We (humankind) are tripartite Beings. We are a Physical Being that interacts with the three-dimensional world around us, limited in our interactions by our five senses, six if you include our linear sense of time. In a computer analogy, the Physical Being would be our “User Interface,” or UI.
We are Beings of the Mind. Our minds rule our senses and our interactions with the perceived world around us. Our minds do the thinking and remembering for us. I like to think of the Mind as the Operating System to carry on the computer analogy.
Then the third and highest part of our being is our “Spirit.” The spirit is the “Me,” or “I” that owns and operates my Body and my Mind. The “I am” which I will discuss in more depth later.
So I am an “Awareness” that I call “Me,” and I operate my Mind and Body as I see fit, sometimes with great success and sometimes with less than spectacular results.
As Spirits, we have long noted that there seems to be a balance in the world-at-large of what we perceive as good and evil. We see that we maintain a balance of good thoughts and deeds with bad thoughts and deeds. We like good so much that we tend to award and promote ‘good behavior.’ At the same time, we are so attracted to doing bad things in order to see if we can get away with them, or to find an easy path to ‘success’ that we also promote and pass down ‘bad behavior.’ To simplify, the twin concepts of Good and Evil have been passed down from generation to generation in various forms throughout the history of Mankind in order to maintain a balance.
Maybe it all started with something like this: At some indefinable point in pre-history long, long ago and probably in a community cave somewhere in Northern Africa, Mankind first became aware of his capacities for committing both good and evil thoughts and acts. He sat down one night with some of his friends around a fire in their nice, warm cave and began to discuss these things that he had become aware of within himself and found out that his friends were having these experiences as well. They discussed what it all meant and how it all might have come about, so one of them decided he should ‘write this shit’ down before they forgot it and thus both Writing and Philosophy were born.
As time went by, Mankind got frustrated with not being able to explain satisfactorily to himself, his friends, or his wife exactly what this all meant. At the same time, he had spent so much of his time thinking all of this over that he was running out of food and the other basic necessities of life, like firewood and leather for his wife to make clothes to the point that she was really getting bitchy at him over it.
He came up with a new idea! He called all of his friends over and told them that after much thought, deliberation and soul-searching, he had come up with a solution to the whole ‘good and evil’ question. His friends were beside themselves wondering what his solution might be, his wife was standing nearby with her arms folded, listening skeptically, as wives do. He told them that the solution was that there was a 'Greater Being!' Greater than all of them! He explained that this 'Being' had created them and had ordained that they should be both good and evil in order for them to grow both Spiritually and Philosophically and have a Balance in their lives. His friends were amazed at such a thought! They wanted to know who this Being was?! Where this Being was?! How had they not all seen this Being before?! Of course his wife, walking off to the back of the cave in disgust, said, “Puuh-leeaase!!” . He told his friends that he would have to get back to them about this radical new idea and so, satisfied for the moment, they all went off to sleep with their families, except him, he went to sleep on the rock-shelf near the opening of the cave because his wife was severely pissed at him by this point. A week or so later, he and his friends went out hunting at about an hour before dawn. They were asking him if he’d come up with any ideas as to who this God-fellow was. Just at that moment the sun came up over the horizon. In a fit of inspiration that would plague us all forever-after, he pointed at the sun and said, “There! There is our 'Greater Being' who created us all!... He's telling me that He will only communicate to the rest of you through me.” Quickly, he added the part that he had been thinking of to cure his own problems at home, “In exchange for my service in interacting with 'God' on your behalf, you will only have to pay me a tithe of 10% of all of your earnings!” Amazingly enough, they all agreed to this! He was very proud of himself! He had answered the 'God Question' and gotten food and clothing for his family at no cost to himself. Thus did Religion come into being. His wife was also very proud because now she had prestige among the other wives who created envy in order to express their feelings toward her elevated status. This also engendered gossip, as a by-product.
For a long time Mankind was happy with the Sun as Supreme Being. But later, as Mankind’s friends asked more questions and their children came along, he invented Theology and the Philosophical study of Divinity to further muddy the waters and ensure his job-security.
On a separate note, one of his friends came up with the associated idea of Governance of their cave and thus was Religion’s handmaiden, Politics, created when he convinced the rest of the cave-dwellers to ‘elect’ him as Chief. Of course he had to induct a system of ‘taxes’ so that he could devote all of his time to efficiently running the cave society. OK, back to my original thought…
Through the Millennia, afterwards, Mankind worshiped many different 'Gods,' in as many different ways, always searching for that indefinable “Supreme Being” that was our “Father,” “Creator” and generally all around Good Guy.
Today, we have continuing arguments over just who or what this 'Supreme Being is,' whether It’s the Christian God (modeled on the Sun), the Muslim God (modeled on the Moon), the Hindu Gods (modeled on both of the above along with various critters), the God or Gods of countless other religions, past and present, or whether He/She/It even exists at all. Atheists love to point out that you can’t define God empirically so It must not exist. Deists counter that God cannot be defined by scientific methods so It does exist but conveniently outside the realm of Human Science or Logic and the arguments go on and on, ad nauseam.
I am fairly certain that, as of this writing, there has never been any Scientific way to define exactly what it is that separates Humanity from the rest of the Mammalian population, but something does. We call it the “Human Spirit.” Can the Human Spirit really be measured using scientific method? It’s the part of us all that defines who we are, the “I am” in each of us. The part that makes us continue on despite great odds against us. The part of us that continually seeks answers, that quests for Enlightenment.
According to the Bible, Moses once asked God what His name was. God replied, “I AM THAT I AM.” We like to shorten that to “The Great I AM,” or just “I AM.” Now, a lot of people today like to think that since our ancestors did not have McDonald's, Starbucks, Malls, Massive Inflation, Big Government, traffic jams, or most of the other amenities that we take for granted every day, that somehow they were stupid, backwards, ignorant and smelly. I submit to you that, fundamentally, Mankind has not changed in thousands of years. In fact, we are no smarter or less superstitious than the cave men that I started this out with. Moses, regardless of where you stand on the issue of religion, was a great thinker and philosopher of his time. Pretty impressive for a goat-herd and purported one-time Prince of Egypt. So, back to “I AM.” Let’s look at that for a moment. What was he trying to say to us? How does “I AM” make sense in any rational way? Here’s what I think. We are all, as individuals, lesser “I am.” But! We tend to shorten the name Moses passed down, “I AM” rather than “I AM THAT I AM.” What I think he was saying is that we are ever-growing, ever seeking. We are best defined as “I am that I may be.” Moses was saying that in his view, 'God' is grown… Spiritually. That It has no need to seek, to explain, that It not only has the answers to all of life’s mysteries, but that It is the answer. Knowing God is knowing all that is. “I AM THAT I AM,” indeed. Moses was expressing the fundamental growth of the Human Spirit and the goal we should reach for. He set a 'God' as the example and benchmark.
The Ancients knew and understood that we are Spiritual Beings, that we are constantly seeking answers. That we have a need, as humans, to strive to understand both our Physical World and the Spiritual World of our minds and only in that way can we grow and mature. “No pain, no gain” as the saying goes.
Religions might have come into being in order to give us a 'Perfect Spirit Model' to reach for, to measure our own imperfect spirits against. Intentional or not, it worked on so many levels and it still does, to a great but lessening extent. In function, it unites groups of people into 'Societies,' and having different religions guarantees that we will have the contention (pain) that we need in order to develop to our full potential as a Species. It will continue to work until we realize that there is only one race, the Human Race, that we are all in this together and that we don’t have to be able to label, define, or understand everything and it is really OK if someone else disagrees with our point of view. Once we reach that point, Humankind will begin the next phase of evolutionary development.
Humanity separates itself along National, Religious, Social and Ethnic boundaries which are ALL artificial and demeaning to us as a sentient species. But then, Humanity is a fairly young sentient species and all playpens need walls.
Imagine the potential that Humanity has available once we realize all of this and put our “childhood” behind us. In the meantime, we will continue to have division and strife along Ethnic, Religious and Political Boundaries until we can grow past this stage of our development.
So, does a separate God really exist? The truth is, I don’t really know, no one does. I have no idea and can’t have any idea short of a ‘Divine Revelation.’ Neither can anyone else, with the possible exception of Televangelists or the Muslim Extremist Mullahs. At least they all tell us that they know that God exists and that It conveniently exists according to their particular model. Personally, I'm completely certain that if It does exist that It is not a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, Buddhist or any other restrictively modeled religion. I strongly suspect that 'God' wouldn't be Religious at all! I sincerely doubt that God would attend Jewish Synagogue, B’Nai Brith, or Pentecostal tent meetings or that It particularly recommends one of these over any other.
To my mind, God would be about Spiritual Growth, about learning to understand and accept who and what we all are and that we are all here in this life together and that this is the only chance we get at it. If there is a Heaven, it is beyond and after this life. What we get there is beyond what we do or believe here. I'm not saying that all of the above philosophies are completely wrong and a waste of time. They are all methods originally designed to help us understand and grow Spiritually in the same way that children grow physically.
One time, when I was a Mental-Health Counselor, a woman came to me very upset and crying because her Baptist Pastor had told her that since she had been raised Pentecost and had “spoken in Tongues,” there was absolutely no place for her in Heaven. He actually told her that she was damned for the way that she was raised. I was shocked and dismayed, although I really should not have been. She wanted to know what I thought, did I think that she was damned to an, in his words, “Eternity in Hell's Everlasting Pit of Fire” simply because of the way she was raised?
I called her Pastor and invited him to come meet us for coffee or whatever he wanted, my treat. When he arrived and got settled, I asked him to verify that what she said that he had told her was true and correct. When he said that yes it was, I asked him to show me in the Bible where it said that, or to at least give me a chapter. When he wasn't able to do that, I asked him when it was that God had told him in particular what was ‘acceptable’ and what was not and why would God in all of His infinite Wisdom, assign this particular knowledge to him. I pointed out that I thought that if people were worshiping God in a manner that they sincerely believed was the Truthful and Right way to do it, then who was He, or I, to judge that they were wrong? Wouldn't God judge me? He had no answer to that and ended up apologizing to the woman in question. He learned a lesson. The lesson he learned was the same one Jesus taught when he said, “Judge not lest ye be Judged.” Indeed who hasn't got a beam in his or her eye to distort the truth when
they are attempting to judge the mote in another persons eye? So, 'What Would Jesus Do?' In the final analysis, he would probably barf all over his divine sandals and take his road-show to wherever he had originally come from. ©Fred C. Pierce 12/1/2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
This is an email I received today.
IF
If George W. Bush had doubled the national debt in one year, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had criticized a state law that he admitted he never even read would you think that he is just an ignorant hot head?
If George W. Bush joined the country of Mexico and sued a State in the United States to force that State to continue to allow illegal immigration, wouldn't you question his patriotism and wonder just whose side he was on?
If George W. Bush had put 87,000 Americans out of work by arbitrarily placing a moratorium on offshore oil drilling on companies that have one of the best safety records of any industry because one company had an accident, would you have agreed?
If George W. Bush had used a forged document as the basis of the moratorium that would render 87,000 American workers unemployed would you have supported him?
If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a 'TelePrompter' installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?
If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?
If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the nonexistent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?
If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States, with a straight face, would you have said that he was clueless?
If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in Texas, would you have thought he was a self important, conceited, egotistical jerk?
If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" (5th of 4th) in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was “Cinco de Mayo” (May 5th) and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?
If George W. Bush had misspelled the word "advice" would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle’s potatoes as proof of what a dunce he is?
If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?
If George W. Bush's administration had authorized Air Force One to fly low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, on the Anniversary of September 11th, would you have wondered whether he actually got what happened on 9-11?
If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?
If George W. Bush had created the positions of 32 'Czars' who report directly and only to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?
Obama had done all of this and more in his first 15 months. Just think of what he will do if he gets re-elected!
If George W. Bush had doubled the national debt in one year, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had criticized a state law that he admitted he never even read would you think that he is just an ignorant hot head?
If George W. Bush joined the country of Mexico and sued a State in the United States to force that State to continue to allow illegal immigration, wouldn't you question his patriotism and wonder just whose side he was on?
If George W. Bush had put 87,000 Americans out of work by arbitrarily placing a moratorium on offshore oil drilling on companies that have one of the best safety records of any industry because one company had an accident, would you have agreed?
If George W. Bush had used a forged document as the basis of the moratorium that would render 87,000 American workers unemployed would you have supported him?
If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a 'TelePrompter' installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?
If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?
If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the nonexistent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?
If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States, with a straight face, would you have said that he was clueless?
If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in Texas, would you have thought he was a self important, conceited, egotistical jerk?
If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" (5th of 4th) in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was “Cinco de Mayo” (May 5th) and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?
If George W. Bush had misspelled the word "advice" would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle’s potatoes as proof of what a dunce he is?
If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?
If George W. Bush's administration had authorized Air Force One to fly low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, on the Anniversary of September 11th, would you have wondered whether he actually got what happened on 9-11?
If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?
If George W. Bush had created the positions of 32 'Czars' who report directly and only to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?
Obama had done all of this and more in his first 15 months. Just think of what he will do if he gets re-elected!
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Armageddon scenario
I didn't write this as a religious person at all - in fact, at the time, I was calling myself an atheist, it was more as a study/illustration of how an SDA would interpret current events. This scenario is purely a product of the way I was raised within the SDA cult. I'm sure that they are preaching somthing very much like this in their pulpits as I write.
What if Islam is the army of the Antichrist predicted in the Prophecies of Daniel and Revelation? What if when the Angel explained about the sacrifices in the Temple being cut off, he was referring to Islam building the Temple of the Dome of the Rock on Temple-Mount in Jerusalem, thereby denying the Children of Israel the opportunity to rebuild their Temple in it’s ordained place and worship God as Divinely directed?
What if the end-time persecution of the Children of God, both Jewish and Christian is ordained to be at the hands of Islam. Could Islam be the false church of the Antichrist rather than the Pope and Roman-Catholicism as most of the Christian world has been led to believe for hundreds of years? Is the Tribulation going to be ushered in through a peace-treaty between Israel and Islam? Or will it be between Christianity through either the Catholic church or the European Union with Islam?
I would be willing to bet that one of the Organizations or States mentioned above is either working on or already has produced a seven-year term treaty with Islam or a ruling State within the Islamic Federation.
Islam is a 'Nation' in it’s own right, formed of separate States comprising most of the old Roman Empire. For now, they are loosely comprised as a “Federation of Islamic States,” but the looseness of the organization could be tightened up in a matter of days into one regime under a strong leader. According to the Prophecies in Daniel and the Revelation, three of the Federation States would have to fall as separate entities and be reformed under the direction of this leader. Is that an outrageous notion as the USA is beginning to leave Iraq? We are leaving a vacuum in the region at a time when Afghanistan is still unstable and Pakistan has been hit by an enormous natural disaster. Is it feasible that an Islamic ‘strong-man’ such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or their ‘Supreme Leader,’ Ali Khamenei, who is the real power in the Iranian Sphere-of-Influence will step in?
Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and a few lesser Nations or portions of Nations were historically a part of the Greek and later, the Roman Empires. They are all now member nations of the Islamic Federation. Is this merely a coincidence? It makes me wonder.
So, according to the above, what I see possibly happening might be: Western Europe and the United States are increasingly being inundated with Muslims. They are already allowed to supplant National Law in some Western Countries with Sharia Law. They’ve even been allowed to do this in some places in the USA. This trend is going to continue. We are already seeing our weakest societal members in the United States beginning to gravitate from Socialism to Islam. The majority of them are still just apologizing for Islam, but we’re seeing increasing numbers of them crossing over and exchanging their temporary extremism for a more permanent one. As this trend builds, we might start seeing more moderate Leftists going over to Islam so that they can obtain the benefit of being sided with what they perceive as the ‘stronger’ party. Not to mention the fact that this is the minority that hates Christianity so much that they’ll jump on anything that denies it the right to exist let alone flourish. During this period, we’ll start seeing college towns like Berkeley, CA. or Cambridge, MA. allowing Sharia Law equal footing with local laws. Soon after that some major Cities will begin allowing it, such as San Francisco, possibly Boston, New York and a few others. At this point, we will begin seeing Muslims on the National Stage, crying for advantages nationwide in the guise of ‘equal-rights.’ We will see national-level politicians bowing to this as they now are to Socialism. So far they haven’t reached the Traditionalist Americans or the Fundamentalist Right. The Right-side politicos, however, will already be making ‘Back-room deals’ with them in an attempt to appease and to ‘Stop the Islamic flood.’ Or so they’ll say to excuse their actions.
The Christian Right will foment a new ‘Political Rebellion’ vis-à-vis the Tea-Parties but on a wider, more organized front. Mosques and Churches will be burned, a lot of people on both sides will die or go to jail. Riots will erupt in the streets, in the jails and prisons of this Country. Social Upheaval will be the norm for a time.
