An Apocalypse Observed

US B-1 Bombers Withdrawn from UK Fairford AFB

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:47:03 +0000

The Shadow Bomber Kerfuffle

Well, the US Air Force has withdrawn its B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford. Here's what happened.

Several Muslim, possibly Iranian, men are arrested lurking around the perimeter of RAF Fairford where US B-1 bombers are based in Britain.
British politicians whine that withdrawing the bombers make it look like the US doesn't trust Britain's ability to provide security for our bases in the UK.
Pete Heseth tells the press that the US routinely shuffles our planes and other hardware back home and doesn't represent a direct response to the terror threat.
British officials say withdrawing the bombers threatens the relationship between the US and NATO.
Iran says US bombers in Britain make Britain a legitimate target for Iran due to the war, just like US bases in their Middle East neighbors make them a target for Iranian attacks.
The mainstream press accuses Trump of threatening our relationship with NATO.
Trump says....

Millions of Microsoft Windows 10 Users Are Hoping the Big Bully in Redmond Receives Much Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:53:05 +0000

Microsoft is being sued by a bunch of frustrated Windows 10 users for it's attempt to force people to upgrade perfectly good computers to Windows 11 effectively turning 240 million PCs into door stops. BUT THAT'S ONLY IF YOU SURRENDER TO MICROSOFT'S BULLYING, SELL YOUR PERFECTLY GOOD COMPUTER AND BUY A NEW ONE AND INSTALL WINDOWS 11. Once you've done that, a little chip in that shiny new expensive computer will start taking a screenshot of what you are doing every 15 seconds or so and storing it offline ostensibly to protect your data. Now Microsoft and Windows 11 defenders disagree but they keep changing the narrative about that and the revised story doesn't sound any better and often sounds quite a bit worse.

Okay but isn't Microsoft offering to help you with the transition to Windows 11 and "help" you get the new computer equipment you need to set up Windows 11. Unless they are giving out free computers and ripping out the spy chip, I'm not buying. Really? Does Microsoft's marketing department think I'm going to just pitch the computer I've been customizing and upgrading for the past 4 years for one that costs way more than this old guy on a fixed income can afford that watches my every move and (who knows) sends all that information to Redmond.

Yeah, right!

From what I read, Microsoft thinks it's a dandy idea to collect and store all that data from their shiny new spy chip that you have to have to run W11. And all this data about me sits snug online in some server farm, where it can be hacked or retrieved by someone (not necessarily me) who will be able to thoroughly check me out. Even worse, I probably will never know it's been done. Such information is prized by our dear leaders so they can make all those pesky decisions on behalf of us ordinary ignorant schlubs with our little computers that they firmly believe we are stupid to make for ourselves.

I don't know about you guys, but I haven't been building computer systems or managing an IT department all these years. So it's taken me months with fear and trembling to even work up the nerve to sideline my old Windows 10 operating system and install a dual boot that lets me use Linux as mine main operating system. And I'm a pretty smart guy. It's just that I'm not interested in becoming a computer geek at my time of life. If I can figure out how to install a reliable operating system that's stable and reliable, I will happily hang up my Nerd Herd ID and go back to streaming movies where they don't say some ugly words that I am tempted to use right now.

But I ain't gonna do it. I've got grandkids and a very religious wife.

Just sayin'
Tom King
© 2026

Straining at Gnats - The Left Criticizes the Texas Flood Response

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 19:45:00 +0000

Straining at Gnats - The Left Criticizes the Texas Flood Response
Because Trump.....

Say what you will about Texas - but when the rivers rise, so do we.
Not with blame. Not with bitterness.
But with boots on the ground, arms around strangers, and hearts wide open.
That’s the Texas I know. And that’s the America I believe in.
- Bex Hale

I mean, before the day was over on July 4, while Texans from all over including "Texans" from other states were pulling kids out of trees and off rooftops, the left was already blaming Texas governor Abbott, Donald Trump and Texans themselves for the disaster and the so-called "poor response." It's ironic that their biggest criticism was that we didn't have enough government in place to stop the floods. As if the lumbering ox-like bureaucrats of government would have been able, in a timely manner, to drag their ample behinds out of their chairs and commence throwing ring buoys to campers floating by on cabin roofs in the raging waters of the Guadalupe.

The word disingenuous applies here, since the things they are complaining about are endemic to a natural disaster. Besides, we didn't hear a squeak about it from them all during the Biden administration's pathetic response to Hurricane Helene's bludgeoning of the southeast last year. Oh, we heard a lot about tempest-in-a-teapot heroics by FEMA clerks, hard-pressed to get all the appropriate paperwork filled out, though. Six months later, there were thousands in North Carolina red counties who had yet to receive other than a pittance in disaster relief funds from Biden's FEMA. In Texas, grocery stores like HEB and Brookshire's, churches, ranchers with horse trailers packed with supplies rolled along the highways to Kerrville. Trying to lay blame for the Guadalupe flooding and loss of life on Trump is not only disingenuous, but petty.

The flood wasn't Trump's fault!

Well maybe the flood wasn’t, but the response after the fact is lacking, so says a Democrat friend of mine.

It seems it took 3 days for FEMA to show up in Kerrville with their forms and folding tables. That's what my buddy was whining about. To paraphrase a senile former president, "Oh, come on!" It took weeks for the feds at FEMA to blunder onto the scene after Helene. In stark contrast, Texans (actual rescuers) showed up the same day in full rescue mode. People all over the country weren't far behind. Unlike the Democrat mayor of New Orleans after Katrina, local officials didn't block rescuers from coming into the area in order to make sure the federal government did the relief effort. Texans didn't sit around and wait for the proper government agencies to save them. People in the flood were rescuing each other. Eagle scouts rescued every kid in the boy's camp. The Cajun Navy showed up with boats just like they did in New Orleans, except the Texas authorities didn't stop them from launching their boats like the Democrat mayor of New Orleans did in the wake of Katrina. The response in Texas was fast and effective. Within hours, boats were buzzing up and down the swollen Guadalupe, plucking kids out of trees, off rooftops and from cars washed off the roads. When Trump and Melania showed up on the scene, someone got a video of rescue workers doffing their hard hats to the first lady (hey, it's Texas our grandmothers taught us respect for a lady). So, the left jumped on the guy that posted the video because he didn't say anything about the Mexican first responders that came up to help. Says we conservatives didn't mention them (because racism evidently). Well this below came off Fox News, so there!

Mexican firefighters from report on Fox News

If there was any delay by FEMA, it was probably an artifact left over from the Biden administration's unwieldy FEMA policy. Following Hurricane Helene, it took FEMA more than a week to get a handful of clerks with boxes of paper forms and folding tables there to start the interminable paperwork process that FEMA considers critical to starting disaster relief efforts. People were still struggling with FEMA six months later. Three days to deploy to Kerrville is blinding speed for a federal bureaucracy, and FEMA would have only gotten in the way of the rescue efforts had they shown up sooner. In Texas, we didn't forbid civilian rescue teams to enter the area like local officials did with Katrina and Helene because the Democrat local officials were waiting for FEMA to tell them what to do. The reason FEMA said it was slow getting there was that they had to get the paperwork set up first. Meanwhile people were lost, hungry and lying about the ruins of their homes dead. Contingents of Texan rescuers were on the scene in North Carolina before FEMA bureaucrats finished scratching their behinds wondering what was the appropriate political protocol. At the same time, FEMA officials were skipping over hurricane victims in Florida that had "Trump for President" signs in their yards.

I think Kristi Noem did the right thing by coordinating with Governor Abbott and local emergency agencies, fire departments, the Coast Guard with helicopters, and civilian groups like Salvation Army, Adventist Disaster Services, The Cajun Navy, The Community Foundation of the Hill Country, Mercy Chefs, The Cajun Army, Team Rubicon, Austin Pets Alive, first responders from Mexico, and others before sending in FEMA to gum up the works. Delaying the still-unpurged Biden-era FEMA bureaucracy from wading in and turning loose an army of bureaucrats to throw their weight around and get in the way of people saving lives was inspired on the part of Secretary Noem, if you ask me.

Good job, Kristi.

It's complex emergencies, disasters and such that provide opportunity for politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies to loot the treasury for taxpayer money and give us such memorable things like $2000 toilet seats, tens of thousands of 120+ year-old social security recipients and millions for emotional support programs for gender queer Venezuelan coffee pickers. Thank God Ms. Noem is there to bring a little sanity to one government bureaucracy that's been out of control for way too long.

Are Trump and Musk a Threat That "All Christians" Should Oppose?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:56:00 +0000

A friend of mine keeps posting these almost hysterical posts claiming that President Trump and Elon Musk are trying to create an authoritarian dictatorship. A true Christians, he and his progressive Christian friends say, should oppose Trump's efforts to clean up the government. It's an evil trick, he says. It continually amazes me that so many "Christians" are so opposed to the dismantling of the corrupt progressive deep state; a state that has robbed taxpayers to pay for its insidious power grab. They accuse those dismantling the machinery of power of trying to create some kind of autocracy. And further confusing me, they actually believe that giving power to a pro-socialist government that is so in the pocket of the real corporate wealthy "oligarchs" is a Christian thing to do. Instead, they accuse the tiny handful of wealthy people who are actually trying to defang the oligarchy of wanting to be dictators.

If you want to be a dictator the first thing you do is enlarge the government, make it more powerful, limit criticism of what you are doing by curbing free speech, and bleed off as much money as possible from the rabble so they are so poor that you can control them easily. And you keep promising them a worker's paradise and try to convince them you will give them positions of authority in the new world order. And among Christian religions, it's no accident that the head of the church that wants us all to come back under the "mother" church's authority is a socialist pope.

Of the 40 richest men in the world who could be called oligarchs only 4 that I know of could even remotely be called conservatives. It's not accidental that so few truly wealthy men are in favor of a smaller, less powerful, less intrusive government and more freedom. All four are thoroughly despised by the progressive left.

And why in the name of all that's holy do "Christians" believe that progressive socialism and more powerful government will give us the man-made Utopia they promise us. "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" and a large majority of us sinners have no interest in letting God make us better human beings. It's all about power and control in the end. That's what Satan said was wrong with the way God made Earth. All that free will, he argued, needed to be controlled. They needed a ruler....oh, I don't know. Someone like SATAN? Inevitably, kingdoms, empires or People's Democratic Socialist Republics are neither democratic, nor of the people, nor are they republics.They're almost never free.

