This month's columns will explore the function of government.  Many liberals want government to be bigger.  Many conservatives want government to be smaller.  Few in either group understand the prime function of any government.  Even fewer understand the effects of automation on government and its duty:

Thursday, January 1, 2009

 

Catholic Fundamentalists understand that one of the first functions of any government is to build streets.  As soon as streets are needed, someone will emerge to "take charge".  Taxes, or labor, will be confiscated to build them.   After people have streets, their government's second, and more enduring, function emerges.  It must keep people off the streets.  Babylonians forced tens of thousands to build huge irrigation works to keep people off their streets.   Egyptians kept them busy building pyramids. Greeks erected temples. Romans, roads. The Chinese built walls and dug canals. Americans put a man on the moon. These activities kept people off the streets like never before. Wherever we travel, the most memorable things we see are all the ways that governments kept, and keep, their citizens off the streets.

 

People who roam around the streets make trouble. They have to be killed, enslaved, jailed, or be armed and sent to places to fight and kill other people who are being kept busy doing the same thing. The governments that don't do that effectively are either destroyed by their own unemployed, or they are invaded and destroyed by the unemployed of other governments. So, governments learned that they had to have armed forces, to keep foreigners off their streets.  At the same time they need police to keep their own people off their streets.

 

When governments fail in their prime mission, street control, wars begin. Governments that don't keep their people busy, busy, busy are destroyed. Usually, their people end up being killed or enslaved.

 

Governments try to rely on "jobs" and "work" to keep people busy.  But, people in freer countries are always trying to make money by inventing and making things to reduce the number of workers needed to do every private sector job that's being done. When they invent dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, corn and cotton pickers, assembly lines, and robots, ever more people are made unemployed.   So, governments invented schools, colleges, and universities to keep many who would otherwise be unemployed off the streets for whole decades of their lives.

 

Governments hate labor-saving devices, because they know that more people will have nothing to do. At the same time, inventions like machine guns, poison gas, and atomic bombs have the ability to quickly remove very large numbers of people from the streets. Governments whose people can invent and make things that rapidly remove people from the streets have a tremendous advantage, so smarter countries always provide encouragement to many of the smarter people inventing and making things.

 

It keeps them off the street, too.

 

 

Thursday, January 1, 2009

                                                    Lots of ways to keep people off the streets.

Slaughter was the first method used to keep people off the street. Wholesale slaughter eliminates all sorts of enemies, both foreign and domestic.  And, it scares survivors into obedience.  It also reduces the number of people who have to be fed and housed by inefficient systems.  Slaughter became unpopular as it was discovered that it loses the income opportunities that slavery provides. 

 

More enlightened countries learned to kill those who might cause trouble, and sell the rest into slavery. Slave sales would often generate enough income to pay for the war that captured them, so slavery became institutionalized in the more modern countries of the ancient world.  Slaves, however, tended to hang out on the streets in their free time.  Often, they would revolt. The amount of money spent on internal security to keep slaves from rebellion soon soaked up much of the profits that slaves generated.

 

More dangerous to established systems, slaves could be promised "freedom" by various radical egomaniacs who wanted to take over the functions of street control, because every element street control is especially pleasing to the vain.   Established street controllers knew that slaves could be relied upon to support any radical group that encouraged their freedom.  People who say "I think the slaves should be free!" sometimes get into power.  They end up killing many more than the street-controllers they replace would have dreamed of slaughtering.

 

Today, all modern governments solemnly announce that they have "freed" their people. Then, they tax their pants off. In order to get money, or have a safe place to live outside the hellholes of public housing, people are forced to engage in taxable activities, which keeps them too busy to make trouble.

 

A problem with keeping people off the streets by having them make things arose when making things became increasingly automated.  Automated production replaced millions of workers with thousands of machines.  Early industrialists, for instance, automated fabric production and assembly.  As soon as a nation could automate its fabric production, it put large numbers of people in cottage industries out of work.  Many unemployed cottage workers were put in uniforms (made by automated fabric production methods) and sent to invade other countries whose backward means of production kept hundreds of thousands of people off the front lines, doing what a few dozen machines could do better.  The British Empire was built at the points of bayonets carried bravely into battle by soldiers whose livelihoods had been destroyed by automating production in metal, wood, fabric, and food.

 

The biggest advances in mining, smelting, refining, and metal work replaced millions of village smithies who worked with gold, silver, tin, and iron. Soon, one or two big mills could turn out what thousands of little operations had been producing.  The "newly unneeded" had no jobs, no prospects, and no hope.  As long as teamsters could be replaced with truck drivers and truck makers, and as long as farmers made unemployed by agricultural machinery could find factory jobs, and as long as unemployed bakers (The National Biscuit Company put countless small bakeries out of business) could find jobs in other places, people were too busy looking for work to make trouble.  They didn't even mind the slow, steady erosion of their assets by ever-higher taxes.

 

Friday, January 2, 2009

                             Schools and universities keep people off the streets more cheaply than prisons.

     When early fabric mills replaced home spinning wheels and looms, lots of newly unemployed children were hired to work in those mills.  As those mills either automated or moved to areas of cheaper labor, children who worked in such factories had nothing to do.  To keep them off the street, and provide jobs for teachers and administrators who, after all, had gone to "college" and thought they had a right to have a good job that kept them off the street, cries for "public education" expanded quickly. 

     By WWI, most American children were in public schools that taught them so well that high school graduates could generally do geometry, trig, solve quadratic equations, do calculus, survey fields, read and write Latin and sometimes Greek, had read widely in history, knew geography, and were more knowledgeable than most of today's college graduates.

     The relentless march of automation, combined with electrification and internal combustion engines, let ever fewer people produce ever more goods and services.   By 1960, "keep 'em off the streets longer" movements were in place that accelerated the "dumbing down" of students, forcing them to largely waste another four years in colleges and universities to meet the "vital, new requirements" for many jobs.  At the same time, increasing and utterly imaginary "certification" needs made it necessary to spend an additional two years in school to get a "masters degree" that qualified the recipients for the further "certification requirements " for favorable employment status in ever more useless jobs, keeping them off the streets for even longer times.  This was accompanied by a plethora of "doctorates" that qualified even fewer, and ever dumber, people for even higher paying jobs.  Today, many people are kept off the streets until they're in their mid-thirties.  

     Now, many students spend a quarter of their lives attending "schools" of increasing uselessness.  They were successfully kept off the streets while in "school" and are ususally paralyzed by crippling debt when they graduate.  These processes were also designed to keep them from having more children during prime child-bearing years, another way of keeping more people off the street.  Western governments were so successful in permanently removing generations of children from the streets that streams of what were hoped to be more docile immigrants had to be imported to do much of the actual work that those locked away in various colleges and universities were no longer in a position, or thought they were "too good" to do.

 

Saturday, January 3, 2009

                                          Sometimes, keeping people on the streets is important.

     Governments that succeed in keeping people off the streets become a funding mechanism for the vain and lazy.  To stay in power, they pretend to "care deeply" about "fairness" .  That motivates them to pretend that they care about people.  Decreasing numbers of people believe such claptrap.

     When officials need money to make investments to buy off newly organized groups of "protesters", "demonstrations" are scripted.  "News" about "the importance of fairness" is widely broadcast to the largely bewildered and increasingly uncaring wider populace by a media hired to convince people that their taxes should be raised for "compelling reasons of fairness".

     When governments need cheap labor, demonstrations about "the rights of immigrants" become popular.  When governments need to reduce their outflows to established fund recipients, "demonstrations to defend the rights of the truly disenfranchised" are orchestrated.

