Story of a Diet

 So you've got a guy. He lives pretty well, does pretty well. And one day, someone offers him some candy.

As it happens, he hasn't had candy before. But the guy promises that it tastes great, and has very few calories, and is practically good for you, and it'll give him all these great feelings and such... and, you know what, the guy is right. He likes it. He gets some, and he starts eating it for dessert instead of pies, cakes, cookies, spiced fruit, and various other things he's used to.

His friends are a wee bit concerned, but not too much. After all, a little candy for dessert won't do any harm. But it isn't just a little after a while. He wants more, and then more, and then he starts to gain weight. His friends say, "Lay off the candy. It's just sugar." But he loves the sugar rush, and the way the artificial flavorings make his mind race for a while. So he has different ideas.

He finds some studies and warnings claiming that red meat is evil. It raises your risk of death. It has cholesterol, and that's bad. Candy doesn't have cholesterol in it. So he cuts all meat out of his diet, and in place of that meat, he eats candy.

I bet you can guess how that works - it doesn't. So, after citing similar studies about dairy, he gives that up, too, and he replaces it with candy. His friends are concerned, and they try to tell him that meat and dairy at least have vitamins and minerals in them. They tell him that a little fat and cholesterol won't hurt him, but the lack of nutrients will. But he'd rather eat candy than meat. It's quicker, easier, cheaper, more satisfying in the short-term.

Well, now he's doing even worse. His weight is still going up and he's starting to have tooth problems. But he has a new culprit - starches. Starches cause weight gain. Starches cause all these other problems, too. In vain, his friends try to explain to him that the risk of starches is that they break down into sugars, and the reason why the main problem is with refined and processed starches is that they break down more quickly into sugar. They try to explain to him that candy is already sugar, and trying to replace starches with sugar is just flooding your system more with what's wrong with starches. But guess what. By now, he loves the taste and feel of candy, and by now he's found that eating candy instead of meats and dairy means that he gets hungrier faster, and the lovely candy feeling fades faster, so he needs more candy and he needs it more often. So out the door go the starches, and it isn't long before the fruit follows, for the same reason... the sugars in it are 'bad for you'.

At this point, as anybody could guess, he starts getting more erratic. His doctor diagnoses him with Type 2 diabetes. His weight continues to grow. And he's got one final culprit left - the worst of all - and his arguments against it are even stronger than against the other foods. That culprit - vegetables.

Vegetables are what's really wrong with diet, he argues. Vegetables are worse than all else. He points to vegans and how many of them struggle to balance their diets. His friends try to explain that it's because of the lack of protein, iron, and other minerals in their diet and not because there's something wrong with vegetables, but he won't listen. He cites Eskimos and others who eat few vegetables and thrive, and they try to explain that Eskimos don't eat candy - they eat meat and fish, and the harsh environment means that their bodies make better use of such foods - but he won't hear it. They try to explain that what's wrong with his diet is the candy and the vegetables are the last thing he's got going for him, but he won't listen.

And he gets stuck on vegetables. When giving them up doesn't improve his health, he starts declaring that his problems are caused by people who eat vegetables. The only example he'll give of vegetables being problematic in a diet are vegans who don't put the effort into getting what they'd get from meat/dairy in other foods. He gets to the point where he's practically screaming it by reflex, his greatest enemy: "Vegetables! Vegetables! Vegetables!" He shuns his friends, because they eat Vegetables. He rails against society, because it allows Vegetables.

Unfortunately, this man does die young. He dies of malnutrition, while surrounded by good and healthy food. He dies obese, claiming that the only unhealthy people in the world are skinny.

First, he shunned religion and cultural tradition. in favor of socialism. Then, he abandoned principles of restrained and limited government and personal responsibility. Finally, he descended fully into communism while still believing that he was only dabbling in socialism, and his dying words were his rant against 'all that is wrong with this world'.

"Capitalism! Capitalism! Capitalism!"

Transgender Hysteria (not what the title makes it sound like!)

Ok, the whole 'transgender rights' thing has shown up in front of the Supreme Court, so I'm going to start seeing articles and discussions and accusations and justifications on the subject, left, right, and center. I've spent some time thinking about it, and would like to present an alternate view. It starts with a question that is going to seem odd, and will probably need a small history lesson and slightly larger science lesson. I'll try to avoid being pedantic about it. So strap yourselves in...

What rights should society give to hysterical women?

I don't mean women who are laughing hysterically, or acting hysterically in grief. The term "Hysteria" used to be a genuine medical term with a genuine medical definition. Technically speaking, Hysteria was a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychogenic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions. (The term 'visceral' means 'involving the inner organs'.)

In practice, this became something to diagnose women with if they seemed to show emotional 'excess' (or too much restraint), sleeplessness and irritability, 'excessive' interest in sex, or even such vague and dangerous symptoms as "arguing/causing trouble with others". In short, there was this view of what women should be within society and, if they didn't meet the expectations, they had Hysteria.

So what rights should we give women who have been diagnosed with this condition? I am sure that the early Women's Rights groups would have had several ideas to offer. How about the right to not be involuntarily committed to a mental institution for the diagnosis? How about retaining the right of ownership to your own property, whether that be a house or simply a bag of trinkets? How about the right to talk about politics, read about religion, and other such activities that suggested, in that time period, a disturbance in a woman's brain?

Well, actually, Hysteria was often treated by masturbation, or by high-pressure cold water showers. So should they be asking for the right to masturbate in public?

Imagine that. Imagine a group of women before the Supreme Court, demanding the right to masturbate in public, as a necessary accommodation to their medical condition of Hysteria. Since they're actually arguing for their rights in front of a court, you know they all have to have it by the old historic definition. Ridiculous, right? Well, let's take a moment and divert from history into science.

What is the difference between a man and a woman. The transgender argument must start here. If we can't define the boundaries they want to cross, how can we discuss their efforts to cross them and society's proper reaction? So let's talk biology. I suspect that many people these days believe that the only difference between the male body and the female body is the reproductive system. Let's dispel that myth. Did you know that archaeologists can unearth a single part of the skeleton and know whether it belonged to a man or a woman? The pelvic bones are noticeably different, but there are other differences throughout the entire skeleton. The male skull has a taller and narrower brow and a more pronounced jawbone; the man's arms and legs are longer, and the bones tend to have more pronounced corners.

So let's put the skeleton aside for a moment. Did you know that every single internal organ has a different size and efficiency in a man than in a woman? Some are larger, and some are smaller. One of the complaints of feminists is that most medication dosage and effectiveness has been derived from studies on males. The female, in the pharmaceutical world, is often treated like a smaller man. I have sat in on several discussions among women with ADHD, for instance, and they all agree that all ADHD medication becomes ineffective during the few days before the onset of menstruation.

That doesn't mean that the reproductive system isn't part of the picture, of course. The body is fully interconnected, with each system supporting and affecting the others, and that's the point. A woman's heart beats at a faster resting rate on average than a man's. Her heart is smaller. That's okay, though, because her blood has less hemoglobin and more water in it by volume. It moves more easily through her circulatory system. Now here's where it gets interesting: a sex hormone is responsible for this difference. Testosterone prompts higher production of hemoglobin, making the blood thicker. In a woman, higher testosterone makes the blood more like a man's.

See, the entire body is affected by the sex hormones in various ways, and the entire body is optimized for the changes made to the body by the sex hormones. The heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, stomach and intestines - all of these changes by gender, larger or smaller, more slow-twitch or fast-twitch muscles, blood volume and ideal heart rate/blood pressure - it's all geared towards the health of the male body or the female body as a whole. Once you change part of it, like the sex hormones, you are giving your body all sorts of conflicting instructions to produce certain muscles, deposit fat in certain areas, change your blood composition, change the chemical content being processed by your liver etc. in a way that puts a great deal more wear and tear on your body. Transgender/transsexual transition surgery is done only on the reproductive organs; the transgender person is not given the heart, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, or skeletal structure of the other sex.

Back to Hysteria, just for a second.

We now know that Hysteria isn't a thing, not really. It's a catch-all for a variety of medical conditions, many of which actually do affect the female reproductive system (such as endometriosis or fibroids) or brain differences (such as ADHD or autism, both of which present differently in women than in men). It would seem bizarre to us to diagnose a woman with autism and then explain that this meant she had to try to masturbate regularly and thus seek accommodations through the Supreme Court to pleasure herself in the workplace. In fact, to divert from that a little, autistic people are now speaking strongly against the application of ABA therapy in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, causing trauma and, sometimes, lasting physical damage, in order to force autistic people to mimic 'normal people' instead of the newer, gentler, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focuses more on coping techniques and self-advocacy.

But instead of asking ourselves if there is treatment for the differences in the brain that seem to set apart many transgender people, whether it be chemical or cognitive behavioral therapy, we seem caught in the Dark Ages of trying to treat thoughts in the mind by throwing every single other system in the body out of whack. The activists and their insistence on 'transgender rights' are advocating a type of ABA for these people, with the only 'natural' endgame being a chemical and surgical process that belongs back in the annals of Medieval and Victorian medicine along with Hysteria.