Notice who sets up the loudest howl when you threaten to throw light on the corruption of any system of government. Who threatens real violence (hint - read the comments of Democrats and progressives objecting to DOGE)? Why do you think they tried to assassinate Trump two or three times already? Especially when they couldn't find a way to put him in jail. Kick over a rat's nest and watch the rats squeal and scatter. How is any of what's been revealed by Musk and Trump's teams in any way Christian? A couple of million dollars worth of condoms for Somalia or Yemen - someplace like that. . An LGBQT opera for Cuba? More millions for transgender surgery in Guatemala?.Anti-disinformation training millions for Kazakhstan to aid its authoritarian government in controlling what is said about it. How about more millions for DEI training in Middle Eastern countries? And tens of millions to terrorist supporting organizations around the world.

Meanwhile American disaster victims are left high and dry, relying on the goodness of their Christian neighbors to survive while FEMA doles out a pittance and claims to be helping. Really? We Christians should be supporting all that corruption because you say we should hate Donald Trump and Elon Musk? I far more trust those guys. They are wealthy and immune to bribes and manipulation. So, you say, we should support what - rich progressive oligarchs like George Soros and the majority of corporate CEOs who wear the progressive badge? Guys who buy corrupt district attorneys who protect them from the consequences of their actions and punish anyone who opposes them are to be our heroes? That's what you're telling me? Robber Barons who wage lawfare against elected officials. Justice Department lawyers they keep on their under the table payrolls to do their dirty work for them. Wealthy donors who buy huge tax breaks for themselves by pouring money into the coffers of pliant politicians? These are who we should trust and follow?

I remember that Jesus once turned over some tables when He found corruption in the Temple. He scattered the corrupt moneychangers with a whip! Can you say USAID? I suppose not, if you're a unrepentant Marxist progressive.

I'm not under any delusion that we'll ultimately win this fight. The Bible does not describe any such period of lasting peace at the world's end. On the contrary, we are promised that they shall cry peace peace and then sudden destruction comes upon them. "Progressives" will ultimately win their shot at Utopia and I suspect anyone who stands against them at that time will be the first (but not the last) up against the wall.

God may be sending those angels for a time to hold back the winds of strife long enough for us to complete the Great Commission and preach the gospel to the ends of the Earth. But once that's done, the rebellious choirmaster will rise in apparent victory and turn loose the armies of hell against God's children. At that time Michael shall stand up, Jesus our Savior, and He will come in the clouds to take us and the righteous dead Home with Him. As we leave the wicked remnants of Earth will destroy themselves in a frenzy of fury leaving the planet desolate for a thousand years, until the resurrection of the wicked, the final judgment and the second death of those who would be miserable living in the presence of God. And then the Earth will be made new and Christ will give our beautiful world back to us and we will live forever in peace and abundant joy.

Should Christians then attack Elon and Donald because they are upsetting progressive plans to seize more power and to create a human Utopia by fiat?

I don't think so, Skippy. Been tried too many times and left too many hundreds of millions of dead behind. Someone is coming to save us and our reward is with Him.

© 2025 by Tom King

Somebody's AI Can't Imagine Jesus

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:21:00 +0000

But the same AI will imagine Molech to whom some 20,00 plus
children were sacrificed annually in what is now Palestine.

If you've tried the picture-making AI of a certain social media site, try this. Ask for a picture of Jesus or Christ and see what it says. "Can't do it!" Then ask for Buddha, Confucius, or Zeus or Aphrodite or "the Egyptian God Ra" or Baphomet the Goat God. To be fair they won't do Satan or Lucifer either, but try Baal or Molech or Dagon and the AI will give you all three of the pagan gods of that region of the world we now call Palestine. Ask it to imagine Quetzalcoatl blood-thirsty creator god of the Aztecs or Viracocha creator god of the Incas. They are all there if you want them.

You have to wonder what went into the algorithm that prevents the primary deity of the Christian church while allowing gods from dozens of pagan religions. They won't draw Mohammed either, but even an AI probably has enough self-preservation code written into it that it doesn't want to be blown up for drawing a picture.

And in an interesting facet of the algorithm, it won't do the god of socialism, Karl Marx for some reason. Guess it's not afraid of leftists either. Won't do Trump or Ronald Reagan either.

Hmmmm. I find the AI picture-making utility handy for illustrating my blogs, just so I don't want a picture of the guy who told the world to "treat others the way you want to be treated." Ironic that the religious figure who never burned children alive, gutted virgins or made them serve as temple prostitutes, cannot be imaged.

© 2024 by Tom King

How Long Will Bureaucrats Continue To Treat Native Americans Like Children on Their Own Lands

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 03:07:00 +0000

On his way out, Joltin' Joe Biden seems intent on blocking drilling for oil on tribal lands in Alaska, even though old treaties gave the natives the right to make such decisions about their own lands. That right lasted till someone struck oil. First white progressives stole the land and gave the first peoples what they didn't much want and then when that land became valuable, suddenly the white men of the DNC decided they needed to protect the primitives from themselves.

Absolute balderdash if you ask me.

Nagruk Harcharek, the president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, an organization that represents the interests of numerous native communities , said, "What we’re hearing from the administration is that (they) are the most tribally-friendly administration in the history of the United States, right?” Harcharek disagrees. “At least from our perspective, that’s not our impression. There was a lack of engagement, meaningful engagement (with the Biden administration over the rights of the tribes to allow drilling on their ancestral lands.) Oftentimes, Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, we heard of policy changes in the news and not from phone calls from folks, even though everybody has our number. We are part of the environment. We utilize it for subsistence hunting, for our culture, and it’s extremely important to us. We don’t need to be protected from our own environment,We can make decisions and help administrations make decisions that are both good for the region and also good for the environment and good for the state, good for the nation. And that just wasn’t the case."

As a person of native American ancestry this sounds to me like more of that paternalistic white man talk the Indians got in the 19th century when white men were talking treaties it seemed that at least some of them had no intention of honoring. The attitude was often "Got to take care of the Injuns because they aren't capable of caring for themselves. Great White Father in Washington my fuzzy muscular buttocks! It's just one more example of progressive white folk lying to the tribes.

Sheila and I have waay more native American ancestry than Pocahontas Warren sitting up there in DC on her high horse. My great++++++ grandfather, Nemacolin, was a scout for George Washington (who is my 7th cousin 8 times removed) and together they cut the Cumberland Trail. Sheila's Great +++++ Grandfather, War Chief Hopothle Mica Bowie traveled to New York to negotiate a peace treaty with the new United States President, George Washington. Papa George gave the Indians a much better deal than Biden even though noted Democrat President Andrew Jackson and others later reneged on the deals. Lincoln and Grant negotiated some fair deals with the tribes only to have later members of a certain party come along later and screw the Indians over.

To this day Indians can't even get home mortgages for homes on the reservation because the Bureau of Indian Affairs won't allow it in case the bank were to foreclose. If the feds would let the tribes truly manage their own affairs they might have better economies that don't have to rely on casinos and cigarette and firework sales. In the past, Indian tribes in Oklahoma that were allowed to contract with oil companies to drill on their lands have been able to seriously improve conditions among their people.

Among the Sea Peoples the states and the feds do give our native brothers a break on fishing rights that commercial companies don't get up here in the Pacific Northwest. Even so, there are still too many politicians who suffer from the "Great White Father" syndrome.

If you want to support Native American rights, make Washington stick to the treaties, give control of the reservations to the tribes, and stop treating Native Americans like children. That's way more demeaning than anything done by conservative Christian Americans.

© 2024 by Tom King

Against Principalities and Powers

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 08:35:00 +0000

As noted poet/philosopher Bob Dylan once observed, "The Times They Are A'Changing." And I'm not talking about the news. I had an uncomfortable ride home from the food bank today with a 350 pound person of unidentifiable gender. I almost asked him/her/they/hir/your highness/o' "arbiter of all that's woke" what the person's pronouns were. The person of massive girth and unidentifiable gender was quick to let me know the person who did not share that person's pronouns with me lived with "my" partner.

I had to rush getting my food because the line of cars at the food bank line was so long today and my driver was early and impatient to get home. It gets crowded at the food bank right after prices at Walmart get bumped up. And I'm pretty sure they did this week, since I had to run by Walgreen's on the way over to get some laundry detergent and saw very quickly that the other Wal store's prices had taken a bit of a jump themselves with a 12 pack of sodas up in the teens now.

I made the mistake of saying something about inflation and this driver person quickly let me know it wasn't the Democrats fault and that inflation was mostly in my imagination. I said, "Well my grocery bill has doubled since 2020 and I don't have enough imaginary money to keep up with that level of spending. I'm not the US government after all, hence the food bank. Anyway," I added, "that was going to happen when the minimum wage for entry level jobs jumped to $15 to $20 an hour."

I thought this gender unaffiliated person was about to have an attack of the vapors.

That had nothing to do with it according to my driver and the driver person quickly let me know he would never agree with me about that anyway. "Besides," he sneered. "I make $15 an hour and without me you wouldn't have a ride home." I wanted to get home so I didn't point out that without me, he'd be able to get behind the wheel of the van more easily. I also didn't bother telling him that's what drivers were making before the minimum went to $15 here. Experienced drivers didn't get a raise after minimum was bumped up because they were already making minimum. All that happened to my driver was he quite suddenly was reduced to a minimum wage worker with the stroke of our very blue governor's pen. Entry level staff were all of a sudden making more than they are worth and everybody's grocery bill doubled. Of course, my person of unisex attire again insisted it was all in my imagination. Silly me!

Having worked more than 4 decades setting up nonprofit organizations to address problems the central planners in Washington overlooked when designing their programs for the proletariat in my neck of the woods, I had a good deal to say about transportation and the massive embezzlement of taxpayer funds that goes into the pockets of bureaucrats in the business of government funded transit. I saw it first hand. I helped triple the budget of our regional rural transit provider due to the unfair distribution of funds in Texas for rural transit. The Republicans had just taken over the state legislature and I helped the Democrats working with us on our rural transit initiative learn how to speak Republican. We were about the only such initiative to get what we asked for that year to the benefit of our region. East Texas is the most densely area populated with seniors and disabled folk in Texas. One in five East Texans were driving challenged or didn't own cars at all at the time. That was 20 years ago. By now it's probably much worse.

East Texas is sort of the Old Texan's graveyard. In our senior years we Texans move there to fish and subsequently die. Lots of lakes and medical facilities in East Texas. All we lacked was transportation for folk living in the country around the lakes. We were the second largest rural transit district and were getting the smallest appropriation. The largest appropriations by 4 to 10 times were the areas around Houston and Austin. It's where we keep our Democrats and their lobbyists so we can keep an eye on them.

When I helped get the East Texas Council of Government's rural transit budget tripled, I got a nasty letter from the president of the COG and he actively worked to get me off the Public Transportation Advisory Committee for the state of Texas. I was warned by a lawyer friend to check under my truck before I started up in the morning to look for any funny wires or boxes. The thing was that when the budget tripled, it triggered an audit and apparently someone at the COG didn't want to do THAT paperwork on the transportation program.

