Category Archives: Politics

What Should Be Done?

Character, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Uncategorized

Let us observe some things about ourselves in how various people among us might answer an overarching question about how to fix a society that most would agree is seriously ailing.

QUESTION

“What should be done about the mess we’re in?”

ANSWERS

SAM: “Pray about it.”
TED: “Throw the bums out of office!”
RALPH: “We need a good man in the White House.”
THOMAS: “We need more unity.”
ROBERT: “Put prayer back in the schools.”
ART: “Vote Republican.”
NED: “We have to get serious about protecting the environment.”
MIKE: “We need stricter regulations to keep big business in check.”
ANTON: “Back the Blue.”
ANSLEY: “Vote Democrat.”
ZANE: “Nothing. Just be at peace.”
WILLIAM: “Lower taxes.”
SAMUEL: “Raise taxes.”
PAUL: “More government programs.”
NATE: “Smaller government.”
FRANK: “Homeschooling.”
DAVE: “Increase spending on Education.”
CHARLIE: “Overthrow the government.”
FRED: “What this country needs is Jesus.”
GARRISON: “Promote diversity.”
HOWARD: “Term limits.”
IRWIN: “People need to get more informed.”
JAMES: “Less talk; more action.”
KERRY: “We need to bring back the great American work ethic.
LARSON: “Restore respect.”
MANNY: “Get rid of religion.”
NILES: “Start prosecuting people in office who break the law.”
OREN: “Put Fox News out of business.”
PAT: “More hate speech laws.”
KELLY: “Get rid of CNN.”
LAWSON: “Put Zuckerberg in jail.”
MARTY: “Break up Amazon.”
MOE: “Bring manufacturing back home to America.”
MUNSON: “Gun control.”
GEORGE: “Stricter health laws.”
CARSON: “Bring back $1 gas.”
KARL: “Free college tuition.”
WALLY: “Defund the police.”
XAVIER: “End racism.”
ALEXANDER: “Make it easier to vote.”
ALLEN: “Voter ID.”
BARRY: “Tort reform.”
DANIEL: “End the Fed.”
FREDDY: “Get rid of internal combustion engines.”
HARRISON: “Get back to the Constitution.”
LENNY: “Get rid of the Constitution.”
ANDY: “A one-world government.”
BRADY: “Anarchy.”
KELVIN: “Diet and exercise.”
MALVIN: “Yoga/Meditation.”
MAURIE: “STEM.”
OLLIE: “Can’t we just get along?”
…
This could go on and on, but I think this is a good enough sampling to get a feel for how varied might be the responses.

Surely, some of these are great ideas. And surely, some of these are terrible ideas. Almost all of these, however, are grossly over-simplified and/or over-generalized ideas, and this speaks to what I had mentioned above, regarding what we could learn about ourselves (either as a society, or as individuals) by observing how we tend to handle such questions. And surely, we’d learn just as much by observing how we tend to handle the more fundamental question: “Just what is the biggest problem in our society?” Indeed, I would expect a lot of people to answer the first question without first exercising the cognitive due diligence of defining just what mess we’re trying to fix in the first place. Yes, we can be that sloppy in our approach to thinking through such things!

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few days, just to highlight how we’re “all over the board”—like what you’d see if you were to throw a dozen darts at a dart board (unless you’re excellent at darts). I don’t want to get off into the weeds of the details, but I will say this much. Let’s look at Sam’s answer at the top of the list: “Pray about it.” And then let’s ask Sam, and everybody who agrees with him, “OK, and what result should we expect to see from that?” And in response to that, I would expect that group’s answers to be “all over the board”. Is this me saying that prayer is bad? No, this is me wanting more than just a pat answer.

Or with Ted’s answer (“Throw the bums out of office”), suppose we were to ask this question to everyone who agrees with Ted’s go-to solution: “After throwing the bums out of office, what would be the next step necessary to produce a substantial improvement in things?” And while we might get some simple answer like, “Put good candidates in their places”, we’d find on follow-up questions that Ted’s group might be “all over the board”. For example, let’s ask them “OK, what makes a good candidate”, or “How can you actually get a good candidate elected in this day and age?”