Transgenderism starts with the belief that your thoughts and emotions and patterns of behavior do not fit into that of your birth sex. Hysteria starts with the belief that your thoughts and emotions and patterns of behavior do not fit into that of your birth sex. Can't we do better than fighting over whether the government should be able to order a business to allow a 'transitioning male-to-female' person to wear dresses to work in a formal-attire environment?

Republican Wolves

Election Season is upon us, and everywhere are the markers of the two major political parties in the U.S. Everywhere, you will see the blue and the red. Everywhere, you will see the donkey and the elephant.

The elephant.

I would like to propose a change to the Republican Party visuals. I would like to replace the elephant with the wolf.

Now that sounds like a strange decision and not one that would immediately play well. After all, aren't wolves evil creatures who prey on the sick and weak? Well... that's the view of them from a herd mentality, and that's what I want to talk about today - herds and packs.

This morning, I mentioned something about a political group with a Cause and various Arguments, and my husband said, "Yeah, this reminds me of my Social Problems class in college. The professor kept saying that a Social Problem arises because the society as a whole comes to the conclusion that there is a problem. I kept saying that a Social Problem arises because a few leaders decide that it is a problem and go about convincing enough of the other people that it is a problem, whether it is or not."

I came fully awake. "You're right and your teacher was wrong, and I know why," I said.

A while ago, I came to the startling realization that human beings are pack animals by nature. I'd been following the research of one of my friends into wolves and wolf behavior, and doing some of my own research into the similarity of genetics in social behavior between humans and prairie voles. Our interests intersected, and I found a whole world of fascinating information. Humans and wolves have very similar social-behavior genetics, and naturally tend to form very similar social structures. After a while of saturating my brain with information about alphas, family packs (the naturally-formed wolf pack resembles a family tribe of an alpha, his daughters, and his daughters' mates, who include formerly-lone wolves from other packs), roles, and tactics, I made the inescapable conclusion: Humans are also pack animals, endurance hunters, and family units, just like wolves.

(And, as the part of the research that led me in this direction, humans are by nature sexually monogamous in bonded pairs. But that, and the liberal Democrat view on it, is another discussion entirely!)

Why was this such a startling conclusion? Just like my husband's Social Problems teacher, the education system is saturated with teachers and administrators teaching and reinforcing the idea that humans are herd animals. Children in school are treated like herd animals, and expected to act like herd animals. Examples of human behavior are often likened to herd behavior, even when the full story of any given incident indicates differently. We even use terms like "sheeple" to refer to "The Masses"... Wait, I've heard that term before. Yes, I have, and so have you. It came out of early socialist philosophy. The very idea of a Communist Paradise requires a type of herd mentality and, since humans do not naturally work together in herds the way that herd animals do, all actual implementations of Communism have required a "shepherd", a member treated as if he is of a different species (some animals are more equal than others), who is determined to be qualified to shove the herd when it isn't 'naturally congregating' in the right direction.

This goes all the way down to government-run healthcare, in which Former President Obama's famous line to Jane Strum about her elderly mother, vital and strong-hearted, would be better off with the pill than the pacemaker. "Devil take the hindmost". Well, to be more accurate, in my part of the country, the hindmost is generally taken by the wolves. The exception is The Children, who are protected not because they are weak, but because they are the future of the herd.

Now herd mentality actually works for herd animals. They will stampede together when the decision is made. They will line up together to protect the young when that decision is made. If a herd did not actually come to a herd decision through their herd behavior, they would flee wildly in all directions, trampling even their young, or refuse to stand up against an enemy that the entire herd can drive off together... kind of like humans in cities, being pushed into herd behavior and not being able to synthesize it. For this reason people are trained, in an emergency, to point at someone and say, "You call 911" instead of hollering, "Someone call 911!" which, in a herd, may result in many people calling, but, in a group of bystanders, all too often leads to everyone leaving the job to someone else. When you tell a specific person to call 911, a specific other person to direct traffic, etc., you may not wind up with a fully elegant solution, as you don't know which of the strangers are better or worse at the roles you are giving them. You will, however, always wind up with a better situation by organizing them into an impromptu pack (that is what you are doing) than leaving them as a disorganized non-herd.

Pack mentality among wolves incorporates a sense of what we would call 'natural rights', in which each member of the pack has a certain level of autonomy and a structure of authority to handle matters that cannot be handled individually. They put up with this because they can get more, more meat, better homes, more security than they can alone.

Now unlike Democrats, Republicans favor a governmental structure in which the top parts of the government are limited in power, because human beings work better in a series of packs, the leaders of those packs coming together to form structures that only handle what can't be done within the packs themselves, just as the individual only yields what authority he must to do in within the pack what he cannot do as a lone wolf. They tend to be willing to put up with a little more structure and authority than the Libertarians do. But they do not have the mentality that human beings are a very large herd which must be pushed about by a shepherd, as the Democrats do.

So when the Democrats like to say, "Wolves, eh? Wolves take the hindmost," what can we point out? In a wolf pack, the 'hindmost' is still a subordinate in the pack. Have you ever seen overindulgent people with their (often small-breed) dogs? The dogs are a holy terror and they give in to every little doggy whim, because they 'just want their darlings to be happy'. I am reminded of Democrats promising their "masses" every little bit of food, shelter, healthcare, bread, and circuses, delivered to them for free and to make them happy. A dog (by taxonomy merely a subordinate wolf in a human pack) who is treated this way will become fearful and aggressive. He develops anxiety issues and winds up a very unhappy, unhealthy pup. What a subordinate wolf needs desperately is to know that he has a place in the pack, to be given a role, a job, and to know that he has received a portion as large as it is because of the health of the pack. The "hindmost" in the pack needs what Republicans promise - workfare and an improved economy in which he can take up his place and feel secure in his pack.

Consider this in your own lives, taking it out of politics for a moment. Consider your place of employment, your gatherings for hobbies, your weekend activity groups, even your momentary inadvertent social structures, like the passengers of an airplane, the other people in a movie theater, the crowd at the scene of an accident. Are they acting as a pack or a herd? If they can be chivvied into an impromptu pack, will the experience be better for everyone?

And when you hear the grand speeches of the politicians, ask yourself: Are they treating us like herd animals or pack animals? What do their wordings and their programs imply?

Conservatism and Slippery Slopes

It took some doing to figure out what to title this thought. After a while of thinking it through, though, I realized that a repeating theme through this post is going to be the "slippery slope". I am going to say some things, and people are probably going to initially react in horror. That's because of "slippery slopes" that are etched in our own brain. You use certain words - liberals like to call them 'code words' - and people who don't understand you are going to slide right into a set of well-worn tracks and assume your meaning based on the continued motion of well-trodden path. I'd like my readers to take a moment to shake themselves loose of the well-trodden paths, and not assume the meaning of my statements until I explain them.

First statement: The more I deal with liberals and children, the more I understand why not everybody is going to Heaven.

Yeah, I started out with the inflammatory-looking one on purpose, just to wake everybody up. I want to make it excruciatingly clear that I am not talking about sin. I am not making any particular person out to be evil. I could already hear the cries of "I work a job and I am nice to people and how dare you say I don't deserve" or whatnot. Yeah, cut that out, ok? I don't deserve Heaven. It isn't because I'm some sort of rotten and mean person who is worse than you. It's because I could be better than you and still not deserve it. This has nothing to do with whether you are a nice person, or even a good person. It has to do with heart and will.

Here's a second statement to add to the first one. Both Christianity and American Conservatism require by their very nature enough hearts and minds willing to follow it from their own free will.

The reason for this is that you can't force someone to follow a philosophy except by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. This is something liberals do understand all too well; it is why virtually every implementation of socialism thus far has been authoritarian. I'm about to hear the "Social Democrats" fuss at me over certain European countries that do not meet some sort of mystical requirement for being full-out Communist. Knock it off. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must know that "Social Democrat" is a form of socialism that is only halfway implemented, and that the areas in which it is implemented do indeed easily meet the definition of "Communist". I'm going to get back to that thought in a moment.

Now I mentioned Christianity and American Conservatism for a reason. Both of them spring from the same root. To be more clear, Conservatism sprang from a period of reformation of Christianity, and Christianity sprang from the root of the One God, previously known by the world as the Hebrew God, and now known to be open to all takers. This is important, because this is the source of my point: To truly grasp and follow either, you have to be willing to do so.

You may have noticed - I certainly have - that a great many political topics have seemed to become needlessly complicated. So many of the minutiae being argued about nowadays seems blindly simple to the uninvolved. So many easy solutions lie by the wayside. This is because liberals are trying to rules-lawyer their way to forcing us to acknowledge that they have some sort of right to what they want. This in turn forces people to go on the defensive and enact laws meant to prevent authoritarianism, but ironically increase it themselves, pushing the government into places where it shouldn't have had to go. The only way you can force someone to follow a philosophy is by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship.

I've mentioned in a previous post that I believe there to have been two Civil Rights movements. In the first, Democrat governments tried to get the government involved in "race" by Jim Crow laws in the South. In the second, Democrat politicians tried to gain power and get the government involved in "race" by Reverse Discrimination laws on the Federal level. Though you will never hear me disparage the overthrow of a single Jim Crow law, I must say that the true winners of the entire era were the Democrats. Considering disparate levels of fatherlessness, joblessness, jail population, poverty etc. we can hardly say that the true winners were actually the blacks. Like I said, liberals understand that the only way to force a philosophy on someone is by authoritarian dictatorship; their goal was to get the government involved in race, which is why the leadership was able to so quickly switch their allegiances from one race to another.

