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December 2005 |
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December 9, 2005 "Thou shalt not bear false witness" Lost souls make a living by bearing false witness. They are the reason that God wants the news media to exist. They very publicly show us some of the people who are trading their souls for wealth and power. Except for the occasional emergency, the evening news is a wonderful parade of well-rehearsed prevaricators who seek funding as they pretend to solve imaginary problems. One of their biggest collections of lies purport to be concerned with the environment. Such lies magnify or invent purely imaginary problems like global warming, ozone holes, and carbon dioxide. The solutions for such problems involve higher fees and taxes, some of which filter to the very speaker to pay for the soul he has sold. Other groups of lies are told about imaginary dangers to a society and its people. They include fuel shortages, lack of funds for education, smoking, cholesterol, diet, exercise, and drugs. Each spokesman offers a cure that makes their group more money. Since every human activity has a downside, they replace every joy with worry, each happiness with brooding, and cheer is burned away by bitterness. The lost souls have to live with their self-inflicted unhappiness. Worse, they know that everything they say is a lie about a lie. The emptiness of knowing that one's life is a blatant fraud makes such a person angry with himself. That anger makes them want to destroy everything that is true or good. No wonder they're so bitter. It's hard to love them, but what else can we do? It's no surprise to Catholic Fundamentalists that they hate The Church that preaches love and truth more than anything in creation.
December 13, 2005 Plots and counterplots are all around us. The most successful plotters on the other side have convinced many that the destruction of unborn children is an exercise of Constitutional rights. Part of their plan has been to favorably label those in favor of such murder as "pro-choice", as if they are participating in an important fight for freedom. Such lovers of death have government funding; the assets of huge, largely untaxed foundations; and a wholly-owned media on their side. The oldest, most consistent force on the side of life is the Roman Catholic Church. There is no hedging about its love of life and her teaching that life begins at conception. Many of us have been confused by the other side, and led into accepting the destruction of life as the other side cunningly defines it as only existing ever farther from conception. It is our fault if we have been led astray, but most of us are easily confused by those who endlessly tell us that they speak the truth. If we have ever supported by word or deed those who destroy life, the same Church that loves life also has a Sacrament powerful enough to forgive us our sins. No point in waiting.
December 14, 2005 Bribes and Payoffs. Bribes have always been a part of government. Some bribes are under the table, others are highly visible. Greeks, Persians, Egyptian, Roman and Holy Roman Empires, monarchies, oligarchies, democracies, communists, capitalists, or socialists, all government decisions are always influenced by bribes. Both Herodotus and Plutarch offer endless instances of Persian gold corrupting Western democracies. Some things never change. Catholic Fundamentalists get into the habit of studying both briber and bribee to get a fuller understanding of the world around them. Some bribes are easy to spot. For instance, petroleum products are expensive. Yet, the number of refiners and drillers never seem to grow enough to get the prices lower. Why not? Bribes. Most people with above average intellect think that it is environmentalists who keep refineries from being built and keep wells from being drilled. Catholic Fundamentalists understand that drillers and refiners, and their stockholders, profit from scarcity. Oil profiteers don't want so many more wells that prices might go down. Oil profiteers cause scarcity in petroleum products. "Enlightened stockholders" take money from the very dividends the oil companies pay to them and give some to environmentalists. The environmentalists obediently rant and rave about anything that will convince people to not drill. "Protect the elk, caribou, polar bears, walruses, seals, snowshoe rabbits, pristine wilderness! Do not drill, ride bikes." Even while they are complaining, rich environments own fleets of jets, SUVs, motor boats, and cathedral-sized homes that use billions of BTUs to move, heat, and cool. (Note to Catholic Fundamentalists: do not call them "hypocrites"! If you call the poor things names, they become more deeply entangled in their lies and their ravaged souls have an even harder time finding God.) Stockholders make far more money when their paid environmentalists produce more scarcity. That increases profit margins, which increases dividends, which gives them more money to pay off more environmentalists to make them even richer. Those who vote against drilling for environmental reasons should always be assumed to be bribed by Arabian and other drilling interests, sometimes their own. Once we understand this simple example, Catholic Fundamentalists know who needs love the most. Others understand, and slowly go mad as they grow to see that we live in a sea of bribers bribing simultaneously.
Saturday, December 24, 2005 Bribes and bribers everywhere. To see how big the Sea of Bribery is, we understand that this broad overview of energy-related bribes and payoffs can be further subdivided. Groups within the energy producing community fight against each other with smaller, self-serving bribes to cause favorable legislation. Coal suppliers, for instance, pay a sub-group of environmentalists to bewail the problem of storing nuclear waste, which they've made nearly impossible. Nuclear power advocates use their own environmental sub-groups to complain about the dangers of air pollution and particulates in the air that come from burning coal. Natural gas advocates have their own sub-group of environmental activists to "prove" that gas is the cleanest fuel. All environmentalists combine to keep anyone from being able to have their own tiny reactor, or drill their own gas or oil well at a reasonable price. They especially hate the idea of breeder reactors providing virtually free power for every electricity user in the world. "Too radical!". All such groups tap into the anger of people driven by hate, who quickly rise to the top of such organizations. They want to stop all progress at any cost. Bribes flow to legislators, lobbyists, and finally destroy free markets. Democracy turns into oligarchy (at one time, seven families controlled nearly all the economic activity in what had been the Roman Republic) when wealthy groups can bribe into existence specially tailored legislation. When legislators can't be bribed to override the public good, readily bribable judges are another prong of attack for special interests. Easily bribed judges are said to be "progressive", as bribes and lies walk hand in hand down the broad paths to destruction. We have to study the beings in the Sea of Bribery. It does no one any good to say "we love our enemies" when we're too ignorant to know who our enemies are and how desperate they are to control their precious little bits of created matter.