This is what I mean by over-simplification. So many of these answers are just something to say. They’re not well-considered strategies; they’re just something to say—something to tell ourselves—something to tell others—something, perhaps, by which to pretend that we’re not as clueless about what goes on as we actually are?

So I thought that in this post, I’d put myself on the spot, as it were, and take my best stab at answering the question briefly—with no particular plan having been conceived in advance. So, here goes:

QUESTION (restated)

“What should be done about the mess we’re in?”

JACK’S ANSWER

Well, the mess we’re in is actually an aggregate of a lot of messes running at once–and that mess certainly includes the trouble caused by all our different ways of identifying causes and effects, and of differentiating between what is true and false, and between what is effective and ineffective. If there is some sort of fundamental cause underlying the overall mess of things, wouldn’t it have to lie in what the typical human does in his or her mind? So, shouldn’t the remedy have something to do with improving how we think, decide, and believe—with how we manage what goes on in our minds?

In short, we need some way to become better at being humans—better at how we manage ourselves and our relationships with others, and our habits of dealing with one another, whether in friendships, businesses, or government. I have seen people who believe any of the particular answers given on the long list above, yet who do not seem to think it’s very important to be learning how to be a better human themselves. But think of the irony that Ted should be adamant about throwing the “bums” out of office, but not about avoiding being a “bum” himself—or that Pat is adamant about “hate speech”, but is not concerned with the fact that he he himself says hateful things about people he thinks are immorally intolerant of others.

If we can’t find a solution for our own selves—for what goes on inside—then is there really any reasonable hope for fixing things on a grand, societal scale? And can you really fix anything overall without having to improve the behavior of individuals? Why, then, would we reach any other conclusion than that each of us should fix him- or herself?

And we tend to have more problems than just one. Cognitive miserliness and moral miserliness are two huge ones—the result of which is often observed in hypocrisy, which is a plague upon our culture. If we were to improve just 50% in these things, it would make a tremendous difference in our society.

The way I see it, this is our work, whether we do it or not. It is so easy to fall into the trap of fussing about what’s so wrong with everyone else, or, perhaps, quietly stewing over it, rather than fixing what we could manage to fix in ourselves. And surely, many fall into the trap of wishing that someone else would come fix their hearts and mind for them—doing for them what they could do themselves if they thought it were worth the effort to learn how and to do it. This is why so many over-invest in the hypothesis that man is an utterly-helpless worm that has no ability to do or think or want anything good, but must have all goodness divinely instilled into him by God.

But here’s something ironic: Even the people who buy into that notion—who claim that any good that resides in them must be the fruit of God’s own doing—seem to settle for so very little of that fruit, when, to hear them talk about it, God is this ever-flowing font of goodness, freely giving of himself and his riches of virtue to all who ask. Why, then, do they not to get themselves some more of that? Must God also make them ask for more—them being unable to desire and request more on their own?

Well, it that were the case, then how would we escape the conclusion that whatever is wrong with us—whatever is not yet fixed in us—is ultimately God’s fault, and that we ourselves must be blameless?

And I know a lot of people that seem to operate quite like that—even though I could not imagine them admitting it in words even in a thousand years of operating that way. They just don’t seem to want to be accountable for themselves. And yet even so, they are quick to stew or to fuss (or both) about how other people ought to be doing a better job in their thinking, deciding, believing, and doing. So, it would seem that the folks I’m talking about really do believe in personal accountability after all, except in their own cases. And what could be a more quintessential exercise in hypocrisy than that?

When I read the Bible, I see God holding a lot of people accountable for their choices. And I suppose I have taken the same view—that it is right to hold us accountable for what we choose, and to judge us by the same standards by which we judge others. Indeed, if that were unfair—if our standards for others were unjust—then why are we using those standards ourselves? If it is good for the goose, then why not for the gander?