I believe that this is a very important point to make because there are elements in the Republican Party who have taken on that liberal point, muddying the actual definition of Conservatism. Their ardent support of President Trump, whom I do not oppose - this is not anti-Trump sentiment being expressed here - has confused people, especially since he ran as a Conservative. That is at the heart of why I, in a "safely" blue state, voted Johnson. (Before anybody jumps on me for this, the election results bore out what I had suspected; all of Johnson's votes in my state would not have defeated Hillary had they been Trump's votes instead. Sad to say, that's the way it was.) I'd also like to specifically call out Dominionism, which is at times conflated with Conservatism. Dominionism - trust me, I know what I am talking about here - is not a Conservative philosophy. It harkens back to pre-Reformation Christianity, in which unwise people violated the spirit of God's Laws and the message of Salvation by falling back upon that bastion of liberalism: oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. (Granted, even so, they were gentler than most... the more Biblical you get, the more you are protected against it, hence the rise of the Reformation in the first place.)

Back to my core point, to make sure it is understood. At the core of Conservatism is an understanding that we should hold to principles of guarded liberty, personal responsibility, and a very real sense of our government as something that must be under our control: not only for the people, but also of the people and by the people in a very real sense. We must be active individuals in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities as well as in our government (as voters, for most of us), careful, and self-disciplined, because a government of an undisciplined people will never fail to establish its own discipline over them, and that is how the authoritarian dictatorship starts.

I do believe that the "silent majority", found in every corner of the country from the much-discussed 'heartland' to the simple New England farmer types from which I partly descended to the grateful Cuban refugees to the black families who still remember the pre-Reverse Discrimination mandate to be articulate, clean, and responsible, are willing and able to return to a time when our salvation depended more on our personal lives than our Federal laws.

Now I said I was going to get back to a point about the Social Democrats, and I'd like to close with it. I've been linking Conservatism and Christianity throughout this post. I do not want to make the same mistake as the Dominionists. I do not believe Conservatism to be especially blessed by God in the same way as God blessed the Nation of Israel or anointed King Saul, whom later-King David refused to cut down even when Saul was corrupt and oppressive in his later years. I do not believe Conservatism to be the only Christian-derived form of government, nor do I believe it to be necessary in any way to be a Christian, though I confess I suspect that Christians will find themselves living it in their personal lives no matter what their political affiliations. Conservatism is a derivation, a lesser production, a philosophy meant to address the here-and-now, and it is not especially favored by God aside from the natural benefits of working alongside the laws of nature rather than against.

I could picture some sort of unusually eloquent and gentle-thinking Social Democrat asking me, "Perhaps you might think the same thing of this philosophy as well? You do want to make it clear that Conservatism can be derived from Christianity without leading to an oppressive authoritarian theocracy. Think of Social Democracy in the same way; it is derived from socialism, but it is not going to lead to full-on Communism." To that, I would like to return to the concept of the slippery slope. You start at a point and fall into well-worn tracks that take you off the very edge of the precipice. In Conservatism, particularly American Constitutional Conservatism, there are a set of Human Rights very clearly enumerated. These are stops, barriers between us and an authoritarian theocracy. How firm are they? Whether any given Conservative personally believes in God or not, those who set up the barriers understood them to have been fixed by a Supreme Authority, quite out of their hands and well beyond their 'pay grade', and so the philosophy demands that they be treated that way whether you are a Christian or not. This, then, is the question to ask the Social Democrats: Where are your stops? What are your stops? Who laid them down, who keeps them steady, and under what circumstances could you violate them? In the area of health care, as we have seen with cases like Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, the part of the country that follows Communism does so to the point where that particular country's government has the power of life and death over innocent citizens. So what *can't* Social Democrats allow the government to do, and why?

Or are the stops nothing more and nothing less than the current will of the people in charge, to be kept, discarded, violated, or worshiped at their desire?

What I am not

Back in the 1950's and 1960's, there were two Civil Rights eras.

There are many different epoch's along the path that brought us here. Different people argue about which ones were most important, about which ones "started it", about which moments of history should be focused upon. I am choosing to focus here for several reasons, many of which should become apparent by the end of this post if they were not already.

In the 1950's, Republicans tore down "Jim Crow", series of laws that Democrats had enacted in local areas with the purpose of using the government to keep blacks down. In the 1960's, the Democrats succeeded in beating the Republicans with promises (which were fulfilled) of using the government to advance blacks over whites. At that time, a group of angry Democrats who had thought that the 1950's was about racism joined the Republicans, and they and their descendants are there to this day.

There are a couple of takeaways here. One is that when the Republicans retort that racism against blacks was a Democrat behavior, they are correct; when the Democrats retort that a bunch of those old racists are Republicans, they are also correct.

The big takeaway is that Civil Rights, for the Democrat Party, was never actually about racism. They didn't care if they were elevating or trampling blacks. What mattered was a particular core strategy: Get the populace to accept big government by making them enemies of each other and promising each group that you will use the government to trample their enemies.

Fast-forward to 2008 and Obama's election. He basically campaigned, more or less openly, on this strategy. He was elected by people who believed that he would use the power of the government, all the power they could give him, in order to bludgeon their enemies. They did not, as our founders did, fear the government more than they feared the people with whom they merely disagreed. Under the Obama Administration, we saw the IRS scandal among other incidents. I think the IRS scandal struck the hardest impact, because it showed us that Obama's government was willing to go after ordinary folk for disagreeing with him. Many praised his election as an achievement of the Civil Rights movement in that "people were willing to elect a black man as our President". It was an achievement of the Civil Rights movement in that people were willing to elect a man on promises that he would use government power against their 'enemies'; their fellow citizens.

I did not cast my vote for Trump and did not speak in support of him during the election period. Too many people believe that I agreed with them that he is misogynist, or stupid, or somehow unqualified to be President. Too many other people believed that I was against him because I preferred "the status quo in Washington", because I hated whites, because I wanted to be marginalized as Obama had marginalized me. When he made his "bitter clingers" quote, after all, he was talking about me. When Hillary made her "deplorables" quote, she was talking about me.

This is the real reason I did not cast my vote for Trump.

I saw among his followers too many people who were looking to him to use the government as a bludgeon against the people who had declared this 'war'.

Angry people on one side elected Obama in hopes that he would use the government as a bludgeon against their enemies. Angry people on the other side elected Trump in hopes that he would use the government as a bludgeon against the people who had declared them to be enemies. (Let me offer credit where credit is due. At least to this point, from what I have seen, President Trump has not in fact used his office, as many followers had hoped, to bludgeon the other side, but has contented himself with tearing down regulations and releasing trapped power back into the wild.)

Now I want to go back to the first takeaway that I referenced about the Civil Rights movements. I have come to believe that the people on Trump's side against whom I have set myself are actually the people and their descendants who left the Democrat Party, not because the Democrats were using the government as a bludgeon, but because they were bludgeoning the "wrong" people.

So in this Charlottesville matter, I find myself set against the white supremacists who are anti-Constitution, who march because they want Trump to use the government as a bludgeon against their enemies. I find myself also set against the "antifa" groups who are anti-Constitution, who counter-march because they want the government to be used as a bludgeon against their enemies. Both sides engaged in violence. Both sides insist that we consider their side blameless. Both sides are very eager to assume that I am on the other side if I refuse.

I don't want either of them.

Am I a Conservative Republican? Am I a Conservative Christian? Am I a Christian Libertarian? Am I a Conservative Libertarian? Am I a Conservative Christian Libertarian Republican? I haven't figured that part out yet.

I'm the one who joins with those who don't hate "the other side" more than we fear government control over us.

I'm the one who doesn't want anybody, even myself, to have the power to use the government to bludgeon another group of fellow citizens.

No matter how much I don't like what they have to say.

Corporatism, Communism, and Christianity

I have to say it - we're in a bad place right now, as a country.

With a stagnant economy and hurting families on every side, the Democrats are heading towards nominating a socialist/fascist for the Presidency, and the Republicans have nominated a corporatist. With the Libertarians nominating a classless fellow, basically a liberal who wants to legalize pot, we haven't got a conservative running in the race.

So I think it's time to take a look and ask ourselves how this race and its result might impact those of us who are Christians.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that socialists are unhappy with Christianity. A socialist, at his or her root, believes that we can replace God with Government and do a much better job of taking care of everybody 'equally well'. Of course, we all know that it will fail, and we know why. A socialist government can't do God's job because they lack intricate knowledge of each and every person and the ability to tailor each person's life experience to his or her personality, ability, and greater benefit. A socialist government can't do God's job because they are as sin-stained as the rest of us... they have a sin-flawed notion of what is good, what is healthy, what is pure, and what is beneficial for us. Of course, in every socialist country, the government has been openly hostile towards Christians. This is true even in the "softer" countries dealing in "democratic socialism", in which Christians may be permitted to live in peace as long as they don't make any sort of decisions outside of their own homes regarding their faith when such a decision would conflict with the Absolute Power of the government. To a socialist, God is a competitor, and one that must be squashed (or, at least, the attempt made) by any means necessary.