I believe that Islam in this Continent will be crushed and virtually eradicated, as it will be in Europe. However so will religious-freedom. The World will virtually be completely under the thumb of extremism, Christian in the Americas, Australia and Western Europe; Socialism in Eastern Europe and Asia; and Islam in the Middle-East and most of Africa.
A treaty will be signed to stabilize the various regimes and allow the peoples to recover. There will be three and a half years of consolidation of power and apparent prosperity, however during that time, stronger and more restrictive laws will be passed in order to assure that the ‘Other Side’ has less of a chance of gaining a foothold in whichever Society one finds oneself in as well as to appease God or Allah as a whole range of natural disasters will be ongoing with more and more frequency. Each side will blame it on the apostasy of the other as well as those few within them that don’t conform to their dictates. At the end of the three and a half year period, new laws will be effected which include a death sentence for all apostates and non-conformists. This law will be uniform world-wide. The Islamists will go after Israel as an apostate part of their ‘Sphere-of-Influence.’ the Christian Countries will see this as proof of the great Evil of Islam and throw their already standing and mobilized armies against the Muslims for a final push to eradicate them from the world. This will result in the fabled, romanticized and oft-fantasized “Battle of Armageddon.”
There are a very few things that Humankind has done extraordinarily well through-out our history: setting up totalitarian regimes, being extremists to our own points-of-view and completely intolerant of anyone else‘s, creating famines, pestilence and war, culminating in our ability to kill one another on a scale only dreamed of in the sick and twisted minds of our ancestors.
As we approach the final days of this Earth as we know it, I’ll close with these few words…
May God have mercy on our souls.©TexasFred 8-28-2010
What if Islam is the army of the Antichrist predicted in the Prophecies of Daniel and Revelation? What if when the Angel explained about the sacrifices in the Temple being cut off, he was referring to Islam building the Temple of the Dome of the Rock on Temple-Mount in Jerusalem, thereby denying the Children of Israel the opportunity to rebuild their Temple in it’s ordained place and worship God as Divinely directed?
What if the end-time persecution of the Children of God, both Jewish and Christian is ordained to be at the hands of Islam. Could Islam be the false church of the Antichrist rather than the Pope and Roman-Catholicism as most of the Christian world has been led to believe for hundreds of years? Is the Tribulation going to be ushered in through a peace-treaty between Israel and Islam? Or will it be between Christianity through either the Catholic church or the European Union with Islam?
I would be willing to bet that one of the Organizations or States mentioned above is either working on or already has produced a seven-year term treaty with Islam or a ruling State within the Islamic Federation.
Islam is a 'Nation' in it’s own right, formed of separate States comprising most of the old Roman Empire. For now, they are loosely comprised as a “Federation of Islamic States,” but the looseness of the organization could be tightened up in a matter of days into one regime under a strong leader. According to the Prophecies in Daniel and the Revelation, three of the Federation States would have to fall as separate entities and be reformed under the direction of this leader. Is that an outrageous notion as the USA is beginning to leave Iraq? We are leaving a vacuum in the region at a time when Afghanistan is still unstable and Pakistan has been hit by an enormous natural disaster. Is it feasible that an Islamic ‘strong-man’ such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or their ‘Supreme Leader,’ Ali Khamenei, who is the real power in the Iranian Sphere-of-Influence will step in?
Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and a few lesser Nations or portions of Nations were historically a part of the Greek and later, the Roman Empires. They are all now member nations of the Islamic Federation. Is this merely a coincidence? It makes me wonder.
So, according to the above, what I see possibly happening might be: Western Europe and the United States are increasingly being inundated with Muslims. They are already allowed to supplant National Law in some Western Countries with Sharia Law. They’ve even been allowed to do this in some places in the USA. This trend is going to continue. We are already seeing our weakest societal members in the United States beginning to gravitate from Socialism to Islam. The majority of them are still just apologizing for Islam, but we’re seeing increasing numbers of them crossing over and exchanging their temporary extremism for a more permanent one. As this trend builds, we might start seeing more moderate Leftists going over to Islam so that they can obtain the benefit of being sided with what they perceive as the ‘stronger’ party. Not to mention the fact that this is the minority that hates Christianity so much that they’ll jump on anything that denies it the right to exist let alone flourish. During this period, we’ll start seeing college towns like Berkeley, CA. or Cambridge, MA. allowing Sharia Law equal footing with local laws. Soon after that some major Cities will begin allowing it, such as San Francisco, possibly Boston, New York and a few others. At this point, we will begin seeing Muslims on the National Stage, crying for advantages nationwide in the guise of ‘equal-rights.’ We will see national-level politicians bowing to this as they now are to Socialism. So far they haven’t reached the Traditionalist Americans or the Fundamentalist Right. The Right-side politicos, however, will already be making ‘Back-room deals’ with them in an attempt to appease and to ‘Stop the Islamic flood.’ Or so they’ll say to excuse their actions.
The Christian Right will foment a new ‘Political Rebellion’ vis-à-vis the Tea-Parties but on a wider, more organized front. Mosques and Churches will be burned, a lot of people on both sides will die or go to jail. Riots will erupt in the streets, in the jails and prisons of this Country. Social Upheaval will be the norm for a time.
I believe that Islam in this Continent will be crushed and virtually eradicated, as it will be in Europe. However so will religious-freedom. The World will virtually be completely under the thumb of extremism, Christian in the Americas, Australia and Western Europe; Socialism in Eastern Europe and Asia; and Islam in the Middle-East and most of Africa.
A treaty will be signed to stabilize the various regimes and allow the peoples to recover. There will be three and a half years of consolidation of power and apparent prosperity, however during that time, stronger and more restrictive laws will be passed in order to assure that the ‘Other Side’ has less of a chance of gaining a foothold in whichever Society one finds oneself in as well as to appease God or Allah as a whole range of natural disasters will be ongoing with more and more frequency. Each side will blame it on the apostasy of the other as well as those few within them that don’t conform to their dictates. At the end of the three and a half year period, new laws will be effected which include a death sentence for all apostates and non-conformists. This law will be uniform world-wide. The Islamists will go after Israel as an apostate part of their ‘Sphere-of-Influence.’ the Christian Countries will see this as proof of the great Evil of Islam and throw their already standing and mobilized armies against the Muslims for a final push to eradicate them from the world. This will result in the fabled, romanticized and oft-fantasized “Battle of Armageddon.”
There are a very few things that Humankind has done extraordinarily well through-out our history: setting up totalitarian regimes, being extremists to our own points-of-view and completely intolerant of anyone else‘s, creating famines, pestilence and war, culminating in our ability to kill one another on a scale only dreamed of in the sick and twisted minds of our ancestors.
As we approach the final days of this Earth as we know it, I’ll close with these few words…
May God have mercy on our souls.©TexasFred 8-28-2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Safety Degree?
I used to be an Assistant Safety Director of an oilfield trucking company. I don't have a formal degree in safety. I do have a lifetime of experience though. Every instance listed is a lesson I've learned in safety.
I had a firecracker blow up in my hand
I was shot in the leg
I was a Navy drug/alcohol/suicide counselor
I was a certified Marine Firefighter
I witnessed a rollover accident where the lady involved didn't have her child restrained and spent half an hour holding the boy's head together until they could fly him to the hospital.
I helped remove a man with a broken neck from a wrecked car.
I observed a man in a car driving over a man on a motorcycle, administered CPR with 2 other people until the ambulance arrived. He lived a week.
I talked a suicidal man with a shotgun out of shooting me and himself
I talked a deranged woman out of killing her family with a double-bit axe
I restrained a man from killing his wife, son and himself when he found out he had AIDS.
I have removed more drunk drivers from the roads than I care to think about, thereby reducing their chances of having an accident and hurting someone else and/or themselves.
I have driven an 18-wheeler more than 1 million miles without having an accident.
I survived a motorcycle wreck that crushed my entire midsection and separated all of the bones in my body.
I subdued a deranged man who was intent on killing me with a knife.
I was shot in my shoulder once.
I single-handedly put down a 24-man riot in a jail.
I have had facial reconstruction from being hit across the nose with a half-full beer bottle, I subsequently chased the man who did it down and put him in jail for 30 yrs.
I have had survivors guilt.
I have seen my wife almost die due to medical malpractice.
I have seen her die during childbirth 4 years later.
I have seen a gas well blow up on more than one occasion.
I survived a rollover accident in which my left side and my head were severely injured and from which I still suffer nerve damage.
I investigated the scene where a big truck from my company was rear-ended by a speeding automobile.
I know the Federal Motor-Carriers Safety Regulations backwards and have taught and tested drivers on same for years.
I wrote an excel program to audit driver logs as well as break down time spent on specific jobs.
I have sent drivers home when they are fatigued or over hours even when it was against company wishes.
I have had to notify next-of-kin when people have died due to neglect or accident.
I trained as a Fire-Safety Inspector
I trained as a Fire-Cause Determination Specialist and Arson Investigator
I have been a Fire Marshal, Building Inspector and City Safety Officer
I won't add more, although there are many other instances where I learned a lesson about safety
I wonder how life experience doesn't add up to a 4 year degree with no experience?
I had a firecracker blow up in my hand
I was shot in the leg
I was a Navy drug/alcohol/suicide counselor
I was a certified Marine Firefighter
I witnessed a rollover accident where the lady involved didn't have her child restrained and spent half an hour holding the boy's head together until they could fly him to the hospital.
I helped remove a man with a broken neck from a wrecked car.
I observed a man in a car driving over a man on a motorcycle, administered CPR with 2 other people until the ambulance arrived. He lived a week.
I talked a suicidal man with a shotgun out of shooting me and himself
I talked a deranged woman out of killing her family with a double-bit axe
I restrained a man from killing his wife, son and himself when he found out he had AIDS.
I have removed more drunk drivers from the roads than I care to think about, thereby reducing their chances of having an accident and hurting someone else and/or themselves.
I have driven an 18-wheeler more than 1 million miles without having an accident.
I survived a motorcycle wreck that crushed my entire midsection and separated all of the bones in my body.
I subdued a deranged man who was intent on killing me with a knife.
I was shot in my shoulder once.
I single-handedly put down a 24-man riot in a jail.
I have had facial reconstruction from being hit across the nose with a half-full beer bottle, I subsequently chased the man who did it down and put him in jail for 30 yrs.
I have had survivors guilt.
I have seen my wife almost die due to medical malpractice.
I have seen her die during childbirth 4 years later.
I have seen a gas well blow up on more than one occasion.
I survived a rollover accident in which my left side and my head were severely injured and from which I still suffer nerve damage.
I investigated the scene where a big truck from my company was rear-ended by a speeding automobile.
I know the Federal Motor-Carriers Safety Regulations backwards and have taught and tested drivers on same for years.
I wrote an excel program to audit driver logs as well as break down time spent on specific jobs.
I have sent drivers home when they are fatigued or over hours even when it was against company wishes.
I have had to notify next-of-kin when people have died due to neglect or accident.
I trained as a Fire-Safety Inspector
I trained as a Fire-Cause Determination Specialist and Arson Investigator
I have been a Fire Marshal, Building Inspector and City Safety Officer
I won't add more, although there are many other instances where I learned a lesson about safety
I wonder how life experience doesn't add up to a 4 year degree with no experience?
Academy
There are people I know who aren’t going to like this at all. Oh well, it’s my life and my opinion.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. The founder of my church’s education system specified that the schools, primary, secondary and college were to be free for the students and to be paid for out of the church budget and by student labor. This lasted less than 50 years after she died.
My parents believed in this church and the education it had to offer. They worked, saved and sacrificed to send their children through that system, at least for as much of their education as they could. My older sisters went to public high school to give myself and my younger sister a chance at the better education potential in this private system.
In my era, a child needed 18 hours of credits to graduate high school. I had that many by the time I was finished with the 10th grade. Knowing the situation my parents were in, I had decided to go to public school to finish out my high school until the principal of one of our ‘Academies’ came to talk with us at our home.
He told us that I could dual-enroll in the Academy’s Sr. High school and in the local university and graduate high school and be well on my way through college at the same time. When we mentioned the money situation, he assured us that if I would agree to work for the school, that my tuition would be completely covered and that the only thing my parents would have to worry about was sending me a very little spending money occasionally. This would afford me to continue in this system and to get done with college sooner as well, which I thought was great because I intended at the time to pursue an MD in psychiatry. I had, in fact, already read all of the psychiatry text books in the public library as well as general medicine and every book I could find on the history of medicine and surgery.
With his assurance that my tuition would be covered by my working there, I agreed and enrolled in Academy, traveling the 450 miles to the place in early June after my 10th grade graduation. Moving into the boy’s dormitory and going to work in the grounds department of the school for a whopping 48 cents per hour, the student minimum wage at the time.
Everything seemed fine and I went through the 11th grade and my attendant college courses with no real problems, working through the summers and holidays as I could. We built an addition to the cafeteria, a parking lot and various other jobs as they came along.
Also the school used us to rebuild and restore certain old houses, this gave them additional income at the time as well as teaching the worker-students about the building trades.
In midterm of my Senior year I received a letter from the Southwestern School of Medicine that I had been pre-accepted for their premed program starting in the fall semester. I was elated. I shared the news with everyone. It seemed that my education was on-track and I was going to be able to embark on the career path I had dreamed of since I was 11 years old.
When school reconvened after spring-break of my senior year, the same principal called me into his office. He told me that unless my parents could come up with $2,000 (this is closer to $20,000 in today’s dollars) to pay up my tuition that I wouldn’t be able to graduate and that my transcripts from both high school and the college would be frozen. I was dumbstruck. I asked what about the agreement that I work for the school and that my labor would pay my tuition? He said that my student wage had paid a little toward my tuition, enough to keep me enrolled, but that the account balance had to be paid in full before I would be allowed to graduate. He gave me the rest of that week to contact my parents and come up with a solution.
I went back to my dorm and really thought it all over, called my parents and talked with them about the situation and my dad said that there was no way they could come up with the money the school wanted in the time specified. My dad and I both had questions about what had come of the money I had earned through almost 2 years of working for the school and had never seen a penny of my pay. I had been told several times that my pay was being put into my tuition and that all was well, so had my dad when he’d inquired about it.
At the end of the week I went back to the principal and talked with him and the school business manager and determined that the school and the system had basically lied to my family and I. That they were going to hold my education hostage for money that I felt they were not due. The principal told me at the time that I quit that I was making a huge mistake and that if I pursued this course that I would never amount to anything. I responded that I would return to the school for graduation and have $500 in my pocket and that he, the school, and their messed up system would never see another dime from me.
So in a time when you had to have 18 hours of high school credit, I quit school ¾ of the way through my senior year and with 24 credits already done, got my G.E.D. at a local junior college and went to work. I got a job that week, saved my money, bought a used car and in 2 months returned to the school, watched my class graduate then took them to a local pizza place to celebrate. That was the last time I ever saw most of them. Although now, 35 years later, a lot of us are back in touch through a currently popular social networking site.
I never did get a degree in Psychiatry. My life took a different turn. I joined the Navy that year to get the GI Bill in order to afford college, ended up married before my enlistment was done and raised a family. In a way, the principal was right, within the framework of that church, I never did amount to anything for them because I would never submit to them in any capacity ever again.
As to never amounting to anything at all? Tell that to my children who all know how much their dad loves them. Tell it to my wife who died in my arms at the age of 40 and who trusted me to raise our child in her absence. Tell it to everyone in my lifetime whom I have touched with kindness and understanding. I will tell you this now Mr. Principal, sir. I have amounted to something you never could have understood. I grew into a man who has gone on with his life regardless of you or your petty little system.©TexasFred 07/24/2010
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. The founder of my church’s education system specified that the schools, primary, secondary and college were to be free for the students and to be paid for out of the church budget and by student labor. This lasted less than 50 years after she died.
My parents believed in this church and the education it had to offer. They worked, saved and sacrificed to send their children through that system, at least for as much of their education as they could. My older sisters went to public high school to give myself and my younger sister a chance at the better education potential in this private system.
In my era, a child needed 18 hours of credits to graduate high school. I had that many by the time I was finished with the 10th grade. Knowing the situation my parents were in, I had decided to go to public school to finish out my high school until the principal of one of our ‘Academies’ came to talk with us at our home.
He told us that I could dual-enroll in the Academy’s Sr. High school and in the local university and graduate high school and be well on my way through college at the same time. When we mentioned the money situation, he assured us that if I would agree to work for the school, that my tuition would be completely covered and that the only thing my parents would have to worry about was sending me a very little spending money occasionally. This would afford me to continue in this system and to get done with college sooner as well, which I thought was great because I intended at the time to pursue an MD in psychiatry. I had, in fact, already read all of the psychiatry text books in the public library as well as general medicine and every book I could find on the history of medicine and surgery.
With his assurance that my tuition would be covered by my working there, I agreed and enrolled in Academy, traveling the 450 miles to the place in early June after my 10th grade graduation. Moving into the boy’s dormitory and going to work in the grounds department of the school for a whopping 48 cents per hour, the student minimum wage at the time.