But that’s an examiner’s question, and not the question of the cognitive/moral miser. And that brings us back to the problem I’ve been getting at—that not enough of us are duly concerned with how we manage things inside. We get upset for how other people’s mismanagement of themselves hurts or inconveniences us, for sure, but we give ourselves a pass far too often for causing similar troubles to this world ourselves.

There are a lot of front porches in town that need sweeping. Shall I sit in the dust on mine, and complain about the neighbor’s laziness?

If there is some answer that’s more fundamental than this one, I have yet to learn it. And there’s a great gradient—both in politics and religion—spanning between those who care nothing about principle, and those who care about it with great diligence. The masses, however, rest in the middle of that gradient, and sort themselves out left-and-right, with none of their camps being very accommodating to the ones who care the most about getting things right. They all cheat. They all cut corners. They all deny, from time to time, the principles they otherwise seem to be interested in promoting. And yet they all expect their members to be more loyal to the group than to their own continuing maturation in principle and practice. The most diligent of people don’t seem to do very well in those groups.

And these are the groups who, generally speaking, run the country and the churches and the schools and the companies and the media. And most of these things are designed to thrive within the status quo, and are not interested in meaningful reform. They are a lousy hope in the hunt for a cure to what ails us, then. Generally speaking, they are deeply committed to mediocrity, and not to excellence—to what is popularly acceptable, and not to what is true. They are not the answer that they hold themselves out to be, and that so many wish they were.

I think the answer lies in the question, “What kind of people are we?” and its sister, “What kind of people are we willing to become?”

I could say without reservation that Fred’s statement (above) is right: “What this country needs is Jesus.” But the catch is this: Which Jesus is Fred talking about? Is he talking about the one in the Bible, who held people to account and expected much from them, or the one that’s so popular in the churches today, who gives people a pass for their choices and slathers them with a “grace” that basically says “Your choices don’t matter, as long as you choose to maintain a minimal belief in the fact that, ‘Jesus is Lord’.”?

Who among us can be flawless? No one. But the question that drives me is this: Who among us can be better than he is?

This, we could do. This, we should do. And this, widely-adopted, would change the world.

These Final Days of the United States of America

2020 Election Fraud, Activism, Character, Economy, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Ron Paul, Rule of Law

A non-Republican, non-Democrat perspective.

by Jack Pelham

Globalists (by which term I mean Communists) have been slowly chipping away at the defenses of the United States for a very long time. They promised back in the 50s to do it, and if you read their long-known strategies, it’s scary to see just how much they’ve accomplished since then.) America has grown dull, however, and relatively few among her see these developments as particularly alarming—yet–even though elected officials from both major parties are complicit in this subterfuge.

Yes, it’s that classic frog-in-the-slowly-heated-pot thing, where they play the “long game” against us, working under the radar of our awareness so that they don’t overwhelm our ability to keep pretending that things are pretty much OK. America has had her alarmists, of course, but she has not listened, and is still not listening. And so, she is about to learn the hard way, and history may well write “They told you so” on her headstone.

Continue reading These Final Days of the United States of America →

Why Donald Trump Should Be in the White House, According to a Non-Trump Supporter

2020 Election Fraud, Activism, Politics, Rule of Law

I am a true Constitutionalist who thinks that the US Constitution, while not perfect, presents a form and function of government that is superior to our modern-day de facto version of it. As a Constitutionalist– a strict one — I cannot throw in with either major political party. (And I don’t like the minor parties, either, for many of the same reasons, along with some other reasons that I won’t bore you with here.)

Continue reading Why Donald Trump Should Be in the White House, According to a Non-Trump Supporter →

He Lurks

Activism, Character, Paradigms, Poetry, Politics, Religion

He lurks, enjoying what he reads
But too afraid to say so.

He would be criticized if his friends knew.
He would have to face the heat for his beliefs.

He would have to take the stand that the author takes,
And defend it himself
Against the foolish criticism of others—
Or not.

Indeed, he tried it before once
But ended up retreating from the backlash.
And that’s when he learned to lurk—
To fly under the radar—
To avoid detection
And conflict.