     No one who will encourage the rights of any group to be free or left alone is encouraged to demonstrate.  If they do, the "news" will follow government orders.  Those directives are always the same.  The media will either ignore them, or quickly brand them as "crackpots" and "radicals".  Governments prefer that any beliefs that may undermine or lessen its power be removed.  All governments encourage attacks on those who think that there is a higher power than government.

     Another reason for allowing, and, even encouraging, demonstrations is twofold.  It allows the established powers to create leaders and then remove them from the demonstrating group by welcoming them into the establishment.  Suddenly, organized groups are leaderless, and, like a headless chicken, thrash about until they disappear, often with the help of those who've been successfully co-opted.  This is a road that can lead someone who successfully organizes various groups all the way to establishment leadership. 

                                                         Be thankful for your government.

     Catholic Fundamentalists believe that we should be thankful for the funding mechanisms that support the vain and lazy who rule us and launch their endless attacks upon us.  Without them, we would have no battle against the lower spiritual orders.  Without that battle, it is impossible for us to save our souls.  Governments, especially oppressive ones, are a great gift.  As St. Columban explained, "Without a battle, there is no victory.  Without a victory, there is no crown."  So, we should be happy to be maligned, insulted, impoverished, and denigrated by our governments, even as they labor mightily to destroy all that is good and decent. 

     Some say that we should pray for the strength to stand for His truth so strongly that we end up being killed, loving those who kill us as they do so, thus ensuring an eternity of joy.  That is much easier to say than to do.

 

Sunday, January 4, 2009

                                                              The worst governments.

     The less intelligent, and, therefore, the less enlightened, leaders of governments still have not renounced slaughter as a way to keep people off the streets.  They are not, themselves, bright enough to understand that the best way to maintain themselves in power is to provide little spaces of freedom on their well-controlled streets.  Those like the Castros, Mugabe, Stalin, and other murderous tyrants are so overwhelmed by vanity that they would rather die than lose even that tiny bit of power.

     The perfect example of how hate-filled leftists destroy themselves with the death they love occurred when Jim Jones had 900 of his followers take themselves completely off the street when he thought his tiny government was threatened.

 

Sunday, January 4, 2008

                                        The two major economic dislocations from 1928 to 2008.

     In the 1920 Census, Congressmen were shocked.  They suddenly discovered that many of the rural residents in their districts had vanished.  Many Congressmen voted into office in 1920 should not have been re-elected because their districts had lost so many people.  "How ya' gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" was one interpretation of the reasons for the huge shift in population.

     The real reasons were simpler.  Tractors pulling bigger plows had begun replacing farm workers.  Horses, and the need for taking care of them, their complicated harnesses, and the manure removal were disappearing.  Each horse replaced by a tractor left a hired man unemployed.

     The disappearance of rural residents during and after WWI had been noticed and thought to be temporary, related to the manpower needs of the "war to end all wars".  The 1920 Census showed that years after the war ended, many never returned to their homes.  Instead, rural men whose jobs were eliminated by the mechanization of agriculture moved to cities for jobs in factories.  Rural women moved to urban areas for jobs as operators in telephone exchanges, which followed the need for telegraphers, humanity's first very first large-scale occupation related to electron flow.

     Redistricting had to wait a couple of years, since no Congressman wanted to lose his office earlier than necessary, but the population shifts were quickly reflected with new Congressional districts.  The "Roaring Twenties" followed.  As agriculture continued to need fewer people, manufacturing boomed in America, which easily competed with the shattered European governments that had kept people off the streets by marching a generation of young men into each others' machine guns.

    Peace brought additional problems to agriculture.  The huge profits that many farmers in the Americas had made during and after WWI came from selling agricultural produce at high prices to a war-ravaged Europe.  The need for American, Canadian, and Argentinean foodstuffs began to disappear as European farms came back on line. 

     European farm output was also increased by its own rapid agricultural mechanization.  A largely Catholic, pre-birth control Europe, despite the slaughters in the trenches, soon found itself flooded with excess food and labor.  The price of both quickly dropped.  Soon, vast food surpluses in North America, never-again-to-boom Argentina, and Europe began to pile up, causing the price of agricultural commodities to collapse.  The farmers, of course, had incurred huge debts to buy and clear more land, purchase far more expensive mechanized equipment, and those debts could not be paid. 

     Depression followed, spreading from farms to main streets to Wall Street.  A similar dislocation has happened in our own time.

     Today, in 2008, we've gone through a similar "boom" caused by greatly increased control, and speed, of electron flows.  Replacing paper and ink with elections has put the vast print/paper segments of all economies into various stages of collapse.  The magnitude of this process has not been fully understood, especially by those whose involvement in it has led them to fearfully ignore the effects of a technology revolution that many of them heralded on their own laptops and computers, on their own financial stability.

      Libraries, newspapers, magazines, books, textbooks at every level, map makers, and all the print/paper accompanying processes and businesses from pulp manufacture to printing, folding, and binding are at the same near-disappearance level as horse breeders and buggy whip makers were in 1920.  The effects of their demise are now being writ large in our everyday lives.  Even the world's Postal Services, early governmental agencies devoted to subsidizing distribution for the print/paper sectors, are increasingly useless.

     As farmers began to be addicted to subsidies three generations ago, the government is now being asked to subsidize newspapers, magazines, and everyone else in the print/paper enterprises.  They finally understand that their days are so numbered that the only way they can maintain their cash flows is to take money directly from their neighbors. 

     When this subsidization occurs, and it will, their credibility as independent observers, already in question, will continue to plummet, thus reducing their perceived value, ensuring and accelerating their demise.   "They're worse'n farmers.", most people say when they see another hand reaching into the huge, government pie. 

                 The bust in print/paper industries was accompanied, and magnified, by "fair housing".

     America's leading leftists complained long and loudly about the "unfairness" in housing.  Many of their clients were sick and tired of living in the snakepits of Public Housing.  Many, particularly the smarter and more vocal, were increasingly endangered by living in the free, collective housing whose artifically low cost had once been sufficient bribe to drag them into the welfare state.

     After being encouraged by those who "only wanted them to be treated fairly", they decided that they wanted to "realize the American dream", which is usually defined as whatever can be promised to get the most votes.  "True fairness" was quickly legislated to help those who "wanted to own their own homes".  The vast Public Education Empire, funded largely by real estate taxes, added their powerful voice to this latest "change".  They counted on getting additional real estate tax revenue they'd get if they could convert occupants of tax-free public housing into payers of the property taxes they needed.   Suddenly, people who couldn't afford to pay rent found themselves with mortgages that bankers who knew better were forced to provide. 

     When those mortgages began to go bad, banks found themselves in the trouble they knew would come.  They tried combining mortgages, selling them in "bundles", and doing everything but write them off, but they could not make sows' ears into silk purses.  From California to Cleveland to Florida, more homes were suddenly for sale than ever.   Housing values began to plummet.  Bankruptcies mounted.  Banks went under.  Home construction came to a near-standstill.  Unemployment hit bankers and builders hard.

     There is no real problem with either the collapse of the print/paper sectors of the economy or with the sudden unaffordability of so many mortgages.  The inevitable "prop-ups" of both will soon stop.  It may disappear as the realization that highly paid executives are still getting their grotesquely high salaries precipitates an outpouring of anger that will slowly reduce subsidization of both industries.

     The underlying industries in print/paper have absolutely no underlying value.  Their assets are becoming more worthless every day.  But, houses are houses, and there will always be buyers for them.

 

Monday, January 5, 2009

                                   Governments' weirdest way of keeping people off the streets:

     After Rome collapsed, it took a few centuries for the Roman Catholic Church to spread throughout most of Europe.  Technologically, this was The Iron Age.  Iron Age technologies stayed pretty much the same from before the birth of Christ until the 1900s.

