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?

Storing up skills

A few weeks ago, my daughter's Webelos troop set up to do Christmas caroling at a nearby nursing home. Now it's one thing to say that you're going to do caroling and another to actually do it. As it happens - I am not trying to boast or brag here, everyone there will agree with me - I was the only voice in a group of about twenty to thirty people who was strong, on key (no instruments), and could hold the melody well enough for the others to latch on. A week afterwards, there was another Christmas caroling event, this one with several good singers. One participant brought a violin, another brought a cello, and one had a few recorders with him and was using his alto. I asked permission to use his soprano, sat down to share music with the cellist, and started adding to the accompaniment.

I enjoy reading classics in literature from the time periods before we had computers, television, or even radio. The upper-class people, both men and women, in those times were practically required to learn a few skills that would make social gatherings more enjoyable and entertain their families in the evening. They memorized poems (or learned to read them dramatically from books), learned to play the piano, and practiced singing. The goal was to be able to make yourself pleasant in any gathering, expected and unexpected.

Many people think about skills in the New Year. January is, according to some calendars that gather names for every day of the year, "Hobby Month". Resolutions often take the forms of new skills to learn. If you ask them why they're learning these skills, they'll usually have a reason for it. They want to eat more healthy. They want to knit hats for babies and socks for people in third world countries. They want to know how to build a shed to save the cost of always paying someone else to bring their ideas to life. In many cases, people learn skills more readily and more easily when the stakes are higher. People who worry about the collapse of civilization, for instance, will learn gardening, first aid, mechanical work, and other skills that are less useful for the average person in this society than in the one they are preparing for.

In fact, that makes for an interesting mental exercise. Suppose civilization as you knew it collapsed, and you made your shaken way from the rubble of your neighborhood to a small settlement made up of survivors trying to rebuild. You entered, and the settlement leader asked you, "What can you do to make yourself useful?" Now you might be a highly-paid administrator of some sort, having come from a city where you made more than enough money to eat out every night and see every Broadway show. What useful skills are you going to bring into this new life of yours? If you were paying attention during the shows and have some theatrical skill, you could organize a troop to practice twice a week in the evenings and lighten the heart of your fellow settlers. Maybe you regularly fixed up your own beater of a bicycle thirty years ago in childhood, and you can make some repairs if you have the tools. Maybe you learned how to use a drop spindle at a county fair once and you think you still remember how to do it. Maybe all you can do is to say, "Well, I have good legs and a strong back, and I'm willing to pitch in and learn."

The Bible has an interesting bit in it, in 1 Corinthians 3. The Apostle Paul writes about building a work on a foundation that is tested by fire. If what you built lasts, he says, you will have a reward. If it is all consumed, you will still be saved, but as one who is escaping the fire. The Bible talks about rewards in Heaven and the New Earth in other areas as well, and I've heard some very odd conjectures about what those rewards will be. Some Sunday School classes in my youth presented the notion that you will receive a jewel in your crown for each person you lead to Christ, and you want many jewels in your crown, don't you? I reject that interpretation. We are responsible for living Christ and preaching Christ; we are not the ones who "save" people, and we cannot control their decision. So what is it talking about? I have a conjecture that I believe is supported by Scripture.

Think back to the question of what you would bring to a post-apocalyptic settlement. If you were as sure as some people that civilization was going to collapse, you would spend your time now learning how to plant and garden, how to forage for wild harvests, how to sew without a machine, how to cook without a stove. Well, if you are a Christian, you can be sure that you are going to die, that the old Heaven and Earth will perish, and that you will be given a new body and a new Earth without sin. Through prophesies about "the lion and the lamb" and "grass" as well as others, we can guess that the new Earth is not going to be totally alien to us. So maybe in this new year, you might ask yourself this: What kind of skills can you learn now, that will be of use to you in this new place?

"How To Get A Big Promotion And Drive A Lexus By Stomping On The Little People" will likely do you no good at all. How to play a video game will mean nothing in a world with no video games. Planting and reaping may be of use, though gardening is likely to be much easier in a world without weeds and thorns, which are clearly stated to be part of the curse of sin. How about "The practiced and ready desire to help others without looking for a reward"? How would that skill do in a world where the reward is going to happen? (It's never a sure thing in this world.) Perhaps "Being humbly willing to learn from people who have figured out a new skill before you have"? How about "Developing the discipline and willpower to finish what you start even when your brain and body are working as hard as they can against you"? Like exercising against tension, that skill is going to explode into brilliance once your brain and body are cooperating properly.