At any rate, my driver, of course, was secure in his knowledge that the Democrats and particularly their genius leaders like Kamala and Tim would take good care of him. He/she/it or whatever pronouns the driver is going by, conveniently keeps his brain oblivious to the blatantly obvious Marxist themes the Harris campaign is embracing, and echoing the same themes in speeches and banners and such by the US Communist party.

Already the Democrat party's socialism lite has attracted wealthy elites drawn to the leftward political movement by the kind of power socialism always puts in the hands of a few powerful people. And who better to rule than powerful rich folks, corporate barons, and power brokers is the thinking. After all, like me and my driver, the masses can't be trusted to think correct thoughts nor take care of themselves. And my friendly neighborhood driver/person of indeterminate sex defends the future enslavement of the proletariat with eyes tight shut. "You're not going to convince me otherwise!" the young person of indeterminate gender assures me.

You'd think all this, the solidly leftist news spewing from the big media companies, the corporate/government collusion, not to mention our leader's taking bribes and colluding with China, Russia, Ukraine and whoever else will slip a few million bucks under the table would discourage me. It doesn't. The more it looks like the seriously evil left appears to be about to seize power totally, the more certain I am that Christ's return is imminent and we'll be going home soon. The devil's been getting panicky and he's become a lot less subtle these days. He's in a lot more hurry to secure his position as Prince of this world because he knows his time is short. Besides being left behind isn't going to be fun for anyone even if they get a seat on the politburo. They don't make asbestos long john's anymore, so I'd rather not be in their bootsies or around after the good guys have gone off to heaven with Jesus. Nukes tend to warm things up pretty good.and now that we humans have the means to annihilate ourselves, I suspect we're gonna finally collect the wages of sin much of mankind has been earning over all these millennia.

Leavin' on a U-Haul - Washington State

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 01:30:00 +0000

The cost of living in Washington State is among the highest in the land. Every time you turn around they're taxing some new thing you can't live without. I suspect it's going to keep on and on until one day, in the name of controlling obesity, the progressive Nazis will finally put a confiscatory tax on chocolate. That, I figure, since this is such an effeminate leftist culture up here, will be the last straw. One Hershey bar too far.

But I kid you not, this is the land where it can cost you three or four Benjamins just to put tags on your car. Property taxes are confiscatory, and grocery prices have more than doubled since Joe Biden swore on some sort of book in 2020. Some mainstream pundit recently opined that a hundred dollars worth of groceries only cost you $125 after 3 years under Biden. Well I want to know what store that is and do they put a limit on how many baskets you can buy at once?

Okay, my rent only went up 25%. My landlord is kind. That's about all that's only 25% inflated. Utilities? I had to sign up for an assistance program to be able to keep up with that. Fuel prices go up and down like a roller coaster. People are putting little stickers on gas pumps all over showing Joe Biden pointing to the price on the pump and saying, "I did that!" Thank heaven my Internet Company is based out of Louisiana and I'd already signed a lifetime no price increase deal with them back during the Trump administration. Everything up here is higher than a cat's back. We gave up trying to own a car and now are experiencing the wonders of old people on public transportation. I didn't realize back in East Texas when I was doing advocacy work for senior and disability transportation, that public transportation involved so much walking. Sometimes it's miles between where you need to go and where you can be picked up. AND the cab driver's union has negotiated new regulations with the cities that have driven up the cost of Uber and Lyft.

But one area where you can still get a bargain is on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and at local garage sales. Particularly, if you want to buy, say, used guitars, keyboards, refrigerators, recliners, sofas and such, hit Craigslist or FB Marketplace up here. We refurnished our living room in all leather furniture for $140, including end tables, 2 recliners, a leather sofa and my office chair. And if you're looking for musical instruments.....

I just saw a Takamine Guitar for $100. You can also find Taylor, Ibanez, Gibson, Fender, Martin and other prime condition guitars in that price neighborhood. I think rich Washingtonians buy their teenage boys guitars so they can attract girls and maybe make them grandparents. Trouble is you have to practice and that's way too much like work for the snowflakes growing up in Seattle and the guitars wind up shoved in closets or laying around unused and the parents, forgetting how much they laid out for the things, put them up on marketplace cheap so they won't have to stumble over them anymore.

The furniture and appliances go cheap because people are fleeing Washington for red states and a lower cost of living. Most are in a hurry to get out and find they can't get it all on the truck. I got a really good Maytag fridge with an ice-maker for $50. The people were leaving the next day so they just wanted it gone. Don't you just love preying on progressives? They voted for the people that are systematically wrecking the state's economy. They are leaving en masse, escaping the fruits of their history of voting for Democrats and fleeing to where voters have elected better stewards of their economies.

Don't you love karma!

The Other Sound of Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 06:31:00 +0000

I was up at 4am yesterday morning after sleeping most of the night in my chair watching Northern Exposure. I noticed after a bit that something seemed to be thumping around downstairs in the garage. I asked Sheila of the super sensitive ears if she heard it too and she confirmed that I was indeed hearing a regular thumping noise - two thumps every two or three minutes. It was the regularity of the noise that troubled me.

I got up and went out on the catwalk between our garage apartment and the landlord's house. In about a minute I heard the thumping sound again only this time it was clearly coming from outside. A couple of more double thumps and I could tell it was coming from the west of us. I've only heard that kind of sound coming from the direction of Ft. Lewis once before since we moved up here to Washington from Texas. Then, I thought it was a thunderstorm, something rare in this region. It wasn't a thunderstorm then. Nor was it now.

It was early morning gunnery practice. I confirmed it with a retired Army officer I know. It seems that the base conducts firing drills and maneuvers along with a lot of planes and helicopters flying around, which I've also noticed over the past week. My Army friend told me the military tends to flex its muscles quite loudly when things get unsettled here in the States. Apparently, they do it to impress the Chinese and Russian (and now Iranian) spies that if they are thinking of getting frisky during this period of unrest, they should think again. The military is warming up just in case they mistake some riots, flag-burning, resignations of political candidates and attempted assassinations as a sign of weakness.

Japan and Germany made that mistake in World War II. Then we were still in the depression, half the country was flirting with communism it seemed, the president was in a wheelchair, and there were some serious anti-war protests going on. So the Axis decided to poke the bear and see what happens.

When you poke the back end of the bear, you dang well better have a plan for dealing with his teeth and claws. And it better be one heck of a plan, because he's a huge bear and if you poke him, he's going to turn on you and reduce you to a bloody pile in short order. It was true then and though the tyrants of the world may think we're on the brink of a civil war and vulnerable, they obviously weren't paying attention in history class.

Come after us, and they'll find us united in a heartbeat. Watch our military grow as enlistments explode. Watch our industry ramp up overnight. And see us lose patience with y'all's nonsense and come together in a breath-taking hurry.

Can't say they weren't warned. It's amazing how short politicians' memories, especially those that didn't grow up in the land of the free and home of the brave. Meanwhile, we're having howitzer practice just down the road at the break of dawn and I'm going to sleep like a baby.

Just sayin'

© 2024 by Tom King

We American Peasants Have No Betters

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 07:35:00 +0000

Here in 2024 we're still getting threats from the Progressive State that if we don't get vaccinations and boosters and lay off the Ivermecting and Hydrochloroquin we're going to lose our jobs and fined and God knows what else. I don't know what else they'll threaten us with us next, but cancel culture has supplied the progressive forces within federal government an exciting (for them) tool for bringing the proletariat into line. Next it will be digital currency, something the Biden administration has already proposed.

Really? Threatening to end people's jobs and businesses the feds believe is "forcing" Americans to do something they don't want to do. Suppose I threatened to throw you off Facebook for getting the vaccination. I don't know where you did your research. If it was off NBC, CNN or The New York times, you might want to check out some actual scientific journals and talk to actual physicians out there in the field treating this disease. I work for myself, so the president can't fire me. I'm lucky in that respect. My wife and I get out very seldom and we do so with medical grade masks and practice social distancing. We both have experienced bad reactions to flu-type vaccines AND we're in the kill zone for this particular virus.

We have carefully chosen our response to this based on risk factors (and there are risk factors with these vaccines). Were I younger and didn't have an underlying health condition, and I were out in public a lot, I might get the vaccine. As it is, my wife and I chose another approach. Others my age and physical health have faced CoVid and taken Ivermectin, Hydrochloroquine and Z-Pack treatments and now with the monoclonal antibody treatments, CoVid has been rendered a rather minor ailment. So on the outside chance I do get the disease, there are treatments available to get you through.

There are "solid" reasons for my choice in this matter not to mention my constitutional right to do what I want when it's my body. Isn't that the pro-abortion argument? How come it's no longer my body. Besides, with the feds telling you that if you've had the vaccine you can still get it, and still transmit it to others, and that it may make it a lighter case if you do get it, it's hard to trust the advice we're being given by so-called scientists who seem dead set on enforcing their own will in the form of what seems more of a political than a medical solution.

Then there is the organization of teams of public health officials and Homeland Security Officers up here in Oregon and Washington to go door to door asking whether people are vaccinated, recording it in a database along with information about whether you were flying Revolutionary War flags, had Trump signs, wore "certain" T-shirts or hats described by organizers as evidence that you are a white supremacist and potential terrorist. And don't start with that being a conspiracy theory. I sat in on the County Commissioner's meetings where they discussed the CDC/Homeland Security plans to do just that. When the County Judge was asked if Klickitat County was planning to do that, he turned to his public health director and asked, "Do we have any plans to do that?"

The Public Health lady went pale and said, "Oh, hell no! You think I want to get shot?" Southern Washington State's natives celebrate a culture, that I discovered would give East Texas a run for the money for being redneck. They have bears running around loose. Those folks are armed! They might get away with that over in Oregon, but they do NOT want to bring that stuff across the Columbia River. Mt. St. Helens blew up in the middle of south Washington.

That bullying is the reason people are resisting the mandates and quitting their jobs rather than comply. It doesn't help that the same people telling us we must get vaccinated, were the same ones telling us the vaccines were dangerous and not to get them back in December and January before Biden was sworn in. Afterwards, through some sort of magical incantation, I suppose, after Biden became president, the vaccines became miraculously perfect and wonderful and essential to the survival of mankind.

So forgive me if I think that belittling and berating people who choose not to take the vaccine is a small-minded, anti-American thing to do. As Americans we are not averse to giving up some liberties in an emergency or to taking risks where risk-taking is needed. Were my circumstances different my choices might be different. But my choices are my choices and I live in a nation where individual rights are sacred. We don't live in a collective thank God, where people serve the state. The state, in the American Constitutional Republic, serves at the behest of the people.