     The Roman Catholic Church was involved in many secular activities.  Scriptoriums in her monasteries produced most of the books, Her hospitals took care of nearly all the sick, and Her schools educated nearly all the literate.  In many areas, monasteries offered the only rooms and food available for travelers.  Each of these endeavors required land and labor, much of which was provided by monasteries and convents.

    It was the strangest thing that had ever happened.  Governments helped The Church because it helped keep people off the streets by encouraging holy men and women to take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.  Even stranger, those who took the necessary vows were encouraged, and paid, to pray; often for the souls of the very kings, nobles, and other government officials who'd facilitated the building of those monasteries and convents.

     By praying for others, Catholics got their own souls into Heaven.  When their prayers landed in the Golden Bowls held by the Twenty Four Elders who sit around the Throne of God, many went onto the Altar of God, and were answered, thus perpetuating the system that encouraged them.

     Modern governments don't like any part of that idea.  Many of them would rather that their own souls suffer endlessly in Hell than do anything to help other souls get into Heaven.  Still, we can look back, and wonder if there weren't some advantages to a system that encouraged people to love their neighbors, tell the truth, pray to God, and only have to pay ten percent of their income in taxes.

 

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

                        Governments love imaginary problems.  They provide excuses for expansion. 

     Before 1928, there had been dozens of recessions, "panics", and economic ups and downs.  In 1928, the word went out:  "Let's not miss another chance to really help!".  To make the 1928 recession bad enough to justify massive, needless intrusion, the American government just stopped printing money.  At the same time, it stopped international trade with protectionist treaties.  As planned, they succeeded in destroying whole sectors of the economy. 

     Soon, what had been the usual downturn was transformed into a full-fledged, world-wide depression.  It lasted until the desires for even bigger government launched us into WWII.  After that war, the government engineered a "cold war" with Russia, partly because Communism was spreading its virulent hatred, slaughters, and deportations all over Europe, and partly to maintain high levels of taxes.  At no time could Russia have actually won a war with the United States, but having the Russian Bear for a deadly enemy provided endless excuses for more spending.

     By the end of the 1980s, Russia's slave-economy had fallen so far behind that it could do nothing but collapse.  So, it did.  Our government was concerned.  Suddenly, there was no depression, there was no "hot" war, there was no "cold" war, there was nothing at all for anyone to worry about. 

     Desperately rooting around for something to use as an excuse for its swollen size to seem necessary, our government made a succession of imaginary problems out of various kinds of "deadly pollution".  Everything from mercury to ozone to carbon dioxide became a "pollutant".  Lots of things got cleaned up.  The entire town of Times Beach and the neighborhoods around the Love Canal were bulldozed into an oblivion that could only be accomplished by a government fighting a vicious war against its own people.  Those who knew what was going on realized that if they complained about such lunacy, reasons for their own towns' destruction could quickly be invented.  But, few well-adjusted people could be convinced that such actions were justifiable.  Once the EPA had arranged for all the funding that it was going to be allowed, the "war" on pollution was put on the back burner.  

     Other groups wanted government jobs.  So, Global Freezing was run up the flagpole.  Unfortunately, this was at the bottom of a solar cycle.  Soon, the sun started to warm up things.  As a result, Global Freezing melted away. Its supporters quickly made a total reversal, and proclaimed that "Global Warming is the "real problem".  "This is our big chance.", those who make money from imaginary problems told each other.  "We've got to make it stick!"

     This was a Really Big Lie, accompanied by endless funding.  Smarter, more honest people quickly saw that Global Warming was more self-serving nonsense to justify government takeover of power generation.  They were proven to be right as the last solar cycle, #23, began to wind down and earth's temperatures began to drop.  A vast fraud, one that involved skewing the temperatures recorded by thousands of temperature sensors, was put into effect.  The internet suddenly emerged as a political force.  People saw pictures of the sensors, and all could see how they had been sited (some, on or next to, black, heat-absorbing asphalt) in order to produce the desired results.  Real scientists began to recognize what ordinary citizens had seen all along, and say "Hogwash!" in increasing numbers, despite the desperate, near-hysterical protestations of those who received billions of dollars for "research" that "proved" Global Warming to be a danger.

     Ever fewer people were dumb enough to believe in Global Warming as global temperatures began to plummet with the end of Solar Cycle 23.  Now, even scientists, journalists, and pundits are beginning to publicly question the moral and intellectual levels of those involved in Global Warming.

     As Global Warming disappears from credible thought, other imaginary problems are being explored.  The "epidemic of obesity" is very popular among agencies desperate for something they can do to "help".  It does not seem to exist.  It's "bad effects" seem to work in reverse.  Thin people are dying at younger ages than the moderately overweight, who are being re-defined as "obese". 

     There have been lots and lots of vitamin lies.  Billions of people take what's growing into an entire alphabet of vitamins.  Studies involving hundreds of thousands of people found that placebo and vitamin takers live about as long, except for the cases that showed vitamin takers died more quickly.

     "Second-hand smoke" was another successful imaginary problem, justifying billions in spending and countless decibels of outrage.  But, once public smoking was largely stopped, there weren't a lot of other opportunities for more taxing and spending.  A brief flurry about the "dangers of 3rd hand smoke" has found few people gullible enough to take it seriously.

     Many are still concerned about "food pollution", but those lies aren't gaining much traction.  No one is overly concerned about the rapidly recurring "salt and sugar" lies.  Neither are the recurring vaccination lies being taken seriously.  What's an alarmist to do?  More lies are necessary.  Elsewhere on this site, The Lie Committees are hard at work.

 

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

                                                    The Catholic Fundamentalism advantage.

     Since we understand that God can program particles, and compile them into systems and beings, we have the advantage of seeing that He simply programmed everything, including our minds, to give us free will.  When we see the endless lies that many of those dependent on government funding tell to hold and increase their powers, we should immediately say a little prayer for the person telling the lies.

     One wonders if someone who lies as often as, for instance, Al Gore, can have any hope of salvation.  Dante tells us that a last minute request for forgiveness can save even the soul of the most hardened sinners.  As professional prevaricators approach their earthly end, we certainly hope that they will ask He Who programmed them to forgive them for bearing false witness so frequently.  A sample prayer:  "God, I have spent much of my adult life telling one lie after another in order to get more money to buy a lot of things I suddenly realize I didn't really need.  Please, forgive me." 

     Asking for forgiveness is similar to the decision to clean a virus-infected computer disc.  Unless that request is made, and the job is done, the operating system will eventually crash.  Just so with the human soul.  John the Baptist's plea to "Repent!" is still the first step to salvation.

     It's doubtful that many hardened liars will take that step.

 

Thursday, January 8, 2007

                                  The Global Warming lies test both I.Qs and "salvationability".

     Now that we're having the coldest weather in a long time, and now that people can see more of the fraud behind the Global Warming lies, it has turned into an I.Q. test. 

     The smarter one is, the sooner he discovered the lie.  Those who persist in taking Global Warming seriously, especially after all the evidence of outright fraud in weather station placement (some have been put on asphalt runways and other places to guarantee higher temperature readings) and outright statistical bunkum (like that which produced the famed "hockey stick"), rate as near-morons on the I.Q. test of life. 

     Those who continue to believe in the Global Warming lies not only have to doubt their own analytical abilities, but also, their own abilities to know the truth about anything.   "Gosh!", they must say to themselves, "If I wasn't smart enough to see through all this hype, can I ever be right about anything?  Am I a moron?"