Everything seemed fine and I went through the 11th grade and my attendant college courses with no real problems, working through the summers and holidays as I could. We built an addition to the cafeteria, a parking lot and various other jobs as they came along.
Also the school used us to rebuild and restore certain old houses, this gave them additional income at the time as well as teaching the worker-students about the building trades.
In midterm of my Senior year I received a letter from the Southwestern School of Medicine that I had been pre-accepted for their premed program starting in the fall semester. I was elated. I shared the news with everyone. It seemed that my education was on-track and I was going to be able to embark on the career path I had dreamed of since I was 11 years old.
When school reconvened after spring-break of my senior year, the same principal called me into his office. He told me that unless my parents could come up with $2,000 (this is closer to $20,000 in today’s dollars) to pay up my tuition that I wouldn’t be able to graduate and that my transcripts from both high school and the college would be frozen. I was dumbstruck. I asked what about the agreement that I work for the school and that my labor would pay my tuition? He said that my student wage had paid a little toward my tuition, enough to keep me enrolled, but that the account balance had to be paid in full before I would be allowed to graduate. He gave me the rest of that week to contact my parents and come up with a solution.
I went back to my dorm and really thought it all over, called my parents and talked with them about the situation and my dad said that there was no way they could come up with the money the school wanted in the time specified. My dad and I both had questions about what had come of the money I had earned through almost 2 years of working for the school and had never seen a penny of my pay. I had been told several times that my pay was being put into my tuition and that all was well, so had my dad when he’d inquired about it.
At the end of the week I went back to the principal and talked with him and the school business manager and determined that the school and the system had basically lied to my family and I. That they were going to hold my education hostage for money that I felt they were not due. The principal told me at the time that I quit that I was making a huge mistake and that if I pursued this course that I would never amount to anything. I responded that I would return to the school for graduation and have $500 in my pocket and that he, the school, and their messed up system would never see another dime from me.
So in a time when you had to have 18 hours of high school credit, I quit school ¾ of the way through my senior year and with 24 credits already done, got my G.E.D. at a local junior college and went to work. I got a job that week, saved my money, bought a used car and in 2 months returned to the school, watched my class graduate then took them to a local pizza place to celebrate. That was the last time I ever saw most of them. Although now, 35 years later, a lot of us are back in touch through a currently popular social networking site.
I never did get a degree in Psychiatry. My life took a different turn. I joined the Navy that year to get the GI Bill in order to afford college, ended up married before my enlistment was done and raised a family. In a way, the principal was right, within the framework of that church, I never did amount to anything for them because I would never submit to them in any capacity ever again.
As to never amounting to anything at all? Tell that to my children who all know how much their dad loves them. Tell it to my wife who died in my arms at the age of 40 and who trusted me to raise our child in her absence. Tell it to everyone in my lifetime whom I have touched with kindness and understanding. I will tell you this now Mr. Principal, sir. I have amounted to something you never could have understood. I grew into a man who has gone on with his life regardless of you or your petty little system.©TexasFred 07/24/2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
WORST NIGHTMARE
So Mr. Obama is not a US citizen... is in fact, either a muslim or a communist. Congress is under communist control and they are trying hard to get the Supreme Court and all federal judges too. They have attacked the fundamental US system of democracy and are raping us and our Constitution as I write this.
Meanwhile, Islam is making a global Jihad against the rest of the world, especially the US. They have declared a holy war against us all and we’re sitting here being complacent and compliant. Expecting someone else to stand up and solve the problem for us. For now, that is.
They think they are, collectively, our worst nightmare.
I have news for them….
When terrorists go to sleep at night, they have nightmares about America and the West waking up and coming after them…
The liberal elitists have nightmares about America and the West waking up and coming after them or re-marginalizing them as the wrong-thinking crackpots they are.
We are their biggest, greatest nightmare because they realize that we do have the power to stop them if we just wake up in time. We are the hairy green monster that sleeps under their beds and believe me, they are very afraid…
We are the purple monster with huge dripping fangs that hides in their closets, in their sub-conscious and the reason they are constantly trying to cover their tracks and looking over their shoulders.
The problem we face is that someone is going to take over and rule us, at this point, it looks like the liberals are going to let Islam take the West completely. They think that this will establish them as co-liberators of America and the rest of the Western World and that they’ll be heroes. If Islam actually did win, all you have to do is look at Russia’s problem with islamic ‘terrorists’ and you’ll see that the supposed ‘elite’ are completely irrational and delusional.
We are faced with either taking our society back and imposing some serious sanctions against these people or getting used to wearing robes, wiping our asses with our left hands and having our wives and daughters completely covered and in danger of losing their lives for attempting to be anything but property.
You don’t want to salute our flag? You don't want to have to pay the price of Freedom? Well the choice is clear, be willing to pay that price, always, and salute the American flag or be a slave.
Hard choices have to be made and our world is going to change, for better or worse. We are on the edge of a great Abyss and the ground is crumbling under our feet. What are you going to do? What will you say when they tell you that you have to submit or die, that your children have to submit or die?
We're under Jihad and for the second time in history, Islam isn’t content to fight the Holy War on their own soil. They’re bringing their jihad to us. We need to stand up for ourselves and our rights. The time is here to choose, what will you decide? ©TxFred 6/22/2010
Meanwhile, Islam is making a global Jihad against the rest of the world, especially the US. They have declared a holy war against us all and we’re sitting here being complacent and compliant. Expecting someone else to stand up and solve the problem for us. For now, that is.
They think they are, collectively, our worst nightmare.
I have news for them….
When terrorists go to sleep at night, they have nightmares about America and the West waking up and coming after them…
The liberal elitists have nightmares about America and the West waking up and coming after them or re-marginalizing them as the wrong-thinking crackpots they are.
We are their biggest, greatest nightmare because they realize that we do have the power to stop them if we just wake up in time. We are the hairy green monster that sleeps under their beds and believe me, they are very afraid…
We are the purple monster with huge dripping fangs that hides in their closets, in their sub-conscious and the reason they are constantly trying to cover their tracks and looking over their shoulders.
The problem we face is that someone is going to take over and rule us, at this point, it looks like the liberals are going to let Islam take the West completely. They think that this will establish them as co-liberators of America and the rest of the Western World and that they’ll be heroes. If Islam actually did win, all you have to do is look at Russia’s problem with islamic ‘terrorists’ and you’ll see that the supposed ‘elite’ are completely irrational and delusional.
We are faced with either taking our society back and imposing some serious sanctions against these people or getting used to wearing robes, wiping our asses with our left hands and having our wives and daughters completely covered and in danger of losing their lives for attempting to be anything but property.
You don’t want to salute our flag? You don't want to have to pay the price of Freedom? Well the choice is clear, be willing to pay that price, always, and salute the American flag or be a slave.
Hard choices have to be made and our world is going to change, for better or worse. We are on the edge of a great Abyss and the ground is crumbling under our feet. What are you going to do? What will you say when they tell you that you have to submit or die, that your children have to submit or die?
We're under Jihad and for the second time in history, Islam isn’t content to fight the Holy War on their own soil. They’re bringing their jihad to us. We need to stand up for ourselves and our rights. The time is here to choose, what will you decide? ©TxFred 6/22/2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
Leftists, Illegals and Hollywood
I wonder if the McCarthy era was really so bad for America?
The communists weren’t in control of the Democratic party or Hollywood. Political correctness was defined as saying what you meant and not being a part of or supporting the communist party because America of the day realized what an evil that was and is. Illegal Aliens were a minor problem of the time and Domestic-Terrorism was the purvey of easily identified crackpots to whom no discerning rational American paid much attention.
Today we have communists in charge of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The difference being how far leftist they are rather than a contrast between left and right with a comfortable middle-ground where most Americans lived. We can no longer afford to be centrist in our views in that the political parties are no longer representative of opposing views.
The function of opposing parties in a two-party system should be to achieve parity. How can we achieve that when both parties espouse the same failed dogma with only opposing views as to how far they can take it before the American people revolt?
I think it’s once again time to outlaw communism in this country, for the sake of our country. I think it’s time that the American people say: “No more Communists in Congress, the Executive or the Judicial Branches of Government. No Communists should be allowed to hold ANY public office, from Politician to Teacher.” It’s time to take our country back and make it the strong bastion of Freedom it always has been rather than the “Utopia” that these misguided and misbegotten degenerates think we need.
I also believe that it’s time to outlaw Islam in the USA. I know, a lot of people would be upset over that and all of the Liberals out there are saying, “But what about the Constitution and Rights?” OK, so the State should NOT ever take part in any issue Church-related. I agree, but at the same time no Church should EVER involve itself in running the STATE. A church that does that is offending the very Constitution they hide behind. Islam is a church-state entity. It cannot survive let alone thrive as a church in any country. It is a CANCER! Well, as a matter-of-fact, so is Communism a cancer. They both need to be surgically eliminated from our great Nation before either or both of them kill us all.
Another thing is Hollywood, why do we support, put up with and generally pay large sums of money for people to be bullies, drug-addicts, degenerates, drunks, abusers and generally messed-up people? I know it’s fun to see them self-destruct and all, I get that. But still, what do we need with someone who continually goes to jail for abusing his wife, for getting drunk and driving, in some cases running over or killing people. Is it a heroic thing to get yourself popular then to hit a cameraman in the face because his job is to take your picture? This is something several of these ‘role-models’ have done. To get so drunk you can’t walk then to be arrested for running over an innocent person? That’s not role-model material in my eyes. How about the actors that have moved to other countries because they can no longer ‘support’ America and American values? Why is America still supporting them?
Why is America rewarding bad behavior? People come here illegally, we reward them and say, “Oh, we need them here.” We reward corrupt Politicians saying, “Oh all politicians are corrupt, after all power corrupts.”
We support idiotic behavior from actors and athletes and pay them exorbitant sums because they’re fun to watch no matter that they are destructive to themselves and others, bad role-models for us and our kids and ultimately detrimental to America. We are going along with an overpriced under-education system based on Marxist philosophy and I’d like to know why? Why are we putting up with all of this corruption? Where are the honest and good Americans that will stand up for us? The answer to that is that we have to all stand up for ourselves. We have got to not elect politicians who have ‘other’ agendas, or work to get them out of office when we find that they are there. We need to let Hollywood know that we aren’t going to put up with crap anymore. We want people who can act, dance and sing who also can live decently. They need to know that we aren’t interested in their views, only in what got them hired in the first place. We need to get involved in our education system, establish standards that the system MUST step up to and those standards must include NO Socialists, No Muslims as teachers, instructors, professors or in any other capacity. Americans lead the world in Freedom, we lead by example and it’s time we show the world that we are Free people, not subject to anyone else or their Socio-political agendas.
As to Illegal immigration. We need to do a couple of things and do them fast. First, we need to adopt Mexico’s immigration laws pertaining only to illegal aliens. It’s their law, who’s to say we can’t use it in regards to them? Second, we need to close our borders to all forms of illegal immigration, round up the illegal aliens already here and immediately send them back. OK, I know, someone is saying, “but what about asylum?” If they needed political asylum, they could have gone to an American Consul in their country of origin and applied for it. Send them back and let them get it there if they need it.©TexasFred 06/11/2010
The communists weren’t in control of the Democratic party or Hollywood. Political correctness was defined as saying what you meant and not being a part of or supporting the communist party because America of the day realized what an evil that was and is. Illegal Aliens were a minor problem of the time and Domestic-Terrorism was the purvey of easily identified crackpots to whom no discerning rational American paid much attention.
Today we have communists in charge of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The difference being how far leftist they are rather than a contrast between left and right with a comfortable middle-ground where most Americans lived. We can no longer afford to be centrist in our views in that the political parties are no longer representative of opposing views.
The function of opposing parties in a two-party system should be to achieve parity. How can we achieve that when both parties espouse the same failed dogma with only opposing views as to how far they can take it before the American people revolt?
I think it’s once again time to outlaw communism in this country, for the sake of our country. I think it’s time that the American people say: “No more Communists in Congress, the Executive or the Judicial Branches of Government. No Communists should be allowed to hold ANY public office, from Politician to Teacher.” It’s time to take our country back and make it the strong bastion of Freedom it always has been rather than the “Utopia” that these misguided and misbegotten degenerates think we need.
I also believe that it’s time to outlaw Islam in the USA. I know, a lot of people would be upset over that and all of the Liberals out there are saying, “But what about the Constitution and Rights?” OK, so the State should NOT ever take part in any issue Church-related. I agree, but at the same time no Church should EVER involve itself in running the STATE. A church that does that is offending the very Constitution they hide behind. Islam is a church-state entity. It cannot survive let alone thrive as a church in any country. It is a CANCER! Well, as a matter-of-fact, so is Communism a cancer. They both need to be surgically eliminated from our great Nation before either or both of them kill us all.
Another thing is Hollywood, why do we support, put up with and generally pay large sums of money for people to be bullies, drug-addicts, degenerates, drunks, abusers and generally messed-up people? I know it’s fun to see them self-destruct and all, I get that. But still, what do we need with someone who continually goes to jail for abusing his wife, for getting drunk and driving, in some cases running over or killing people. Is it a heroic thing to get yourself popular then to hit a cameraman in the face because his job is to take your picture? This is something several of these ‘role-models’ have done. To get so drunk you can’t walk then to be arrested for running over an innocent person? That’s not role-model material in my eyes. How about the actors that have moved to other countries because they can no longer ‘support’ America and American values? Why is America still supporting them?
Why is America rewarding bad behavior? People come here illegally, we reward them and say, “Oh, we need them here.” We reward corrupt Politicians saying, “Oh all politicians are corrupt, after all power corrupts.”
We support idiotic behavior from actors and athletes and pay them exorbitant sums because they’re fun to watch no matter that they are destructive to themselves and others, bad role-models for us and our kids and ultimately detrimental to America. We are going along with an overpriced under-education system based on Marxist philosophy and I’d like to know why? Why are we putting up with all of this corruption? Where are the honest and good Americans that will stand up for us? The answer to that is that we have to all stand up for ourselves. We have got to not elect politicians who have ‘other’ agendas, or work to get them out of office when we find that they are there. We need to let Hollywood know that we aren’t going to put up with crap anymore. We want people who can act, dance and sing who also can live decently. They need to know that we aren’t interested in their views, only in what got them hired in the first place. We need to get involved in our education system, establish standards that the system MUST step up to and those standards must include NO Socialists, No Muslims as teachers, instructors, professors or in any other capacity. Americans lead the world in Freedom, we lead by example and it’s time we show the world that we are Free people, not subject to anyone else or their Socio-political agendas.
As to Illegal immigration. We need to do a couple of things and do them fast. First, we need to adopt Mexico’s immigration laws pertaining only to illegal aliens. It’s their law, who’s to say we can’t use it in regards to them? Second, we need to close our borders to all forms of illegal immigration, round up the illegal aliens already here and immediately send them back. OK, I know, someone is saying, “but what about asylum?” If they needed political asylum, they could have gone to an American Consul in their country of origin and applied for it. Send them back and let them get it there if they need it.©TexasFred 06/11/2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Diversity
DIVERSITY
The USA is a melting pot of all peoples. All American bloodlines came from somewhere else originally, including the so-called Native Americans. There is no such thing as Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans or any other -American. We are all Americans. Our unity regardless of the diversity of our origins is what makes us strong and sets us apart from the rest of the world.
Forty-five years ago I asked my Dad about our American-Indian heritage. We were living in Dallas at the time and had just come out of a store and saw there on the sidewalk an “Indian” sitting on a blanket selling trinkets. Dad had talked to him briefly and he apparently knew him. It turned out the man was a distant cousin. After we got in our car was when I asked the question. My Dad’s response was that yes, we did have an “Indian” heritage, but that he and his family had chosen to live and work in the Dallas area, denying this because they didn’t need or want Government aid and had no wish to live on a Reservation. He went on to tell me, “Never tell anyone that you are an Indian or have any Indian blood. They will only call you a ’blanket-assed Red Nigger.” Remember this was the time of rampant discrimination just as the civil rights movement was starting, before Dr King walked to Selma. Before Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, before the uprisings within the Indian Nations too.
I didn’t understand why people would think such a thing or what made people so different from each other or why some people feared the differences in others and I thought that separating us all based on our differences rather than bringing us all together based on our common bond as Americans was stupid, ignorant and plain-old dumb. I still think so today.
At one point the same year, we went to our church’s Camp-Meeting at a local Church-owned College. Dad took me to the Library building which was opened to the public and showed me the “Men’s,” “Ladies,” and “Colored” bathrooms and the segregated “White-only” and “Colored” water-fountains. He told me that these things were a disgrace and shouldn’t be tolerated anywhere and especially in a church-owned facility where supposedly all were recognized as the “Children of God.” He then went on to tell me that the facilities were only for white and colored people, that Indians, if known to be present wouldn’t have even been allowed in the building and probably not in the campground because Society of the time knew us to be lazy, ignorant people who were nothing more than thieves and bums.