Why, then, does he admire the author
Who dares things he will not,
And yet not figure out his own shame?

Why does he see himself as being on the right side of things
When he’s afraid to declare a side?

He is not the champion he’d like to think he is.
He is, rather, a fugitive in the very society whose approval he seeks—
Or, perhaps more accurately, whose disapproval he avoids.

He will not write.
He will not take a stand.
He will not enter the fray.
Yet he considers himself brave by association—
By an association he dare not acknowledge.

With the one writer,
Nine others engage, one way or another.
But the lurker is among the ninety who will not—
The ninety who lack either the courage or the conviction
To get in the game.

And so the lurker enjoys the security of the silent masses
Who have not learned to hash a thing out
Or to invest themselves in principle
Or to help a friend who is wrong—
Who dare not speak
For fear of rejection—
Or for some other priority
That keeps them from
The particulars of
This real world.

We Sang “Jesus Will Fix It”

Character, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Uncategorized

We sang “Jesus Will Fix It”,
As if fixing broken things
Is indeed the right thing to do.

But looking back,
I can see that we didn’t really care
All that much to have everything fixed;
No, what we wanted more than that
Was simply to have a way out.

We wanted to be snatched from this world
Into the other one—
Delivered from its evils
And perils
And aggravations
Into boundless joy and glory—
And to let Him do with the rest of this world
Whatever He would do with it.

We even thought it unspiritual
And worldly–
A needless distraction–
To get our hands dirty with
The world around us.
But I can’t help but think now
That we were freeloaders,
Not lifting a finger to
Protect the body politic
That afforded us so much freedom.

We thought it work for civilians,
And not for us soldiers of Christ.

Now, don’t get me wrong,
For we helped the poor
And the children,
But we did not take a stand
To fight the corruption–
And often, not even the corruption
In our own number.

I suppose we thought Jesus would fix that, too–
Or rather, simply deliver us from it.

What seemed so great a religion,
We used to shield us from
Plain, everyday responsibility.

And I regret that.



The Ship’s Undone

Character, Poetry, Politics, Uncategorized

The ship’s undone—
So far asea as to have
Lost sight of the shore—
With neither sail nor anchor.

The hands on deck are not our crew,
For we’re all forced below
To do whatever we can find
To suit us here.
We pretend away
The mounting peril—
Thinking ourselves brave for it.

We have no captain,
Save the scoundrel who sold us out—
Who sups even now aboard
The pirate frigate that tows us leeward
To some country not our own.

None dare challenge
The guards topside,
Nor cut the towline
And fend for ourselves.

And so she creaks and moans as
She is dragged through the night—
The weeping, once-proud leviathan, now
Hooked through the nostrils
By the captor.

We grumble,
But still we drink our rum
And eat our stores—
While they hold—
And boast of what grand sailors
We will be again someday soon
On the patriotic sea.

We blame the captain,
His treachery so plainly seen,
But we know we are undone
By our own hands—
Both by the wicked among us
Who worked corruption and subterfuge
And by the idle
Who did nothing to stop it—
Who strain even now to count that idleness
As anything but evil itself.

We know.

Truth be told,
Our why went overboard
Into the impossible abyss.
And none dare go in after it.
Nor did any at first fight
Sufficient as to keep it.
We did not keep our watch,
And now it is not ours.

The others would pummel me
For saying it aloud,
But I will whisper it in your ear:

We dared not risk our proud comforts
For what then seemed such cold diligence.
And now we have but to wait and see
What shall befall us,
For we have no heart left in us —
No matter what we may say—
That we should sail our own ship
Once again.




The Klaxon Culture

Character, Poetry, Politics

Mocking, scoffing–
This klaxon culture–
Ripping at the world–
Rebels with scarcely a cause but outrage itself–
Hating their shortlist of wrongs
And a thousand rights–

The songleader points a finger and screams.
And the chorus joins in.
And it echoes across the land,
Amplified a million-fold by the powers
Who take cover behind the strife.