In this new year, I'd like to encourage you to think about what skills and works you might develop for the life that we know will last. Since I can sing in this world, I can bring entertainment to groups of people without television, cell phones, or radio. Since I can sew in this world, I have been able to customize garments to myself and other people - as part of my ministry, I once charged materials-only to make special skirts for a wheelchair-bound woman. In times past, being an "accomplished person" was part of being in proper society. How can you be an "accomplished person" when we start to roam the New Earth together?

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?

Kneeling for the flag: A different perspective

Here we go again. Football season is nearly upon us. With it comes a batch of politics that the fans, in general, do not want. Attendance is lower. Ticket sales are cheaper. Pretty soon the players who are protesting their unfairly bad treatment at the hands of their customers are going to find that their customers aren't paying enough money to give them those multi-million dollar salaries.

Ok, that was a bit of a dig at the process, and perhaps an unfair one, considering the point I've come to present today. We seem to have two sides to this issue. One side says that these players are doing something utterly necessary and justifiable, because of the problems that those who share their ethnicity face every day in this country due merely to being of that ethnicity. The other side says that no amount of problems justify disrespect to the country itself and its national symbols, as if the players are protesting, not their problems, but the very fact that America exists. They also may downplay or deny any problems being faced by this ethnicity and point to the powerful and wealthy football players themselves as proof that these one-percenters have nothing to complain about.

But let's step to the side for a bit and look at this through a different lens.

There's no denying that there is still injustice for black people, particularly black men, in this country today. A very carefully-done bit of research shows that they are less likely than whites to be shot by police (the very thing that the football players mention the most) in equivalent situations. However, in equivalent situations, police use unnecessary force on blacks, especially black men, more than upon whites. They are more likely to be searched, more likely to be stopped, and more likely to be treated poorly when they are stopped. Now many whites have one, maybe two "this policeman was an idiot" stories to gripe about. Blacks have more, and I can see how a tipping point is reached in which "this policeman was an idiot" becomes "policemen themselves have it out for me".

I can understand this because one of my great-grandfathers lived the same life, only worse. Because of his ethnicity, he lived in the poorest parts of town. Because of his ethnicity, he faced violence as a daily possibility. In a world that was getting electricity into regular homes, he lived in a dwelling no more sophisticated than an African tribal hut. He and his family often lacked for the simplest necessities - food, clothing - and faced, at best, a level of threat from others that was similar to the worst threat faced by blacks from the KKK. Even more so, his was the first generation that, due to government reforms, was actually permitted to go into town and learn a trade so that he could actually have a job; his parents worked very hard to sell a few meager supplies here and there, but were not allowed to be actual legal employees, due to and only due to their ethnicity.

Now that's notable. The country was changing. The threats were beginning to wane. The opportunities were starting to come in. Things were improving. But he wanted more and better, and he started engaging in protests against the government. Instead of working within the system to secure further liberties, he chose to speak against the system and wish it to be changed to a new one. Like the football players' message - and if they want to convey a different message, they really need to find a different method - he wanted a change of government rather than for the government to use its existing powers to bring about the change he wanted.

Ok, granted, I don't know to which extent this specific man wanted this specific goal. But I can tell you that, whether he wanted it or not, he got it - and the same people who are pushing the black football players' protest got into control in his own country. The same ideology that leverage black racial struggles into fuel for the revolutionary fire leveraged his racial struggles into fuel for their own revolutionary fire, and he twigged on very quickly (a survival trait, in this case) as to the purpose and eventual fate of fuel.

He fled Eastern Europe, Russian territory, for the U.S. right 'round the neighborhood of 1905.

I'm not going to praise the Russian Imperial Government. I don't have a strong favorable or unfavorable opinion of Tsar Nicholas II, though I question whether his children really deserved to be hunted down and shot in the dirt like dogs. I'm not even sure if the rights my great-grandfather was looking for would have been attainable through the system, though I have to say that it looked like they were on the right track. But I can say this: the Bolshevik Communism that replaced it had no inherent human rights (even during periods when the government temporarily conceded privileges that we in America would call 'rights'), and had no love for Jews. My great-grandfather and his people were tools, and fools, for a political system that didn't care about them beyond what could be profited from their blood, sweat, and tears.

