agencies, attending public comment meetings, testifying before or meeting with legislative bodies, congressmen, senators and state legislators. Heck I even helped put together one of those infamous Federal earmarks for my community once.

The thing is that my wife and I spent our careers as militant do-gooders. We worked with a lot of people who were in a bad way and the government agencies that purportedly were there to "help" them. We worked with and met some amazing and incredibly brave and selfless people over the years. We also worked with some downright self-centered rotters too. It's surprising how many of those you bump into when you are dealing with social justice warriors. I have therefore collected a lot of stories over the years. What I saw in progressive government programs turned me into your basic conservative, so you can imagine that my stories kind of support my political persuasion.

When I get into it online over some political point, I do so because I know something pertinent to the argument. What I don't know I research. I've done a lot of research so I have lots of data at hand about lots of different topics and issues. I've written five books and have four more I'm in the process of publishing.

So when I comment, I try to limit my comments to things I know about or to which I can bring some sort of insight. I know it may seem unfair to a twenty-something recent poli-sci graduate out to "save the world" but there is some advantage in the "save the world" business to being an old geezer. You tend to know things about what sort of world we'll be saving. There was an old Saturday Night Live skit back in the early days in which Superman  (I think it was Dan Ackroyd) was raised in Germany. He wound up fighting for "Untruth, Injustice and the Nazi Way!" Not every would-be superman (or woman) fights for good things like truth and justice. I know a lot about that, especially when it comes to a discussion about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Which, by the way, I don't think the answer to that question is "42". The Guide got that wrong.

 - Tom King

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.

 

Not Enough Pottery Shards - Why the Archaeologists Say the Bible Is Fiction

Eli Shukron walks through remains of the Citadel of David

An Associated Press story reports that Israeli Biblical archaeologist, Eli Shukron has found, what he believes is David's Citadel at Jerusalem - the one David captured in his conquest of Jerusalem. It fits the Biblical description perfectly, but other archaeologists say it can't be David's Citadel. The claim rekindles the debate again about using the Bible as a field guide for finding archaeological sites. First off the Biblical account is fiction, as all "true" archaeologists know, and besides there aren't a bunch of pottery shards dating back to David's time lying about the place.

Archaeologists do love their pottery shards and in the absence of centuries of ceramic debris, they inevitably conclude that, whatever it is, isn't as old as unreliable witnesses (like the Bible) say it is. I mean do these guys really base their belief in the infallibility of pottery shards on the idea that everybody in olden days just left the pieces of their broken pots lying around on the floor or in the yard? Were there no ancient trash men to take junk to the town dump?  

Apparently some professors
do leave an archaeological record.

One wonders what these guys' homes and offices must look like. Do they leave beer cans and broken wine glasses around on the floor for the enlightenment of future archaeologists? Do they pitch their old socks and juice boxes out the window to create a nice orderly progression of crap on the lawn so that later generations of archaeologists can accurately the site where the famous Dr. Illinois Smith once took his historically significant naps?

Eli Shukron, who found the place (and the water shaft David and his men crawled through) points out that the Israelis weren't in the habit of leaving broken pottery fragments lying around for centuries in places they lived for the convenience of Ph.D.'s doing archaeological dating. Even the historically inconsequential Hebrews had brooms and wives who disapprove of untidiness.


The site fits the Biblical account to a "T". This is troublesome for so many archaeologists who have refused to believe David was any big historical deal, although they did have to admit he existed when someone found an old inscription near some really old potter shards that mentioned King David by name.  They still resist the idea that he actually was anything more than a minor warlord.  After all, it would threaten the premise that the Bible was not at all historically accurate, but a fictional account written many centuries after the supposed events.

And besides, if the guy who found it is Jewish, it must be a fraudulent discovery meant to extend Israeli control over the poor mistreated Palestinians of East Jerusalem.~ That's what all the cool guys, liberals and propeller-headed Ron Paul conspiracy theorists say anyway, because we all know how trustworthy they are and what liars Jews are.~

The First Doctor of Thinkology

I'm utterly fed up with the smug self-proclaimed intellectuals and their super-cool self-worship. It's a shame we can't just get the whole war for human hearts right out into the open.  Actually, I expect the war is already heating up. Certainly the anti-Christian, anti-Jew, anti-conservative faction is growing ever more brazen and irrationally angry at anyone who disagrees with the progressive socialist agenda for making us all the same by making us all equally miserable (while making themselves our rulers by virtue of their great brains).

Really, I think we should get some university to issue all of these progressive geniuses a Th.D. (Doctor of Thinkology).~ Maybe brand them with some sort of mark so we, the ignorant masses, could identify them for the towering intellects they think they are.~

Come Lord Jesus. I'm ready to go home.