The klaxon daily tells the fools what to hate.
And hate they do,
With insane passion–
Finding such dear promise in the notion
That they are owed revenge upon those
Who have not really wronged them–
Getting drunk on the idea that
Whatever ails them simply must be,
Without exception,
Someone else’s fault.

They tear down.
And do they ever build up?
Do they even know how?
Is not destruction all that hatred knows how to do?

They play the menace to our society–
Disturbing the peace,
Stirring the pot,
Lying the lies and even
Inventing ways to lie the truth.
Defying the Golden Rule.
Darkening the days.
Calling good evil, and evil good.
Never having their fill.

Exploding at the slightest excuse,
True or false,
Leveraging their tantrum on the world–
Running the ploy of the two-year-old
On childish parents who can be counted on
To give in most every time.

“Give me what I want or I will not shut up!”

And what champion can be found to tell them “no”?

Indeed, when what they really need is a spanking,
They are given a pulpit instead.

They are a parasite upon our own weakness–
An exploitation of our shameful lack of conviction–
A relentless enemy of truth and prosperity and justice alike.

If they find a just cause today,
They parade it like nobody’s business.
But when tomorrow, their cause du jour is unjust,
They parade it just the same.
And so we see through their game,
That they don’t care about truth at all,
But only about advantage.

But the blame does not belong to them alone,
For they see through our game, too–
That we don’t really care as much
About principle as about avoiding a fight.
So they push it to the brink
Knowing that we will not.

It is we who have dared to feed the stray,
Even though the wisdom of the ages
Has warned us against it
A million times.
And it is now we who are trained
To keep it fed
Day and night
At our own weary and begrudging expense.

And the dogs who used to bark all night on Main Street
Are now broadcast from sea to shining sea,
Magnified beyond the petty powers of their forebears,
And useful beyond the wildest dreams of those who
Loot the treasury under the noses of the distracted masses.

Perhaps our society–
Who could never bring itself
Fully to outlaw the lie–
Could use its sleepless nights
To give careful thought to its ways
As the klaxon sounds on.









The Reality of Work-for-Food

Character, Politics

So far in the history of Planet Earth, what animal species has ever survived without working for its own food?

If this is how nature handles it—if the species work to support themselves—then how is it that certain humans pretend today to have found a better way to thrive than by working for what they need?

The only way to do this, of course, is to steal from others—either taking what they have earned with their own work, and making it your own, or taking the workers themselves as your own property, and making them work for you rather than for themselves.

The latter (chattel slavery) has been flatly condemned in latter centuries in our society. But as to the former, the American people are still somewhat fuzzy on what to think about it. They already live in a system where the main earners are heavily taxed, with over 50% of the net income being taxed away in various ways. Yet surprisingly, there is practically no push-back in regard to this. Rather, it seems that most just throw up their arms and sigh, and then continue to live under a tax burden that is many times greater than the one that sparked the American Revolutionary War in 1775. (They were quite a different people from what we are today.)

We have switched slavery types in this country since 1775. Chattel slavery is now anathema to our culture, but the slavery of over-taxation and over-regulation is well tolerated by the American people. (Again, were are a different sort of people than were the American founders.)

One of the ways that the overlords are manipulating the nation today is by promising non-workers that they have a right to be equal in this world with those who do work for their own livings–to have “equal outcomes” in life, even if there’s a huge inequality of input from one individual to the next. It’s a promise that even though the non-workers don’t survive in nature, they’ll thrive in our society, because we will give them “equality” just for being alive. But they won’t say it this way. No, the way they put it is a lie. They want to frame it as a matter of “race”, such that anything labeled “white” is bad, and anything labeled “minority” is good.

So basically, all those whites who spent all those centuries working for a living—like the rest of the animal species do—had got it all wrong. (Never mind the white bums among them who tried to pretend against reality that there’s a good way to succeed in this world without working to support yourself–and who had miserable lives as do the bums of every other skin color.) And now, we are supposed to believe that the answer for all the minorities finally to have a good life in this world is to redistribute what the white workers are earning—giving it away to people who did not work for it.