December 26, 2005 Complex Frauds In every age, every people is continually ravaged by foreign and domestic fraudsters. In America, fraud-based government quickly followed a brief "idealistic period", echoing the same downward spiral that destroyed Athens, Sparta, Israel, and Rome. To be effective in raising taxes, fraud must be based on fear. "The ozone hole will cause cancer and death. So will second-hand smoke, too much salt, too little salt, alar, sunshine, freon, chocolate, alcohol, x-rays, antibiotics, industry, agriculture, etc. If we are not killed with chemicals and radiation, we will be destroyed by foreign terrorists. They are poor people who are right to be angry with us for having so much. Our group can save the world from some of these problems, but we need additional funding and controls to be truly effective." Another type of fraud is based on the grossest deception. "We know that SAT scores are going down. We have cured the problem by recentering the tests." Deception often morphs into fear. "If we do not raise taxes to provide better public education, we will be destroyed by future inability to understand math, science, and engineering." Catholic Fundamentalists automatically assume that anything they hear on government controlled frequencies, aside from the first minutes of actual disasters, has been edited to maximize profit to favored groups of exaggerators. Actual disasters, like tsunamis, are quickly converted to propaganda for various alarmist groups. What one Catholic writer once said about a far-left author, "Everything she says is a lie, including the 'ands' and the 'thes." usually applies to all media. All the time.
December 27, 2005 Money and taxes.
Money is a human form of energy. Taxation is the taking of energy from those who have it by those who can take it. The more powerful the tax collectors' weapons, compared with those of the taxpayers, the more they can take. Taxing authorities want more powerful weapons for themselves, and no weapons at all for taxpayers. Those most helplessly addicted to taxes want to disarm all taxpayers. Extreme taxing authorities, like Pol Pot, know they aren't going to last long, so they take everything they can get, including whatever lives are necessary to keep everyone else in obedience. Pol Pots and Fidel Castros spend more on guards and guns, their people lose enthusiasm for all work, and revolution is always right around the corner. There's another extreme. People with no tax rates, like the United States in the heady days between the Revolution and the adoption of The Constitution, thrive when left with all their own money to spend and invest. Taxing authorities with long-term views try to find a tax rate at which they can keep people working, and paying, in the most economical way. A few sticks and lots of carrots work better than all sticks and no carrots. Taxation is easier in Christian countries. There, believers either obey Jesus Christ or disobey Him. The smarter ones combine "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" with His bizarre "love your enemies" idea, and are doubly encouraged to give Caesar the little bits of created matter and energy that he's so desperate to get. Taxing authorities in Christian countries know that if they can get people to sign a tax form swearing they have told the truth, they know many people will not bear false witness, violating an order from Jesus. So, in Christian countries, tax collection is easier. Taxing authorities know this. The worst of them hate it. "People must pay taxes because we are all powerful, not because there is someone more powerful than we who tells them to pay. Christianity makes us look like spoiled children who have to be mollified in the hopes we'll grow up. We are much, much more than that!" The phrase "body politic" has meaning to those who take things literally. We know that a living body with too little muscle to move its fat around will die. The worst tax collectors don't care. All tax collectors are merely front men. They are empowered by those who run the government. In modern democracies, public sector unions are highly organized, and usually determine who is going to be elected, thereby controlling the government. Their elected minions set tax rates, and their employees enforce it. Their operations are always in favor of the tax collector. Love them all. It's the only way we can help them overcome the hostile feelings many of them have toward the taxpayers whom all of them need to ravage to survive.
December 28, 2005. Time is money.
Public Educators are skilled at manipulating time. They know that the children of complaining parents get older every year and will soon be gone. So, they've learned to "study" problems. Such studies will last until the child has left the premises, and the parent has to deal with a whole new school, which will happily busy themselves "studying" the problem. When they need to manifest their power, bureaucrats greatly extend the time that can be lost to prison sentences. Whole lifetimes are wasted when people are over-sentenced for petty crimes so that bureaucrats can demonstrate their strength. Time is also manipulated by public sector unions. "We are asking for very small raises, but we do need for our pensions to be 'fairer'. It won't cost anything, now." But, like a tsunami, a wave of pension obligations will come rolling down upon the taxpayers, washing many of them away because time was used against them. We each have about 25,000 days to live. We will each have about 10,000 workdays taken from us in order to pay taxes to those with the power to collect them. Time is money. Loving those who steal it from us is one of Christ's challenges that Catholic Fundamentalists try to take. |