In the history of corporatism, however, Christianity is tortured into a different role. Historically speaking, the greatest Christian-committed atrocities have occurred when a corporatist government cherry-picks and uses Christian principles in order to serve the government first, rather than the corporation. While the socialist tries to kill God, the corporatist merely tries to enslave Him and make Him do the government's bidding. The socialist insists that Christians abandon their religion, while the corporatist goes back to the age-old tribal method of trying to convince us that he bears the will of the gods (or, in this case, God) and we must obey him as we obey our Lord. The corporatist will pretend to be doing the will of God, usually by cherry-picking the parts of God's laws that he thinks will give him greater control over the people, and forcing them upon everybody by law.

Which is a greater threat to us? Robber barons are generally safer than moral busybodies, as C.S. Lewis pointed out in one of his most famous quotes. A robber baron (the corporatist) merely wants your wealth, while the moral busybody (the socialist) wants your heart, mind, and soul. We would think that it is better for us, certainly safer for us, to have someone who might use the government to persecute our enemies rather than a government keen on persecuting us. And yet... one of the strongest complaints that atheists have against us is derived from every instance in which a government tried to use the surface appearance of Christianity in order to implement its own goals, especially goals which are actually counter to the actual teachings of Christ. Caught in the quandary of socialism vs. corporatism, I have to ask... is it actually better for us to face open persecution, under which Christians have often been purified and Christianity has spread strongly (nothing exposes fakery and uncovers reality like difficulty), than a twisted form of 'Christianity', which might lead millions of people to Hell even as they are sure that they are headed for eternal paradise?

I do not have a good answer to this question at this time.

The real civil war in America

Democrats like to taunt Republicans by claiming that there are all these "racist old white men" in the party. Their claim is based in part in truth, in that there was an influx of old Southerners back in the 1960's who fled the Democrat Party over the civil rights movement. However, this is only the very surface of the story, and held at an angle that gives people a very misleading impression of what actually happened.

This is what actually happened.

McCarthy, previously vilified by history as having started the "Red Scare" and "being wrong", is increasingly being justified in retrospect. Though many of the people he targeted in his investigations were not specifically planning open treason against the government, they were card-carrying Communists who were bent on a much longer game plan. Communism did spread from its birthplace into America and lay dormant through the World Wars. In the 1960's, it finally did make itself visible.

History books talk about the "Civil Rights Era" and the "Civil Rights Laws". There were actually two Civil Rights Eras, each pushed by radically different people, for radically different purposes, with radically different results.

The first was the work of the Republicans. Old South Democrat racists, seeing their power slipping further and further as businesses saw no reason to refuse blacks (their money was as green as everyone else's, after all) and blacks themselves were rising quickly through the economic ranks, set out to make state laws prohibiting the free market from treating people of all races equally. This, like the American Civil War itself, was a desperate holding action against the natural, corrective power of our country the way it was created by our Founders. Blacks were on their way up. Within another generation, they would be indistinguishable from the rest of the country, from the Germans and Irish and all those other cultures which had started out on the bottom of the heap. The Republicans in the Federal Government correctly sought to strike down the artificial barriers being placed against blacks by the state governments.

The second was the work of the newly-infiltrated Democrat Party, and it was not actually about race at all. Like Modern Feminism, which came out of the same era and the same birthplace as Socialism (which is meant to be the transitional stage to Communism), this new Democrat Party was merely seizing upon the grievances of a minority in hopes of imposing government control on the majority. Their goal was not to remove artificial barriers that were oppressing a people, but to change the function of the government from one that keeps the playing field level to one that rewards 'winners' and 'losers' according to government policy. (If you want to know who sets the policy and how, I strongly recommend the entire Francis Schaeffer "How Should We Then Live?" series, made up of ten half-hour episodes.)

They sought, not to remove government barriers to one race, but to impose government barriers upon another race. The Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action (once more correctly called Reverse Discrimination) came from two different sources; from two different sides of this new civil war.

What is this new civil war about? It isn't about gay wedding cakes and transgender bathrooms. It isn't about birth control and 'Equal Pay'. It's about what President Obama so neatly explained as "negative rights" versus "positive rights". Is it more important that the government be allowed to pick winners and losers according to government judgment? Or is it more important that the government be restrained by the people? Some mistakenly believe (I have addressed this before and may do so again) that the fight is Corporatism vs. Fascism. It doesn't have to be. A government focused on "negative rights" does not have the power to support either path. As I've said before:

Capitalism - the system in which the government is empowered to prevent companies from using lawlessness to stifle competition, and the government is constitutionally fettered to prevent companies from using laws to stifle competition.

The Republican Civil Rights provided a shining example of "negative rights": the government shall not be permitted to force one race below another. The Democrat Civil Rights provided a shining example of "positive rights": the government shall have the power to elevate one race above the other.

What prompted all of this? The North Carolina Bathroom Bill, actually. Talk about going far afield, right? The Charlotte ordinance that the bill is meant to strike down is an artificial barrier set up by the government in order to have the government choose 'winners' and 'losers'. It embodies the "positive rights" that Obama loves: the government has the right to tell you what it can/must do for/to you. What it states, in short, is that no private business or organization has the right to bar anybody of either gender from a gender-separated space. In short, by the law, a battered woman's shelter must permit a man to enter the ladies' shower room, sit down, and watch them shower naked, if that's what he wants to do. He cannot be told to leave just because he is fully and unapologetically male.

The much-derided "bathroom bill", on the other hand, embodies "negative rights". It says that the government does not have the right to force a private business to let somebody into a gender-separated changing/showering/bathroom/etc. space, unless said person can show, if challenged, documentation that he or she is of the declared gender. (Your gender is on your driver's license and your birth certificate, and post-op transgender/transsexual people can have it officially changed.) Now this is not a requirement upon the business; nobody has to ask, nobody has to check, and nobody has to try to bar anybody from entering a bathroom. The choice is theirs. If they choose to tell a given person, "You look like a man, so you can't go in there," the person who is challenged can display that document and must be permitted to enter.

Under the "bathroom bill", the battered woman's shelter can bar anyone with  functional male genitalia from entering the shower. However, the Walmart can set up a DADT policy in which people who are obviously transgender and "passing" are allowed in, and any liberal fruitcake hippie shop can choose to let men and women freely intermix in one big, 'happy' locker room. And people can choose to frequent the places of which they approve and avoid the places which make them uncomfortable.

Along with the freedom to choose comes the ability to react quickly and fluidly to unexpected situations. The most religiously gender-separated facility can choose to let a desperate pregnant woman into the men's room, or to let an elderly man assisting his disabled wife into the ladies' room. When the government makes the decision, however, the leering middle-aged man cannot be removed even if a sexual abuse survivor needs to use the facility... because such reasonable decisions made by private people in the course of day-to-day business are now against the law.

The real two sides of this civil war are no longer to be found between the Democrats and the Republicans, because there are people who are only Republican because they disagree with the decisions coming from up high, not with the notion of centralized power. If the Democrats decided to set government policy throwing homosexuals in jail for engaging privately in government-forbidden sex acts, or to mandate that all public meetings must start with a prayer led by a confirmed member of their favorite Christian sub-denomination, there are "Republicans" who would quite happily jump ship again. The real civil war is between them and those who say, simply, "The government cannot have this power," and hold to it even when people are not forbidden from doing things that they personally find abhorrent.

God as an Economic Ruler

On Easter Sunday, I was reminded of the Jewish holiday which was fully fulfilled by Jesus's death on the cross. On Passover, the people spread the blood of a lamb on the lintel and posts of their door, to show that they were set apart by blood sacrifice, and the angel of death passed over them. That got me thinking, of all things, about economics and the upcoming election.

See, it's an oft-mentioned Christian (and Old Testament Jewish) notion that we are to give God everything we own and everything we are. We're afraid to do that, usually because we get this image of God acting as an earthly king, using up what He feels like having, and returning little or nothing to us. When a king demands your gold, he wants it so that he can decorate his throne. When he demands your daughter, he is looking for a maid and a concubine. When he demands your son, he is looking for a guard or a soldier, someone to die for his safety or even his comfort or convenience.

When people give things to God, though, God has a long-standing habit of giving the things back, as a sacred duty and stewardship rather than simple, selfish ownership. You offer your computer to God, and you find yourself typing out resumes and formatting flyers, or maintaining websites, for churches and other ministries while still being quite able to entertain yourself with a video game in the evening. You offer your house to God, and it becomes a quiet, refreshing place that offers shelter periodically to people in need. Instead of you keeping a house of your own, you are now steward of a shelter of God, and you are, of course, expected to enjoy it while you are keeping it.

We see this in the Passover story with Moses, who was born during a time when the Egyptian Pharaoh's men were killing baby boys, but letting the baby girls live. Moses' mother hid him for as long as she could, keeping him by her own power, but then she knew that all she could do was to give him to God. Of course, we know the end of the story. The Pharaoh's daughter found his basket in the water and decided to keep him. The detail we often miss is that the baby still needed to be fed, and his 'new mother' needed to find a wet-nurse for him. His sister, who had been watching the basket, stepped forward and bravely told the Pharaoh's daughter that she knew a woman who could do the job. And so Moses' mother, who had given her baby away to God, had her baby back in her arms by evening, with orders from royalty preventing him from death!