This high-handed imposition of mandates based on the will of our dear leaders is foreign to American beliefs. Americans don't believe in complying, obeying or submitting to the will and authority of our betters. That's because we don't think we have any betters.

Sorry for the long post, but my leftist Facebook friend's original post had a snarky tone to it and I'm kind of angry about that. He ridiculed those of us who have carefully chosen through research in medical studies, journal reports, our own observations and consultation with our physicians (each one of whom holds a doctorate and is a scientist in his or her own right). I find that more than a little condescending.

And as I said, we don't much care for rule of our betters over us masses, peons, proletariat or whatever you want to call us regular ordinary schlubs! A whole lot of us would take umbrage if you came to our house, banged on my door and presumed to classify me a terrorist because I wouldn't mindlessly fall in line quietly and knuckle under to the latest attempt by Marxist progressive government bureaucrats to test to see just how much we'll tolerate and how quickly we can be bullied into submission to blatantly illegal and unconstitutional executive orders.

Not smart, Joe. We will not kneel to Moloch and his ilk.

Just sayin'.

© 2021 by Tom King

Biden Authorizes Mass Murder of Undocumented Immigrants

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 08:09:00 +0000

Just because they're birds doesn't make it right!

Hoo me? You talkin' about me?

Sounds hypocritical to me. Washington State, Oregon and California, in cahoots with the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service are planning the genocide of half a million Barred Owls which have apparently been classified as undocumented owls! Illegal aliens if you will.

Me? I'm an open borders for birds guy. Just let them come after the sweet pair of barred owls that hoot at us every spring outside our window at night! It is ironic that the leftist government in Washington is doing the following:

1. Declaring a whole race of owls that moved in here naturally to be unwanted illegal immigrants. I thought Democrats liked illegal aliens!

2. As a result of this anti-immigrant policy and the state's racist spotted owl supremacy stance, they have planned to commit genocide against barred owls based on their race.

3. They are talking about authorizing men with gun to go from tree to tree murdering innocent owls.

4. For people who believe in evolution and the survival of the fittest, they sure have a prejudice in favor of the survival of the demonstrably weak spotted owl population.

5. They didn't ask the rest of us if we wanted to turn Washington State et al into owl Auschwitz. They plan to play enticing owl sounds on loudspeakers and the shoot them when they fly in looking for a hot date.

6. And the story says Joe Biden basically issued the kill order.

Here's the story.

https://komonews.com/news/local/west-coast-spotted-owl-potential-extinction-kill-bared-owls-us-fish-wildlife-service-oregon-washington-california?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0SAXBCJE2LeWkHmfSEw1pVsIE49sPjuY7DJl23vyGUOJ8eTdH04MXiafM_aem_TRWz-cteEV5y0cUzh4fSmg#

These guys keep the giant ship rat population in check here near Puget Sound.
Government assassins beware. I will protect my feathered neighbors!

He's Done Stopped Preachin'

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:32:00 +0000

My friend Mark Milliorn this week wrote a scathing criticism of our election system, both parties and then he started naming names of people's favorite presidential candidates. I don't know about New Mexico, but in certain places back in Texas, that sort of rash talk could get you a load of buckshot in the seat of your pants and from more than one direction. It's reminded me of a story.

Aunt Bertha and the Preacher

One of my great aunts, a dedicated church-goer, used to make expressions of encouragement to the preacher during the service. She'd practically sing out the Amens and Hallelujahs. She also used a little bit of snuff on occasion. This particular Sunday, the preacher started in on the sins of the flock and he was getting serious.

"All of you out there that are drinking that demon rum are on the high road to hell!" he thundered.

"Amen!" enthused Aunt Bertha.

"And all you out there using that maryjewana or messin with them fetameans....well, I hate to say it but you're looking at getting an eternal hotfoot!" The preacher warmed to his work.

Aunt Bertha sang out, "Preach it brother!"

"All you smokers out there, slaves to that vile nicotine, well you're gonna be able to light them Winston's and them Lucky Strikes off your own hair." Oh he was stepping on some toes now and Aunt Bertha mightily approved.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaamen!" she glissandoed from an alto to a soprano in one long shout of praise.

"And the devil has prepared coals of fire for the beds of those who's lips drool black tobacco spit, chewing that evil chewing tobacco!" the reverend by this point in his sermon was filled with the spirit.

"Oh, brother, praise the Lawd Jesus, tell em all," Bertha, her voice strained by then managed to croak.

"And I am here to tell you," the preacher raised his hands toward heaven.

"Oh, I know that Gawd is preaching through you, reverend!" Bertha shook her head and raised her hands too.

"That the Lord does not look kindly, nor will He allow into his kingdom," the pastor affixed the amen pew with a fierce glare and continued dramatically, "He will stop cold at the pearly gates, those who partake of snuff!" He shook his head sadly. "For there will be no spittoons in heaven."

Aunt Bertha stopped in mid-hallelujah and fell silent. Then she turned to her sister, Aunt Pearl and in a shocked whisper said, "Well damn. He's done stopped preaching and done started meddlin'!"

Poor Mark. He's definitely done started meddlin', poor boy.

© 2024 by Tom King

The Key Bridge Collapse - A Black Swan Event?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 03:49:00 +0000

Last night a huge container ship rammed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and collapsed the bridge, taking with it a number of vehicles and tossing people into the frigid waters of the bay. Former National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, went to X (the former social media site known as Twitter), calling the bridge collapse a Black Swan event. A Black Swan Event is an unexpected major event that has unpredictable large scale impact. A Black Swan event is one that in hindsight could have been predicted, but seems so unlikely that we really don't think it will happen.

As a Black Swan event, the Key Bridge disaster was entirely predictable. Some day, quite by chance, there was every chance that a giant container ship in the harbor would lose power, go astray and crash into the bridge. Ships move. Bridges don't. And bridges have been known fall before due to other factors like earthquakes, age, and structural issues. A surprising number of ships and barges have struck and damaged or collapsed a bridge. These incidents don't get beyond the local news in most cases if there is not a substantial loss of life, so we are therefore confident, perhaps more so than is warranted, that the ship guidance systems, trained captains and harbormasters would perfectly prevent such events. So, though it's predictable that such a thing could happen, it still comes at a surprise. After such a huge event, people get all a twitter and the ripples of the shock of the event pass through delicately intertwined social, economic and government systems. We should be resilient enough to resist knee jerk reactions to big scale traumatic events, but, though we should be able to, most of us don't. One can always tell folks, "Hey, don't panic," but people will panic anyway.


Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse Wikimedia Commons

But it's not like bridges haven't collapsed before. The Scottish railroad bridge over the River Tay in
a violent storm in 1879, collapsed carrying a train load of passengers to the bottom of the Firth of Forth. The engineer had failed to consider wind loading from storm winds when he designed the bridge. It was a shock, but it wasn't unpredictable had someone calculated wind loading into the design as it has ever since the tragedy. In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed into Puget Sound in a 40 mph wind due to a design that, like the Tay Bridge, also failed to take into account the lateral pressure of the wind on the suspension bridge and the need to consider both aerodynamic and resonance factors in the design. A dog was killed.

As recently as 2007, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13. In 1989, a massive earthquake collapse sections of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge and caused 63 deaths, nearly 3,800 injuries, and an estimated $6 billion in property damage. So despite our confident reliance on bridges, they do unexpectedly fail.

Strikes on bridges by ships have happened before:

In 2007, the container ship M/V Cosco Busan struck one of the towers of the western span of the rebuilt San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge because of a “pilot’s blunder in the fog,”. The bridge didn't collapse, but it was a near thing.
In 1974, a barge struck the Endom bridge over the Ouachita River in Monroe Louisiana and knocked it down. Thank God it was a swing bridge and was open. The inebriated tugboat captain rammed a heavy barge into a span of the bridge, collapsing it and leaving a police cruiser stranded on the center swing span. The barge rammed Pier No. 3, the rest pier for the western end of the swing span and the eastern pier for the Petit through truss No. 3. According to the local paper, after the barge hit the pier, "the span twisted and rolled to one side and collapsed into the river. It happened in the middle of the night so no one was on the bridge. It did, however, demonstrate once again that boats can knock down bridges. I drove over the adjacent Interstate highway bridge the next morning and saw a bridge I had driven over many times lying in the river. since then have avoided being on bridges when a ship was passing underneath.
In 2009, a vessel pushing eight barges rammed into the Popp’s Ferry Bridge in Biloxi, Mississippi, resulting in a 150-foot section of the bridge collapsing into the bay.
In 1998, a tow boat, The Anne Holly rammed the center span of the Eads Bridge in St. Louis Harbor . Eight barges broke loose. Three of them hit a gambling vessel permanently moored below the bridge. Fifty people suffered minor injuries.
In 2002, A barge hit the Interstate 40 bridge over the Arkansas River at Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, collapsing a 500-foot section of road and plunging vehicles into the water. Fourteen people died and 11 were injured.
In 1993, A towboat, pushing an empty hopper barge, hit a support tier of the Judge William Seeber Bridge in New Orleans. Two spans collapsed onto the barge and two cars carrying three people along with the four-lane bridge deck dropped into the canal. One person died and two were seriously injured.
In 2001, a tugboat and barge struck the Queen Isabella Causeway in Port Isabel, Texas, causing the midsection of the bridge to drop 80 feet into the bay Eight people died as unsuspecting drivers drove off into the hole.
In 1980, the Summit Venture was navigating the tortuous Tampa Bay shipping channel, when a sudden, blinding squall knocked out the ship’s radar. The ship sheared off a support of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, dropping a 1,400-foot section of concrete roadway during the morning rush hour. Seven vehicles, including a bus with 26 aboard, fell 150 feet into the water. Thirty-five people died.
In 1993, a string of barges being pushed by a towboat in dense fog hit and knocked the Big Bayou Canot railroad bridge out of line near Mobile, Alabama. In minutes, an Amtrak train with 220 people aboard derailed on the displaced bridge, killing 47 and injuring 103.

And of course we will see an outburst of conspiracy theories from all the usual people after this latest tragedy. As it turns out, many people are just naturally fearful of randomness. They would much rather believe this was a deliberate attack by evil human beings, rather than cope with the fact that it happened due to blind chance. Random events really freak such people at. They cannot believe that everything is not planned and orchestrated by somebody somewhere. These guys would blame the Deep State if an asteroid dropped from the sky and obliterated Manhattan. They could never live with the idea that at any moment a space rock could drop on their heads or a volcano pop up in their back yard.