I was beat up when I was eleven, especially around my groin area. The four older boys who did that to me held me down and pounded on me until I couldn’t resist. They especially pound my scrotal sack so that I would never be able to have children when I got older. Why? because 1) my skin was darker than theirs and 2) I went to a different church than they did. They thought I was Jewish. They were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and seventeen. they were all white and all members of one particular denomination of the Christian faith and all neighbors of ours.
I learned to fight after my convalescence and over the next year. Two years later, I was confronted on my street by a gang of five black boys, all older than me, who didn’t think I had a right to stand outside on my street. This time I didn’t get beat to hell. Somehow they triggered a reaction in me like a Dam bursting. During the next few days after that fight, I looked up the three remaining neighborhood boys who had beat me up earlier and taught them to respect and even to fear me a little. After that I lost the weight I had gained over that year of hiding in my house and became more assertive.
I also learned that it doesn’t hurt me to give others respect on meeting but to reserve judgment as to whether the respect given is going to be earned or not and thus taken back. I am who and what I am, nothing more and nothing less and I accept that you are the same. I accept that and respect it. Always. I accept that we all have issues and make mistakes. I respect that and I respect it when I see a person dealing with their issues and trying to rectify their mistakes or at least learn from them. I lose respect quickly for those who don’t respect me and for those who show me that they are unwilling to learn from the mistakes they make or right wrongs they have committed.
I do not notice a person’s race or form opinions of them based on their race or religion and never have. As a matter of fact, I have been shocked in the past when a person’s race or religion is noted by another. I’m sorry I just don’t think along those lines. I wish the whole population of the US was more like that. I instantly distrust and/or dislike someone who bases their sole opinion of anyone on their race, sex, sexual-preferences or religion.
This is why I completely distrust Islam, they discriminate against any other religion, and against women. I also distrust race-mongers. Race-mongers are people who make a living or a political career out of racism in any form. Two who come to mind instantly are the Rev.’s Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Those two gentlemen, claiming to be Reverends, will have to explain their behavior and motivations to a Much Higher Authority in the end and that’s fine with me, but what I don’t understand about them and their ilk is how many Americans buy into their particular brand of crap! There are other brands of crap for sale in America today as well that I find equally heinous, to be sure.
The ability of people to peddle their own brands of crap and for others to listen to it and judge it’s worth are a vital part of what makes America the best and strongest country in the world today. We aren’t Imperialistic, sure we’re flattered and happy when another country accepts our Constitution and way of Governance as their own and will send troops, aid or both to any Nation who requests our help. Those are American values. They are what set us apart as a unique people regardless of the diversity of our individual origins.
The really unique thing about America and Americans is that all of our origins are from somewhere else. We are United together in the common cause of the inalienable right to Freedom for all Mankind. Anyone, and brothers and sisters, I mean ANYONE who sets out to deny me or any of us that right in ANY WAY is my enemy, your enemy and ultimately the enemy of every person who will ever draw a breath on this World. Forty-five years ago the enemy in the US was Racism. Today we have two major enemies to Freedom in the US, Democratic Liberalism (Marxism under a new name) and Islam.
It’s time for us to realize that ‘Politically Correct’ is a phrase used by these Totalitarians to attempt to emasculate us, just as those bullies used their fists to try to emasculate me all those years ago and to stand up for our Rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America and to show the world that the US is still standing and will continue on through this crisis and all future crises the stupidity of Mankind throws in our faces. We are the Bastion of Freedom, it’s time we showed that to the World-at-large.©TXFred06-02-2010
The USA is a melting pot of all peoples. All American bloodlines came from somewhere else originally, including the so-called Native Americans. There is no such thing as Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans or any other -American. We are all Americans. Our unity regardless of the diversity of our origins is what makes us strong and sets us apart from the rest of the world.
Forty-five years ago I asked my Dad about our American-Indian heritage. We were living in Dallas at the time and had just come out of a store and saw there on the sidewalk an “Indian” sitting on a blanket selling trinkets. Dad had talked to him briefly and he apparently knew him. It turned out the man was a distant cousin. After we got in our car was when I asked the question. My Dad’s response was that yes, we did have an “Indian” heritage, but that he and his family had chosen to live and work in the Dallas area, denying this because they didn’t need or want Government aid and had no wish to live on a Reservation. He went on to tell me, “Never tell anyone that you are an Indian or have any Indian blood. They will only call you a ’blanket-assed Red Nigger.” Remember this was the time of rampant discrimination just as the civil rights movement was starting, before Dr King walked to Selma. Before Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, before the uprisings within the Indian Nations too.
I didn’t understand why people would think such a thing or what made people so different from each other or why some people feared the differences in others and I thought that separating us all based on our differences rather than bringing us all together based on our common bond as Americans was stupid, ignorant and plain-old dumb. I still think so today.
At one point the same year, we went to our church’s Camp-Meeting at a local Church-owned College. Dad took me to the Library building which was opened to the public and showed me the “Men’s,” “Ladies,” and “Colored” bathrooms and the segregated “White-only” and “Colored” water-fountains. He told me that these things were a disgrace and shouldn’t be tolerated anywhere and especially in a church-owned facility where supposedly all were recognized as the “Children of God.” He then went on to tell me that the facilities were only for white and colored people, that Indians, if known to be present wouldn’t have even been allowed in the building and probably not in the campground because Society of the time knew us to be lazy, ignorant people who were nothing more than thieves and bums.
I was beat up when I was eleven, especially around my groin area. The four older boys who did that to me held me down and pounded on me until I couldn’t resist. They especially pound my scrotal sack so that I would never be able to have children when I got older. Why? because 1) my skin was darker than theirs and 2) I went to a different church than they did. They thought I was Jewish. They were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and seventeen. they were all white and all members of one particular denomination of the Christian faith and all neighbors of ours.
I learned to fight after my convalescence and over the next year. Two years later, I was confronted on my street by a gang of five black boys, all older than me, who didn’t think I had a right to stand outside on my street. This time I didn’t get beat to hell. Somehow they triggered a reaction in me like a Dam bursting. During the next few days after that fight, I looked up the three remaining neighborhood boys who had beat me up earlier and taught them to respect and even to fear me a little. After that I lost the weight I had gained over that year of hiding in my house and became more assertive.
I also learned that it doesn’t hurt me to give others respect on meeting but to reserve judgment as to whether the respect given is going to be earned or not and thus taken back. I am who and what I am, nothing more and nothing less and I accept that you are the same. I accept that and respect it. Always. I accept that we all have issues and make mistakes. I respect that and I respect it when I see a person dealing with their issues and trying to rectify their mistakes or at least learn from them. I lose respect quickly for those who don’t respect me and for those who show me that they are unwilling to learn from the mistakes they make or right wrongs they have committed.
I do not notice a person’s race or form opinions of them based on their race or religion and never have. As a matter of fact, I have been shocked in the past when a person’s race or religion is noted by another. I’m sorry I just don’t think along those lines. I wish the whole population of the US was more like that. I instantly distrust and/or dislike someone who bases their sole opinion of anyone on their race, sex, sexual-preferences or religion.
This is why I completely distrust Islam, they discriminate against any other religion, and against women. I also distrust race-mongers. Race-mongers are people who make a living or a political career out of racism in any form. Two who come to mind instantly are the Rev.’s Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Those two gentlemen, claiming to be Reverends, will have to explain their behavior and motivations to a Much Higher Authority in the end and that’s fine with me, but what I don’t understand about them and their ilk is how many Americans buy into their particular brand of crap! There are other brands of crap for sale in America today as well that I find equally heinous, to be sure.
The ability of people to peddle their own brands of crap and for others to listen to it and judge it’s worth are a vital part of what makes America the best and strongest country in the world today. We aren’t Imperialistic, sure we’re flattered and happy when another country accepts our Constitution and way of Governance as their own and will send troops, aid or both to any Nation who requests our help. Those are American values. They are what set us apart as a unique people regardless of the diversity of our individual origins.
The really unique thing about America and Americans is that all of our origins are from somewhere else. We are United together in the common cause of the inalienable right to Freedom for all Mankind. Anyone, and brothers and sisters, I mean ANYONE who sets out to deny me or any of us that right in ANY WAY is my enemy, your enemy and ultimately the enemy of every person who will ever draw a breath on this World. Forty-five years ago the enemy in the US was Racism. Today we have two major enemies to Freedom in the US, Democratic Liberalism (Marxism under a new name) and Islam.
It’s time for us to realize that ‘Politically Correct’ is a phrase used by these Totalitarians to attempt to emasculate us, just as those bullies used their fists to try to emasculate me all those years ago and to stand up for our Rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America and to show the world that the US is still standing and will continue on through this crisis and all future crises the stupidity of Mankind throws in our faces. We are the Bastion of Freedom, it’s time we showed that to the World-at-large.©TXFred06-02-2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Interview from Frontpage magazine
I am reprinting this interview in it's entirety, including links and credits. I find it to be that important to read and share.
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
How Evil Works
Posted By Jamie Glazov On April 20, 2010 @ 12:10 am In FrontPage | 12 Comments
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Kupelian, award-winning journalist and managing editor of online news giant WorldNetDaily.com [1] as well as its popular monthly newsmagazine, Whistleblower. A widely read online columnist, he is also the author of the bestselling culture-war classic, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom, now in its eleventh printing. His new book, released in February by Simon & Schuster, is How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America. [2]
FP: David Kupelian, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Let’s start by talking about the Stockholm syndrome that, as you discuss in your book, is affecting the West right now in its confrontation with Islamic Jihad. Give us your perspective.
Kupelian: Jamie, thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about “How Evil Works.” In Chapter 3, “How Terrorism Really Works,” I use the Stockholm syndrome to explain the inexplicable level of weakness and appeasement we continually see in the West toward Islam – for instance, in our disastrous failure to stop Nidal Malik Hasan before he shot dozens of people at Fort Hood, killing 13, even though we knew full well he was a jihadist time bomb waiting to explode.
Everyone’s heard of the Stockholm syndrome, named after the Swedish bank robbery when two escaped convicts terrorized four hostages in a bank vault for five and a half days, during which time the hostages grew increasingly sympathetic toward their captors and antagonistic toward the police who were risking their lives to rescue them. The hostages, who had been tied to chairs, had nooses around their necks and guns trained on them day after day, ended up siding with their captors wholeheartedly, later raising money for their defense and refusing to testify against them at trial.
The syndrome, which law enforcement psychologists recognized long before it had a name, is pretty simple: When we’re seriously intimidated, in a life-threatening way, some of us start to side with whomever or whatever is intimidating us. I don’t mean just cooperating and “agreeing” with a captor as a survival strategy, which makes perfect sense. Extreme intimidation has a way of sometimes flipping our sympathy and loyalty in favor of the people doing the intimidating. In the news business, we see this in high-profile cases like Patricia Hearst, Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard.
Radical Islam is extremely intimidating – by design. The more crazy it acts, the more powerful it becomes. Just a few weeks ago, in Nigeria, Muslim gangs slaughtered 500 Christians, including many children and pregnant women and old people – hacked them to death with machetes. Islam has spread in this way – “at the point of a sword” – for centuries. As I write in “How Evil Works,” I personally lost many family members, perhaps over 100, in the genocide of the Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks. I tell one story in which my great grandfather, a Protestant minister, was martyred, along with 60 or 70 other clergymen and their wives, in Adana, Turkey, because they refused to convert on the spot to Islam. This is how it spreads, by traumatizing people. Many, just to survive, join the religion.
So the murderous Islamic tantrums we keep hearing about have a certain dark logic to them, in terms of enabling the spread of Islam. Remember the Danish Muhammad cartoons, which resulted in over 50 deaths? Or when Newsweek reported (incorrectly) that someone at Gitmo flushed a Quran down the toilet, which led to at least 15 deaths? Or the Miss World contest in Nigeria, when a single comment by a newspaper columnist about the beauty of contestants led to insane Muslim rioting in which rioters massacred over 200 people with machetes, or beat them to death or burned them alive – all because of a single sentence a newspaper columnist wrote, which wasn’t even offensive?
How do we respond to these outrageously demented and murderous tantrums? We refer to terrorist acts as “man-caused disasters.” We proclaim Islam as a “religion of peace.” Burger King recalls thousands of its ice cream cones because someone thought the ice cream swirl logo looked too much like the way the word “Allah” is written in Arabic and was therefore sacrilegious. “The 3 Little Pigs” is repeatedly censored in Britain so as not to offend Muslims, who don’t like pigs. In the U.S. we have a middle school curriculum that requires our children to dress up in Islamic garb, take on a Muslim name, memorize verses of the Quran and play so-called “jihad games.” Imagine trying that in today’s public schools with the Christian religion!
America, Europe and Britain today, in the way they deal with radical Islam and the terror threat, reveal something very akin to a low-grade, widespread Stockholm syndrome.
Bottom line, we don’t want to offend Muslims. Why? Because we’re afraid of them. We’re not afraid of Christians or Jews, because Christians and Jews don’t have tantrums and burn down other religions’ houses of worship and cut of people’s heads and commit terrorist acts. Radical Muslims do. We’re so afraid that, even after the Fort Hood attack, the Pentagon, in its 86-page postmortem report analyzing the event, did not see fit to mention the word “Muslim,” “Islam” or “jihad.” This is reminiscent of the “Harry Potter” stories, where everyone is so spooked by the villain Voldemort that they are afraid even to utter his name.
Ironically, people in the grip of jihadist fervor have nothing but contempt for our weakness and appeasement, which actually encourages more violence. Their madness is neutralized only by strength. Ronald Reagan knew this, which is why his watchword was “Peace through strength.”
FP: David, you mention how just recently, in Nigeria, Muslim gangs slaughtered 500 Christians, including many children and pregnant women and old people. Everyone has heard about the “Christian militia” that was just arrested in Michigan (casualties, which seem to be at the number of zero, are still to be numbered or named). How come the slaughter in Nigeria, which took 500 lives, is not in the news and no one has heard about it?
Kupelian: The Obama propaganda ministry – aka the “mainstream press” – is always looking to reinforce the largely phony narrative that “homegrown terrorism” on the right is a major danger to American civilization. Hence the saturation coverage of the “Christian militia” group. The “rightwing terrorism” narrative is necessary for justifying the left’s attacks on normal, hard-working, tea-partying Americans – evident in the growing allegations that speaking honestly about the leftist coup in Washington is “hate speech,” that those opposing Obama are racists, and that tea partiers are one step away from violence.
On the other hand, dwelling on Muslims’ blood-lust and widespread massacring of Christians in foreign lands supports the “wrong” narrative (from the media’s point of view) – namely, that Islam is not a religion of peace after all, hasn’t been one for the last 14 centuries and shows no signs of starting. Thus, the murders of 500 innocent people are reported perfunctorily, if at all, and then dropped. The mainstream media are just not interested.
FP: You say that, “Bottom line, we don’t want to offend Muslims. Why? Because we’re afraid of them.” Absolutely, we have a pathetic talk show host on the CBC up here in Canada, George Stroumboulopoulos [3], who makes constant jokes about Jesus, yet you will never hear him make one joke about the “Prophet” Mohammed.
Fear, as you state, is definitely a factor. But let’s move a bit further and deeper. I’ve made a life-time study of these people and we know that in the world of the Left, it is unimaginable to criticize an adversary culture or religion, and that it is very chic to slander anything connected to the Judeo-Christian tradition. To poke fun at Islam would threaten these peoples’ whole identity, world vision and social life. Can you comment on this a bit?
Kupelian: For one thing, the Left’s very identity and sense of righteousness are tied up in hating America for all its supposed wrongs, arrogance, injustices, exploitations and wars of oppression. And since, as we all know, “the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” cultures that hate and revile America are therefore respected and even admired by the Left, which also hates America. This is one reason Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court; he secretly – maybe unconsciously – has a certain amount of sympathy for the 9/11 mastermind. The logic of this is straightforward and incontrovertible: KSM hates and blames America, and because leftists like Holder also hate and blame America, leftists “understand” and even sympathize on some level with terrorists, no matter how despicable their crimes.
FP: Tell us a bit about how people who want to manipulate us often use crises to do so. Explain how this is connected to what Obama and his administration are up to.
Kupelian: As all skilled manipulators know, the easiest and surest way to exert control over people is to get them to react emotionally to you. One way to get people to do what they wouldn’t ordinarily do is to create a phony crisis for them to overreact to.
For instance, in “How Evil Works” I cite a child-abduction case in which a little girl was approached after school by a man she didn’t know. He claimed her house was burning down, that her parents were busy putting out the fire, and that he was a friend of the parents who had asked him to pick up their daughter and take her to them. The crisis – and the emotional upset the girl experienced over the thought of her house being on fire and her parents in danger – drowned out her normal caution about getting into a car with a stranger. Result: The stranger, a predator who had concocted the lie for the sole purpose of upsetting and tricking the girl into going with him, murdered the little girl. This same routine was portrayed in the film “Changeling” starring Angelina Jolie, a true story that involved a serial child murderer who enticed youngsters into his car using this exact “your-house-is-on-fire” ruse.