Where does this become political? Right here.

I see this election season as being a choice in direction, in which economic system we will take one more step towards in the coming years. Our choices are capitalism, corporatism, fascism, and communism.

Bernie Sanders embodies communism - the system in which the government collects and redistributes goods and services directly. Though the stated purpose is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," in practice this becomes "from each according to the government's need, to each according to the government's preference."

The economy in this system is controlled directly by the government as an oligarchy (rule of the few).

Hillary Clinton embodies fascism - the system in which the government controls the private companies, deciding what they are permitted to produce and fixing their wages/prices, but allowing them to act otherwise as 'private' organizations. People make the mistake sometimes of thinking that fascism is 'capitalist' because it involves 'nationalism'. The nationalism of fascism is not flag-waving and setting off illicit fireworks in vacant lots, but the action of permitting the government to take away rights, responsibilities, and freedoms for the (perceived) good of the nation. What decides what is good for the nation? The government, of course.

The economy in this system is controlled indirectly by the government as an oligarchy. There can be some crossover with corporatism, as members of government-favored companies may have a hand in setting policy.

Donald Trump embodies corporatism, previously called mercantilism - the system by which the corporations have the power to influence (or downright set) government policy. Through government taxation and regulation applied unevenly throughout the private world, the larger companies raise artificial barriers against their competition. With lack of competition, the pressure to provide a high-quality product at a lower price and the pressure to raise wages while improving working conditions are both greatly reduced.

The economy in this system is controlled (usually) indirectly by a few corporations as an oligarchy. There can be some crossover with fascism, as members of the government garner corporate support by promising increased corporate power in return.

Ted Cruz embodies capitalism - the system in which the government is empowered to prevent companies from using lawlessness to stifle competition, and the government is constitutionally fettered to prevent companies from using laws to stifle competition. In this system, neither the government nor the corporations are allowed to enact a "command economy".

The economy in this system is not controlled by any centralized authority.

The economist Adam Smith described a capitalist economy as being controlled by an "invisible hand". In short, he argued, even though you don't have an authority in charge of ensuring that prices are low, wages are high, and the poor are fed, it happens naturally through the process of capitalism. Though secular capitalists may have any of a number of explanations for this, including 'game theory' and belief in the power of 'nature', Christian capitalists (including those who first set up the system in this country) view that "invisible hand" as being God.

In this way, capitalism is a rather scary system. We basically give the economy to God, and trust Him to give it back to us as stewards. Just as Moses' mother only gave him up when she saw no other way for his survival, people who are otherwise comfortable may be afraid to give up their economy to this "invisible Hand", unless they believe that they will lose too much otherwise. In this day and age, capitalism means reducing some government social programs and ending others. Cruz has said that he will end the Department of Education. That means that the Federal Government will no longer have ultimate control over what public schools teach children. For someone who sees no authority above that of an authoritarian oligarchy, this is a frightening thought. They don't want to trust God with these things. Those who don't believe in God, of course, don't want to trust "chance", "fate", "luck", or whatever they call it, even though capitalist systems tend to work very well as long as the people aren't panicking and giving their freedoms away in hopes of being able to point to specific people and claim that they, at least, are in 'control'.

The National Enquirer and Ted Cruz

Now, here are my thoughts on the National Enquirer story.

My greatest concern is that people are taking it as being automatically true. They justify this by pointing out a few times when the Enquirer broke a story about someone having an affair and, though the details were more or less wrong, the basic idea (a particular person having had an affair) turned out to be true.

(The National Enquirer also says that Michelle Obama is a lesbian, that Barack Obama has had multiple secret affairs because of this (redux: they used to say that the reason why Bill Clinton had all those affairs was because Hillary Clinton is also a lesbian), that Hillary Clinton has brain cancer, and, back in 2009, they claimed that Oprah had three years left to live.)

C'mon, guys, be smarter than that.

It's like fortune-telling.

Do you know how fortune-telling works? The fortune teller concentrates on you, but not on some spiritual aspect of your presence. She looks at your expression and your body language. Then she starts throwing out a few things that are extremely common among human beings. "You want to find someone to love." Or perhaps, "You feel the need to be acknowledged for the work you do." In the body language of your response and the words you say, you give her some extra information. "Yeah, my boss never appreciates me!" Now she knows that you work outside the home for a boss whom you believe does not appreciate you. People in that situation are often hoping for a promotion. So she says, "That promotion you are hoping for is not long off." Now, if you get a promotion any time in the next five years, you will think it is an answer to the prediction.

(Newspaper horoscopes work the same way. When my eldest asked about horoscopes, I mentioned his birthdate, found his astrological sign, and read a prediction out from a random site. When he said that it fit, I read another one. Then another. Then another. Each one, he said, fit his situation. Then I revealed to him that I had read to him every astrological sign prediction except for his own.)

Multiple studies and surveys claim that the adultery rate among men is roughly around 20% That means that, statistically speaking, if you accuse five men of adultery, you'll probably be right once. If you have six headlines on your page and three of them accuse someone new of adultery, you're probably going to get a hit about once every two or three months, unless you're really unlucky. If you're concentrating on politicians and Hollywood, your rate is going to go up.

Does that mean that you actually know what's going on? Does that mean that everyone you accuse should be automatically considered guilty?

No. It just means that you know how to guess well enough to make money off the fools who want to believe what you have to say.

Just like fortune tellers.

Does this mean that I absolutely do not believe that Cruz has ever had an affair? No. As noted, at least 20% of the male population has. This percentage climbs when you hit Hollywood and the political scene. Maybe he has. Maybe he hasn't. He says he hasn't. At least two of the women contacted so far have also said that they did not have an affair with him. From what I hear through the grapevine (about as useful a source as the National Enquirer itself), the high-price prostitute is suggesting that she might have a story and dickering for a price. I'll take that with about as much seriousness as it is worth.

But for all I know, maybe it is true.

All I'm saying is this: If you believe it because the National Enquirer says so, you're a fool. And if you believe it because the National Enquirer says so and you want to believe them because you hope it's true, you are worse than a fool.

Liberal cage match: Trump vs. Cruz

So what exactly happened over the past couple of weeks?

In summary, this is exactly what happened.

Anti-Trump liberals sent violent protesters to attack Trump's followers at a couple of events, one of which Trump canceled for the safety of the attendees. They then claimed that Trump's followers were violent. Cruz (among others) fell for it and told Trump that he ought to make it clear that he does not condone violence. Trump supporters responded by basically saying, "Stupid Cruz, don't you see it was the Democrats who did it?"

Then an Anti-Trump group put out an ad showing an old picture of Trump's (current) wife mostly-undressed as an attack ad. Despite the fact that both the group and Cruz clearly explained that liberals were behind this, Trump showed himself to be at least no smarter than Cruz, blaming Cruz and Cruz alone for the ad, and making veiled threats about Cruz's wife. Then Trump's buddy at the National Enquirer, the same one who ran a story about Carson's supposed barbaric maiming of children ("wields the scalpel like a machete", among other claims) when Carson was doing well in the polls and ran a story about Fiorina's supposed secret druggy daughter (she has never made a secret of her step-daughter's struggle; said step-daughter was in her mother's custody) when she was doing well in the polls, suddenly decided to claim that Cruz had a whole bunch of affairs with various staffers, associates, and a high-price prostitute (because if you're going to throw a bunch of charges at the wall, you might as well make them interesting).

Now I have my own things to say about condemning Cruz based on nothing more than the National Enquirer, but that's not my current concern, so I'll leave that part until the end. The short, short version of what happened was this:

Liberals managed to turn the GOP race from a discussion of the issues into a cage match, stopping all this uncomfortable talk about lower taxes and stronger military that resonates with the people whom the liberals hope will vote for Hillary or Sanders, and get people's attention on "more important" (to their candidate's victory) issues, such as whether Melania Trump is hotter than Heidi Cruz.

This is, frankly, the kind of thing that rich people can afford to worry about. If we wind up with Hillary or especially Sanders as our next president, we will no longer be rich. In the midst of making sure that we don't say the 'wrong thing' in public and bring the Federal Government down on our heads in a nation governed by people who staunchly oppose a simple law preventing gay couples from suing pastors who do not wish to conduct their 'marriage' ceremonies, while trying desperately to find enough post-tax cash to buy on the black market the health care that the government refuses to allow us to receive, we will laugh bitterly at our naive selves who worried so much about the issues that the liberals want us to worry about - some woman's partly-clothed body or some man's alleged affairs. Do you think that celebrity worship happens in countries where the people are scavenging for their basic needs after getting government-paid for their government jobs and being given what little shelter and food that the government can manage to provide for them?

Remember the real issues.

Discuss the real problems.

Never mind all this 'sex and violence'.

Trump and the Liberal Conspiracy Theory

I don't make decisions like this lightly, but I do hold them lightly. I will not pledge right here and now that I will unquestionably not vote for Donald Trump if he is the Republican nominee. I will, however, state that, as the election currently stands, my decision is that I will not vote for him, even against Hillary.

Nobody is going to guess the real reason.