Should We Reject Religion as Outdated?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 10:52:00 +0000

There is a movement among Christians to reject "religion" in favor of being "spiritual" instead. Adherents to this theology do not seem to like going to church, listening to preachers or taking the Bible literally as the Word of God. This troubles me. We've been warned against spiritualism in Scripture and from the pulpits of Christendom. Unlike my spiritual friends, I am content to accept the Word as my guide and to wait till eternity until God offers me explanations of how everything works,

before I cast aside religion altogether. Discovering the things we have not been shown yet, should keep me thoroughly entertained for millions of years. God's penmen could only tell us what they saw, what they experienced and what they understood in their walk with Him on Earth, when they wrote all that down. Sadly, we see through a glass darkly. I have found that it takes knowing God in His completeness to find one's way to the truth.

I'd be very careful about tossing out all the parts of Christian "religion", including the organized bits, that may not suit our modern clothes. Some ideas could stand to go. For instance, a lot of people stubbornly cling to the idea that God punishes dead folk by chicken frying them for eternity. The thing is Scripture doesn't actually teach that. It was a handy way to keep people afraid and in the pews with their purses opened. That Satan introduced such evil ideas doesn't void all organized religion. Paul warned about that. He says we should meet and work together even more so as we see the end approaching. And if you aren't seeing the signs on the evening news, you're not paying attention.

And if you actually come to know God experientially, you'd know He's not a Hitler or Stalin or Caligula to inflict unfathomable cruelty on creatures He6 lov, and it very specifically teaches that the human soul is not by nature immortal (John 3:16). God truly IS love and knowing that, you'll soon come to realize and recognize what some branches of the church and some churchmen who claim they have spoken for and still speak for God, take his name in vain (a severe violation of a commandment with some pretty harsh consequences).

In my study of psychology in grad school, I recognized many of the therapeutic tools we were taught to use were, in fact, the same sorts of things Christ and the apostles built into the church as a way of altering human bad behavior - prayer, praise, study and sharing what we learned from the other four. Turns out, Jesus knew how the human mind works and built things into His church that would help us change our behavior (what we Adventists call sanctification). We get close to emulating religious training with the behavioral/reality therapy techniques psychologists and counselors use. Seems Jesus understood how the human mind works.

We're just now catching up and seeing the edges of God's amazingly detailed creation. The sciences, when freed of politics, have begun to see evidence of God as Moses did. Not fully His face, but His "back parts" - the footprints of deity. Physicists, biologists, astronomers and mathematicians have recently begun to discover answers to questions they never thought to ask because they dismissed the idea of a God altogether from the very beginning. Too many approached science by first rejecting the idea of a pan-dimensional being with vast power because of what He is; one described as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end all at once. That was a pretty scientifically advanced idea for a former fisherman, traveling self-educated preacher, and prisoner of Rome living out on an island in the sea to have come up with all on his own. The remarkable thing is that the Bible we've got is flexible enough to guide everyone from the poor, the uneducated and simple folk to some of the most brilliant intellectuals of our time.

So, we probably should be very careful about rejection "religion" in its entirety and making it a dirty word. Much of the greatest good in history has come from the exercise of Christian religion, from ending the tossing of infants into the fires of Molech and Baal, the forced prostitution in Dagon's temples, the massive human sacrifices of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans, and the scourge of slavery that persisted for far too long in Earth's history.

Tossing out the religious baby with the truly evil bath of some of the worst cultures in history, could set us back centuries. Already we've sacrificed more than 50 million unborn infants in the past half century or so. Humans have committed genocide on an unbelievable scale and seem to throw a new war every few years with result death and carnage. Does anyone believe it's going to get better if we end Christian organized religion in favor of searching for truth within our own screwed up heads.

Me, I'm going to seek enlightenment from my creator. Looking around at humans, I don't think I'm going to find truth and goodness in the unconverted human heart. I think that comes from Someone outside ourselves and navel-gazing isn't going to find it.

(C) 2024 by Tom King

Do We Need a Law to Force Grocery Stores to Stop Throwing Away Food

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 05:13:00 +0000

In America, you have no excuse for being hungry.

Short Answer: Nope!

Ever once in a while, some dear lefty buddy of mine will throw a post up on Facebook about a clever way that France (why is it always France) has passed a law making it illegal for grocery stores to throw away food. It feeds the hungry and stops global warming they say, thus killing two virtual birds with one stone. It seems that decomposing food releases carbon into the air much to the dismay of environmentalists and the joy of plants everywhere who need carbon to breathe.

Well, it's true that France passed such a law back in 2016. The law made it illegal for any grocery store larger than 4000 square feet to throw away food that is getting close to its sell-by date. On the surface, it all sounds like a nifty idea and even punishes those greedy corporate grocery chains.

The law requires stores to stop tossing useful nutritious, if slightly aged food. Instead, they would have to donate it to some charitable nonprofit that would hand the food out to the deserving poor and hungry while making sure only the people getting it actually need it.

And like any good law, the mechanics of it is fraught with unintended consequences. It makes the supermarket responsible for sorting and shipping out the food which adds to the cost. There is some concern that if the poor don't buy food, the grocery store will lose money from even that small amount of lost business. Remember that of all retail, grocers operate on a very narrow margin, earning, after expenses from 1 to 3 cents on every dollar they spend.

Don't get me started on the economics of making this idea a government program. My friend Mark Milliorn has done an excellent explanation of the economic chaos caused by getting government involved in this scheme. There's one reason not to do this that Mark missed.

AMERICANS ALREADY DO EXACTLY THIS SAME THING WITHOUT A LAW FORCING THEM TO DO IT. And we do it efficiently without wrecking the economy and we insure that no one goes hungry. The surest way to mess it all up is to make it a government program.

I worked in East Texas for close to 4 decades, helped start 5 nonprofit organizations to fill community needs that weren't being met by government programs. One in 5 East Texans didn't have ready access to transportation. One in four were seniors or disabled adults. I helped write community collaborative grants for homeless programs and agencies. And I helped raise funds for food bank programs.

The East Texas Food Bank was a huge project. ETFB operated a large warehouse as a distribution point for the East Texas Food Bank programs in the region. Several grocery stores and chains donated food being rotated off the shelves to the food bank. It was carried to the ETFB warehouse in the store's trucks and by the food banks vehicles. Volunteers from all over come in and donate their time to sort the food onto pallets, where it is labeled and stored.


A local church school's kids volunteer time at the Food Bank

Across the region community organizations, nonprofits and churches set up food banks in their facilities. Sometimes several churches cooperate to set up a food bank location. They buy shelves and coolers and freezers from a company that resells and recycles store appliances. The individual location sets up a room like a store. When someone comes in needing groceries, church secretaries or volunteers give them a basket and lets them shop for what they need. The bank staff know what's available and help to distribute it fairly.

The program was particularly successful during economic hard times. People would need food to time them over till they started work. So instead of going through the Food Stamp Offices' proctological exam, they pick up a couple of bags of groceries at the church food bank. Other ways food is distributed is through outdoor distributions in parks and public facilities, through soup kitchens, nonprofit residential facilities, and Meals on Wheels.

The upshot was that one day panicked Food Stamp officials summoned us all to a meeting where they announced that the feds were cutting $800,000 from their budget. AND IT WAS OUR FAULT THEY CLAIMED. Apparently, we did so well with the food banks that their applications dropped significantly and DC cut their budget. They were planning to spend $150,000 on a marketing campaign, the theme of which was "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform."

It was then that I discovered where they got the "One in five children go to bed hungry" slogan. The spokesman for the Food Stamp office let it slip out that their applications were way down. I asked if they were going to make the application process easier and was told "NO!" It was then that the I found that the 1-in-5 hunger statistic was based on the number of applications, not the number of food stamp awards. What they really wanted was more applications.

Our little church/nonprofit-based food banks would pick up truckloads of food at the central bank. We would pay 1 cent per pound to help cover the food bank's operating costs. The system runs entirely without state or federal government assistance. The grocery stores donate to the central food bank without being coerced by government. Other independent nonprofit volunteers from organizations like Gleaners whose volunteers harvest fields gleaning potatoes, yams, carrots and other crops after the farmers do the first pass, also donate harvested produce and overflow stuff from festivals and fairs.

The system works smoothly and doesn't get mucked up by government bureaucrats. And nobody knows who needs food like church secretaries and the field staffs of community organizations.

So if the government can keep its grubby hands off of us, we can make sure the greatest health threat to Americans in poverty is obesity and we can do it efficiently and economically.

Americans are good people by nature; Christians are under orders to be good people. We give more money to charity, to third world countries and the poor than the US government does.

Is God a Torturer?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 22:40:00 +0000

You would think that the son of God would
have his Father's temper, but........not so much.

Do atheists realize the fact that we Christians will go to heaven while non-Christians and atheists will going to hell where God will torture you for eternity and we will mock you all day long?

This bait question was recently posted on Quora. It was posted I suspect in order to generate a debate between atheists and Christians, in part to reveal Christian hypocrisy. I don't think the doofus who posted it is, in fact, a Christian or has ever met Christ in his spiritual life. The premise behind the question is a false premise - an argument based on a fallacy. The false premise here is that the human soul is and always will be immortal without any interference from God to keep our souls going.

Ecclesiastes 9:5 says, "The living know that they shall die but the dead know nothing neither have they a part in anything done under the sun." The righteous dead, we are told in Scripture, will be raised from sleep at the second coming. Jesus describes death as sleep. He says (Matthew 10:28) "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." Apparently the soul does not survive hell according to Jesus.

The wicked dead, on the other hand, will be raised at the second resurrection to face judgment and will then die again one last time. There is no eternal ever-burning hell. It isn't in Scripture. It’s a doctrine borrowed by the Roman church from Greek and Roman mythology to frighten people into obedience.

God is love and merciful. The idea that He, who died a horrific death that all of us who believe in Him might not perish but have eternal life, will “torture and mock” people for eternity is a damnable though quite effective lie designed by Satan and borrowed from paganism by the Roman church that actually drives people away from God by making Him look more evil than Hitler.

Man’s soul is not immortal. Only God grants eternal life (see John 3:16). Nowhere does the Bible say God grants eternal life to the lost. The only place where anyone says “Thou shalt not surely die” is in the Garden of Eden and it’s the first lie told to Eve by a snake.

Sadly, the “You’ll be tormented in hell” malarkey is just too good a story that pastors cling to in order to scare people into the pews and loosen their purse strings. Turns out that idea keeps more people out of the church than it keeps in. It’s a lie about God’s character and a violation of the 3rd commandment, even more so than using swear words like GD. It’s claiming to speak for and about God without his direction. It defames God’s character and THAT is the bit God won’t hold you blameless for as it drives away people from Him.