As I explain in Chapter 1, “Why We Elect Liars as Leaders,” manufactured crisis is the primary modus operandi of the Obama administration. After all, how else could a far-left administration lead a center-right country in such a terrible direction without big-time deception and subterfuge – which is accomplished handily by constantly creating bogeyman crises? For instance:
* We heard for 14 months that our healthcare system is desperately broken. In reality, it’s the finest healthcare system in world history. If you’re an illegal alien child molester and you get sick or injured and go to a public hospital, you will, by law, be taken care of whether or not you can pay. That’s not a broken system. And as for the relatively small number of Americans who truly can’t afford health insurance, our government has always been good at creating safety nets. But that was not the intent of Obamacare, which conspicuously bypassed all sensible, market-based reforms – like litigation reform and allowing intrastate purchase of insurance – that would lower costs without degrading quality of care.
* Until wave after wave of scandalous fraud revelations proved the global warming “consensus” was a giant hoax, America was poised to pass “cap-and-trade” legislation which would institute massive and ruinous levels of wealth redistribution – which was the object all along. The administration is now regrouping and re-strategizing how best to force this abomination down Americans’ throats, as they did with Obamacare.
* We’ve been told throughout the age of Obama that America will plunge into hopeless depression if government doesn’t spend trillions and take over entire sectors of the economy. In reality, massive government and Federal Reserve intervention has always worsened and prolonged economic downturns, not solved them.
* Here’s one most people don’t know about: Last May, just a few days before the World Health Organization classified swine flu as a phase 6 pandemic – the highest, scariest category – the WHO quietly redefined pandemic to eliminate the phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” and substituted wording that said pandemics “can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause.” You see, the WHO grows in power and lots of money starts to flow when a phase 6 pandemic is declared. The White House, never one to let a good crisis go to waste, issued a press release saying up to 90,000 Americans would likely die from swine flu. The next day, the head of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, told Americans to ignore the White House’s wild fear-mongering, saying “Everything we’ve seen in the U.S. and everything we’ve seen around the world suggests we won’t see that kind of number if the virus doesn’t change.”
Fundamentally, the whole leftist obsession with power – which promotes ever-increasing dependency of people on government – is, in and of itself, a huge crisis machine. Normal competent adults are able to take care of themselves and their families through their own efforts and through voluntary cooperation with other free individuals. That’s America. If you’re an adult who can’t take care of your own life, that’s a crisis – and this is the state leftists want us to be in, to be dependent on them since that’s the basis for their growth in power. So socialism not only requires crisis to become established, its very existence is a state of perpetual crisis for free people.
FP: You refer to the “whole leftist obsession with power” in passing. Not everyone might know what you mean. In my own research and study, I know this reality in terms of how the Left lives vicariously through supporting communist dictators like Fidel Castro through what is called “negative affirmation.” But that is another matter (a bit). I know our themes are connected, so can you expand a bit on what you mean?
Kupelian: Whole people – that is, people who are internally connected to conscience, to common sense, to God, however you want to put it, and who therefore possess a certain natural reverence for other souls and their autonomy – are not attracted to obtaining power over other people.
But people who have become twisted in certain ways – maybe they had a crummy childhood, or were brainwashed in college into embracing some toxic ideology, or simply are really resentful or envious or insecure – sometimes develop a compulsion to control others.
Imagine that you just met someone for the first time, and discovered that this person considered himself or herself far superior to others, above the need to be truthful, above the law, willing to break the law, and was arrogant and defiant at every turn. And that furthermore, this person harbored an overwhelming urge to control you, take what’s yours, and exercise power over you. You might understandably conclude this person is not only dangerous, but likely a criminal and/or mentally ill. That’s who we have running the country right now – the inmates are truly running the asylum.
These are very sick people we’re talking about: They thrive on crippling others, because the more dysfunctional people there are in the general population, the greater their power. More competent, mature, self-sufficient grownups translate into less power for them, which is why they disdain and malign the tea partiers and other normal, hard-working, tax-paying, independent Americans.
For the very egotistical, deluded person, power is like alcoholism. People like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are drunk – on power. They don’t think, feel, reason or act in a normal way; they’re in an altered state of consciousness. As we say, “power corrupts,” and the more power we give them, the more absolute that corruption becomes.
Also, we need to remember that leftist politicians by definition believe the purpose of government is to ensure, by force, that wealth is evenly distributed. Thus, they look at us like we’re farm animals and they’re the farmers. When some of us have “too much food” and others “don’t have enough,” they come in and take it from us, and scold us for “hording” all that food we don’t need, and give it to the poor, righteous animals with not enough food. The problem is, we’re not animals and we don’t belong to them.
FP: How come the West has such a difficult time understanding the conflict we are in? This has much to do with, as is the subject of your work, the difficulty we have in understanding evil. Illuminate this phenomenon for us.
Kupelian: In the past 60 years, America as a whole has been conned into abandoning the core Judeo-Christian values that have provided the moral foundation of Western civilization for millennia, and of American civilization for centuries. The fundamental principles of life that previously gave our existence meaning and kept our society unified, safe and strong – belief in God, belief that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount were the basis for a good life and a great society, recognition of the sanctity of life (which means you don’t kill babies before they’re born or old people when their care gets too expensive), belief that sex is sacred and reserved for marriage, and so on – have been discarded like yesterday’s newspaper.
If we don’t understand that we are created by God and that we live in a moral dimension in which we constantly can choose between good or evil, and that things go really badly when we choose the wrong way – if we don’t recognize this basic reality level of our lives, then it’s very difficult to understand evil, or to understand ourselves for that matter.
FP: You refer to the Sermon on the Mount as being the basis for a good life. I always found that one of the most moving parts of the New Testament, but I always saw it mostly as a promise for the next life (i.e. your reward will be great in heaven). Can you expand a bit on what you mean in terms of it being a basis for a good life on earth?
Kupelian: The beatitudes (“Blessed are the …”) describe the kind of attitude toward life that leads to genuine happiness or “blessedness” – including the admonition to “let your light shine before men” (which includes speaking the truth even if it’s unpopular) but also to forgive people who attack you for speaking the truth (“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely”). That’s very reassuring and strengthening.
A lot of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount is practical, for the here and now: He talks about hate and lust and divorce, and how we need to rise above these things. Some of the most transcendent truths that have infused traditional Judeo-Christian culture derive from the Sermon on the Mount, including The Lord’s Prayer; the admonition to “Seek first the kingdom of God” (and all else will be added); the warning to “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”; the truth that “a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit,” and so on. Wisdom for living.
FP: Your book deals with the war that is being waged on men and on masculinity in our society. Why is this happening and what are its consequences?
Kupelian: In schools today, boys are doing worse than girls by every measure. The vast majority of children with discipline problems, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, who are put on Ritalin or who drop out of school – 70 to 80 percent – are boys. Three out of five college students today are young women.
As boys grow up and get married, two thirds of divorces are initiated by the wives – and it is the wives that almost always get the children during custody proceedings, since the entire family court system is notoriously biased against men.
In popular culture, virtually every TV commercial portrays men as idiotic and women as smarter and hipper. Same with sitcoms, and with animated comedies like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.” The dad is always the doofus. What happened to “Father Knows Best”?
In Chapter 8 of “How Evil Works,” titled “The War on Fathers,” I document how, as an outgrowth of the radical feminist movement of the sixties, today men, boys and masculinity itself are under attack. Our leftist academia harbors a major movement that is so offended by masculinity that it holds workshops on how to “transform” boys, eliminating their aggressiveness, competitiveness and maleness!
Remember the radical feminists of the sixties, with their angry denunciations of marriage as “legalized rape” and “slavery for women”? Just as the sixties political radicals are today running the American government, culturally the sixties’ radical feminist hatred of Christianity and the traditional patriarchy that goes with it has infected today’s culture. It manifests as a compulsion to ridicule, diminish and have contempt for men. You can see it everywhere.
There is, of course, also a “practical” governmental motivation for breaking up marriages: Tyranny always works better when families are in crisis. Intact, functional families constitute their own universe, one with powerful internal loyalties and transcendent values that compete and sometimes clash with those of despotic government, which therefore strives to separate fathers from their families. In 1918, right after the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin passed a radical no-fault divorce law. Realizing that to maintain control of the people the Russian family had to be destroyed, Lenin passed a law whereby you could divorce your spouse simply by mailing or delivering a postcard to the local register without even notifying the spouse being divorced!
FP: Final thoughts?
Kupelian: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident who exposed the evils of the gulag system to the world, once wrote: “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’”
Decades later, Solzhenitsyn said that in trying to explain the totalitarian horrors that permeated the 20th century – which he himself endured – he could not improve on the explanation he had heard as a child: “Men have forgotten God.”
FP: David Kupelian, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
I have to tell our readers that How Evil Works is a brilliant book. Buy it [2]!!!!
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/04/20/how-evil-works/
URLs in this post:
[1] WorldNetDaily.com: http://www.wnd.com/
[2] How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America.: http://www.amazon.com/How-Evil-Works-Understanding-Transforming/dp/1439168199
[3] George Stroumboulopoulos: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=31776
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
How Evil Works
Posted By Jamie Glazov On April 20, 2010 @ 12:10 am In FrontPage | 12 Comments
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Kupelian, award-winning journalist and managing editor of online news giant WorldNetDaily.com [1] as well as its popular monthly newsmagazine, Whistleblower. A widely read online columnist, he is also the author of the bestselling culture-war classic, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom, now in its eleventh printing. His new book, released in February by Simon & Schuster, is How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America. [2]
FP: David Kupelian, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Let’s start by talking about the Stockholm syndrome that, as you discuss in your book, is affecting the West right now in its confrontation with Islamic Jihad. Give us your perspective.
Kupelian: Jamie, thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about “How Evil Works.” In Chapter 3, “How Terrorism Really Works,” I use the Stockholm syndrome to explain the inexplicable level of weakness and appeasement we continually see in the West toward Islam – for instance, in our disastrous failure to stop Nidal Malik Hasan before he shot dozens of people at Fort Hood, killing 13, even though we knew full well he was a jihadist time bomb waiting to explode.
Everyone’s heard of the Stockholm syndrome, named after the Swedish bank robbery when two escaped convicts terrorized four hostages in a bank vault for five and a half days, during which time the hostages grew increasingly sympathetic toward their captors and antagonistic toward the police who were risking their lives to rescue them. The hostages, who had been tied to chairs, had nooses around their necks and guns trained on them day after day, ended up siding with their captors wholeheartedly, later raising money for their defense and refusing to testify against them at trial.
The syndrome, which law enforcement psychologists recognized long before it had a name, is pretty simple: When we’re seriously intimidated, in a life-threatening way, some of us start to side with whomever or whatever is intimidating us. I don’t mean just cooperating and “agreeing” with a captor as a survival strategy, which makes perfect sense. Extreme intimidation has a way of sometimes flipping our sympathy and loyalty in favor of the people doing the intimidating. In the news business, we see this in high-profile cases like Patricia Hearst, Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard.
Radical Islam is extremely intimidating – by design. The more crazy it acts, the more powerful it becomes. Just a few weeks ago, in Nigeria, Muslim gangs slaughtered 500 Christians, including many children and pregnant women and old people – hacked them to death with machetes. Islam has spread in this way – “at the point of a sword” – for centuries. As I write in “How Evil Works,” I personally lost many family members, perhaps over 100, in the genocide of the Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks. I tell one story in which my great grandfather, a Protestant minister, was martyred, along with 60 or 70 other clergymen and their wives, in Adana, Turkey, because they refused to convert on the spot to Islam. This is how it spreads, by traumatizing people. Many, just to survive, join the religion.
So the murderous Islamic tantrums we keep hearing about have a certain dark logic to them, in terms of enabling the spread of Islam. Remember the Danish Muhammad cartoons, which resulted in over 50 deaths? Or when Newsweek reported (incorrectly) that someone at Gitmo flushed a Quran down the toilet, which led to at least 15 deaths? Or the Miss World contest in Nigeria, when a single comment by a newspaper columnist about the beauty of contestants led to insane Muslim rioting in which rioters massacred over 200 people with machetes, or beat them to death or burned them alive – all because of a single sentence a newspaper columnist wrote, which wasn’t even offensive?
How do we respond to these outrageously demented and murderous tantrums? We refer to terrorist acts as “man-caused disasters.” We proclaim Islam as a “religion of peace.” Burger King recalls thousands of its ice cream cones because someone thought the ice cream swirl logo looked too much like the way the word “Allah” is written in Arabic and was therefore sacrilegious. “The 3 Little Pigs” is repeatedly censored in Britain so as not to offend Muslims, who don’t like pigs. In the U.S. we have a middle school curriculum that requires our children to dress up in Islamic garb, take on a Muslim name, memorize verses of the Quran and play so-called “jihad games.” Imagine trying that in today’s public schools with the Christian religion!
America, Europe and Britain today, in the way they deal with radical Islam and the terror threat, reveal something very akin to a low-grade, widespread Stockholm syndrome.
Bottom line, we don’t want to offend Muslims. Why? Because we’re afraid of them. We’re not afraid of Christians or Jews, because Christians and Jews don’t have tantrums and burn down other religions’ houses of worship and cut of people’s heads and commit terrorist acts. Radical Muslims do. We’re so afraid that, even after the Fort Hood attack, the Pentagon, in its 86-page postmortem report analyzing the event, did not see fit to mention the word “Muslim,” “Islam” or “jihad.” This is reminiscent of the “Harry Potter” stories, where everyone is so spooked by the villain Voldemort that they are afraid even to utter his name.
Ironically, people in the grip of jihadist fervor have nothing but contempt for our weakness and appeasement, which actually encourages more violence. Their madness is neutralized only by strength. Ronald Reagan knew this, which is why his watchword was “Peace through strength.”
FP: David, you mention how just recently, in Nigeria, Muslim gangs slaughtered 500 Christians, including many children and pregnant women and old people. Everyone has heard about the “Christian militia” that was just arrested in Michigan (casualties, which seem to be at the number of zero, are still to be numbered or named). How come the slaughter in Nigeria, which took 500 lives, is not in the news and no one has heard about it?
Kupelian: The Obama propaganda ministry – aka the “mainstream press” – is always looking to reinforce the largely phony narrative that “homegrown terrorism” on the right is a major danger to American civilization. Hence the saturation coverage of the “Christian militia” group. The “rightwing terrorism” narrative is necessary for justifying the left’s attacks on normal, hard-working, tea-partying Americans – evident in the growing allegations that speaking honestly about the leftist coup in Washington is “hate speech,” that those opposing Obama are racists, and that tea partiers are one step away from violence.
On the other hand, dwelling on Muslims’ blood-lust and widespread massacring of Christians in foreign lands supports the “wrong” narrative (from the media’s point of view) – namely, that Islam is not a religion of peace after all, hasn’t been one for the last 14 centuries and shows no signs of starting. Thus, the murders of 500 innocent people are reported perfunctorily, if at all, and then dropped. The mainstream media are just not interested.
FP: You say that, “Bottom line, we don’t want to offend Muslims. Why? Because we’re afraid of them.” Absolutely, we have a pathetic talk show host on the CBC up here in Canada, George Stroumboulopoulos [3], who makes constant jokes about Jesus, yet you will never hear him make one joke about the “Prophet” Mohammed.
Fear, as you state, is definitely a factor. But let’s move a bit further and deeper. I’ve made a life-time study of these people and we know that in the world of the Left, it is unimaginable to criticize an adversary culture or religion, and that it is very chic to slander anything connected to the Judeo-Christian tradition. To poke fun at Islam would threaten these peoples’ whole identity, world vision and social life. Can you comment on this a bit?
Kupelian: For one thing, the Left’s very identity and sense of righteousness are tied up in hating America for all its supposed wrongs, arrogance, injustices, exploitations and wars of oppression. And since, as we all know, “the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” cultures that hate and revile America are therefore respected and even admired by the Left, which also hates America. This is one reason Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court; he secretly – maybe unconsciously – has a certain amount of sympathy for the 9/11 mastermind. The logic of this is straightforward and incontrovertible: KSM hates and blames America, and because leftists like Holder also hate and blame America, leftists “understand” and even sympathize on some level with terrorists, no matter how despicable their crimes.
FP: Tell us a bit about how people who want to manipulate us often use crises to do so. Explain how this is connected to what Obama and his administration are up to.
Kupelian: As all skilled manipulators know, the easiest and surest way to exert control over people is to get them to react emotionally to you. One way to get people to do what they wouldn’t ordinarily do is to create a phony crisis for them to overreact to.