Oh, there are plenty of reasons that liberals like to talk badly about Trump. They accuse him of being racist because he has an immigration policy that legally-residing Hispanics love. They send people to his rallies to violently attack his supporters and then call his supporters violent when they defend themselves. They take half of what he says so badly out of context that it doesn't even resemble what he actually says. They seem determined to attack him in all the ways that will make his supporters dig in their heels and promise to stay with him forever.

I'm not even all that concerned about many of the attacks on the Right. This whole kerfuffle about his wife... I can take that in a candidate. I can even take a certain level of moderate politics in a candidate. After all, I voted for McCain over Obama, and then I voted for Romney over Obama, and I encouraged my friends and family to do the same.

So what has changed?

I believe that the leadership in the Democrat Party has, for decades now, desired to establish full-out government control along socialist principles, whether by Fascism or straight-out Communism. They want command. They want to be in charge. This isn't really the condemnation that it may seem like. Throughout history, the majority of higher-ups have desired control over larger groups of people. Everyone wants to be the king, the general, the emperor, the supreme leader. The unusual thing in human society has been a free society, a system in which the people are, as individuals, in control of their own lives. It is no accident that these societies have invariably been Jewish or Christian. You have to feel as if someone is in control and, if that someone is God, then it is wrong for you to subjugate your fellow man. (Even in areas where they have failed in this, the precepts of Christianity have been a correcting action that have caused Christians, not outsiders, to correct it.)

But I digress.

Socialism doesn't just happen. It takes sacrifice. Even on the face of it, it takes sacrifice that the people believe will yield benefits down the line. In implementation, of course, the sacrifice continues to strengthen and the benefits do not appear. The important thing is, people don't just take to socialism "because". They start by believing that it is a better system than what they have. Either they lose faith in that "invisible hand" in a free market (whether you believe in God or in the laws of nature), or they live in a system that is not a free market, or both. Socialism took hold in Germany under a war-torn country forced to make heavy reparations from a destroyed economy. Socialism took hold in Russia as a replacement for the iron hand of Imperialism; early Party members were fighting, not for a command economy, but merely for the allowance of sick days for workers. When socialists started trying to find ways to implement their system in the U.S., they ran into a problem... they could not easily convince anybody that socialism was better than what they had, because what they had was freedom, prosperity, and even the poorest considered themselves to be "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".

To peddle their system, they would have to change the one we already had.

Do I have proof that this is a conspiracy theory led by the leadership of the party? No, not really. I know this; though the "Red Scare" and McCarthyism went too far and was misused for witch hunts, history has vindicated McCarthy himself. Though most of the people he investigated were not foreign agents seeking to betray America to her enemies, they were dedicated socialists seeking to transform America into a socialist country over time. We've seen their efforts in the school systems (where they've been pretty brazen about their goals and plans) and in other areas of society. There's one in particular that I want to focus on today, and that is the effort to spread corporatism (what in the 18th century would have been called 'mercantilism') while redefining capitalism such that people believe that capitalism is really corporatism, and socialism is the other choice in the false dichotomy that they are working to set up.

We've seen this whenever Democrats have derided Republicans for being "pro-big business" for wanting to lower taxes or regulations on all businesses (because, of course, a big business makes more profits from it than a small business, even if the small business benefits at a much higher percentage). Then those Democrats tighten regulation and taxes, but they define loopholes for big businesses that support them, and declare this to be "their willingness to enable capitalism". They present the worst parts of corporatism to us, call it 'capitalism', and say that 'capitalism doesn't work'. I have been confused when I've watched movies like Robocop after being told that it's about the evils of capitalism, because it isn't about capitalism at all. It's about corporatism. (I've given you a few sketches here. I could probably write a book on this process and the harm it's doing.) And now we come to the crux of the reason why I don't think I can vote for Trump.

Trump is a corporatist running as a capitalist.

If Hillary wins because I vote for a third party, it's going to be bad. It's going to be tough. Short-term, it's going to be awful. But if Trump wins because I vote for him, then I have colluded in the Democrat effort to rebrand corporatism as 'capitalism'. In the short term, he will not be as bad as Hillary in most respects. In the long term, however, if he provides that last big push, if his reign in office brings us to the point where we truly believe the false dichotomy, the long-term ramifications will be far, far worse.

We will be choosing between Corporatism and Socialism.

And whichever wins, we will lose.

"Feeling the Bern" - The Middle Class Experience on Social Programs

Is my family middle-class? I persist in believing that we are. The term "class" is not as easy as the term "income". It carries with it a sense of lifestyle, of priorities, of emotion and atmosphere. The "working class" has one set of jobs, lifestyles, and priorities. The "middle class" has another.

Our family income alone would mark us as a member of the working class. That said, the way I usually try to describe us is by typing "working/lower-middle class" or simply using the term "lower middle class". The job is white-collar educated, my husband has his college degree (so do I), and we own our own home in a quiet rural area with a large yard. We really do not have much in common with the blue-collar lifestyle. We actually don't have much in common with other lifestyles either, to be honest.

Our food budget is less than that of the average family on welfare, yet we eat well, with my cooking and careful pantry choices. We have the lack of processed foods usually associated with the wealthy. Our furniture may be used, but it is kept in good repair. We get our clothing for free (a church giveaway room, to which we contribute as children outgrow clothing), and I can sew the type of well-fitted outfits for myself that one might associate with the upper-class, even if I have to take trashcan-bound XXXL clothing and cut them down to get the cloth. We take pride in appearing as well as we can with what we have. We take no vacations, and we buy our vehicles used, quite old (both are currently over 10yrs), and with cash on hand. We actually have several thousand dollars in the bank, in a time when the vast majority of this country, even people twice as rich as we are, live paycheck-to-paycheck.

I feel strange whenever I find myself asking for need-based scholarships for my children to go to summer camp or engage in similar opportunities (my daughter did a year of high-class preschool on a half-tuition need-based scholarship, and my grandmother helped us cover the other half), yet when I sit down with Social Services to deal with bureaucracy, the person helping me is always perplexed at our family size and income and has no clue how we manage to make our ends meet at all.

So what happens when a family like mine encounters Sanders'-style economics? (Also known, by me, as 'social programs creep') There are three stages that I've been able to identify over the past about seven and a half years, as liberal economics have caused the process to begin already.

Stage 1: Self-Sufficiency
This is the very best stage, and the reason why families in situations like mine tend to be "surprisingly" conservative rather than wanting to "feel the Bern", as they say. In this situation, the family has low taxes and a high percentage of disposable income. The family uses this income, setting its own priorities, choosing its own lifestyle. Alternative lifestyles or uncommon needs (such as rare medical conditions) are accommodated quickly and easily, as the point of decision-making rests with the family. Money is tight, yes. We don't have the new television. We don't take the vacation. We don't buy the boat. We simply don't have the money, we say to ourselves, because we have already chosen to spend it.. on a curriculum that fits a child's special learning needs, or a doctor who specializes in a parent's medical condition. We are, indeed, by historical standards, wealthy.

Stage 2: The Transition
Anyone would expect this to be the hardest part, a temporary difficulty that results in a family like ours being better off than it was before. It is, in fact, not. As taxes rise, we begin losing our ability to afford that curriculum or that specialist. Income never rises when taxes rise, and so our budget narrows. We wind up giving up things we want, and then things we need, in order to allow the government to give things we already could not afford to people who are poorer than us. As the process continues, we start going into our savings, cutting to the bone, and praying for relief. Unfortunately, we already know from experience that this relief will never come.

Stage 3: Social Programs
Now the government has finally seen fit to "help" us, not by allowing us to meet our own needs again, but by 'graciously' deciding to meet them for us. We are now eligible for the social program. We do the paperwork. We wait for months, since we are one of a large influx of people joining the program, and the staffing for the program has not increased. Finally, we receive our shiny new cards and vouchers, stamped with our identities... our entire lives, experiences, hopes, and dreams, everything that makes us people, collated down into a number and entered into a government file somewhere. We have now been stamped, filed, and categorized. At least now we can access education and medical care again, right?

No. This is the point where we find out that we can't.

The specialist is not covered by the government program. The educational curriculum is not on the government list. They've run out of the bread that's on the WIC list, and the cheaper, healthier store-brand loaf is not on the WIC list, so it won't be covered. If you want bread this week, you'll have to pay for it yourself... out of what's left when the higher taxes have been taken from your paycheck. This is the point at which you learn that the government apparently doesn't think you're supposed to have that medical condition, or need that curriculum.
In the end, you are transformed from a family that does not have what the wealthier families have, but meets its own individual needs with its own money, to a family that still does not have what the wealthier families have, and is now bereft of the means by which to meet its own individual needs on top of it.

People try to claim that conservatives just plain don't want to help the poor. That's unquestionably a lie, provable, if by nothing else, by the statistics that show how much more generous conservatives are to the poor with their own personal money. Even conservatives on the libertarian side do not oppose government programs as well, programs meant to aid those who simply cannot get what they need by any other means, programs that pay for surgeries and food for the destitute and the disabled. I think I can best explain my opinion on the matter by simply saying this:

The government should not be giving social programs to anybody who is paying taxes; in reverse, the government should not tax anyone who is receiving social programs.

Before a family is aided by the government, they should be permitted the full body of their resources in order to minimize or meet their needs.