     Those who propound the Global Warming lies know that they are intentionally lying.  They must live with the knowledge that they have broken the Commandment "Thou shalt not bear false witness.".  They have reduced their chances of getting into Heaven by the size and numbers of their lies.  But, they do promise to keep more people off the streets doing useless "green work".  This taxing of their neighbors to do things that don't need to be done is a complicated form of theft, making thieves out of all they employ, therefore it is a "compound sin" that anyone with any hope of everlasting joy will shun like the plague that it is.  

 

Friday, January 9, 2008

                                                          Desperate to be considered useful.

     As long as the possibility of being removed from office exists, those dependent on taking money from taxpayers have to appear to be doing something useful.  They created the illusion of "helping" by inventing endless imaginary problems.  "Bees are disappearing." exemplifies the recurring "problems" that fill most of the media output.  Global Warming, the largest of their lies, is another.  New "food pyramids" reappear every few years.  Acid Rain came and went, but still resurfaces periodically. 

     More people understand that the media is largely a system to regurgitate lies to benefit those who control it.  There is little to be gained by paying any attention to "news", except to see where the latest attacks upon us are being launched.  It is not intelligent to repeat or pay attention to such phrases as:  "If only the media would look at this or that or the other thing, they would see both sides."

     Only the simple entertain even lingering beliefs that those who can hire and fire media staffers are more interested in anything resembling truth than in making their employers wealthier.

 

Saturday, January 10, 2009

                                                        Getting new people on the street.

     Most populations shifts, for instance Europeans coming to America, are caused by immigration.  Governments sometimes encourage immigration because they need more people, mostly to replace native populations.

     Today, most immigration comes from Moslem countries to the once Christian countries that have developed large-scale, and now, suicidal, welfare programs.  Arab countries encourage and subsidize this because it gets rid of people who might otherwise take to their streets, demanding more distribution of wealth.

     The easiest way for wealthy Arabs to get rid of those troublemakers is to export them to the West.  That solves the immediate problem of getting them off their streets while destabilizing and impoverishing the countries in which they settle.  Lots of bribes are necessary to get elected officials in the West to destroy their own nations, but they work.

     Spending time in any international airport shows how effective those bribes have been.  Incoming planes disgorge endless numbers of foreign peoples, all of whom have places arranged for them to go.  National borders in the West are now a joke, an open door to all those taking advantage of the bribed officials whose actions encourage the destruction of their own nations and neighbors, in the name of "fairness" and "diversity".

     We may look at them as potential converts to Christianity, but that's made difficult because they move into neighborhoods that are organized to keep them from seeing those in their new countries as anything but enemies, to be destroyed.  Ever more quickly, they turn into saboteurs.  But, what else can we do?

 

Sunday, January 11, 2009

                       Governments only have to keep small numbers off the street to ensure domestic peace.

     It is a universal truism that those who lead riots on any streets will stop if given either money or a job.  The brighter rioters want government jobs.  So, they sidle up to those in a position to transfer money to them, and promise "peace" if they are able to quickly find employment among those who endlessly "study" problems.  Of this group, the smarter ones want their own department, or sub-department, to ensure more permanent funding.  Gradually, the smarter ex-rioters work their way into permanent jobs in the "civil service", many departments of which are neither.

     Deprived of leadership, the mobs quickly evaporate, to be resurrected only when a new group of people seeking tax money re-organizes them, often incorporating the word "new" into their title.  Most low-level members of the group get little out of it, except the opportunity for drugs, theft without jail, and sex.  That's all they want, that's all they get.

     Interestingly, once they're established with secure cash flows, those who led the earlier groups of rioters will cheerfully shoot successive waves of rioters down like dogs.

 

Monday, January 12, 2009

                                                                        Flows.

     Catholic Fundamentalists understand that an important part of The Programmer's work involves the transfer of energy in ways that we human programs generally lack the ability to fully understand.  Generally, energy flows from areas that He has programmed to produce large amounts of energy to areas of low energy.  Human users of light bulbs, for instance, duplicate, in a tiny way, God's Sun Program, and use devices that turn energy into light and use it to illuminate places where there's less light.

     Water in the atmosphere flows in more complicated ways.  Water, in liquid form, generally flows downhill.  In its magnificently complicated program, it can also exist in a gaseous state, during which it flow upwards, downwards, or sideways.  In its solid form, ice generally moves downhill.  (What started as a simple entry was made more difficult by a short road trip on snowy roads from which I just returned.  A couple of hours ago, I think I inadvertently ran over a squirrel that I thought had moved out of the way of my car.  After turning around and coming back the way I'd gone, I saw by the tire tracks in the snow that I had accidentally run over it.  It had made it through a summer without getting eaten by a hawk, fox, or parasite, and had gotten halfway through a very cold, rural winter.  I feel so bad about having run over it that I can hardly concentrate on this.)  But, as I look out my window (still thinking about the poor squirrel, another of which was running through the woods with an ear of corn the two of them had probably planned to eat, and realizing, with relief, that it was already dead before I ran over it, which is why it didn't get out of the way as I thought it would, since I was going less than 10mph.), I see snowflakes swirling upwards, downwards, and sideways, seemingly less affected by gravity, at least in the short term, than by air flow.

     Flows are complicated, and sometimes reversed, by friction with the surfaces that contain them.  Along the sides and bottoms of rivers, a surprising amount of water remains stationary, and some actually flows upstream in the innumerable eddies that are characteristic of all laminar flow, whether in pipes or rivers. 

     As Catholic Fundamentalists, we know we are always living in nations in various stages of collapse.  Picturing the river eddies that move upstream, or remain stationary, we may picture a way to avoid being swept downstream and pray to find such a place where we may be safer from being washed away.

     While the residents of Jerusalem were being wiped out by a flow of God's energy focused against them by His agents, Vespasian and Titus, the early Christians found a place to escape the annihilating flow by moving to the tiny backwater town of Pella.

 

Tuesday, January 13, 2008

                             Organs and tumors help Catholic Fundamentalists understand the economy.

     Lots of people are worried about what is going on around them.  Businesses are laying off workers, taxes are going up, foreclosures are increasing, values are dropping, and jobs are disappearing.  Gleeful promises of "bailouts" fill the air.  Longer lines of people with their hands out are appearing at the first sight of money, justifying their own reasons to be bailed out.

     The problem, in a nutshell, is institutionalized fraud.  We can understand the fraud and its effects by comparing fraud to tumors.  We imagine an animal, (the squirrel in a prior column comes to mind), and can visualize its living body as "an economy".  It has to eat, drink, maintain body temperature, and reproduce.  All the while, it has to fight parasitic enemies within and predators without.

     If a squirrel has a tumor, it becomes weaker as the tumor grows.  Its tumor, like its host, is a living being that wants to survive.  Tumors in that they are organisms that lack the self-control to reduce their own growth in order to help the body in which they live to survive.  If it grows excessively, it will kill the animal in which it lives.  If the tumor grows to the size of an acorn, the squirrel will no longer be able to run and jump fast and far enough to escape the weasels that prey on it.  The tumor will die with the squirrel whose death it caused.  If that tumor could talk, its dying words would be to blame the squirrel for what went wrong.

     When we understand that basic principle, we turn from the squirrel to consider the far larger elephant.  An elephant could carry a hundred, a thousand, maybe five thousand tumors of the size that killed the squirrel.  As each of those tumors grows within it, and the tumors do try to destroy each other, the seemingly healthy elephant reaches a "tipping point".  Suddenly, it is gone, either killed by its own internal collapse or so weakened that it becomes easy prey for poachers, predators, or other elephants.