Uh-huh. And how long is that going to last? If I give up my house for the bums down the street, how long is it until they are going to ruin the house? Remember, they’re not the sort to maintain the thing, or to make it BETTER. Nope, they are simple users, and when it’s used up, they have no means to build another house. Their only recourse will be to take yet another house from somebody else—another house they did not work for themselves.

A society like that cannot live long unless it is maintained artificially—such as by an unruly government who sees value in throwing unconstitutional money its way in return for votes. Without any such host for its parasitic lifestyle, such a society would be the economic equivalent of a group that does not believe in having children; it will die out quickly. It is not self-sustainable. And that means once the government support dies out, this is a flash-in-the-pan movement. But it has been kept alive for many decades now by the US Government and the cartel that runs the government behind the scenes.

But this is no movement of philosophers and statesmen and problem solvers; it is a movement of irrationals and irresponsibles—and I shall not be in the least surprised to find out that it is funded by the Fascists/Communists who are continuing the process of overthrowing the United States (while we sit idly by and watch).

It’s likely, I suppose, that when the time is right, their handlers will try to stir up the minority mobs to violence against the committed workers—likely as a first round of warfare against those with the real power in this country (the power to get things done–and I’m referring to people who work for their own living). The non-workers will be of no long-term use to the Fascists, but they’ll make useful pawns in the opening rounds of the mounting conflict. But then, once they become a liability to the Fascists, and are no longer an asset, only a fool would think that the Fascists are going to go out of their way to keep feeding a nonworking class. Ironically, they’ll be much more likely to enslave them as chattel slaves, and then, simply to work them to death—even underfeeding them along the way. (And before they die, they’ll long for the good old days when they could suckle freely at the teats of the great American sow, having only to complain for their supper.)

It’s amazing where all one will run in the flight from reality. People end up in some very untenable places. You don’t want to work for a living, so you pin all your hopes on those “Critical Race Theorists” who tell you that you shouldn’t have to work, and that the world simply owes it to you to provide for you, and that anyone who says differently is merely spouting “white” propaganda—and that they can’t possibly know what they’re talking about, because they’re all hopelessly biased, and have no real idea how the world works.

Well, funny, but before “white people” were a thing, there were Semites in the Ancient Near East who were teaching hard work as a paradigm. (Check your Bible for this.) And there are other non-Caucasian cultures who have recognized that the need for hard work is a reality in this real world. Is it not a fair stereotype to mention Japan, for example? Do they not have an obvious national paradigm of diligence and hard work? And are they not prospering? But now, suddenly, we’re supposed to believe it’s a “white thing”, and that that’s all there is to it.

Well, that’s just stupid.

The klaxon culture has been a parasite alongside the classical American body politic for my whole life, at least—people assuming the right to what is not rightfully theirs, and being angry that it’s not being handed to them as they demand. And that culture has thrived as the US Government (and other entities) have learned how to manipulate them by way of their corruption of greed. But that klaxon class will definitely be thinned out in the coming struggle, because they’ll be left eventually to fend for themselves—and fending for themselves is the very thing they refuse to do. They’ll end up shooting each other, and being shot by workers defending their own possessions and safety, and eventually, by the very government that now promises them such uber-rights over everybody else.

You could clear off a continent and populate it nicely with people of any skin color, and the workers among them would thrive while the non-workers would not. The word for this is not “racism”, but “nature”. That’s how it works in the real world, friends. It’s not a “white thing”.

The “Runaway Congress” Bill (Faithless Representation Felony)

Activism, Politics, Rule of Law

Empowering Constitution-supporting citizens to remove bad-acting members of Congress with the help of state courts. (See the full text of the bill below.)

I’ve drafted a bill to help the states solve one of America’s greatest problems. That problem is that Congress does not very well follow the Constitution it swears to uphold. And who is responsible for impeaching and trying members of Congress who break the rules? Well, Congress is.

Do you see a problem here?

Continue reading The “Runaway Congress” Bill (Faithless Representation Felony) →