Every time God gets mad at an individual or a group, it’s because they are harming the innocent. He got mad at Israel because they were sacrificing 26,000 babies a year to the god Moloch. If I were God, I’d get mad at that too, but even I wouldn’t chicken fry someone forever and not allow him to die. And I certainly wouldn't mock him. That’s just horrible and nothing like the God of love and mercy that I know.

Jonathan Edwards lied, whether he believed what he was saying or not. The not-so-Reverend Edwards upset a lot of good Christian people with his horrific sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It upset me centuries later when I had to read that monstrous thing for literature class in high school. Edwards took massive liberties with the Scripture in that sermon. It drove thousands of the timid into the pews and loosened their purse strings as it was intended to do. You have to wonder how many good-hearted people fled westward, appalled that New England's god was a monster.

Here is the absolutely terrifying picture of God that Edwards paints.

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment"

No!

1 John 1:5 - This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
2 Peter 3:9 - The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
John 17:3 - “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
Romans 5:8 - But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

God doesn't give Himself a pass on the eternal hatred and vengeance option. How can we say God is good all the time, and tell people he sets fire to immortal people and enjoys the ensuing fiery sports - people flopping around and screaming.

I don't think so!

© 2023 by Tom King

We Bards Have Our Work Cut Out for Us!

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 03:23:00 +0000

Time for the Bards to rise up and save football!

Having unsheathed my word processor of late in the great cause of shining light on hypocrisy, oppression and outright stupidity, I find myself being called "mean-spirited" for characterizing yesterday's Thanksgiving football game here on the left coast as the San Francisco Homeless vs the Seattle Porch Pirates. I'm sure some snowflake out there must be offended by the names of those two teams. The 49'ers for whom the San Francisco Football team were, after all, money grubbing gold-diggers who certainly didn't pay their taxes. And a Seahawk is a predatory bird who kills for food - hardly an example of proper Veganinity for the youth of California and Washington. So I said we should, in the spirit of the Washington "Commanders", change the team names to something more in keeping with the image of the two great cities they represent.

And at least such a name change wouldn't ruin the whole point of the matchup like they did by changing Texas' Thanksgiving day classic between the Cowboys and the Redskins into something that makes no sense. Everybody knows Cowboys don't pay any attention to commanders. At least the Cowboys did respect the Native Americans with whom they shared the Great Plains, mutual respect, buffalo meat and the occasional burst of gunfire. Actually, most Native Americans, at least the ones with functioning hormones appropriate to their sex, didn't seem to have a problem with the name of the Washington DC football team.

I'm just waiting for an expansion team to show up. I think it should be named "The Whiteskins." Every snowflake in America could root against that team and feel much superior to the redneck rubes that merely come to watch a good football game without any need to have their culture insulted.

In ancient times, my Celtic ancestors had a tradition. Wandering and not so wandering troubadours and comedians known as bards attended the courts of the ruling class, visited the village squares and the homes of the wealthy (sort of like early social media) and they sang scurrilous songs, told scandalous jokes and because the culture protected such rogues, they poked fun at the wealthy and powerful - kind of a pressure valve that kept the peasants from rising up in the middle of the night and murdering the upper classes in their beds.

Today, folks like me, the guys at the Babylon Bee, the late great Rush Limbaugh, Ray Stevens, South Park, Saturday Night Live (which has, of late, taken some pretty hard swipes at the omnipotent moral busibodies of the regressive left), Internet sensation Oliver Anthony and others are driven to create satire, to spoof egregious behavior by the rich and oppressive and to make fun of their foolishness. We are the bards of the 21st century. The current wave of so-called wokeness that has overwhelmed our traditional and much-loved cultural icons like Disney, the six o'clock news, and, God help us, the halls of Congress threatens us regular folks out in the heartland. Sadly, the perpetrators of wokeness have lost their sense of humor almost entirely.

Our betters, back in the olden days tolerated the teasing of the bards and jesters for if they were too thin-skinned about being teased, people figured they were weak and someone with a big sword would come along and relieve them of their heads on behalf of "the people" that Karl Marx claimed to be fighting for. Back when Karl was unemployed, living in his mother's basement, and trying hard to come up with something that would catch on with the hoity toity set, he created socialism, which the British upper class immediately recognized as an ideal mechanism by which to re-institute the old divine right of kings nobility and hierarchy of the leader class. And that is all Marxism/communism is after all and it's why the elitist upper classes love socialism so much. They figure they will be the big dogs after the revolution comes.

The dismal history of socialism is also why I believe it to be my duty and the duty of every brave soul with a rapier wit and an Internet website to poke fun at and let a little air out of today's over-inflated self-important unearned but self-proclaimed morally superior gasbags. It's part of our heritage. Let's face it Americans were kicked out of every decent country in the world mostly because we just couldn't keep our mouths shut. We come from long lines of sarcastic, loud-mouthed troublemakers. I consider myself a bard, the descendant of generations of bards (and like bard's of yore, I have a sword nearby just in case some over-entitled busybody takes umbrage.)

© 2023 by Tom King

Churches Are the Conscience of the Nation

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 23:55:00 +0000

Churches have long been a vital part of the conscience of this nation. The Revolutionary War was fomented in the pulpits of the American colonies. Churches complained loudly about the mistreatment of the Indians and Presidents like Lincoln and Grant pressed the disloyal opposition to keep the treaties we agreed to, and to stop slaughtering whole native American villages. Churches drove the abolition movement and church people held together the underground railroad. Churches pressed the WWII government to accept Jewish refugees (which good Democrat FDR resisted). Wilson segregated the military during WWI and it took church-going Harry Truman to desegregate the military in 1946 after black soldiers, sailors and airmen served honorably on the front lines. White and black churches lined up behind Martin Luther King, himself a minister and outspoken political activist, to march for Civil Rights in the 60s against powerful resistance by the Democrat party.

Today churches are still a powerful voice for the right to life of unborn children which many organizations, politicians and the IRS violently oppose. Such leftist organizations are free shout to the skies about the right of women to kill their unborn children in the womb. In this day and age Christian church organizations (the church triumphant which spans all Christendom) is just about the only unified voice rising in protest. The churches of America provide equal time voices to such tax exempt organizations and yet find their tax exempt status constantly threatened if their moral exhortations conflict with the dominant political narrative.

The Sierra Club, 501(c)5 and partly 501(c)3, and Black Lives Matter a 501(c)3 (same as churches) are both clearly political. Sierra Club does offer tax deductible donation options, but cash donations are fungible and all of its political activities do come under the Sierra Club banner, political or not. Black Lives Matter's website still claims 501(c)3 status despite sponsoring violent political protests and led by avowed communists who use the money to buy themselves mansions.

Pressure on churches to sit down and shut up is growing. A Houston Mayor, a few years ago, demanded that church pastors submit their sermon notes or tapes of the sermon to the mayor's office for review. In Texas that didn't go over so well, but she certainly tried to force churches to testify against themselves in that manner. She threatened area churches with the IRS investigations.

I worked with nonprofits for 40 years and hardly a one did not skirt the no politics rule in one way or another. I know. I taught them how to get their messages to legislatures by being careful how they did it. I worked with coalitions to address a wide variety of community issues - bipartisan coalitions for the most part. I had to teach my progressive brethren to speak Republican and talk them into not chaining themselves to things at the capital. We were practically the only initiative to get what we asked for from the new Republican majority. They were so glad we weren't picketing outside their offices or chaining ourselves to statues of Stephen F. Austin that we found them to be grateful allies.

A pastor here in Washington is in trouble for providing a list of people to vote for to his congregation. It's not the least of his problems. Questions about money and treatment of women makes it look like there are lots of other things for authorities to worry about other than his politics. That's NOT his biggest problem here it appears. So to frame this situation as another example. Concern that the church is meddling in things political seems disingenuous. Liberal churches aren't drawing the same sort of heat these days. Seems if you have a coven meeting in the all purpose room on Thursday nights and an abortion rights group having potlucks in the kitchen, nobody is worried about that.

Had the church folks of my generation remained silent and uninvolved, how far would the Civil Rights Bill got? Southern Democrats took a lot of heat from church folk over how they were treating our black brothers and sisters back then. That heat is why LBJ managed to get enough of them to sign on to the Civil Rights Bill to pass it and he only did that because, as he told fellow Democrats, he thought the party could position itself as the savior and author of Civil Rights in America and "...have those n!@@#%$ voting Democrat for the next 200 years." He actually said that. Somehow nobody noticed that Johnson didn't have to persuade the Republicans to vote for it.

There's no question that there is a strong conservative lean to Christian churches. Gagging them would be a really effective way to silence the influence of Christianity in the nation's halls of power. That would be a shame. You may not agree that we are a Christian nation, but there's no denying that religious freedom is in the bones of our system of government. We should be careful before we excise that bone in order to get a little peace and quiet while some of us work out our political agendas. On a Nextdoor discussion thread, someone who was restricted for his political comment said, "I'm a conservative sure, but I don't call people names, lie about them or engage in personal attacks. The people who reported my post cannot say the same. I just present facts and reason."

This may not stay up on Facebook, but I've got several more social media accounts among the dwindling number of conservative friendly social media. Parlor and Realtalk are gone and others are looking feeble. Twitter did come over from the dark side, but even they are facing organized attacks.

If I didn't sufficiently skirt the line of what is now deemed acceptable speech, simply ignore this post and go your merry way. I assure you that I meant no harm to anyone's delicate sensibilities, which I seem to do without intending to. I suspect it will get worse for people like me as the generation whose parents did little to correct them as children and gave them whatever they squealed for rises in influence.

Thank God Jesus is coming. I expect it will happen before the Almighty has to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Just Sayin'

© 2023 by Tom King

Google Has Discovered My Subversive Blogs Are Making Money!

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 04:18:00 +0000

I have now joined the august assemblage of conservative bloggers who have been threatened with demonetization by Google Adsense. Allegedly I have been laying out the ads in my blogs so that they trick readers into “accidentally” clicking on ads.

First off I wouldn't even know how to do such a thing.

Second, I've made enough lately that they owe me money.

And, finally, the biggest problem is that since I’ve got the blogs set up on auto-ads with Adsense. I did this recently and suddenly I get an email threatening to demonitized my 9 weblogs for deceptive advertising. The trick is that, if such a thing is happening, it’s Google doing it. On their advice I set Adsense up to automatically set up ads on my blogs to maximize the visibility of my ads and increase reader clicks. So if I'm all of a sudden in violation of some sort of ethical advertising standard, it's Google that set up the ads on my blog to do that automatically.