     A "body politic" is so named because any political organization has similarities to a living body.  The only difference between a parasitic tumor in a body politic and one that is in the squirrel or elephant is that the tumor in the body politic can talk and lie.  As long as the "talking tumors" can keep people from the painful operations that are needed to remove them, they will grow until the body politic dies from their accumulated drains upon it.

 

Wednesday, January 14, 2008

                     Each living body, and each political body, is composed of tumors and healthy organs.

     We can see that every living body has organs and organisms to defend itself.  Therefore, those involved in the defense of the body politic, like the white blood cells in our own bodies, may be considered useful.  Their usefulness may be judged by their effectiveness.  A squad of soldiers fighting a modern war with flintlock rifles would not be useful.  That same group, armed with modern missiles, would provide an effective deterrent.

     Each of our own bodies requires energy.  In a body politic, those who provide the cheapest, cleanest energy are useful components.  Those who interfere with that are tumor-types.

     Our bodies require food, water, and elimination of both.  Those who supply calories and liquids to the body politic, and those who get rid of waste, provide a useful service.  The tumor-types do whatever they can to disrupt or complicate those process so that they may grow by attaching themselves to the necessary processes.

     Warm-blooded bodies have to move around.  In the body politic, those who facilitate the easy movement of people, goods, and services provide a valuable service.  The tumor-types tend to want to slow down, tax, or excessively regulate easy transfers of people, goods, energy, information, and materials within a body politic.

     Those who live must learn about the world in which they live.  In a body-politic, those who teach provide a valuable service.  The tumor-types among them do not want people to learn enough to take care of themselves.  They use the educational process to keep others in the body politic from learning much about anything.

     In a body politic, those who want to conserve, protect, and defend the political body in which they live tend to be conservatives.  As their name implies, they want to "conserve" the body that provides them with many useful things.

     That same political body also has tumor-types living within it.  They want to grow by gratifying their own egos and bank accounts.  They give no thought to the ultimate fate of that greater organism that gives them sustenance.  Ultimately, their self-centeredness is what makes people and groups into tumors.

 

Thursday, January 15, 2008

                                 A single sinner is a sinner.  A group of them becomes a tumor. 

     The average sinner has a dim, thrust-back awareness that his soul is going to eternal perdition.  Most of them avoid thinking about that by going through the usual gymnastics by which they convince themselves that there is no God, no judgment, and no eternal pain.  They make a point of sharing this "philosophy" with as many others as they can, unaware as they do so that their sin "is not that they are blind, but that they say (tell others) that they see". 

     During no waking moment can they allow themselves to picture their souls standing in front of a Judge Who can see through every lie they ever told and sentence them with justice to their place in eternity for having embraced those lies.  On the rare occasions that they might consider such a thing, it is invariably with the comforting, if erroneous, thoughts that "It really wasn't my fault.  I couldn't help it.  I'm basically a good person."

     Tumors in the body politic are conglomerations of sinners who are willing to use political power to take money from their neighbors.  Whether individually or en masse, all involved blind themselves to the long-term results of their own activities.  Even as a body politic is in the final stages of collapse, its tumors will be clamoring for more.  The tumor-commitment to death and destruction is exemplified by French bureaucrats during their revolution.  Even after Robespierre was guillotined and the reign of terror was over, the people in charge of scheduling executions went right on sending wagonsful of those scheduled for death to their awful end.

     One can imagine a government under a final attack by a ruthless enemy.  A jet has to be sent with weapons to win a key battle.  But, a bureaucrat says "I have to make a very important speech at a vital meeting about global warming!"   We know where the plane will go.

     Most sinners, whether justifying their own actions or those of the tumor of which they are a part, will justify their sin by saying that it is good.  Then, they encourage others to participate.  In the body politic, the most useless of tumors are the loudest and most hysterical when demanding more funding.  Large groups of sinners in powerful agencies can do a tremendous amount of harm, often turning even the useful agencies into destructive tumors. 

 

Friday, January 16, 2009

                                                                 Bubble children.

     We don't read about as many children living in bubbles as we used to, but we're generally familiar with the concept.  Some kids seem to be devoid of resistance to all the germs, microbes, viruses, and bacteria around them, so they have to live in a carefully controlled "bubble" that keeps them from as many impurities as possible.

     Interestingly, like Howard Hughes, some adults are afflicted with the same disorder.  The fear of infection drives them into increasing isolation.

     After serving for twelve years on a school board, it occurred to me that many of the people in public education, when it comes to living life boldly, have much in common with the "bubble children".

 

Friday, January 16, 2009

                                                        Taking our own temperatures.

     It has become apparent that world-wide temperatures are being skewed at both the temperature collection sites and by those who "adjust" those temperatures to "let people know what temperatures really are ".

     http://wattsupwiththat.com/ has done a wonderful job exposing some of the ways thermometers have been sited to maximize the temperatures they record so that higher temperature records will support legislation to enrich those in the global warming industry.

     One wonders if there would be a thousand or so people in the United States who would buy, install, record and send temperatures in their neighborhoods to an impartial center that would produce a record of truer temperatures.

     This would do two things.  First, it would eliminate the false reporting and computation of numbers that seems to be endemic with the global warmers.  Second, it would force them to lie a little less.

     It would be a fun project, if only to watch the initial sputtering and outrage that would accompany it, especially in its initial stages.

                                        Global Warming, at heart a manifestation of leftist vanity.

     Those on the left hate anyone who solves problems efficiently.  Their livelihoods depend on not solving problems, so they have a natural antipathy to those who can solve them.  They know that if problem-solvers are allowed to do what they do best, they will lose their jobs.

     Global Warming, at its heart, is their way of saying:  "Those awful people who make and do things are so powerful that their activities are destroying life on earth, polluting it with carbon dioxide, and they must be stopped.  Only we can stop them, and we will, if we are not given money."

     At the same time, these chronic complainers about "excess" take full advantage of air conditioners, furnaces, automobiles, medicine, airplanes, lights, computers, and all the other things that were provided by problem-solvers able to overcome the leftists of the past. 

     It's an awful way to go through life, hating the very things that they use every single minute of every single hour of every single day that they live.  Catholic Fundamentalists ask, "Don't they notice that they hate so much that they can't even think straight?  Don't they notice that their hate has destroyed their ability for rational thought?  Don't they care?"

     The answer to all three questions is "No."  Their souls have been so overwhelmed by their own vanity that they simply hate any truth that shows them how utterly awful they've become.

 

Saturday, January 17, 2009

                                                             Hmmm.  Demons.

     When reading the four Gospels, one is struck by a recurring theme, the number of times that Jesus drove demons out of people who were sick, disturbed, and unable to live happily.  From this, Catholic Fundamentalists understand that demons are something to be gotten rid of rather than obeyed.  Those on the other side differ from us in that they often welcome demons into their minds and follow their orders.

                                        Whassa matter with you?  Whassa the matter with me?

       Though hidden demons cause the common problems among us, their existence is rarely considered, especially by those minds whom they have most successfully infiltrated and afflicted.  We can get a hint as to their activities within our own minds by making ourselves stop and think about our own tendencies to sin the moment we can recognize that a particular thought or temptation is leading us away from God. 

     As soon as we recognize that, we see how boringly repetitive the demons are.  We often think about the same sin many, many times a day.  That helps us see which demons afflict us most frequently.  With practice, we can extrapolate from our own experience with these personifications of temptation and see how others are affected by them.  For us, things like the "news" exist to give us information not about what is happening in the world, but about how currently noteworthy people have been successfully influenced, if not actually possessed, by demons.