For instance, in “How Evil Works” I cite a child-abduction case in which a little girl was approached after school by a man she didn’t know. He claimed her house was burning down, that her parents were busy putting out the fire, and that he was a friend of the parents who had asked him to pick up their daughter and take her to them. The crisis – and the emotional upset the girl experienced over the thought of her house being on fire and her parents in danger – drowned out her normal caution about getting into a car with a stranger. Result: The stranger, a predator who had concocted the lie for the sole purpose of upsetting and tricking the girl into going with him, murdered the little girl. This same routine was portrayed in the film “Changeling” starring Angelina Jolie, a true story that involved a serial child murderer who enticed youngsters into his car using this exact “your-house-is-on-fire” ruse.
As I explain in Chapter 1, “Why We Elect Liars as Leaders,” manufactured crisis is the primary modus operandi of the Obama administration. After all, how else could a far-left administration lead a center-right country in such a terrible direction without big-time deception and subterfuge – which is accomplished handily by constantly creating bogeyman crises? For instance:
* We heard for 14 months that our healthcare system is desperately broken. In reality, it’s the finest healthcare system in world history. If you’re an illegal alien child molester and you get sick or injured and go to a public hospital, you will, by law, be taken care of whether or not you can pay. That’s not a broken system. And as for the relatively small number of Americans who truly can’t afford health insurance, our government has always been good at creating safety nets. But that was not the intent of Obamacare, which conspicuously bypassed all sensible, market-based reforms – like litigation reform and allowing intrastate purchase of insurance – that would lower costs without degrading quality of care.
* Until wave after wave of scandalous fraud revelations proved the global warming “consensus” was a giant hoax, America was poised to pass “cap-and-trade” legislation which would institute massive and ruinous levels of wealth redistribution – which was the object all along. The administration is now regrouping and re-strategizing how best to force this abomination down Americans’ throats, as they did with Obamacare.
* We’ve been told throughout the age of Obama that America will plunge into hopeless depression if government doesn’t spend trillions and take over entire sectors of the economy. In reality, massive government and Federal Reserve intervention has always worsened and prolonged economic downturns, not solved them.
* Here’s one most people don’t know about: Last May, just a few days before the World Health Organization classified swine flu as a phase 6 pandemic – the highest, scariest category – the WHO quietly redefined pandemic to eliminate the phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” and substituted wording that said pandemics “can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause.” You see, the WHO grows in power and lots of money starts to flow when a phase 6 pandemic is declared. The White House, never one to let a good crisis go to waste, issued a press release saying up to 90,000 Americans would likely die from swine flu. The next day, the head of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, told Americans to ignore the White House’s wild fear-mongering, saying “Everything we’ve seen in the U.S. and everything we’ve seen around the world suggests we won’t see that kind of number if the virus doesn’t change.”
Fundamentally, the whole leftist obsession with power – which promotes ever-increasing dependency of people on government – is, in and of itself, a huge crisis machine. Normal competent adults are able to take care of themselves and their families through their own efforts and through voluntary cooperation with other free individuals. That’s America. If you’re an adult who can’t take care of your own life, that’s a crisis – and this is the state leftists want us to be in, to be dependent on them since that’s the basis for their growth in power. So socialism not only requires crisis to become established, its very existence is a state of perpetual crisis for free people.
FP: You refer to the “whole leftist obsession with power” in passing. Not everyone might know what you mean. In my own research and study, I know this reality in terms of how the Left lives vicariously through supporting communist dictators like Fidel Castro through what is called “negative affirmation.” But that is another matter (a bit). I know our themes are connected, so can you expand a bit on what you mean?
Kupelian: Whole people – that is, people who are internally connected to conscience, to common sense, to God, however you want to put it, and who therefore possess a certain natural reverence for other souls and their autonomy – are not attracted to obtaining power over other people.
But people who have become twisted in certain ways – maybe they had a crummy childhood, or were brainwashed in college into embracing some toxic ideology, or simply are really resentful or envious or insecure – sometimes develop a compulsion to control others.
Imagine that you just met someone for the first time, and discovered that this person considered himself or herself far superior to others, above the need to be truthful, above the law, willing to break the law, and was arrogant and defiant at every turn. And that furthermore, this person harbored an overwhelming urge to control you, take what’s yours, and exercise power over you. You might understandably conclude this person is not only dangerous, but likely a criminal and/or mentally ill. That’s who we have running the country right now – the inmates are truly running the asylum.
These are very sick people we’re talking about: They thrive on crippling others, because the more dysfunctional people there are in the general population, the greater their power. More competent, mature, self-sufficient grownups translate into less power for them, which is why they disdain and malign the tea partiers and other normal, hard-working, tax-paying, independent Americans.
For the very egotistical, deluded person, power is like alcoholism. People like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are drunk – on power. They don’t think, feel, reason or act in a normal way; they’re in an altered state of consciousness. As we say, “power corrupts,” and the more power we give them, the more absolute that corruption becomes.
Also, we need to remember that leftist politicians by definition believe the purpose of government is to ensure, by force, that wealth is evenly distributed. Thus, they look at us like we’re farm animals and they’re the farmers. When some of us have “too much food” and others “don’t have enough,” they come in and take it from us, and scold us for “hording” all that food we don’t need, and give it to the poor, righteous animals with not enough food. The problem is, we’re not animals and we don’t belong to them.
FP: How come the West has such a difficult time understanding the conflict we are in? This has much to do with, as is the subject of your work, the difficulty we have in understanding evil. Illuminate this phenomenon for us.
Kupelian: In the past 60 years, America as a whole has been conned into abandoning the core Judeo-Christian values that have provided the moral foundation of Western civilization for millennia, and of American civilization for centuries. The fundamental principles of life that previously gave our existence meaning and kept our society unified, safe and strong – belief in God, belief that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount were the basis for a good life and a great society, recognition of the sanctity of life (which means you don’t kill babies before they’re born or old people when their care gets too expensive), belief that sex is sacred and reserved for marriage, and so on – have been discarded like yesterday’s newspaper.
If we don’t understand that we are created by God and that we live in a moral dimension in which we constantly can choose between good or evil, and that things go really badly when we choose the wrong way – if we don’t recognize this basic reality level of our lives, then it’s very difficult to understand evil, or to understand ourselves for that matter.
FP: You refer to the Sermon on the Mount as being the basis for a good life. I always found that one of the most moving parts of the New Testament, but I always saw it mostly as a promise for the next life (i.e. your reward will be great in heaven). Can you expand a bit on what you mean in terms of it being a basis for a good life on earth?
Kupelian: The beatitudes (“Blessed are the …”) describe the kind of attitude toward life that leads to genuine happiness or “blessedness” – including the admonition to “let your light shine before men” (which includes speaking the truth even if it’s unpopular) but also to forgive people who attack you for speaking the truth (“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely”). That’s very reassuring and strengthening.
A lot of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount is practical, for the here and now: He talks about hate and lust and divorce, and how we need to rise above these things. Some of the most transcendent truths that have infused traditional Judeo-Christian culture derive from the Sermon on the Mount, including The Lord’s Prayer; the admonition to “Seek first the kingdom of God” (and all else will be added); the warning to “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”; the truth that “a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit,” and so on. Wisdom for living.
FP: Your book deals with the war that is being waged on men and on masculinity in our society. Why is this happening and what are its consequences?
Kupelian: In schools today, boys are doing worse than girls by every measure. The vast majority of children with discipline problems, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, who are put on Ritalin or who drop out of school – 70 to 80 percent – are boys. Three out of five college students today are young women.
As boys grow up and get married, two thirds of divorces are initiated by the wives – and it is the wives that almost always get the children during custody proceedings, since the entire family court system is notoriously biased against men.
In popular culture, virtually every TV commercial portrays men as idiotic and women as smarter and hipper. Same with sitcoms, and with animated comedies like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.” The dad is always the doofus. What happened to “Father Knows Best”?
In Chapter 8 of “How Evil Works,” titled “The War on Fathers,” I document how, as an outgrowth of the radical feminist movement of the sixties, today men, boys and masculinity itself are under attack. Our leftist academia harbors a major movement that is so offended by masculinity that it holds workshops on how to “transform” boys, eliminating their aggressiveness, competitiveness and maleness!
Remember the radical feminists of the sixties, with their angry denunciations of marriage as “legalized rape” and “slavery for women”? Just as the sixties political radicals are today running the American government, culturally the sixties’ radical feminist hatred of Christianity and the traditional patriarchy that goes with it has infected today’s culture. It manifests as a compulsion to ridicule, diminish and have contempt for men. You can see it everywhere.
There is, of course, also a “practical” governmental motivation for breaking up marriages: Tyranny always works better when families are in crisis. Intact, functional families constitute their own universe, one with powerful internal loyalties and transcendent values that compete and sometimes clash with those of despotic government, which therefore strives to separate fathers from their families. In 1918, right after the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin passed a radical no-fault divorce law. Realizing that to maintain control of the people the Russian family had to be destroyed, Lenin passed a law whereby you could divorce your spouse simply by mailing or delivering a postcard to the local register without even notifying the spouse being divorced!
FP: Final thoughts?
Kupelian: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident who exposed the evils of the gulag system to the world, once wrote: “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’”
Decades later, Solzhenitsyn said that in trying to explain the totalitarian horrors that permeated the 20th century – which he himself endured – he could not improve on the explanation he had heard as a child: “Men have forgotten God.”
FP: David Kupelian, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
I have to tell our readers that How Evil Works is a brilliant book. Buy it [2]!!!!
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/04/20/how-evil-works/
URLs in this post:
[1] WorldNetDaily.com: http://www.wnd.com/
[2] How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America.: http://www.amazon.com/How-Evil-Works-Understanding-Transforming/dp/1439168199
[3] George Stroumboulopoulos: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=31776
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Glenn Beck CPAC Keynote Address
Glenn Beck at CPAC
I watched the video of Glenn Beck's speech at the recent CPAC conference and thought it was outstanding. Here's a link to it:
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/videos/?uri=channels/338018/788930
I think Mr. Beck has come into his own at last. Mr. Beck is a commentator rather than a politician himself but I think that if he did decide to run for a political office that he would have a strong following. I'm not sure that it would be a good thing though in that at this point he has great value as a voice for a lot of Americans and a 'conscience' of both political parties. Well, 'conscience' may be too strong of a word as I don't believe that either party has any conscience at all and are both morally bankrupt.
Of course, he was targeted by both parties' favored lap-dog pundits. Jon Stewart had this to say about Mr. Beck's speech:
Pretty typical Liberal/Progressive revisionist stuff. By the way, Mr. Stewart, progressives (communists) did not start the Libraries, Benjamin Franklin did. I believe Mr. Franklin would be surprised indeed to find himself labeled a communist.
And then there was Rush Limbaugh, the paid political pundit of the Republican Party:
What comes through to me from listening to both of these gentlemen is that Mr. Beck hit the nail squarely on the head and both parties are in 'damage-control' mode. Covering their nether-quarters with anything that comes easily to hand which, generally speaking, isn't much more than trying to 'out-shout' Glenn Beck, distract the American people by causing a general glee amongst us at seeing the fight develop. Americans are, after all, easily distracted by a fight. They also realize that we tend to tune things out when it comes to bombast and Pseudo-intelligence.
We do have a history of not paying attention when it comes to that and if we don't pay attention at this stage, then we're going to lose what freedom remains to us. The truth that Mr. Beck brought to light is that both parties are working together for the destruction of everything America stands for and the removal of the Constitution and inherited rights of all Americans.
In short, the Glenn Beck speech at the CPAC conference was a great catalyst and should be watched, and paid attention to. Personally, I agree with Glenn Beck and have been thinking the same things for a long time. It's nice that someone with a voice and a talent for public-speaking is actually able to articulate this.
Last, here's another paid voice of the 1-party-by-2-means system, Mark Levin:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33353.html
The only difference between the Communists and Republicans as far as I can see, is 'style.'
That's my take on the matter, what's yours?©TexasFred2/2010
I watched the video of Glenn Beck's speech at the recent CPAC conference and thought it was outstanding. Here's a link to it:
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/videos/?uri=channels/338018/788930
I think Mr. Beck has come into his own at last. Mr. Beck is a commentator rather than a politician himself but I think that if he did decide to run for a political office that he would have a strong following. I'm not sure that it would be a good thing though in that at this point he has great value as a voice for a lot of Americans and a 'conscience' of both political parties. Well, 'conscience' may be too strong of a word as I don't believe that either party has any conscience at all and are both morally bankrupt.
Of course, he was targeted by both parties' favored lap-dog pundits. Jon Stewart had this to say about Mr. Beck's speech:
Pretty typical Liberal/Progressive revisionist stuff. By the way, Mr. Stewart, progressives (communists) did not start the Libraries, Benjamin Franklin did. I believe Mr. Franklin would be surprised indeed to find himself labeled a communist.
And then there was Rush Limbaugh, the paid political pundit of the Republican Party:
What comes through to me from listening to both of these gentlemen is that Mr. Beck hit the nail squarely on the head and both parties are in 'damage-control' mode. Covering their nether-quarters with anything that comes easily to hand which, generally speaking, isn't much more than trying to 'out-shout' Glenn Beck, distract the American people by causing a general glee amongst us at seeing the fight develop. Americans are, after all, easily distracted by a fight. They also realize that we tend to tune things out when it comes to bombast and Pseudo-intelligence.
We do have a history of not paying attention when it comes to that and if we don't pay attention at this stage, then we're going to lose what freedom remains to us. The truth that Mr. Beck brought to light is that both parties are working together for the destruction of everything America stands for and the removal of the Constitution and inherited rights of all Americans.
In short, the Glenn Beck speech at the CPAC conference was a great catalyst and should be watched, and paid attention to. Personally, I agree with Glenn Beck and have been thinking the same things for a long time. It's nice that someone with a voice and a talent for public-speaking is actually able to articulate this.
Last, here's another paid voice of the 1-party-by-2-means system, Mark Levin:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33353.html
The only difference between the Communists and Republicans as far as I can see, is 'style.'
That's my take on the matter, what's yours?©TexasFred2/2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Toad Lick, TX. Pt 5
Toad-Lick, Part V
PART V
There’s Darryl Mcphatridge, and his lovely wife Darlene. They own and operate the last real Barber-shop/ Beauty Salon in the State of Texas. Well, probably not the last one in the state, but definitely the last one here. There are three other places around here to get your hair cut, all of them those trendy, new-style unisex places. Everyone over about forty here, is a little leery of them. I think that Pro-something, you know the one, it’s all over in the city, is some kin to that Hooter’s place. Anyway, Darryl and Darlene, or Double-D, because you hardly ever see one without the other, and they’re never more than yelling distance apart, have owned and operated the Barber-Shop since I can remember. Darryl gave me my first hair-cut, and had to suspiciously examine the cuts that Dave and I were sporting when we came home on leave from the Army. He cut my hair all my life that is, until a couple of years ago, I got a shaver, and started cutting my fringe myself. Nature had taken care of the top part, already. So, when they come into the coffee-shop for lunch, or when I pay a visit to them at the store, they always greet me by fondly saying, “Hi, Traiter! How ya doin’? Ready to come to your senses yet?”
Double-D always goes to the lake for a camp-out, and some fishing with their grandkids for spring-break. They figure it gives the kids something interesting to do, away from the pressure of school, and gets them out of their mom and dad’s hair for a few days. They were in here this morning, with the grandkids in tow, the RV loaded up, boat attached, and ready to set out on high adventure. Their grandkids are Tony, 13, Timmy, 10, and Rae. Rae’s a little sweetie. She’s 6 and wants to know about everything. I don’t see where Double-D get the energy for it, but bless them, they do. Their son, Darryl Jr., we all call him DJ, is ten years younger than me, and Dave. Darryl Sr. was one of the scout leaders in our town, and when we went on campouts, he’d always bring DJ. with him. Between the two of them, I don’t think there’s anything they don’t know about camping out, the woods, or fishing. DJ’s an insurance salesman now, up in the city, so the only time he gets to go anymore is the annual 4 th of July Picnic out at the lake. Donna and I used to go to the Picnic religiously, but since she died, and I took the job of Police Chief here, I don’t get the chance to do it for long anymore. Everyone usually goes out there on about the 2 nd or 3 rd , and camps out together through the 4 th , fishing, boating, hiking, or just lazing around, then they all pack it up and come back the 5 th . Nowadays, I get to go out there on the 4 th , usually for a couple of hours, but Toad-Lick always has a 4 th of July parade in the afternoon, and then a fireworks display right after sundown. Dave and I always have to be here, and on duty for that, so neither of us gets to go be with our friends for the 4 th anymore. I sure miss it, a lot. What I don’t miss is Double-D, or DJ, or Gary, Sam, one of the reverends, or somebody, or their wife more likely, always bringing some nice, middle-aged woman to the picnic, and just happen to think that she’d be a good match for lonely little ol’ me!
Sheesh! Dave says that I, being a single middle-aged man, am the talk of the town among the ladies, hereabouts. He says I’m a challenge to them, so I better just pick one of the ladies they throw at me, and settle down, or they’ll never give me a moments peace. I’m hoping to outlast them. Here’s an example.