My suspicion here is that the evil Google algorithm we've all heard about has been up to no good. I think it has ferreted out my subversive conservative sympathies and decided it doesn’t like my politics, my religion or my bad jokes. It doesn't make sense that I would get trouble when I turned over the arrangement of ads to Google auto-ads that I'd get in trouble for it..

Pray for me y'all. I am going to beard the Google lion in its den next week. I mean I don’t make much on my blogs, but sometimes it helps pay the grocery bill in a pinch. I've been growing my audience lately and my ad revenue has increased. If I can't work it out with Google, I may have to go through Patreon to fund my madness or take up stand up comedy or become a Youtube chef or something.

Slouching Toward the Apocalypse - Are Republicans Losing Their Way?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 23:39:00 +0000

It looks to me like the GOP may be irredeemably divided. The liberal Republicans won't vote for a serious conservative like Jim Jordan and the conservatives won't vote for a RINO like Tom Emmer. The party seems stuck between 25 "radical" Republicans and 25 RINOs. At least that's how they think of each other. There are some 60 or 70 Republicans in the middle that seem eager to vote for anybody, just so they're a Republican. The divisions in the party threatens to push entire nation over the tipping point.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are firmly aligned behind Hakeem Jeffries (and with a foreign sounding name like Hakeem who can blame them). The party of Jackson, Wilson, FDR, Johnson (and other assorted racists) has successfully raised virtue signaling to a fine art and a House Speaker with an Arabic name (though he's a Northern Baptist by religion), like a President named Barak, helps establish Democrat street cred as the anti-racists they aren't.

The level of confusion on the Christian right may be another sign of the end. I am excluding the radical lunatic right, of course as they every bit the gadflies that the radical left are, but far less useful. They don't march on command after all.

The pope (Frances the Jesuit) is, I'm sure, still praying for the global government with teeth. Pope Benedict (a more direct sort of pontiff being German and all) called for in in his third papal encyclical and which has been firmly seconded by Frances.

I'm not sure, though, who took charge of answering that particular prayer. After the chaos that will result from trying to corral free people into socialist collectives, I have my suspicions.

At any rate, the Congress is limited, for the time being, in its power to meddle in our lives. I count that as a positive in all of this. As Mark Twain said, probably borrowing the idea from some other pundit - he did that a lot:

Just How Compassionate is the Progressive Left?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 22:59:00 +0000

The Progressive Fantasy

America is fast approaching a tipping point. The Left has captured most of the media, one entire political party, most universities, colleges, high schools, junior highs, middle schools and elementary schools. The film industry still makes conservative sorts of films when they want to make money, but mostly they make money-losing seriously "woke" and progressive post-modernist stories of misery and debauchery - at least the ones that want to win Oscars.

So let me list some things, besides my 40 years having to deal with entrenched leftist government programs, that have led me to my current conservative philosophical position.

Hatred:

Democrat rally in Michigan

Progressives hate Nazis
Nazis hate the Jews
Communists hate Nazis and vice versa in the same way the Crips hate the Bloods.
In WWII Muslim leaders of some Muslim nations like Iraq and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem actually supported Hitler in their shared hatred of Jews.
Many Muslim political factions, including Palestinian terrorist groups, hate the Jews and vow to "drive the Israelis into the sea.
Most Progressives unequivocally support Palestinian groups who share hatred of the Jews with the Nazi Party.

Socialism:

Progressives are pro-socialist and originate from Marxist philosophy.
Nazis were national socialists, not capitalists, but socialists all the same.
Communists consider themselves the logical end state of socialism.
Socialism in the 20th century has a dismal record of creating for people under socialist governments, what Churchill called "shared misery". The proletariat who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of socialist systems of government experienced deprivation, hunger, and oppression, surviving through black markets, theft and smuggling.

Socialist Mass Murder:

Communist and Marxist socialists in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other communist states murdered hundreds of millions of "enemies of the state" and killed other millions in waging war on their neighbors in just the 20th century.

Nazis killed more than 14 million Jews, Germans and Gypsies they considered enemies of the state and genetically defective Germans in the name of producing a pure Aryan race.
Progressive polices promoting abortion killed tens of millions of largely minority unborn children.

Serving the Collective:

Communists believed that citizens should serve the state/collective not the other way round.
Nazis believe that citizens should serve the state/collective not the other way round.
Progressives believe citizens should serve some vague sort of collective to be determined when the movement finds its superior leaders and create the Progressive Utopia which other socialist nations failed to do correctly.

Marxist Socialism:

Soviet Communists were Marxists Leninists.
Chinese Communists were Marxist/Maoists.
Nazis were Marxists. Hitler claimed Nazism was simply a better sort of Marxism.
Progressivism is a direct descendant of 19th century Marxism and draws the roots of its political model from Karl Marx.

Socialism's Eugenics Roots:

Communists practiced eugenics.
Nazis were enthusiastic eugenicists.
Progressivism throughout its history has believed in and practiced eugenics in the form of laws that resulted in forced sterilization of what they termed genetically inferior people (mostly the developmentally and mentally retarded), mass abortions of minorities that Progressive heroine Margaret Sanger called "human weeds," and policies of separation of people by race via Jim Crow laws, terrorism (the KKK), and segregation practices.
Progressive icon, George Bernard Shaw, insisted that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man", even suggesting, that defectives be dealt with by means of a "lethal chamber".
Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood".
Charles Darwin had a profound effect on politics and the ideas of Karl Marx. Early progressive socialists embraced the eugenics movement's definition of "unfit." The target of the left's efforts to improve humanity through science was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held "that most of the behavioral traits that lead to poverty are inherited. Progressive luminaries like Shaw, HG Wells, progressive economist John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski and JBS Haldane believed that the poor and certain races were genetically inferior to the educated middle class." It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor.
Darwin, himself, wrote, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world."
John Maynard Keynes, darling economist of the progressive left, was vice president of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. His belief in Malthusian and Eugenics pseudo-science influenced British leftists from 1907 till his death in 1946 when he endorsed eugenics as a legitimate science.

Progressivism's Confused Roots:

Darwin introduced the idea of evolution by survival of the fittest, which led to his belief that natural selective breeding would separate the intelligent upper class from the lower cast who would die out naturally from their own stupidity or be exterminated by the smart people.
Friedrich Nietzsche predicted the rise of progressive neoliberalism and attacked what he contemptuously characterized as the “Christian-moral view of the world.” He famously said "God is dead," and blamed Christianity for a rise to a general European culture of “decadence” that he claimed was careening on its way to catastrophe.
Karl Marx's philosophy that sketched the outline of the socialist worker's collective was seized upon by the upper classes who still held to the old idea of a superior noble class as a way to restore the privileged class to leadership that had been brutally undercut by the example of American constitutional democracy which had infected the Western world.
Francis Galton's theories about how to use a mish mash of Darwin, biology and genetic theory to improve the human race thoroughly infiltrated early progressive politics, capturing Theodore Roosevelt's, Woodrow Wilson's, HG Wells', George Bernard Shaw's and the Democrat Party's attention.
Eugenics was a good fit for the Democrat Party with their traditional belief that certain races were genetically inferior. Eugenics explained for progressive Democrats why Republicans didn't understand about race - even the white ones.

Every one of the political versions that came from progressive origins has committed more than its share of atrocities. The Soviet Union had it's gulags and mass starvation of the Kulaks. China's Great Leap Forward killed and/or starved millions of Chinese, especially poor ones. North Korea shoots any who disagrees with the Kim family, often with anti-aircraft guns at point blank range. North Vietnam murdered 2 million of its people after they overran the abandoned South. Cambodia killed a couple of millions in the infamous killing fields. And the list goes on and on. Che Guevara, the Cuban enforcer and darling of the American left, murdered people in the most brutal ways imaginable, a fact the progressives prefer to "forget".

And the American Progressive Left, really does think it can do progressive socialism better than anyone had done it before. This ignores the fact that even if you find a perfect leader, when he dies or is assassinated, the next guy is liable to be a sadistic monster like Josef Stalin and the whole thing goes to hell.

People don't want to believe in the idea of Original Sin - basically that left to themselves, people are no damned good. Progressives socialists philosophy is based on the idea that was later theorized by Abraham Maslow that people, if a heirarchy of needs is addressed, people will become progressively.......better. I've worked half a century with people and that dog won't hunt. Good people tend to be the ones who choose to follow the Christian morality that Nietzsche complained loudly about.

Turns out a godless Utopia just doesn't work out. Still Progressivism is rapidly approaching a tipping point, beyond which, our only hope is if Jesus gets the bus loaded and comes to get us. Dear God, make it so.

© 2023 by Tom King

Disney Goes Woker!

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:07:00 +0000


Retitled Snow White and the 7 Magical Creatures. Wonder what would happen if a white guy played Shaka Zulu in a movie? Almost as ludicrous as German Max Von Sydow playing Jesus - a Jew if you remember. Jesus with a German accent! What happened to the uproar about cultural appropriation?

Well, Disney goes even more woke with a version of Snow White that should be retitled Snow "Brown" and the 7 "Magical Creatures". So long Caucasian German princess. Goodbye 6 of the 7 dwarfs. That's put 6 diminutive actors out of a job. Kind of sucks, but then it was Peter Dinklage's idea. Sucks for him, though. No work for Dinklage either. And he'd have made a lovely Grumpy.

Seems there's only one race going to be canceled in the New Disneyworld Order. Seems a little lop-sided to take one culture's children's stories and "appropriate" them wholesale. There are plenty of stories in every culture that could benefit from the Disney touch. They've already demonstrated that they don't have to depend entirely on the Brother's Grimm. They did Jungle Book, Mulan, Lion King, Kung Fu Panda, Coco and others. Plenty of great stories there.

It seems a shame that a message is being sent to the kids of one culture that their traditional stories aren't good enough unless they are adjusted to a different, less objectionable ethnicity than their own. Seems, if not racist, at least...........well no. It's definitely racist. But then what do you expect from the staunch allies of the party that fully embraced progressivism in the first place? The party of Jim Crow, the KKK, the Civil War, slavery, lynchings, segregation and separate but unequal. Seems they need at least one race to discriminate against. But like their white supremacist political roots, they have to divide the dominant new "minority" into liberal whites and conservative whites.

And apparently it's us conservative honkies that are the source of everyone's problems.

© 2023 by Tom King

How Do You Solve a Problem like a Brandon?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 20:05:00 +0000


Just watched a kid go through our neighbor's car. I let them know...

I posted the following on our neighborhood website. I received an immediate community standards warning. The site's omnipotent moral busybodies that monitor the site will likely take it down, so I've posted my comment here. The kid in the photo to the left had just looted someone's car and got caught on camera. His picture was posted on the Nextdoor app which triggered a lot of angry talk and apparently the name of the kid AND his parents. There was a lot of frustrated talk on the thread with the picture, but not a lot of helpful advice. Gossiping about it isn't terribly helpful either. Here's what I suggested that apparently is anti-woke and must, therefore, be censored.