     Catholic Fundamentalists believe that there are seven main tribes of demons.  They are divided into the tribes of Pride, Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Anger, Lust, and  Sloth.  Hollywood "stars", for instance, who are successfully controlled by the demon of Lust, for instance, have their falls into that demon's temptation celebrated by the "news" organizations devoted to the justification and spread of that particular sin.

     When we find ourselves tempted to sin, a first step is to immediately recognize that temptation.  Then, we may try to categorize it to see which particular demon or demons is attacking us.  As we do so, we remember what they want us to forget, that same sin's frequent appearances in our mind.  "Oh, you again.  I remember you from a few minutes ago, an hour ago, a dozen times yesterday, ten thousand times last year, and, maybe a quarter of a million times in my life when you've tried to get me to think about doing this.  God, please get this evil thing away from me."

     The demons within hate it when we do that.  They are happy, well, as happy as such wretched beings can be, living in our minds.  They only get to stay there as long as we don't ask God to evict them from the comfortable apartments they've built near the busy neural highways where what we see and hear intersects with our basest desires.  Frankly, many of us have grown to like some of the demons with whom we've been living.  We have a tendency to grow comfortable with some of our sinful thoughts, and, when we're bored, we have a regrettable tendency to turn to them to help pass the time.

                                         The overwhelming counterbalance to demonic thoughts.

     When we understand that evil thoughts are produced by tiny, living beings, dark sparks that dull our minds, we realize that of all the religious leaders in history, only Jesus Christ recognized their existence and made a well-publicized career of driving them out.  It's easier to get rid of them, or minimize their effects, if we have the good fortune to be Catholics, because we go to Mass once a week.  There, we eat a wafer and drink wine from a cup.  By two miracles, the presence and power of our priest, and the Transubstantiation he is allowed to effect, the wafer is made into Jesus Christ's Body, the wine into Jesus Christ's Blood.

     One thing on earth that the demons hate as much, or more, than the Eucharist is the Sacrament of Confession.  They don't hate it so much because our choosing to seek Absolution means that we have turned to a Higher Power than any of them have or can access, but hate it because the very words of Absolution, "I absolve you of all your sins" negates all their past successes within us, literally turning the darkened places in our mind into light, reducing their power over us and making their eviction more likely. 

     Never does a demon work harder, and they are, by nature, slothful, than when trying to keep us from confessing a sin of which they're particularly proud of having had us commit.

 

Sunday, January 18, 2009

                                                       Keeping bankers off the street.

     This month, there have been several columns about the effects of automation and increased use of electron flow on the economy and its employment levels.  The same effects that automation and electron flow control had on farmers, manufacturers, and those in the print/paper industries have also affected bankers and everyone else in financial services.

     As the transfer of money could be done electronically, the number of people needed to move money faster and farther decreased with great rapidity.  Few in the banking industry realized that, even as larger banks found themselves with the ability to absorb smaller banks with increasing speed. 

     Successful automation then allowed even bigger banks to ingest what had been considered large banks.  Then, like huge sharks who'd run out of smaller fish to eat, they began to devour each other.  This had a predictable effect on all the industries who depended on borrowing money and paying it back.  As those individual operations in manufacturing and retail similarly streamlined, they needed fewer people in the finance departments in millions of companies around the world.  They, and the banks, began to lay off workers in those areas even as they stopped hiring new workers.

     The present bank bailouts are an attempt to smooth the transition of no-longer-necessary money handlers into other sections of the economy.  The bailouts must continue until the downstream companies have made the adjustments to dealing with fewer banks.  Closing too many banks too quickly throws too many companies on the less than tender mercies of the fewer remaining banks.  If too many companies that actually make and do real things close, the entire world economy will collapse.  So, we have bank bailouts.  This, too, shall pass.

 

Sunday, January 18, 2009

                                                         Money.  Lots and lots of money.

    I live about fifteen miles from a Western Pennsylvania town called Wampum. The name "Wampum" means "money".  Locally, wampum was made from beads fabricated from shells.  The beads were laboriously strung together and used as money.  Indians agreed among themselves to use their own labor, in the form of wampum, as a medium of exchange. 

     British and Dutch traders quickly debased that currency with factories that could crank out glass beads by the billion.  It was partly that debasement of their currency that facilitated the destruction of the Indians, first by destroying their economy with mass-produced wampum, then by replacing whatever else they had of value with distilled liquor.  Traders discovered that many Indians would exchange virtually anything they owned for whiskey, an early form of oxycontin.

     In the days of "King Beaver", who lived just South of Wampum, where the river and the town are still known as Beaver, a third kind of money emerged.  The beaver pelts for which he and several nearby towns were named, became a "new" currency.  A stack of beaver pelts as high as a musket could be exchanged for it. That same stack could also be exchanged for a few bottles of whiskey, much to the disappointment of countless Indian families waiting in vain for their braves who rarely returned home sober from the trading post with the blankets, salt, flour, and iron pots that would have kept them alive through the bitter winters if they hadn't been exchanged for whiskey.

     Soon, the "beaver pelt money" disappeared, along with the beavers, themselves, and the popularity of expensive beaver hats in England.  Beaver hats were intentionally made "necessary headgear" by the British government's marketing arm to insure that English trappers had a motive to foray into the West and compete with the French.  For many years, the true source of that Western Pennsylvania "money" was the vanity of wealthy Englishmen, who wished to follow the style purposely set by Royal haberdashery.  The success of using beaver hats to encourage colonization later prompted Queen Victoria to popularize opals, the mining of which facilitated the English exploration and settlement of Australia.  That royalty-encouraged fad, like tobacco and beaver hats before, used the vanity of her richest subjects to help pay for colonizing and settling an Empire of Englishmen.

     The copper, silver, and gold coinage, and pieces of same, followed the shells, glass beads, whiskey, and pelts as Western Pennsylvania's money.  It  was soon replaced by Continental dollars made out of paper. Despite the worthless, "not worth a Continental" dollars, settlers continued to pour over the mountains, followed by builders of iron furnaces, and miners of coal, limestone, and iron ore.  The fact that their paper money was essentially worthless didn't slow them down.

     Soon, local farmers went back to using barrels of whiskey as money, laboriously carting their latest "money" across the mountains to fill the endless appetite of Philadelphia's alcoholics.  G. Washington, the owner of the largest whiskey-making distillery on the Continent, and a military commander of some reknown, used government troops to quickly put a stop to that.

     Then, while there was still copper, silver, gold, and paper money circulating, private banks began to print their own money, backed up by the credibility of local banks, their officers, and directors.  Since they were easily defrauded by pie-in-the-sky schemes, that system didn't provide the security the economy needed.  Additional forms of "money" included various kinds of warrants for land, bonds for canals, and at least one cockamamie system to move boats, not filled with whiskey, over the mountains.

     The intrinsic values of the dozen kinds of money in this one area within a hundred year period is of historical interest, but its lessons may be applied to the present; one of those lessons being  that if we work hard to satisfy our neighbors' needs, and God smiles upon our endeavors, we will have a good chance of accumulating whatever is thought to be the medium of exchange of the time, knowing as we do so that it is not necessarily something of permanent value.

     Indeed, if we focus too much on making the correct guess as to which medium of exchange will appreciate most in value, we may lose opportunities in doing the work that will gain us more of that commodity.  On the other hand, if we do not consider the underlying value of what we do accumulate, we may end up with a big pile of Continental dollars that aren't worth a darn.  Worse, we may end up with a big stack of rapidly rotting beaver pelts.

 

Monday, January 19, 2009

                                                       Complaining about government waste.