We should never, ever be in the position we are in now, a position that Sanders seeks to worsen, in which the government takes money from us and gives us the goods or services we desire (or those that the government thinks we ought to desire, which does manage to coincide on occasion).

Feeling the "Bern"

What exactly do people mean by "Feel the Bern"? I was startled to see this phrase begin to pop up, especially when used by supporters to encourage other supporters! Apparently, in the world of bodybuilding, "feel the burn" describes the sensation you achieve by working your muscles to the point where you know that they are going to start building themselves higher and stronger. I find that to be a rather bizarre coupling with the cries for taxpayer-funded swag, but perhaps the statement is only meant to indicate the 'good pain' that comes only with hard work and personal sacrifice for personal gain.

I am not a body builder. Though I will exercise to the point of "feeling burn", I am not exercise-inclined, and won't do it for the sake of doing it. I usually exercise for enjoyment and in hopes of weight loss. I do, however, engage in quite a bit of Internet debate, in which the phrase means something very different. Commenters will say "Burn!" or "Feel the burn!" when one member of a debate manages to put down the other in a very satisfyingly thorough and often demeaning way. For many people, the more demeaning the put-down, the more satisfying, and they crow "Feel the burn!" as the other debate opponent reels back, half-blinded by impotent fury.

Given that, when I first saw the phrase appear, I thought it meant, "We are going to vote for someone who is going to take things away from your already-embattled finances and crow about it as you struggle to make your ends once again meet!"

I have never really been able to rid myself of the utter distaste I hold for the term. As I see more and more of Sanders' policy stances, I doubt I ever will.

A Christian Nation when it suits us...

Back in the dark days before science and progress and all the things we prize so much, humanity was ruled mostly by a series of tribes led by a leader who claimed either direct godhood or speakership with godhood. 'For some strange reason', it seemed that the god particularly favored the leader in that it invariably gave orders resulting in the leader having whichever property, goods, and women he wanted. These ancient 'gods' also had a tendency to value peace while the tribe was doing well and then suddenly demand war when the leader wanted to expand his territory or saw another tribe as a threat. There is no doubt that this convenience had been noticed by other tribal members, but that little seed of doubt would remain... Human leaders can be toppled, but gods are quite a different story.

One of the radical innovations brought into the world by Judaism and then Christianity was a knowable God whose precepts did not change, and to whom every man, especially leaders, were answerable. King David was punished by God for exercising his 'divine leadership' in order to take Uriah's wife for himself; King Ahab was punished by God for taking Naboth's vineyard. Under God, a leader cannot claim divine right to what he pleases. This goes on to modern times... when religion has gone wrong, even Christianity during some historical ages and in some parts of the globe, at the center you can often find a human being using it in order to gain personal power.

Socialism, whether its pretend-private form (fascism) or outright state-control form (Communism), by necessity sees Christianity as a threat. Socialism, especially liberal socialism, teaches that the world can be made a paradise as long as everybody agrees to follow the rules laid down by the human beings who created it. This devotion to the State (and hence, they argue, to the community - though the State, which speaks for the 'god' of the community, seems to deliver edicts that benefit the State more than the people... how about that?) must be paramount, and any secondary devotion to the family or another god must be suborned or destroyed. This was touted as a brand new thing, a non-religious (and therefore, somehow, pure) type of government meant to bring us into a new age, but scratch the surface and you will find the same old pagan tribalism as before.

That brings us to today.

Now the role of homosexuality in our society and our attitude towards refugees from the Middle East are really separate issues, and I do honestly believe that those on both sides of both issues should be wary of this argument being produced and spread by liberal Democrats. Have I been the only one to notice that, when 'gay marriage' is being discussed, we are a 'secular nation', yet when Syrian refugees unwittingly harbor terrorists, we suddenly have a 'Christian duty' to let them in with current vetting (or lack thereof) procedures?

Never mind your feelings about gay sex or Muslim terrorists for the moment. Ask yourself this. Are we a Christian nation, required to follow Christian edicts on aiding the needy equally with Christian edicts on forbidding sexual immorality? Are we a nation which, for cultural effect even among those who do not follow Christianity, has public schools offer prayers to the Christian God? Are we a nation that imposes a religious litmus test for leadership?

Or are we a secular nation? Do we follow the desires of our Christian forefathers to make this a country in which, as Christianity does demand, we permit only voluntary conversion? Is this a place where an atheist can have equal access to government programs and justice? Is this a nation which does not ban practices which, though they may offend God, do not cause imminent harm to innocent bystanders? Do we approach national security and response to violence, not directly as followers of a Lamb to the sacrifice, but with a no-nonsense desire to safeguard our borders first? Do we examine social welfare programs based on their cost, their merit, and their effect on our freedom, rather than enshrining a religious zeal in government procedure?

If the Democrats do not want this to be a Christian Nation, then they cannot appeal to Christian duty when trying to push for open borders or social welfare programs. If the Democrats do want this to be a Christian Nation, then they cannot use the government to force people to accept gay sex as identical to marriage, or to refer to decorated trees on public property at Christmastime as "mitten trees", or to ever, in any context (even the correct one), make reference to the "separation of Church and State".

When Democrats vie for a "secular state" in permitting the social issues they wish to promote, and then turn around and demand our "Christian duty" in government-controlled, government-mandated practices they wish to demand, they are the same as the leaders of the ancient tribalism, declaring themselves to be God (or God's direct servant) and using claims of divine power in order to force us all to follow flawed human beings as if they were perfect.

The Sanders Contract

Free college! Crackdown on the banks! Bernie Sanders is gaining steam quickly, capitalizing on the anger of people who believe (not without reason) that they are being oppressed by the Corporations, the CEO's, the "1%". When the crowds form, though, they don't understand what Sanders truly stands for, and what they are truly signing up for when they support him.

Let's say that you live in a neighborhood with a few lower-income housing areas, a bunch of reasonably nice houses, and this one mansion up at one end. It is owned by a total jerk. He wolf-whistles at women when they try to jog through the neighborhood. He throws loud parties at night. His vehicle's engine has been modified to sound like a roar, and it grates on your nerves every time he drives by. He is making your neighborhood unhappy.

Now, if he were any of you, he would be taken down by noise ordinances and harassment laws. However, the government keeps granting him special privileges and special permissions, because he is rich, and he pays more through taxes than the rest of you combined. He is, to borrow the phrase, "too big to fail".

One day, a Federal agent comes to your door and offers to rid you of this problem. "I can initiate house inspections on his mansion whenever I please, and cite him for the silliest infractions," he says. "I can change the environmental standards to make his car modification illegal. I can even set caps on the size of house he is allowed to own, and change them at will."

Everyone likes this idea. He offers them a contract, and they barely glance through it before signing it. Now they'll finally get rid of the nuisance.

However, the contract contains these clauses. They give the Federal agent the right to initiate house inspections on any house in the neighborhood whenever he pleases. He can change the environmental standards on all cars in the neighborhood. He can set neighborhood-wide caps on the houses that everyone is allowed to own, and change them at will. In short, anything he is allowed to do to this jerk neighbor, he is allowed to do to you. A couple of people notice this and ask him about it. His response: "Oh, I'm sure that you will never have a big enough house or a loud enough car for this to affect you."

Do you trust him?

What is the alternative? Hillary Clinton is the one claiming that the jerk is too big to fail. What about the Republicans? Well, most of them are of one mind on the issue. Picture now a different Federal agent entering the neighborhood.

"Well, if we were to have the power to harass him in his home, we would have the power to harass you in your homes, and I don't think you want to give that away. If we could decide how big his house can be, we would decide how big yours can be. Do you really want to limit your ambitions? What we can do is to remove the government privileges which safeguard him from harassment charges and nuisance fines. No, it probably won't drive him out of the neighborhood altogether, but at least he will know that he has to behave himself, and it'll be better for all of you."

So here's the question, then. Are you so determined to "punish the rich", to hate the "1%", to see to the ruin of another human being (however justifiable it may seem), that you are willing to give the government the power to decide whether or not you will be the next target?

If so, then vote for Bernie Sanders, and may he have mercy upon you.

Search for the Cure

I heard yesterday that the Federal Government has now spent over $3.5 million on an ongoing HHS study on "why lesbians are fat". More specifically, they are trying to find out why nearly three-quarters of lesbians are overweight or obese, while obesity risk doubles in gay men compared to heterosexual men.

The person who advanced the news item had a typical conservative viewpoint on it. How ridiculous, that we should be wasting taxpayer dollars, the money that is paid to the government even by people who struggle to make their own mortgages and food budgets, on fat homosexuals! It is doubly silly from the viewpoint of a conservative Christian, who will naturally believe that the simplest way to solve the problem is to not openly encourage and laud open homosexual behavior, due to the various harms that it already causes on its own, regardless of what it may do to your figure.

I'd like to look at it differently for a moment. The people who should be most up-in-arms about this study are actually the homosexuals themselves, especially the activists. Why? Consider the ramifications of this: What if they found something?

No, really. Think about this for a moment. What if scientists, backed by Federal Government money, found a link? What if they found a chemical imbalance, or even a faulty genetic expression, that increased the chances of both homosexual desire and obesity? What if we could "cure gay" and "cure obesity" at the same time, with a single supplement?

What if they succeeded?

