Archive for June, 2015

Flag Banning


I’m a native New Yorker. Had I been alive in the past centuries with my current beliefs I would have been a slavery Abolitionist and if possible both an activist in the Underground Railroad smuggling slaves to freedom in Canada and an agitator for slave rebellions against slaveholders in states where slavery was legal.

That said, I oppose the current move by retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Sears and eBay to ban sale of merchandise displaying the Confederate Battle Flag and of Warner Brothers to stop making toy “Dukes of Hazzard” cars carrying the Confederate flag decal.

Dukes of Hazzard General Lee
Dukes of Hazzard General Lee

This wiping out of American history, putting the Confederate flag into an Orwellian Memory Hole, can only benefit a totalitarian view where the honoring of any rebellion against central government is tagged as unallowable. The cause of preserving slavery was an evil motive for rebellion but the Constitution as permitting no exit clause for dissenters against hegemonic centralism is also evil.

I would have agreed with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison that, if anything, the non-slave-owning states should have seceded from the Union and been a haven for slaves escaping from the slave-holding states.

Libertarians make a mistake if we believe our freedom can only be lost to government edict. The surrender without a fight to trendy historical censorship is as quick a path to tyranny.

When private companies ban merchandise because the fragile among us object, it will never stop. Banning sales of firearms and ammunition when evildoers use them against the innocent will follow. The battle flag of the American Revolution — the “Dont Tread on Me” Gadsden Flag — will disappear if some demented Tea Party zealot commits a lone-wolf act of terrorism and embraces that symbol while doing it.

And when we see drone-strike “collateral damage” burning the Stars and Stripes should Americans pull down their national flag in sympathy as well?

Abandon your past and you condemn your future.

If flags can be banned, so can books and movies.

Bookmark and Share

The Nobeus News Report — June 22, 2015

My first Nobeus News Report since November 12, 2011.

News for Adults and News for Infants

President Barack Obama with Marc Maron
President Barack Obama with Marc Maron

Today, June 22, 2015, only the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley and CNN played the segment of President Barack Obama’s interview with podcaster Marc Maron without bleeping out the President’s use of the word “nigger.” NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, and cable news channels Fox News Channel and MSNBC — unprecedented in the history of radio and television news transmission — censored a presidential interview. NBC Nightly News explicitly said they were bleeping the word out of “sensitivity” to its viewers.

Now we know which news operations consider their viewers to be adults and which have a Nanny view which considers their audience to be incapable of ingesting uncensored news.

This is a horrendous precedent for the video news business in general. Fox News, NBC/MSNBC, and Disney/ABC News are to be condemned for this break with broadcast news history. CBS News and CNN have upheld the standard for newscasting and a public interested in being treated as adults should preference those news outlets.

#

The Vicar of “Christ!”

Pope Francis
Pope Francis

Back in May 2014 when Pope Francis pontificated favoring government redistributing wealth, I posted — then deleted — a blog article titled “The Vicar of Another Man” in which I told the Pope to shut his pie-hole. I was not being specifically anti-Roman Catholic or even, more generally, anti-Christian. I was invoking the principle that being a religious leader with multitudes of followers does not automatically grace one with infallible knowledge, especially when he is not even claiming to speak with a pontiff’s ex cathedra authority.

When atheist Bill Maher is having a love affair with the head of the Roman Catholic Church because the Pope’s sounding like a Democratic presidential candidate, Rush Limbaugh is telling his listeners how Protestant he is out of the same political perception, and Roman Catholic former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan refers to Pope Francis as an “Argentinian Jesuit Socialist,” you know the Pope is making waves.

The discussion of planetary global warming is not scientific; it’s political. The for-and-against on this issue divides along lines from partisan left to right. I consider that anyone who regards as a “pollutant” the all-important exchange gas between chlorophyll-breathing plant life and oxygen-breathing animal life — carbon dioxide — is either a stealth agent of invading extraterrestrials intent on terraforming this planet to their own ecological needs or is manipulating this issue for other brands of world domination.

The Pope heads up a tiny state but his church has 1.2 billion worldwide followers. With the threat of excommunication always held in reserve — and for the faithful this means the possibility of spending an eternity in hell if one dies without church-monopolized absolution of sin — a papal encyclical is a powerful psychological weapon. Issued on matters of science, industry, or economics, it can determine the selection of governments and policy.

When the head of the Roman Catholic Church is a messenger of Keynes, Gore, and the Brady Campaign, it’s time for Jesus Christ to send him a pink slip. To quote George Burns in the movie Oh God!, “Every time I turn around he’s spreading the word – my word – only my words he ran out of years ago. Take these to Rev. Big Mouth and say that God says he’s a phony. If he wants to get rich, tell him to sell Earth shoes. But personally tell him I’d like him to shut up.”

#

Defending the Church

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, SC
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, SC

Under South Carolina law the holder of a license to carry a concealed firearm may not carry the concealed handgun into a “church or other established religious sanctuary unless express permission is given by the appropriate church official or governing body.”

So, once again, the murder of nine innocents was in a politically-mandated gun-free zone because someone in authority gave a monopoly on gun possession to the devil.

The opposition to self-defense is not a Democratic-only position, though President Obama and Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton have used this incident to resume calls for more gun restrictions. Former New York Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg is as anti-gun as they come; and speaking to FNC’s Chris Wallace yesterday Karl Rove suggested the only way to eliminate “gun violence” is to repeal the Second Amendment and remove guns from society.

Even my friend Brad Linaweaver suggested to me that without a focus on identifying and opposing evil the gun-rights movement will finds its political coalition decaying because talking about shooting back is not a good enough argument.

Of course a stand for good and against evil must be made, and not just from pulpits. No culture can survive, much less thrive, when a theory of natural law leading to the Rights of Man (and yes, this includes females as well as sapient anthropoids, cetaceans, avians, ET’s, and AI’s who can pass a Turing Test), is not the base of culture.

But I don’t see angels around me; I see men. And there enough of those men who are evil and mad that to protect the innocent I want even prayer meetings to be able to shoot back against the invader.

#

Bookmark and Share