© 2014 by Tom King

* You will notice a sprinkling of an odd bit of punctuation throughout this article that looks like this:  .~    It is called a snark mark and is used to indicate sarcasm. I use this mark so that I clearly indicate when I'm not serious, lest I get another round of "Congratulations on finally seeing the light" emails from my propeller-head readers. I hate having to burst their bubbles after they have worked so hard cutting and pasting and sending me all those Youtube links about the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Conference and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

 

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

The Proper Use of Campfires

Throughout history, there has been no more iconic human experience than that of singing and telling stories around a campfire. Since pre-historic times, the campfire has drawn us together in the darkness. The campfire was the basis of the tribe. As humanity spread out and our population grew, the fires got bigger, but they were still there.  We looked into the fire and found a common impulse, a shared dream if you will and we passed along the dreams of our fathers and mothers, our own dreams and the dreams of our children. For most of us who gathered round the fires, it was a dream of peace.

Not so for those who gathered outside in the darkness.

The campfire is a wonderful metaphor for the way that God works in us to change us. The fire is the center of the circle, within our very hearts. It warms us and binds us to itself and to one another. If we join our neighbors, friends and loved ones around that fire, we are inevitably changed by it. It draws from us depths of love, kindness, empathy and comradery we may not even have suspected were there in the first place. Worship as an act of faith in God works the same way. It is no accident that the imagery for the Holy Spirit of God is often depicted as a fire.

There are those who reject the fire. Their goal is to draw us away from the fire and to themselves. They delight in making themselves the center of gatherings. What they lack, however, is the power of God, symbolized by the fire - the power to warm those gathered about them.  They attempt to change those they seek to lead by external means - by force, threats or by enacting LAW and penalties for disobedience.

Changing man from without, by force of the will of another, is always doomed to failure. A movie filmed by German director, Leni Riefenstahl, documented the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. It is called, appropriately enough, "The Triumph of the Will".  The film was honest about how the German nation was expected to be changed - externally, by the power of the will of the Nazi leaders. Ironically, within a dozen years, Riefenstahl could have just as well done a sequel to her first movie and called it "The Defeat of the Will".  Forcible change from the outside inward never works.

Man can only be changed from the inside out by the submission of the will to God. It is the transformative power of a relationship with Him and spending time around the fire of His grace with others that works the change. Over time, mankind has been changed by this principle despite a long and bitter ongoing war against the lust for power and the exercise of the human will to dominate and coerce.  

Our time at the campfire must be inclusive if it is to be effective. We must draw people to into the circle, not push them away. There is no place for hard words, name-calling, strong-arm tactics or bullying in our prayer and worship circles. We are told not to even call another person a fool, lest we endanger our own souls in the process. We are told that where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there amongst us. It is not accidental that Jesus, Himself, performed his first miracle at a celebratory gathering. Throughout His ministry, He was criticized for hanging out with sinners, tax collectors and harlots.  His own circle of followers were a mixed political bag to say the very least.

And finally Christ was murdered by those who believed there were people in their communities who were not good enough to join their circle; who resented Christ's invitation to all and sundry kinds of sinners to "Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." 

Some of my conservative colleagues ridicule the idea of sitting around the campfire, holding hands and singing "Kum-ba-Yah" as a way to change the world.  They forget that Kum-ba-yah is a Christian song that invites the lost, the sad, the lonely and alone to join our sacred circle. Perhaps if we all spent a little more time around the campfire; if perhaps we spent more time including our neighbors instead of pushing them away; perhaps, then, we could get past our differences and find that common faith that could bind us all together in peace.  

We surely aren't going to get there by passing dueling House Bills.


I'm just saying,

© 2013 by Tom King

Uncle Tom's Handy Dandy Carbon Offset Credits - Get 'em While They're Hot!

(c) 2011 by Tom King

A word to my fellow Facebookers and forum posters on the left and right.  It has been recently brought to my attention that excessive bloviation may produce increased significant increases in levels of atmospheric CO2.  If this is the case I suspect that global warming discussion threads as found on such weighty scientific forums like Facebook, MySpace, Google Plus and the Banjo Hangout are in danger of becoming major sources of greenhouse gases.

To head off this problem for the sake of the planet and to prevent possible new regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. I have decided to be pro-active. So, today I am announcing my newest product: carbon offset credits for obsessive global warming posters (COCOGWPs). Now, anyone who wishes to post page after page of dry statistics, graphs, charts and web-page links, can do so guilt-free.  All you have to do is purchase carbon offset credits (COCOGWPs) from me.  Now your bloviations on the subject of anthropogenic global climate change can be totally carbon neutral. For the modest price of $3.50 per credit, you can go on and on and on and on about anthropogenic global warming or even about how anthropogenic global warming is a total crock - your choice - and do so completely guilt free.