     This month's columns began with governments building streets.  The first street was built by a man who said to someone, "If you help me get this street built, I will give you a job inspecting it."  Then, he promised another, "If you help me get this street built, I will hire you to do the necessary excavation."  The next man was told, "If you support the street, I will see to it that you are hired to quarry the stone that we need."  Another was told, if you help me get this street built, you will be appointed to build all the drains."  Someone else was promised the job of collecting tolls. Another was promised the contract for keeping it clean.  Soon, so many, many people wanted the street that it was built.

     Then, others saw the opportunity.  They began to ask about building houses, inns, blacksmith shops, and stores along the street.  Permits became required, along with inspections of all the appurtenances that appeared along the street.  Many, many peoples' livelihoods were tied inextricably to the street.  That street was connected to other streets.  Soon, an entire network of roads began to go through that nation and many others.

     After a while, the streets became crowded.  Sometimes, people decided, "There are no more opportunities along that street.  We need another way."  The original street building process was duplicated.  Some repeated the same process with boats, bypassing streets.  New streets were built at the termini of shipping lanes.  Then, railroads caused a similar disruption, bypassing whole continents full of streets and necessitating new ones.  Airplanes caused similar changes. 

     Taxpayers found that they were still responsible for maintaining and improving the first street.  They also had to pay for it and for everything connected to it and all the later transportation changes that appeared.  Taxpayers were on the hook for shipping terminals, airports, trains and train stations, and all had to be subsidized because no one could say "No." to even the most useless transportation activities.

     As more money was spent on various transportation projects, taxes were raised.  Soon, there was less to transport.  Still, no one could say "No.", though more and more people were going broke.  Vast structures, including unions and lobbyists, appeared to maintain the spending upon which families, groups, and entire communities, became utterly dependent.

 

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

               Roads, schools, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, food, housing, welfare, farms. space travel, etc.

     There are no end of things to which taxpayers can be convinced they have a "right".  Soon, a country finds itself unable to stem the outflows necessary to give all its people all their "rights".  Making it worse, people from other countries want to have those same "rights", too.  So, they come thronging in, welcome because of the cheap labor they provide to those who actually produce the things necessary for the nation.  The downside is that they are easily organized to demand their "rights", too.  From the day the leave their country, many look at themselves as an invading army, and act accordingly as soon as they reach critical mass in the more modern "enemy country", whose inhabitants they would like to exterminate and work to do so.

     Every person involved in every area of tax-supported spending is promised pensions, benefits, and raises.  Taxpayers are on the hook.  As long as taxpayers are free to automate, thus reducing costs, the country can survive by taxing those savings. 

     During this process of "giving people their rights", two basic groups appear.  There are those with government-guaranteed jobs and those without.  Those in the latter group are called the "private sector".  Some of those in the "private sector" work hard to get government funding for their endeavors.

     It is, they feel, their "right".

 

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

                                                                 Balancing books.

     As the process of demanding "rights" accelerates, there is an automatic and concurrent decline in the number of those who believe that "People should take personal responsibility for what they do."  An avoidance of personal responsibility quickly leads to behavior encouraged by demons.

     Lust is directly opposed to love, which it tries to destroy.  Lust encourages people to view each other as sources of physical pleasure, rather than seeing each person as an immortal soul whose salvation is important.  Turning people into objects of pleasure makes unborn children especially vulnerable, so countless millions of them are killed every year, both by abortionists and abortificant chemicals.

     Those in the Culture of Death do not like for men and women to love, marry, and have children.  They work as hard to discourage marriage as they do to encourage promiscuity. This battle that the Culture of Death wages is encouraged by many in governments.  From the point of view of those who must buy ever more votes to stay in power, taxpayers' babies are dreaded because they are tax deductions.  Therefore, those who pay taxes are discouraged from having them.  Babies also take working mothers out of taxable employment, reducing tax revenues for desperate governments. 

     Where do the souls of the lost children go?  One may project from Revelations 6;9, where John saw "underneath the altar the souls of those who had been killed on account of the Word of God, for witnessing to it."  While the murdered innocents did not bear vocal witness to God, they did bear silent witness right up to the moment of their tragic death.

     Those souls are crying out for justice.  They will receive it.

 

Saturday, January 24, 2009

                                              A cheap way to keep people off the streets.

     Governments for the past half century have delighted in television, which has kept more people off the streets than nearly anything.  Driving down most streets on most evenings, glowing television sets immobilize the vast majority of citizens who have, with their own money, purchased the television sets that tell them what to think.

     "While they're sitting there, we get to feed 'em full of whatever we want.", say gleeful officials.  Not only are we kept off the streets, but also, we're brainwashed in as many ways as there are to brainwash us.  Governments thought TV was wonderful.  Each set was at the end of a licensed, well-controlled one-way street that carriedwhatever they wanted straight into the minds of viewers.

     Over time, home computers evolved.  The internet quickly followed.  In a few years, the smarter people had left their TVs and gone to their computers.  New worlds opened up, in which all were much freer to access whatever they wanted.  Worse yet, from the governments' point of view, they could respond. 

     They were off the streets, but on the information superhighway.  Suddenly, information and opinions traveled in many directions.  Governments are cracking down, but it's harder than they thought.  Suddenly, nations of couch potatoes are making their opinions felt.  For the first time, expensive government programs are being questioned.  Huge lies are being exposed. 

     For the first time in history, people are off the streets and still making trouble.

 

Sunday, January 25, 2009

                                           If it walks like a duck, ____, and ____, then it's a duck.

     We've all heard that so many times that we can automatically fill in the blanks.  It's such a common expression that we rarely think deeply about it.  Not doing so keeps us from seeing how useful it is in separating sheep from those who say, "What I believe may walk like a duck, quack like a duck, and look like a duck, but it is actually something quite different."

     The lost have learned to excel at naming and describing things and then reaching a conclusion that's entirely unlike the readily apparent truth.  We hear such tortured thinking every time someone wants to take life or money from their neighbors:    

     "This looks like a baby.  It sucks its thumb.  It moves around in the womb.  It tries to make itself comfortable.  But, it is not a baby, it is a blob of cells."

     "This looks like a tax increase.  It will take money from you.  It will leave you poorer. It will reduce your disposable income.  But it is not a tax increase, it is 'a wise investment in your future'."

     "The ice caps are growing.  The temperatures are falling.  Snowfall is increasing.  It may look as if the world is growing colder, but the greatest possible danger to all of us is global warming."

     One of the essential divisions between the saved and the lost is the latter's ability to willingly say that:

"Truth + truth + truth = a lie.  Just as bird-watchers identify birds by looking at plumage and listening to songs, we may identify those on the other side by their adoption of that formula in what they think, say, and do. 

     If they were birds, they would not be ducks, but raptors and eaters of carrion. Unfortunately for their long-term prospects, they are not birds, but immortal souls whose purposeful avoidance of truth has destined them to an eternity of agony.  We may pray for them to change their ways, but that requires belief in a God powerful enough to provide miracles as great as raising Lazarus from the dead.

 

Sunday, January 25, 2009

                                   Bodies and computers; minds and operating systems; souls and discs

     Catholic Fundamentalists describe our concept of souls with the phrase "ether disc".  It reflects our definition of God as the Unprogrammed Programmer by seeing that each of us carries within a tiny bit of something akin to the "cloud", in which form, though vastly larger and more powerful, He appeared frequently in the Old Testament. 

     As our body, mind, and soul traverse life, we, His free-will programs, are surrounded by His other programs, seen and unseen.  There is a particle program that includes subsidiary programs of water, air, and earth.  He has downloaded energy programs, movement programs, plant programs, animal programs, and various versions of all of them.  Each of us is an individual Free Will Program that chooses how it will operate within what we see, and may categorize as, Outside Programs. 