This morning when Double-D came in for breakfast with the grandkids, they also had this nice-seeming, attractive woman with them. Turns out her name is Gloria, and she’s Darlene’s niece from the other side of the city. She’s a school teacher, ( they all have this thing that public- service professionals should be more attracted to each other, I guess. They’re always either school teachers, or nurses it seems to me, except one female cop, who turned out to be a Lesbian, {They hadn’t asked her beforehand, just sprung us on each other} that was memorable.) and had just gone through a nasty divorce. They’d just incidentally asked Gloria if she wanted to go camping with them this week, to get away. Then they sat at a table where there was no room for Gloria, knowing that, gentleman that I am, I’d invite her to sit with me. Ok, I did that. So they know their mark! So sue me. Quit snickering!! I hear you! Besides that, she is attractive, and smells good, too. So, Gloria and I had a nice conversation, in which we exchanged information about Double-D trying to set us up with each other. Seems that Darlene had told her all about me, over the last couple of weeks. Just kind of casually, you know. I found out right away that Gloria ain’t dumb. We laughed about it good-naturedly, and exchanged phone numbers. Neither of us are ready for more than dating right now, but having someone to date is an important step, right?
Ok, I said quit snickering, and I meant it. I’ll be looking for your old pick-up, speeding though my town.
So, after a nice conversation, Double-D, Gloria, and the kids all piled into the RV, and off they went to high adventure, down at the lake. Of course I told them I’d look in on them, and am supposed to go down there for supper with them one night this week. Gloria’s cooking, no less. Oh, yeah. Darryl let it slip that there’s supposed to be a full moon out this week, just in case we might feel like a little walk in the country after dinner. Gloria and I both just grinned at them. Can you say “Set-up?” I knew you could. Some of the older folks around here get pretty obvious about their matchmaking. I’ll bet you that Darlene is supposed to report in full detail to my mom, God bless her little pea-pickin’ heart, when they get back. Mom and Darlene have been thick as thieves for years. I think they’ve been volunteers at the same charity program 30 years, or more, and we can’t forget the weekly ladies bridge club, to which they both belong. Then there’s the “Red Hat Society.” Both of them are members in good standing. From what I know of the “Red Hat Society,” one must be female, over 65, possess a red hat, and be available for the monthly luncheons. I’m not sure I want to know more than that about it.©Texasfred
PART V
There’s Darryl Mcphatridge, and his lovely wife Darlene. They own and operate the last real Barber-shop/ Beauty Salon in the State of Texas. Well, probably not the last one in the state, but definitely the last one here. There are three other places around here to get your hair cut, all of them those trendy, new-style unisex places. Everyone over about forty here, is a little leery of them. I think that Pro-something, you know the one, it’s all over in the city, is some kin to that Hooter’s place. Anyway, Darryl and Darlene, or Double-D, because you hardly ever see one without the other, and they’re never more than yelling distance apart, have owned and operated the Barber-Shop since I can remember. Darryl gave me my first hair-cut, and had to suspiciously examine the cuts that Dave and I were sporting when we came home on leave from the Army. He cut my hair all my life that is, until a couple of years ago, I got a shaver, and started cutting my fringe myself. Nature had taken care of the top part, already. So, when they come into the coffee-shop for lunch, or when I pay a visit to them at the store, they always greet me by fondly saying, “Hi, Traiter! How ya doin’? Ready to come to your senses yet?”
Double-D always goes to the lake for a camp-out, and some fishing with their grandkids for spring-break. They figure it gives the kids something interesting to do, away from the pressure of school, and gets them out of their mom and dad’s hair for a few days. They were in here this morning, with the grandkids in tow, the RV loaded up, boat attached, and ready to set out on high adventure. Their grandkids are Tony, 13, Timmy, 10, and Rae. Rae’s a little sweetie. She’s 6 and wants to know about everything. I don’t see where Double-D get the energy for it, but bless them, they do. Their son, Darryl Jr., we all call him DJ, is ten years younger than me, and Dave. Darryl Sr. was one of the scout leaders in our town, and when we went on campouts, he’d always bring DJ. with him. Between the two of them, I don’t think there’s anything they don’t know about camping out, the woods, or fishing. DJ’s an insurance salesman now, up in the city, so the only time he gets to go anymore is the annual 4 th of July Picnic out at the lake. Donna and I used to go to the Picnic religiously, but since she died, and I took the job of Police Chief here, I don’t get the chance to do it for long anymore. Everyone usually goes out there on about the 2 nd or 3 rd , and camps out together through the 4 th , fishing, boating, hiking, or just lazing around, then they all pack it up and come back the 5 th . Nowadays, I get to go out there on the 4 th , usually for a couple of hours, but Toad-Lick always has a 4 th of July parade in the afternoon, and then a fireworks display right after sundown. Dave and I always have to be here, and on duty for that, so neither of us gets to go be with our friends for the 4 th anymore. I sure miss it, a lot. What I don’t miss is Double-D, or DJ, or Gary, Sam, one of the reverends, or somebody, or their wife more likely, always bringing some nice, middle-aged woman to the picnic, and just happen to think that she’d be a good match for lonely little ol’ me!
Sheesh! Dave says that I, being a single middle-aged man, am the talk of the town among the ladies, hereabouts. He says I’m a challenge to them, so I better just pick one of the ladies they throw at me, and settle down, or they’ll never give me a moments peace. I’m hoping to outlast them. Here’s an example.
This morning when Double-D came in for breakfast with the grandkids, they also had this nice-seeming, attractive woman with them. Turns out her name is Gloria, and she’s Darlene’s niece from the other side of the city. She’s a school teacher, ( they all have this thing that public- service professionals should be more attracted to each other, I guess. They’re always either school teachers, or nurses it seems to me, except one female cop, who turned out to be a Lesbian, {They hadn’t asked her beforehand, just sprung us on each other} that was memorable.) and had just gone through a nasty divorce. They’d just incidentally asked Gloria if she wanted to go camping with them this week, to get away. Then they sat at a table where there was no room for Gloria, knowing that, gentleman that I am, I’d invite her to sit with me. Ok, I did that. So they know their mark! So sue me. Quit snickering!! I hear you! Besides that, she is attractive, and smells good, too. So, Gloria and I had a nice conversation, in which we exchanged information about Double-D trying to set us up with each other. Seems that Darlene had told her all about me, over the last couple of weeks. Just kind of casually, you know. I found out right away that Gloria ain’t dumb. We laughed about it good-naturedly, and exchanged phone numbers. Neither of us are ready for more than dating right now, but having someone to date is an important step, right?
Ok, I said quit snickering, and I meant it. I’ll be looking for your old pick-up, speeding though my town.
So, after a nice conversation, Double-D, Gloria, and the kids all piled into the RV, and off they went to high adventure, down at the lake. Of course I told them I’d look in on them, and am supposed to go down there for supper with them one night this week. Gloria’s cooking, no less. Oh, yeah. Darryl let it slip that there’s supposed to be a full moon out this week, just in case we might feel like a little walk in the country after dinner. Gloria and I both just grinned at them. Can you say “Set-up?” I knew you could. Some of the older folks around here get pretty obvious about their matchmaking. I’ll bet you that Darlene is supposed to report in full detail to my mom, God bless her little pea-pickin’ heart, when they get back. Mom and Darlene have been thick as thieves for years. I think they’ve been volunteers at the same charity program 30 years, or more, and we can’t forget the weekly ladies bridge club, to which they both belong. Then there’s the “Red Hat Society.” Both of them are members in good standing. From what I know of the “Red Hat Society,” one must be female, over 65, possess a red hat, and be available for the monthly luncheons. I’m not sure I want to know more than that about it.©Texasfred
July 12, 2006
Entry for July 12, 2006
I've just recently come back home from a nice stay at our regional Medical Center's ICU, preceded by a 25 minute flight in an ambulance type of helicopter, preceded by being trapped for approximately 3 hours in my upside-down, no longer viable, Kenworth truck. This was preceded by me spending about 25 seconds exploring whether it is humanly possible to remain viable after you lose control of your truck and go spinning madly off the side of the road. I felt somewhat like an agitator in the washing machine, on the "Spin" cycle.
I won't go into detail about what happened, how I wrecked, and all that stuff. Suffice it to say that when the dust settled, it was 3 am, on the wrong side of a curve, beside a little 2 lane road, about 3 miles east of the nearest town, which has a population of about 50, not including dogs or cows. I was sort-of upside down, caught by my left leg, which was trapped between the steering wheel, and the driver's seat. The rest of me was laying comfortably on the broken glass, on what had once been the roof of the truck, within easy reach of the front hole-where-the-windshield-used-to-be. Oh, did I mention that the diesel tank had ruptured, so I was getting a steady flow of fuel pouring down my body? And the power was still working. Everything you need for a nice fire; a source of fuel, Air, and a nice trapped person to burn. I threw my cigarettes, and lighter as far as I could!
Then I lay there, praying that God might find it within Himself to save me, as I'd left a lot of loose ends, and couldn't seem to extract myself from this mess. This lasted a good few minutes. Then, after about 10 minutes or so, a nice man stopped, and wondered if anyone was still in there, so I said yes, and would he call 911? He did. Thankfully cell service was working in the area at the moment, because it doesn't always. Then he asked me if he could call anyone else for me, so I had him call my dispatcher, then my son. At least that way, they'd know what was going on. Then he shined his cell phone in the truck, and I got my first look around, sort-of. Well, truthfully, my face was pretty well mush, and when he saw me in his cell-phone light, he dropped the phone, and said "Oh My God!" This is a wonderful confidence builder for those of you who may find yourselves helping people trapped in overturned wrecks. It didn't bother me, I knew I was pretty messed up. I couldn't see the damage to myself, but I could certainly feel it. After that he stayed back a good 20 feet or so, until the Mineral Wells Fire/Rescue people got there. About 20 minutes.
The first one of them I met was a man named "Jerry". He introduced himself to me, got my assessment of the situation, passed that, along with what he could see and his much more professional assessment back out to some other people around us, and told me, "We're going to get you out of here as soon as we can and no matter how long or short a time that is, I'm right her with you, OK?" Jerry was my constant companion throughout the rest of my entrapment. Every time they'd get ready to cut, or pry on the truck, Jerry would be laying over me, spreading his bunker coat, telling me what was happening and that it'd be OK. At one point, I told Jerry I liked him, but he was going to have to ease up or go on a diet!
The other fellow who was pretty much in constant attendance to me was Chris. I'm assuming Chris is a Paramedic? Anyway, he's EMS, and he started an IV on me right away, and got me some Oxygen to breathe. Before they got me out, I went through two and a half bottles of Oxygen. It was a tight space but I was always in physical contact with one or the other of them throughout the rest of the ordeal and, at times, both of them.
The first thing they did was crack the passenger door open. I'd seen the safety triangle box, which weighs about 10 pounds, hanging between the door and the passenger seat above my head. I pointed it out to them before they popped the door so that maybe someone would move it? Jerry assured me they'd get the box out of there then he put a blanket over me to protect me from flying glass and debris, then they popped the door open with the "jaws of life". This was the only time Jerry went outside and of course I got hit by the box. Oh, well, it only fell a couple feet, so I figured at this point, no big deal. Later, I found out I had a 6" gash on the left side of my scalp, and my skull was cracked. My left leg was really going to sleep by now, so I told them about that. They cut out the gear shifter, and that gave me some relief. Then they cut the steering wheel off, and with them pulling me, I was able to straighten up somewhat, but found to the dismay of all, especially me, that my leg was still trapped between the dash-board and the driver's seat.
They began the next part of the rescue by trying to push the dash away from my leg, but as they got it away from my leg above the knee, it gouged into my shin. Kind of like a see-saw. No luck there. So, after some observation, and a little consultation, they decided the best thing to do would be to cut the seat away. The only problem with that was there's a back wall the seat was up against. So, they stabilized me and the truck, which was in serious danger of rolling completely and crushing Jerry and I, as best they could and then proceeded to cut away the back wall of the cab. Most of this time, I was lying as quietly as I could, talking with Jerry and Chris. Jerry was holding my hand, and Chris was taking my heart-rate, and blood-pressure, and just trying to keep me calm.
Finally they got the back wall out, and were cutting the seat away from the back of my leg. As we were talking, Jerry was telling me what they were going to do and what I needed to do in order to help; I overheard Chris say something about the "helicopter". On asking, I learned that I was to be care-flighted to John Peter-Smith Hospital in Ft. Worth. This is the County Hospital, so I made sure they knew I had insurance! And! I wasn't really hurt that bad, was I? Chris told me no, I wasn't that badly injured and that the reason for JPS wasn't because they're a county hospital, but that they have the best unit for compression/confined space injury. This was when I realized I'd been partially crushed, but not to what extent yet. A little bit later, one of them told me that if I could live long enough to get to the JPS Trauma Center that I'd have a 50/50 chance of living.
So, that's what they were worried about! They told me that confined space injury, or long term compression resulted in erratic heartbeat, and blood-pressure problems, in addition to the cuts, and abrasions. Chris told me that I could go wherever I wanted, of course, but he recommended JPS in this instance. I had to agree with him, sometimes you just have to bow to the experts, and these guys hadn't stepped wrong with me in 3 hours.
So, they finally got the seat out from under my leg, rolled me onto a buckboard, got me all taped and tied down, and carried me to a waiting ambulance, where they took off my boots, and belt, and began cutting off my clothes, and assessing the injuries they'd only been able to see dimly, if at all, before. On the way to the Ambulance I asked if anyone had taken photos, and asked for a copy of them. I wish I’d gotten them.
The final total of injuries? Well, let’s see. Face torn, with broken maxillary bone (That’s the one that holds your nose in place, and protects your sinuses,) sinuses permanently damaged. Cracked skull, on the left side of head. Left arm severely lacerated, (that is: severe cuts, and tears)and the little tube the nerve runs thru was crushed so I ended up with little feeling or strength in my left hand. Left rib-cage crushed (that means the ribs were broken in the front and the back, both) with bruised left lung and heart, bruised and compressed intestines/ colon/ stomach, bruised left hip, severe lacerations to left knee and lower leg, compression injury just above the left knee, severe damage to right knee, and last but not least, two vertebra impacted, C-5, and L-3 with resultant burning pain in my legs, and numbness/loss of sensitivity in my back and legs.
When I wrote this, I had just that day gotten out of the hospital and was still on Morphine, so it may appear somewhat disjointed and incomplete. There have been several long-term consequences of my injuries which I wasn't aware of at the time of this writing and which I won't go into now.
I've just recently come back home from a nice stay at our regional Medical Center's ICU, preceded by a 25 minute flight in an ambulance type of helicopter, preceded by being trapped for approximately 3 hours in my upside-down, no longer viable, Kenworth truck. This was preceded by me spending about 25 seconds exploring whether it is humanly possible to remain viable after you lose control of your truck and go spinning madly off the side of the road. I felt somewhat like an agitator in the washing machine, on the "Spin" cycle.
I won't go into detail about what happened, how I wrecked, and all that stuff. Suffice it to say that when the dust settled, it was 3 am, on the wrong side of a curve, beside a little 2 lane road, about 3 miles east of the nearest town, which has a population of about 50, not including dogs or cows. I was sort-of upside down, caught by my left leg, which was trapped between the steering wheel, and the driver's seat. The rest of me was laying comfortably on the broken glass, on what had once been the roof of the truck, within easy reach of the front hole-where-the-windshield-used-to-be. Oh, did I mention that the diesel tank had ruptured, so I was getting a steady flow of fuel pouring down my body? And the power was still working. Everything you need for a nice fire; a source of fuel, Air, and a nice trapped person to burn. I threw my cigarettes, and lighter as far as I could!
Then I lay there, praying that God might find it within Himself to save me, as I'd left a lot of loose ends, and couldn't seem to extract myself from this mess. This lasted a good few minutes. Then, after about 10 minutes or so, a nice man stopped, and wondered if anyone was still in there, so I said yes, and would he call 911? He did. Thankfully cell service was working in the area at the moment, because it doesn't always. Then he asked me if he could call anyone else for me, so I had him call my dispatcher, then my son. At least that way, they'd know what was going on. Then he shined his cell phone in the truck, and I got my first look around, sort-of. Well, truthfully, my face was pretty well mush, and when he saw me in his cell-phone light, he dropped the phone, and said "Oh My God!" This is a wonderful confidence builder for those of you who may find yourselves helping people trapped in overturned wrecks. It didn't bother me, I knew I was pretty messed up. I couldn't see the damage to myself, but I could certainly feel it. After that he stayed back a good 20 feet or so, until the Mineral Wells Fire/Rescue people got there. About 20 minutes.
The first one of them I met was a man named "Jerry". He introduced himself to me, got my assessment of the situation, passed that, along with what he could see and his much more professional assessment back out to some other people around us, and told me, "We're going to get you out of here as soon as we can and no matter how long or short a time that is, I'm right her with you, OK?" Jerry was my constant companion throughout the rest of my entrapment. Every time they'd get ready to cut, or pry on the truck, Jerry would be laying over me, spreading his bunker coat, telling me what was happening and that it'd be OK. At one point, I told Jerry I liked him, but he was going to have to ease up or go on a diet!