It is from that perspective that I see the football players kneel. I don't try to minimize the struggles of their people or claim that they have no grievance. (Though I include a few grievances that they seem uninterested in, like the government funding of an organization originally created to target their babies for death due to despising their ethnicity.) Neither do I believe that their particular form of protest is good and honest and totally justifiable. I believe they have the freedom in this great country to engage in their protest, just as they have the freedom, should they choose to leverage it, to use this system to correct the problems they face. My issue with their behavior is that they are targeting the system itself, and looking for changes that remind me strongly of my great-grandfather, the tool, the fool, for a political party that neither favors nor esteems them.

About ten years after my great-grandfather fled to New York City with little more than what he could carry, in hopes of avoiding the fire that would have burned him up, the young woman who would become my great-grandmother joined him. Her family had actually been, despite her shared ethnicity, as wealthy, powerful, and esteemed as those football players who are kneeling on the field. She had learned quickly what the football players will learn if they succeed in their protest; the new system is no kinder to them than to the people for whom they kneel.

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?

Immigration and Health Care - what can we afford?

This is, as usual with me, kind of a sideways look at the issues that people have been bringing up lately, mostly in liberal forums and among liberal friends' facebook posts. The issues might seem only tangentially related, but, when I look at them together, I find an interesting set of connections. These issues are illegal immigration (specifically, open borders), and single-payer health care.

What connected the two for me was a series of articles (isn't it funny how each day seems to have a 'theme', in which articles show up in multiple disparate feeds and sources?) about the struggle that much of Western Europe is having with their health care systems, and the effect that an increased flow of refugees has had upon them. In parts of Sweden, overcrowding and a lack of funding has actually led health care groups to start giving rural families lessons on how to deliver a baby by themselves.

Now, Western Europe is learning a lesson that I learned in childhood. I did not grow up in a wealthy family. Actually, I grew up in a family that bounced back and forth between working poor and lower-middle class. At some times, we were actually quite poor by U.S. standards. We never lacked food, shelter, clothing, or medical care, however, and we actually had a fair number of nice toys. How did we do it? My mother prioritized, and she passed down that skill to us. In fact, I learned to prioritize, myself, as a child, for the toys that I wanted. I knew for a fact that I could not have all of the toys I wanted. I taught myself to think about what I wanted, check the prices, consider our family situation, and place all of my energies towards begging specifically for the subset of toys where "they can afford it" crossed with "I want it most". I found that, if I did that, I would pretty reliably wind up with what I wanted most on my birthday and Christmas, and I could build up my toybox over time on these principles. This served me well when I started earning my own money.

What happens when we look at the issues of immigration and single-payer together? Actually, I was able to come up with a chart that gave me an interesting view of the political philosophies and their response to these two issues. It is doubly interesting when I view these two issues as mutually exclusive in that we simply cannot, as a country and a society, afford both of them.

Conservatives oppose both open borders and single-payer health care. Why choose between two burdens upon the society?

Libertarians (large-L on purpose, as libertarians differ widely and overlap with conservatives) are in favor of open borders, but oppose single-payer health care. This is generally on principle, though some have tried to explain how it would still work when reality is applied.

Moderates want to kind of half-do both things; open up immigration further without inadvertently letting in the gang members and human traffickers, and have government-paid/government-involved health care without making it an actual universal social welfare program. As is usual for treading the very line of a fence without falling to either side, it's a very delicate balancing point with a very narrow margin for error.

Liberals want to do both, Western Europe be hanged (unless they're using it as an example that is, at this point, largely imaginary).

Now here's the interesting part. From what I've seen and read, there's a new (tiny) faction to consider, the one that actually deserves the badly misapplied label "Alt Right". And their stance is distinct from the rest. They seem to approve single-payer, but oppose open borders; in fact, they seem to oppose all immigration and all citizenship by people who are not white. Ironically, the system they desire is like the one that is breaking down in Sweden. Conservatives have oft celebrated the fact that our system works best in our country because of the great diversity of peoples and cultures; the Alt Right would sacrifice diversity in favor of socialism, while the Liberals seem determined against all notions of reality to force both to happen.