     Thinking too much about the Outside Program keeps us from seeing that our own, individual programs, written and downloaded at the moment of our conception, give each of us unique abilities to work with the Outside Programs.  If St. Therese of Lisieux was correct in saying, "People's souls differ more than their faces.", then each of us has our own utterly unique spiritual gifts that we often ignore.

     If we continue the analogy between our own bodies, minds, and ether discs with our computers, operating systems, and discs, we see that all six entities have the possibility of corruption in common.  Bodies, minds and souls, like our computers, operating systems, and discs will crash if any becomes too corrupted.

     Our computer may be corrupted by viruses again and again.  Some computer technicians refer to particularly thorough disc cleaning as "sandblasting", blowing out every possible error so that the fresh download will not have any residual errors that will corrupt the new, fresh program.  Many priests, hearing the same sins over and over, wish there were some sort of "spiritual sandblasting" they could provide.  

     When our bodies are corrupted by microbes, they may be "cleaned out" with antibiotics.  Viruses may be cleaned out by very high fevers.  Improperly working minds may be "cleaned out" by replacing erroneous assumptions and conclusions with sounder thinking.  When our souls are corrupted, they may be "cleaned out" by requesting, and getting, Absolution. 

     Catholics have an easier time with this, because the priest, a living link with Jesus by the miracle of Apostolic Succession, has a Scripture-endorsed ability to forgive sins. Protestants' sins are forgiven when God is asked to do so, but the mechanics are less certain, partly because a skilled confessor has not had an opportunity to inquire into, and encourage the removal of, the particular sin's proximate causes.     

     When considering our bodies, minds, and souls, we have to avoid many kinds of corruption.  Earlier Catholics recognized a way to keep themselves safe from spiritual viruses by their admonition to "avoid the near occasion of sin".

 

Monday, January 26, 2009

                                                  Once saved, always saved?  Not likely.

     Many, particularly in Protestant Denominations, believe that if they are "saved" once, often by publicly "accepting Jesus", that they are always saved.  "I don't have to worry about anything that I do.  I've been saved for all time because I have been saved many years ago when I accepted the Lord into my heart."

     Catholic Fundamentalists, as usual, compare the soul to a computer disc.  We realize that a disc can be corrupted, no matter how clean it may have once been.  Similarly, the "ether disc" that is the soul, though cleansed by Baptism or conversion, may also be later corrupted.  The corruption of a "saved soul" is harder to get clean again.  It can be done, and often is, but it is better to avoid sin in the first place.  Thinking that having once been saved provides a "free pass" that allows us to go on sinning is one of the worst sins we can commit.

 

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

                                                  The Culture of Death at work among us.

     Yesterday, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, justified asking for several hundred million dollars from taxpayers for "contraception".  When asked about her decision, she explained "Children are very expensive, and the states are having a hard time paying for them.  That's why we need more contraception."

     What she is really saying:

     "Minority children are very expensive.  Their birth rate is very high because we have set up programs that reward them for having illegitimate children.  The people who run those programs, as well as those employed by them, would not like to see us change them."

     "We cannot teach the values of chastity, self-control, and marriage because that would offend those who profit from early deaths."

     "Frankly, we are not here to help people, but to reduce their numbers.  We must keep children from being born."

     Those who share Mrs. Pelosi's views operate in direct opposition to God's instruction, "Be fruitful, and multiply."  At this time, the only thing that can help them is our prayer that they begin to obey God and love their neighbors.

 

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

                                                            Two kinds of people.

     Catholic Fundamentalists are fond of saying, when thinking about various problems that we see, "There are two kinds of people", and we go on to see which kind of people are involved in the difficulty at hand.  We get our inspiration for this from Mark 4:1-20:

                                “The mystery of the Kingdom of God has been granted to you.
                                But to those outside everything comes in parables, so that
                                they may look and see but not perceive,
                                and hear and listen but not understand,
                                in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.”

     In this passage, we are told that there are two kinds of people.  Some have been granted access to the Kingdom of God.  Others are "outside" that Kingdom.  Any period in history reflects the earthly power that these two groups have.  Sometimes, there are political structures under the control of believers who see and perceive; listen and understand.  During these times, things generally go well for people within the body politic so controlled.

     Most of the time, those who look but do not perceive join with those who hear but do not understand and impose governments devoted to killing, lying, and stealing.

 

Thursday, January 29, 2009

                          There are two models for government make-work, Egyptian and Roman.

     Archeology is interesting because it shows us ways that previous governments kept people off the streets.  Many nations had periods of time where they were no longer in fear of enemies.  The stretches of peace provided their citizens with opportunities to develop more efficient means of producing goods and services.  These efficiencies, like Rome's and Egypt's "factory farms", resulted in unemployed people wandering the streets, where they could make trouble.

     Two methods of providing government employment evolved, Egyptian and Roman.  Rome put its unemployed to work building roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects that kept people busy while making others more efficient.  The Roman example of keeping people off the street was duplicated in wall-building China and in most Western countries. 

     Egypt, on the other hand, put its people to work on massive projects that institutionalized their religious beliefs in large, stone structures.  Mayans and Aztecs followed the Egyptian model, in a far bloodier way. 

     Both the Egyptian and Roman systems worked for many centuries.  In retrospect, we see that Egypt's method worked for a few thousand years, Rome's, for many centuries.

     Today, the more "modern" countries have moved away from infrastructure development.  The reason is simple.  Building roads and bridges used to require huge gangs of men with picks and shovels.  Earth movers and automated production techniques now produce infrastructure improvements with far fewer people. 

     Western governments are now moving toward the Egyptian model to keep people off the street.  Modern governments now keep people busy by making them serve religious needs.  State religions presently demand that all must work to serve ideals they invent.  Today, we serve scary gods like "Maintain the right carbon dioxide levels or we will all die."  Their religion requires that taxpayers waste billions to cover the earth with god-pleasing windmills and solar collectors while staffing vast temples to serve their Climate Gods. 

     The new religion will be allowed to focus ever-larger resources on doing things that hurt, rather than help its citizenry.  The citizens who are drained to pay for this foolishness will grow ever poorer, but their gods must be served.

 

Friday, January 30, 2009

                                     Why do governments fail?  They are not able to defend themselves.

                                           Why can't they defend themselves?  Leaders are bribed.

     Olmstead's classic "History of the Persian Empire" traces the attempts of various middle-eastern kingdoms to take over large sections of land.  Between Afghanistan and Athens, Egypt and the Black Sea, empire after empire came into being and was replaced.

     While reading this, the frequency with which the word "bribe" appeared was staggering.  On some pages, multiple examples of bribes being paid to subvert neighboring governments appeared.  Bribes were especially effective against the Greek democracies.

     In our own time, we see nations with democratic governments so paralyzed that they cannot even drill their own oil wells or build nuclear reactors to provide cheap energy.  This paralysis comes from huge bribes, paid by foreign energy producers.  They are eager to pay billions in bribes to protect their trillions in profitable cash flow.

     The corruption caused by these bribes becomes institutionalized throughout whole nations.  Those who receive bribes have the money necessary to win elections, stopping any efforts to forestall the impoverishment of the countries under attack. 

     When God turns His face away from a people, He destroys the moral outrage that should occur when people find that their own leaders are selling them into slavery.

 

Saturday, January 31, 2009

                                         Reviewing January's columns, anticipating February's.

     January's columns have concentrated on relating to our governments.  Should you find some interest in how Catholic Fundamentalism looks at entities with which we all must deal, please feel free to recommend or forward to others.

     In February, most of the columns are going to be on how the vastness within each human mind provides endless battlefields for warring spirits.

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