The benefits of buying Uncle Tom's Handy Dandy Carbon Credits include:

1. They are inexpensive. For just the price of one ticket on the Loch Ness Monster Boat Tour, you can erase any guilt you might feel about using more than your share of the Earth's resources.
2. They are easy to purchase. Simply send your $3.50 per COCOGWP to my e-mail address (twayneking@gmail.com)  via Paypal. Easy peasy - take it out of your eBay profits and your wife need never know you've been obsessing over global warming on Facebook again.
3. 10 percent of proceeds will be donated to a charity I like, eventually, once I pay for a bigger motor for my new fishing boat.
4. Your purchase helps me avoid having to work at a real job where I might be forced to produce carbon against my will (this way my carbon production is entirely for a good cause, is voluntary and I can stop at any time if I really want to).
5. I'm much less obnoxious than Al Gore and can tell a joke with a proper punchline.
6. Uncle Tom's Handy Dandy Carbon Credits free you from all guilt associated with rattling on and on interminably about global warming and filling up all those extra hard drives on all those extra servers Mark Zuckerberg has to install just to keep up with Facebook's global warming archives.
7. As an added premium your carbon credits come with a free membership in the premier nonprofit support group for people who have trouble stopping themselves from talking about global warming.  It's called "On and On and On ANON" and your membership is free with the purchase of 7 or more carbon credits.
8. With your purchase of ten or more Uncle Tom's Handy Dandy Carbon Credits you also get a ticket to a free special class for your loved ones. This training class for spouses and families of people who talk incessantly about global warming includes -

• Choosing a bat to match your arm length
• Placing your stroke for maximum effect and minimal obvious bruising
• Using common household items when your bat is not handy
• Making it look like an accident - it's all in the setup
• Convincing your loved one he was struck by a loose blade from the ceiling fan
• What to tell the police - surefire ways to get you off with probation and time served
• Timing your interventions to achieve the maximum negative behavioral conditioning effect

How does it work?

The beauty of Uncle Tom's Handy Dandy Carbon Offset Credits is that, not only does it reduce carbon, sulfur and other emissions too ghastly to mention here, but it also prevents the death of tens of thousands AT THE SAME TIME. You see, I live in the shadow of the most dangerous active volcano in North America - Mt. Ranier. At any moment it could go off and pour millions of tons of carbon, sulfur and other noxious gases and ash into the atmosphere and send a flood of mud, rock and debris sweeping down the Puyallup, Carbon and Green River Valleys with little or no notice, destroying dozens of picturesque, environmentally friendly towns that carefully recycle all their trash and industrial waste and burying tens of thousands of environmentally-conscious Washingtonians beneath a 50 to 100 foot wall of melted glacier muck.  The real tragedy would be that THE millions of dollars these communities have spent to reduce global warming and thereby increase the size of the Mt. Ranier glaciers would be lost along with the glaciers themselves if the mountain were to erupt. I have therefore begun a program to prevent this disaster and, at the same time provide a way for environmentally-conscious Americans to feel smug and guilt-free.

Every six months I will climb the flanks of Mt. Ranier and plant one pine cone for each carbon credit purchased through Uncle Tom's Handy Dandy Carbon Offset Credits program. These pine cones will grow into trees, their roots will reach down into the mountain and press apart the loose volcanic rocks which make up the outer shell of the mountain. This will, according to scientists at the Blossomville Community College Vulcanology Center (you should have seen their science fair project last year), expand the outer shell of the mountain, increasing the "gas carrying capacity" of the volcano shaft significantly. If we continue this program* and steadily increase the number of pine cones planted, with your help we can create a "green blanket" that should cool the atmosphere around the mountain and further increase the depth of the snow pack above the tree line. This dense snow pack will theoretically cool the inside of the mountain, causing the gases inside to contract, further enhancing the mountain's carrying capacity and delaying the inevitable eruption of the volcano by decades - long enough for those who bought carbon credits for their jets and jacuzzis to croak off so they won't care anymore whether the mountain blows up or not.

GET YOURS TODAY!

Uncle Tom

* This program was inspired by the economic stimulus programs initiated by the United States Congress and the President to prevent the economy from going bust by putting the whole thing off till after we're all safely dead. The principle behind Uncle Tom's Handy Dandy Carbon Offset Credits. As one of the great modern philosophers whose philanthropic work, in part, inspired the idea of COCOGWPs has said:

"I don't believe in guilt, I believe in living on impulse."  - Angelina Jolie

 

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