Wouldn't the gay activists all be thrilled? For all these years, they have been painting themselves as the eternal victim. These poor young folk, you see, none of them want to be gay. None of them hope they are gay. They are only now embracing this desire because it's the only way they can feel good about themselves! They are what they are, and there's nothing they can do about it! If they could "not be gay", they'd do it in a heartbeat! They've tried so, so hard, the poor dears!

No doubt there are many of the rank-and-file who would jump at the chance. But would people who have built a livelihood on their victim status, people like Ellen Degeneres or George Takei, would they jump at the chance to take a simple supplement that would make them attracted to the opposite sex?

What if Science proved, for a fact, that homosexual desire was the result of a chemical imbalance?

How would the gay activist groups respond if parents started asking for their children to receive the supplement? What if pediatricians recommended it? What if it was the best possible way to prevent child and adult obesity? Would the government consider this a good thing or a bad thing?

What if the Federal Government issued a mandate through the Department of Health and Human Services - which both funds this study and has unprecedented control over our healthcare system thanks to the "Affordable" Care Act - requiring all Americans to have their sexual desire chemicals balanced in the name of preventing another "Obesity Epidemic"?

Suppose it was confirmed, in a way they could not ignore, that homosexual behavior was the result of something going wrong?

Remember the brouhaha about waterboarding Muslim terrorist suspects at Gitmo? What if the chemical imbalance can be shifted the other way? What if it gets out that American doctors can turn captured Islamists gay? What are the moral implications of that?

Frankly, it should be the gay activist groups who riot against the Federal Government spending money on a study that has a possibility of "curing gay". And in the grand scheme of things, with Obamacare costing nearly three trillion dollars in ten years, Obama's new environmental regulations costing Americans over 400 billion dollars, and nearly 800 million dollars paid in 'wages' to Federal employees who are on paid leave while awaiting verdicts in disciplinary actions, this particular little study is peanuts. There is so much more that a conservative Christian can work on before we even worry about a government study linking obesity with homosexual identity.

Can the gay activists say the same?

Who keeps your brother?

So the news is buzzing about Obama's dealings with this organization called "My Brother's Keeper", which has something to do with tutoring black teenagers. The phrase was used by Obama himself in a call for the government to interfere in our lives as much as possible 'for our own good'.

Of course, his use of this phrase and his support of this group is horribly funny for several reasons.

1. The very phrase "my brother's keeper", as Obama pointed out as a misguided attempt to justify his point, was spoken by Cain to God when God asked Cain where his brother Abel was. Of course, Cain had ample reason to know where Abel was, having just killed him in anger. However, all that aside, assuming as Cain did that God did not know about the murder, it could have been a valid question.

"Am I my brother's keeper?"

What he meant by it was this: My brother is a grown man, an adult. He doesn't need someone to hold his hand. He doesn't need me to always know where he is and what he's doing. He doesn't need someone else making all his decisions for him as if he was a child. My brother doesn't need a 'keeper'. In short, "my brother's keeper" was a sarcastic barb meant to make the point that adults don't need other people living their lives for them - the exact opposite of the way Obama used the phrase.

Shorter version: Obama took seriously a sarcastic phrase spoken by a liar and murderer.

2. Obama hasn't been his own brother's keeper. Barack Obama still has a half-brother in Kenya who still lives in a hut made of garbage because it's the best he's got. Despite the fact that the average monthly salary in Kenya is 1% of Obama's presidential salary, Obama can't seem to spare a single dollar for his own family. Of course, that's just his half-brother. He also has an aunt living on government welfare funds in Massachusetts, despite being an illegal immigrant.

Even if we play the sarcastic phrase straight, as Obama did, isn't it telling that he cares more about making other people help strangers than about helping his own family with his own money?

3. Obama doesn't treat black tutors very well when they don't fit into his political agenda. Now, my first two points may make it seem as if I object to people tutoring black teens. Far from it. I've done it myself (I am willing to tutor those in need and many of them have been black and teenaged), and I think it is a solidly good idea to do what we can, as a personal and Christian care for those in need rather than a government program or presidential guilt-trip, to alleviate some of the burdens caused by the rampant fatherlessness in the black communities.

However, one of the men well-known in his community for tutoring black teens in need as part of his many contributions to society was nearly killed by a criminal whom Obama identified as a metaphorical son. Protecting tutors of black teens seems to mean nothing to Obama when he can use an incident to inflame racial tensions and ensure that the only people able to safely tutor black teens are blacks who have not "gone white", "turned Oreo", or "become Uncle Toms" (I'll spare you the Uncle Tom pet peeve today), and therefore are likely even less qualified to aid these people than the people they are supposed to be aiding.

Then again, with Common Core coming into full swing especially in the big cities where underprivileged black teens tend to live, who will know how to tutor them anymore?

It's 'okay' to be X-Men

"Have you tried not being a mutant?"

One of my long-standing beefs with the newer X-Men live-action movie franchises can be summed up in that line from X2. For generations, X-Men has been a story about outcasts, weirdos, and freaks struggling to find a place in society and just be themselves. It calls out to virtually every teenager alive, who feels as if he or she is the only person in the world going through this bizarre body-morphing process while struggling to figure out whether he or she is a child or an adult.

Originally, mutants were sometimes seen as a rough analog to racism. (In one extremely cute moment in the Larger Universe of the franchise, a mutant sent back in time is almost 'charmed' to be denied a seat in a restaurant, not because she is a mutant, but because she is black.) The more recent trilogy, though, especially the second movie, leaned heavily on a connection with homosexuality instead. Of course, they probably immediately alienated everyone who wanted to make that connection in X3, when a mutant 'cure' was found and at least one pitiable case decided to take it...

The more I began to think about this connection, the more I realized that it was actually pretty useful in untangling the modern 'gay rights' movement, much more useful than it could have been in understanding racism. The standard factions of the X-Men franchise actually correlate fairly well to the factions in this particular struggle. Of course, it isn't a perfect correlation, as a significant group of people (myself included) do not believe that homosexual behavior is inborn, unavoidable, and morally neutral. (Granted, arguments could be made about the morality of a mutant ability that can only be used to make other people deathly ill.) Still, for what it's worth, here are the correlations:

Charles Xavier and the Rank-And-File: On the good side, you have Xavier's school for mutants and his undying efforts to tweak society gently into one in which a blue-skinned girl can walk down the street alongside her 'normal' friend without fear. He simply wants mutants and regular humans to live in peace. To that end, he encourages mutants to show a sense of propriety in public. Being blue-skinned isn't an invitation to walk around naked. There is no harm in using your ice power to cool your tea, but don't go flinging shards at the neighborhood bully. Live in peace inasmuch as you can. On the other side, he opposes the Mutant Registration Act, which tends to lead to big stomping robots going about genetically identifying mutants and putting them in prison.

In the realm of 'gay rights', these would be the people who are quite willing to work with a gay person, or have one in the apartment complex, as long as he and his partner aren't tongue-kissing out in front of the children or doing drugs... things that are utterly avoidable no matter your sexual preference.

"Friends of Humanity" and the genuinely afraid: Everyone can agree that these people are basically either bad or misguided, so I don't need to spend a lot of time on them. They are analogous to the people in the gay 'rights' debate who want to throw all homosexuals in jail, the ones who see these people not as sinners with the rest of us, but as being in some way subhuman. In an irony that carries over to the real world, some of the angriest anti-mutant folk have mutants in their family, and the hatred spills over from fear.)

Now here comes the interesting part of the discussion.

Magneto and his followers: Unlike Xavier, who wants peaceful coexistence, Magneto sees himself and other mutants as superior to humans and believe that mutants should rule. He takes it as a no-brainer that mutants should not only appear in their natural shapes in public, but should have free and unfettered exercise of their mutant powers. He believes that they are the next step in human evolution and that the regular humans should submit to them.

This is a clear and not often-explored goal among the gay 'rights' activists. Many homosexuals are just as willing as many non-homosexuals to simply live in peace, respecting each other's rights. Gays don't claim religious significance for acts that religions ban; straights don't confront them in alleyways telling them to 'repent' or take a beating. That would be the Charles Xavier way. Gay activists, however, insist that homosexual behavior will "strengthen" marriage... how? By redefining adultery and removing 'old-fashioned' notions of longevity. The gay relationship is, to them, the next step in human evolution, and they will ensure that everyone be forced to submit.

Mystique/Raven, being a blue-skinned shapeshifter with golden eyes, is drawn alternately in the most recent movies to Charles Xavier, who says that she should be able to go to school with the other children in the proper school uniform and not ostracized for her skin color, and Magneto, who says that she should be able to go to school utterly naked (the actress wears a latex suit) and the other people should have no right to object. I can't help but be reminded by the school officials who are willing to extend to a single-stalled bathroom to a physically male student who thinks he ought to be female, and the activists who insist that he should be allowed to enter a bathroom full of girls and neither the girls nor their parents have the right to object.

I have consistently taken Charles Xavier's side in the gay 'rights' fight, affirming the right of any peaceful citizen to live and travel peacefully. I wonder what would happen if I started referring to the gay activists as "Magneto". Perhaps that simple act would be enough to get the homosexual lobby to leave X-Men alone... and for the next generation of geeks and freaks who are not homosexual to feel comfortable, as has been for generations before us, identifying with the mutants.