The other fellow who was pretty much in constant attendance to me was Chris. I'm assuming Chris is a Paramedic? Anyway, he's EMS, and he started an IV on me right away, and got me some Oxygen to breathe. Before they got me out, I went through two and a half bottles of Oxygen. It was a tight space but I was always in physical contact with one or the other of them throughout the rest of the ordeal and, at times, both of them.
The first thing they did was crack the passenger door open. I'd seen the safety triangle box, which weighs about 10 pounds, hanging between the door and the passenger seat above my head. I pointed it out to them before they popped the door so that maybe someone would move it? Jerry assured me they'd get the box out of there then he put a blanket over me to protect me from flying glass and debris, then they popped the door open with the "jaws of life". This was the only time Jerry went outside and of course I got hit by the box. Oh, well, it only fell a couple feet, so I figured at this point, no big deal. Later, I found out I had a 6" gash on the left side of my scalp, and my skull was cracked. My left leg was really going to sleep by now, so I told them about that. They cut out the gear shifter, and that gave me some relief. Then they cut the steering wheel off, and with them pulling me, I was able to straighten up somewhat, but found to the dismay of all, especially me, that my leg was still trapped between the dash-board and the driver's seat.
They began the next part of the rescue by trying to push the dash away from my leg, but as they got it away from my leg above the knee, it gouged into my shin. Kind of like a see-saw. No luck there. So, after some observation, and a little consultation, they decided the best thing to do would be to cut the seat away. The only problem with that was there's a back wall the seat was up against. So, they stabilized me and the truck, which was in serious danger of rolling completely and crushing Jerry and I, as best they could and then proceeded to cut away the back wall of the cab. Most of this time, I was lying as quietly as I could, talking with Jerry and Chris. Jerry was holding my hand, and Chris was taking my heart-rate, and blood-pressure, and just trying to keep me calm.
Finally they got the back wall out, and were cutting the seat away from the back of my leg. As we were talking, Jerry was telling me what they were going to do and what I needed to do in order to help; I overheard Chris say something about the "helicopter". On asking, I learned that I was to be care-flighted to John Peter-Smith Hospital in Ft. Worth. This is the County Hospital, so I made sure they knew I had insurance! And! I wasn't really hurt that bad, was I? Chris told me no, I wasn't that badly injured and that the reason for JPS wasn't because they're a county hospital, but that they have the best unit for compression/confined space injury. This was when I realized I'd been partially crushed, but not to what extent yet. A little bit later, one of them told me that if I could live long enough to get to the JPS Trauma Center that I'd have a 50/50 chance of living.
So, that's what they were worried about! They told me that confined space injury, or long term compression resulted in erratic heartbeat, and blood-pressure problems, in addition to the cuts, and abrasions. Chris told me that I could go wherever I wanted, of course, but he recommended JPS in this instance. I had to agree with him, sometimes you just have to bow to the experts, and these guys hadn't stepped wrong with me in 3 hours.
So, they finally got the seat out from under my leg, rolled me onto a buckboard, got me all taped and tied down, and carried me to a waiting ambulance, where they took off my boots, and belt, and began cutting off my clothes, and assessing the injuries they'd only been able to see dimly, if at all, before. On the way to the Ambulance I asked if anyone had taken photos, and asked for a copy of them. I wish I’d gotten them.
The final total of injuries? Well, let’s see. Face torn, with broken maxillary bone (That’s the one that holds your nose in place, and protects your sinuses,) sinuses permanently damaged. Cracked skull, on the left side of head. Left arm severely lacerated, (that is: severe cuts, and tears)and the little tube the nerve runs thru was crushed so I ended up with little feeling or strength in my left hand. Left rib-cage crushed (that means the ribs were broken in the front and the back, both) with bruised left lung and heart, bruised and compressed intestines/ colon/ stomach, bruised left hip, severe lacerations to left knee and lower leg, compression injury just above the left knee, severe damage to right knee, and last but not least, two vertebra impacted, C-5, and L-3 with resultant burning pain in my legs, and numbness/loss of sensitivity in my back and legs.
When I wrote this, I had just that day gotten out of the hospital and was still on Morphine, so it may appear somewhat disjointed and incomplete. There have been several long-term consequences of my injuries which I wasn't aware of at the time of this writing and which I won't go into now.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Government
A few thoughts on the government
Congress shall enact no law for the American people which doesn't affect Congress members themselves. NO MORE EXEMPTIONS! .
Congress should have no retirement or medical plan, other than Social Security and Medicare.
Congress should have a drastic pay-cut and NO living expenses! They have dormitories in place for when Congress is in session, they should use them.
Being a Congress person is ultimately a part-time job. I know that most Congressmen/women make it a full-time position nowadays and with the system in turmoil, they don't have much choice. The position was created to be part-time, however, and the People of the United States are really getting tired of paying out the nose because you somehow feel ENTITLED to more simply because we elected you.
If you want to stay in Congress and get a retirement, keep us satisfied for a minimum of 20 years, then you can get your Social Security Retirement like everyone else.
I suggest a salary cap for Congress, say $50,000 a year, plus expenses for travel and an allowance for meals while the Congressperson is on the road, say $25 a day – that should be enough for them to eat at most fast-food places. If they want better meals, they should pay out of their own pockets for them.
Travel – Congresspersons should be reimbursed the cost for a bus ride. Buses travel all over this Nation. If the Congressperson in question wants to take a plane, that is fine, they can pay the difference.
Congressional Staffing – Full-time, salaried staffers should receive a regular salary commensurate with their position and responsibilities – say 10% less than the same position would pay in the business world. Student staffers should get student wage, or minimum wage. Staffers can also retire on Social Security and get Medicare while employed by Congress.
Remember Mr or Ms Congressperson, you are NOT our leaders, you are in fact our followers. I'm sick and tired of you USURPING the Authority of the American People to further your own private agendas or the agendas of corporate sponsors or radical minorities. These are NOT the people who put you in office. We, the American People, are who put you there and we expect you to SERVE us in that capacity.
To the Radical Leftists in Congress. If you really believe in equalization as you say, why haven't you given away your own wealth? Why are you ENTITLED to force the rest of us, or rather US, to give up what we've worked for but not to have to do this yourself? The simple truth of the matter is this: You are NOT entitled to anything but the title you won in election and to fairly represent your Constituents.
I think its time for the American People to stand up for common sense and to take back our role as the true leaders and to put Congress and the President back in their true roles of servants to the will of the American People. The time for 'Special Interest,' for Corporate Congress, for High Privilege, is over. We've entered a tough time in America these days and it's time that you, our elected representatives show some resolve and common sense in your actions. Being elected to Congress is NOT a license to further the goals of some special interest group or to rape the American Public. It is a license to serve the American Public, through your Constituents.
I think that when a person is elected and swears their oath, they should leave “Party Politics” behind for the duration of their term in office. You should be a Republican or a Democrat while you are running for office, but once you get there you should be a Member of Congress and nothing else! You can go back to being a Republican or a Democrat when it's time for re-election.
“Undocumented Emigrants.” Nice phrase. They are, in fact, illegal aliens. This is the plain truth of the matter. They are not entitled to anything but a free bus ride back to the border. While I'm thinking about it, let's get them documented. Let's fingerprint and ID them so that if and when they DO come back, we'll know who they are and they won't be 'undocumented' anymore. We'll know that they are 'illegals' and can skip the formalities and ship them back forthwith.
Prisons. They're overcrowded. We know this and haven't done anything but make it worse. I won't use the actual word that I normally would in the next sentence, I'll use the word 'mess' instead. There are two kinds of people who get in trouble with the law and go to jail/prison, there are those who 'messed' up and those who are 'mess ups.' If a person messed up, then they're gonna go serve their time and we'll never see them in the system again. They learned a lesson and are going to go on to live normal, productive lives. Then there are the 'mes ups,' they think that next time, they'll get away with it. They have nothing but contempt for our Society, our Laws and the 'System.' They accept jail and prison as a part of the lifestyle they choose to lead. Now according to our current system, they get to go on probation several times, then progressively longer sentences in prison. We like to think of it as a chance at Rehabilitation. This is a nice idea and generally works for people who just 'messed up.' It is, however, a 'revolving door' for 'mess ups.' The actual word for them, by the way, is Recidivists. We should build 'prison' colonies at various locations and let them 'chain-gang' their time. They can farm public beef, chickens and food staples, work on roads with picks and shovels and reclaim previously unusable land. The food they produce can go to feed themselves, be doled out to public welfare recipients and Congress, since we won't be paying for their previously lavish lifestyle anymore.
Military. All persons in this country, at age 18 and after High School, should be subject to the draft and service for two years. Just like in the past, but with a twist. The military should have quotas and fill them from the draft pool, but the excess should go to a re-established Conservation Corp. This would give all of our youth the chance to experience discipline and teamwork, to learn cohesiveness and to give something of themselves to America. To feel that they had earned the right to be truly American Citizens. Draft-dodgers would become persons-non-grata and lose the right to vote or run for any public office. There would be no exemptions.
Our government should go back to being blind to ALL religions, rather than punishing Christianity and giving special interest to Islam and Atheism. No religious group who are also political entities should be recognized my our government. We already do this with Israel and the Jewish population and Roman Catholicism, which both have their own governments and function in the US as established religions. Islam and Atheism should be treated no differently. They have no place in the political sphere of the United States of America.
We should do everything within our power to wean ourselves from oil or fossil fuels in general. That being said, we should also develop our own resources of these for our consumption till such time as we don't need them anymore and then sell them to other nations.
We should be selling food stocks at a higher rate than OPEC sells oil. After all, people can always walk or ride animals without gas, they can't do much more than starve without food. We subsidize much of the world's food supply, virtually for free while we're going further and further in debt to the same nations we're subsidizing. This has got to stop. If a nation wants to trade in the American Market, they must meet American Standards and trade fairly with us. We don't have to trade any more fairly with them than they do with us.
Respect and partnership are earned, not inalienable rights of politicians. You, Congress, have not earned the respect of the American people and don't have our trust. You can not fairly expect to be our partners. There are individual members who have and continue to do a good if not great job of representing their constituents and have earned the respect and partnership due them. They are a very small minority in the current Congress.
Generally speaking, the people think that to be a lawyer is to say that you are well-educated and well-read, but are generally a failure. You can't make an honest living doing productive things. To take that one step further, and I'm still speaking generally, to be a politician is to accept that you've even failed as a lawyer. Of course there ARE exceptions. There are people who are great lawyers and there have been some truly great politicians. Who knows, some of you may become great, but as of this writing, I don't see any great politicians in Washington. Just a lot of self-inflated ego and self-entitlement.©texasfred
Congress should have no retirement or medical plan, other than Social Security and Medicare.
Congress should have a drastic pay-cut and NO living expenses! They have dormitories in place for when Congress is in session, they should use them.
Being a Congress person is ultimately a part-time job. I know that most Congressmen/women make it a full-time position nowadays and with the system in turmoil, they don't have much choice. The position was created to be part-time, however, and the People of the United States are really getting tired of paying out the nose because you somehow feel ENTITLED to more simply because we elected you.
If you want to stay in Congress and get a retirement, keep us satisfied for a minimum of 20 years, then you can get your Social Security Retirement like everyone else.
I suggest a salary cap for Congress, say $50,000 a year, plus expenses for travel and an allowance for meals while the Congressperson is on the road, say $25 a day – that should be enough for them to eat at most fast-food places. If they want better meals, they should pay out of their own pockets for them.
Travel – Congresspersons should be reimbursed the cost for a bus ride. Buses travel all over this Nation. If the Congressperson in question wants to take a plane, that is fine, they can pay the difference.
Congressional Staffing – Full-time, salaried staffers should receive a regular salary commensurate with their position and responsibilities – say 10% less than the same position would pay in the business world. Student staffers should get student wage, or minimum wage. Staffers can also retire on Social Security and get Medicare while employed by Congress.
Remember Mr or Ms Congressperson, you are NOT our leaders, you are in fact our followers. I'm sick and tired of you USURPING the Authority of the American People to further your own private agendas or the agendas of corporate sponsors or radical minorities. These are NOT the people who put you in office. We, the American People, are who put you there and we expect you to SERVE us in that capacity.
To the Radical Leftists in Congress. If you really believe in equalization as you say, why haven't you given away your own wealth? Why are you ENTITLED to force the rest of us, or rather US, to give up what we've worked for but not to have to do this yourself? The simple truth of the matter is this: You are NOT entitled to anything but the title you won in election and to fairly represent your Constituents.
I think its time for the American People to stand up for common sense and to take back our role as the true leaders and to put Congress and the President back in their true roles of servants to the will of the American People. The time for 'Special Interest,' for Corporate Congress, for High Privilege, is over. We've entered a tough time in America these days and it's time that you, our elected representatives show some resolve and common sense in your actions. Being elected to Congress is NOT a license to further the goals of some special interest group or to rape the American Public. It is a license to serve the American Public, through your Constituents.
I think that when a person is elected and swears their oath, they should leave “Party Politics” behind for the duration of their term in office. You should be a Republican or a Democrat while you are running for office, but once you get there you should be a Member of Congress and nothing else! You can go back to being a Republican or a Democrat when it's time for re-election.
“Undocumented Emigrants.” Nice phrase. They are, in fact, illegal aliens. This is the plain truth of the matter. They are not entitled to anything but a free bus ride back to the border. While I'm thinking about it, let's get them documented. Let's fingerprint and ID them so that if and when they DO come back, we'll know who they are and they won't be 'undocumented' anymore. We'll know that they are 'illegals' and can skip the formalities and ship them back forthwith.
Prisons. They're overcrowded. We know this and haven't done anything but make it worse. I won't use the actual word that I normally would in the next sentence, I'll use the word 'mess' instead. There are two kinds of people who get in trouble with the law and go to jail/prison, there are those who 'messed' up and those who are 'mess ups.' If a person messed up, then they're gonna go serve their time and we'll never see them in the system again. They learned a lesson and are going to go on to live normal, productive lives. Then there are the 'mes ups,' they think that next time, they'll get away with it. They have nothing but contempt for our Society, our Laws and the 'System.' They accept jail and prison as a part of the lifestyle they choose to lead. Now according to our current system, they get to go on probation several times, then progressively longer sentences in prison. We like to think of it as a chance at Rehabilitation. This is a nice idea and generally works for people who just 'messed up.' It is, however, a 'revolving door' for 'mess ups.' The actual word for them, by the way, is Recidivists. We should build 'prison' colonies at various locations and let them 'chain-gang' their time. They can farm public beef, chickens and food staples, work on roads with picks and shovels and reclaim previously unusable land. The food they produce can go to feed themselves, be doled out to public welfare recipients and Congress, since we won't be paying for their previously lavish lifestyle anymore.
Military. All persons in this country, at age 18 and after High School, should be subject to the draft and service for two years. Just like in the past, but with a twist. The military should have quotas and fill them from the draft pool, but the excess should go to a re-established Conservation Corp. This would give all of our youth the chance to experience discipline and teamwork, to learn cohesiveness and to give something of themselves to America. To feel that they had earned the right to be truly American Citizens. Draft-dodgers would become persons-non-grata and lose the right to vote or run for any public office. There would be no exemptions.
Our government should go back to being blind to ALL religions, rather than punishing Christianity and giving special interest to Islam and Atheism. No religious group who are also political entities should be recognized my our government. We already do this with Israel and the Jewish population and Roman Catholicism, which both have their own governments and function in the US as established religions. Islam and Atheism should be treated no differently. They have no place in the political sphere of the United States of America.
We should do everything within our power to wean ourselves from oil or fossil fuels in general. That being said, we should also develop our own resources of these for our consumption till such time as we don't need them anymore and then sell them to other nations.
We should be selling food stocks at a higher rate than OPEC sells oil. After all, people can always walk or ride animals without gas, they can't do much more than starve without food. We subsidize much of the world's food supply, virtually for free while we're going further and further in debt to the same nations we're subsidizing. This has got to stop. If a nation wants to trade in the American Market, they must meet American Standards and trade fairly with us. We don't have to trade any more fairly with them than they do with us.
Respect and partnership are earned, not inalienable rights of politicians. You, Congress, have not earned the respect of the American people and don't have our trust. You can not fairly expect to be our partners. There are individual members who have and continue to do a good if not great job of representing their constituents and have earned the respect and partnership due them. They are a very small minority in the current Congress.
Generally speaking, the people think that to be a lawyer is to say that you are well-educated and well-read, but are generally a failure. You can't make an honest living doing productive things. To take that one step further, and I'm still speaking generally, to be a politician is to accept that you've even failed as a lawyer. Of course there ARE exceptions. There are people who are great lawyers and there have been some truly great politicians. Who knows, some of you may become great, but as of this writing, I don't see any great politicians in Washington. Just a lot of self-inflated ego and self-entitlement.©texasfred
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