If this kid has stolen from you or broken into your car, visit the parents in person. Often these folk will nit pick and argue about proof and try to tell you it couldn't be their child. Of course, they know better, but that doesn't mean they'll admit it. Do not attack the parents. They're probably out of their depth. Just state your case, be kind and talk about consequences.

I had to do that once with a kid who beat up my son and left him with a bloody eyeball and me with a $200 doctor bill. His parents spoke no English so I had the bully translate for me. I am certain he did not do so accurately, but they got enough of what I was saying and he heard me promise to carry his fuzzy behind to the police station. He said I couldn't do that and I would be arrested if I did. I told him he'd best hope we didn't wind up in the same jail. He did not touch my son again which kept my son safe and I didn't have to wrestle with authorities unwilling to act.

You won't leave that house feeling like the parents got the point, but they will. This sort of parent does not want to see you at their front door again, nor do they want to see more pictures of their delinquent son on the Internet. The kid will get over it and perhaps he will learn that his folks may let him get away with it, but the community will not. It may be one of those key points in a young life where they turn back onto the path toward becoming a good person. I've seen it happen. Don't underestimate the power of communicating honestly and remembering to treat all as you would like to be treated. That's the power of sites like this. We used to sit on porches and talk to the neighbors. Builders stopped putting porches on our houses so the Internet and sites like this have to take on that role.

Remember these steps:
1. Visit the parents
2. Offer to help
3. Outline the consequences of his continued behavior
4. Remind them that not everyone would bother to talk to his parents about his dangerous behavior.

Not sure if this will be kept up here on Nextdoor. I've been warned that it's against community standards. I don't know how, for it is an effective method for dealing with the problem without:

    (a) ruining the kid's life
   (b) trying to go through overworked under-motivated authorities
   (c) convincing the kid that no one is going to stop him.
    (d) Shooting his butt with a load of rock salt when you catch him
            (my great grandfather's solution)

Do not underestimate the power of community for good or evil. Bring problems out into the open. Do not just gossip. People including kids are reluctant to misbehave if everyone is watching and expressing their disapproval with patience and kindness. It's possible to set points beyond which bad behaviors will not be tolerated with kindness. Watch your language and name-calling. Assume the best of others and often they will rise to the occasion.

Just sayin'
Tom King
Alderwood Estates

The Constitution's Governmental Cage Match Works

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:46:00 +0000

Leave the cage alone!

The US Constitution brilliantly created a style of government that resembles, if nothing else in modern culture - the inimitable wrestling cage match. The recent kerfuffle over the Supreme Court has pundits coming out of the woodwork with suggestions ranging from a constitutional convention of states (there's a scary idea) to packing the court, a practice that could go on until there are 40 or 50 judges on the court and nothing would ever get done. The biggest complaint from my side of the political aisle is that allowing the packing of the court would make the court an arm of whatever party that packed the court more effectively.

This would be a very bad idea I believe. The Supreme Court is not, nor should not be an arm of the administration or of the congress. It serves as the arbiter between those two branches and the Constitution. While there is this idealism around how law and judicial justice should be free of contamination by religious tenets and beliefs, that's just not possible, especially since people who consider themselves non-religious bring their own ideology/religion to bear in how they view laws and justice. Marxism, socialism, atheism and other anti-Christian ideologies are as much religion as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism.

The Western legal tradition draws most of its view of what is legal and what should not be from the stone tablets Moses dragged down from Mt. Sinai (and promptly broke). It says something that despite Israel's apostasy and Moses' temper tantrum, God made him climb back up the mountain and this time to carve a copy of the commandments out of rock. Western law is built on the code inscribed on those tablets.

There is a place in Revelation full of symbolism which seems to say that His people would, near the end of time, flee to a wilderness place of safety from rising persecution. I think He was talking about the United States, which in its time became a refuge from religious persecution for all sorts of Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution and more than a few Catholics who were on the receiving end of persecution by both church and state.

One of the symbols for this refuge to which the "woman" (God's church invisible) flees is symbolized by another beast that was like a lamb but spoke like a dragon. Having confronted a bull buffalo once, I suspect that was what John saw. Don't mess with those guys. The buffalo would be an excellent symbol for a place of refuge. The American bison is pretty peaceful mostly, but threaten the herd or more foolishly, their calves, and they'll flip your car upside down and tramp on it. Later the lamblike beast

The point is that the Constitution was brilliantly designed to limit governmental power. It basically created a cage match arena that pits 3 coequal powers against each other if they disagree yet gives them the ability to cooperate when it makes overwhelming sense to do so. The Constitution surrounds the arena, limiting the fight to the inside of the arena and regulating what comes out of the arena to the rest of us.

As a conservative, I prefer to keep the power of the arena limited. Fight it out all y'all wish, but only let out of the arena what everybody is, if not happy with, at least able to accept with some grace. I admit I prefer my judicial system to lean to the right (Ecclesiastes 10:2), but that there should be some debate, I find healthy. The Supreme Court has made some bad decisions in the past, Dred Scott, Buck v. Bell, Plessy v Ferguson, Roe v. Wade (I know some will disagree violently with me on that last one, but I rather think that a decision that led to the death of more than 52 million unborn infants is one of the more horrible ones since Herod, Pharoah, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and others who took on themselves power to murder millions by government decree.

For closing in on 2 1/2 centuries, the system has worked to stem the tide of evil caused by greed, self-centeredness, lust for power and the odd burst of mass insanity. It's no surprise then that people with an agenda, facing a system that blocks them at most every turn would want to alter the Constitution or simply ignore it and do what they want. So far the venerable document has managed to hold on, balancing power to kind of hold at bay the principal articulate by Frank Herbert. "It's not that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptible."

So long as we can make the urge to tyrannical power too difficult to accomplish within the arena, we'll be okay. But beware of those who would tear down the cage that holds them in. They are not your friends. They are enemies of America as it is.

© 2023 by Tom King

What's the Actual Number One Cause of Death in Children?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom King) — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 02:52:00 +0000

Is the right to bear arms responsible for
being the #1 cause of child gun deaths?
Is it time to abolish the 2nd Amendment?

Some people I like today said on camera that the number one cause of death of children was guns. First off, I would think that the number one cause of death was shooters. Secondly, it's a deceptive, manipulative lie. That's because the statistics are manipulated by changing the definition of "children".

Benjamin Disraeli, 19th Century Prime Minister of England, once opined, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In this case, the number one cause of death in children requires some serious manipulation of the numbers and definition. If you look it up in most anti-gun websites, gun related deaths in children top motor vehicle accidents, other sorts of accidents and individually each other cause of death such as illness, poisoning, murder, and manslaughter. Here's how you do it.

Infants seldom die of gun violence, so
they are not included in the child death
rate by guns statistics to avoid bringing
down the "numbers" of child gun deaths.

If you define a "child" as aged from one to nineteen, you arguably get somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand children's deaths. The reason they don't include age 0 to 1 numbers is because it would remove gun deaths from the number one spot. The death from natural causes is significantly higher as babies are fragile creatures and we caregivers don't get a lot of training before they are born. Meanwhile, even with the age of children being extended to include 18 to 19 years old the 0-12 month death rate from "other than guns" is pretty significant and not many babies often die from being shot.

These guys have inordinate numbers of gun deaths,
so they are counted as children to inflate the
child gun deaths numbers.

The reason the definition doesn't exclude 18 to 19-year-olds from being counted as children is that leaving them out would cut the number of child gun death numbers in half. Including murders and suicide by depressed teens and teenage gang members from Chicago, LA and Detroit, runs up the numbers of so-called deaths by gun violence. The inflated numbers glommed onto the child death stats makes no allowance for kids killed in mass shootings in "gun-free" zones by 18 to 26 year olds using illegally obtained guns nor for the cops shooting the shooter. He gets counted as a child gun death. I don't know about you, but "children" age 18 and up don't seem much like children at that age. If you can be tried as an adult, I believe you ARE an adult. Don't be blowing smoke up my skirt by telling me that someone who shaves (face or legs I don't care) is a child.

And yet well-meaning people get all in a twitter because they believe that toddlers are shooting each other in droves based on this statistical picture being painted by the anti-gun lobby. This is the picture such statistical manipulation is supposed to create in your mind. It's the same with adult gun death statistics. When our progressive friends talk about "victims" of gun violence, they cite statistics that are deliberately skewed to make you believe these are people who died at the hands of criminals or in gun accidents. What they don't tell you is that whenever a cop shoots a criminal caught in the act, when a homeowner shoots a home invader in self-defense, when a citizen with a gun puts a stop to a mass shooter, or when a father shoots a farm hand who is raping his daughter in the barn (true story), it is recorded as a death by "gun violence." No one records statistics when a Florida grandmother chases off a pair of home invaders by waving her shotgun at them or when a young mother with toddlers fires a shot at thieves ransacking her home or when an 89-year-old man is charged by a 20-year-old thief intent on looting the house next door and cops are an hour away according to the 911 operator. In Texas, charges against the old guy are dismissed automatically based on the "he needed killin'" principle.

The thing is that half of the gun-violence-against-children gun death numbers are created by "kids" who look like the picture above on the right. It's not a true picture of those "gun deaths" but it certainly distracts Mom & Pop America from the true purpose of all the talk about massive gun confiscation going on in the halls of power and in the media these days.

It's important to note that every tyrannical government in history first finds an excuse to disarm the citizenry. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The Communists disarmed the proletariat, the Chinese under Mao disarmed the peasants. Then they piled up the guns and burned them and came back the next day and piled up anyone who owned more than one ox and burned them.

I'm not mad at the people who believe the lies, though. They think they understand and are appalled, accepting the lies that the politicians and media spoon-feed them. Who can blame them for trusting that they are being told the truth? The sad thing is that the political party that has long claimed to be the party of the people, the party of the working man, has made common cause with wealthy individuals and corporations and conspired to dump the rest of us into a heap they call the collective. And they want to make sure we won't be troublesome or able to resist when our betters decide they need to visit a "reeducation" facility because they disagree with the new order and won't shut up about it.

Someone I respect described these collectives or "unions" as bound up in bundles to be burned at the end of time. Statistics like the phony gun death statistics are the matches and make no mistake. They will not hesitate to light the pyres.

And the number one cause of death for children 0 through 17 is motor vehicle accidents by a good bit. Oddly, enough no one has called for private citizens not being licensed to drive cars an activity demonstrably more dangerous to actual children

As I'm wont to say, "I believe Jesus is loading up the bus to come get us from this crazy place and take us home."