None Dare Call It Fascism

• Governments nationalizing their banking and largest industries.
• Government regulating salaries of the businesses that they control.
• Government hiring and firing executives and members of governing boards.
• Government confiscating or depleting the assets of its wealthiest citizens.
• Government trying to spend its way into economic prosperity.

The Cold War Soviet Union? Cuba? China? Venezuela?
NO! It’s the United States of America under Barack Obama.

Reports are surfacing today that the newly elected President will be give the head of General Motors President, Rick Wagoner, as the price of any more federal funds to keep GM afloat. Wagoner has reportedly agreed to step down. Wagoner’s sin according to Obama was that “He is considered responsible for increasing GM’s focus on trucks and SUVs—at the expense of the hybrids and fuel efficient cars that have become more popular in the last couple of years.” – Politico
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20625.html

Translation, GM made the types of vehicles that Americans wanted to buy instead of forcing American consumers into “green” vehicles that the environmentalists said were good for the planet. He has sinned against the planet and assisted in the violation of “Mother Earth” and for this he must be sacrificed.

Obama furthers his fascist aims of controlling the means of production and also furthers the erosion of individual liberty and freedom of choice.

Kings

Allegedly this new show is a modern day telling of the lives of Kings Saul and David. After watching it last night I was disappointed. The King’s son is a spoiled party animal that pretends to like girls but saves the really intimate stuff for the boys. There is no son named Jonathan even though he and David are best of friends in the biblical account. David reveals that his slaying of the Goliath tank was an accident not the result of his faith in God. I could go on but I think you get the point.

The story premise could actually work if the writers were just more attentive to the original material. It looks like NBC has chosen to give the biblical account the same treatment that they gave to Battlestar Galactica. Keep the names, flush the story line and “reboot the franchise”. Hey guys, God doesn’t need your help to rebrand the Bible.

There are a lot of reasons that Saul might want to kill David, but it was the people chanting “Saul killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands” that really pushed Saul into a homicidal quest. In the first episode David surrendered twice and blew-up a tank. With a kill ratio like that how is he ever going to get the King a few hundred foreskins for his daughter’s hand in marriage? I Samuel 18:24-29

I have my DVR set to record the show but I have little confidence that it will improve. Too bad. If the show lived up to the hype I would make my children watch every episode.

Watchmen

Over the weekend I snuck out of the house and went to see the movie Watchmen. I had read much of the publicity about the movie. I also was familiar with the legal disputes that almost stopped the film from being released.

Unlike some ignorant idiots, I did know that this was an “R” rated movie and not intended for children. The violence in the film was not as disturbing to me as The Dark Knight Batman movie from last summer. Most of the rape scene in the movie ended up on the cutting room floor but has been promised in the director’s cut of the DVD. You did get the idea of what happened and at least a few other guys stopped it once they figured out what was going on. Dr. Manhattan manages to spend half the movie buck naked and the full frontal shots of his “purple pickle” at parade rest is a new addition to the “R” film genre.

The movie soundtrack has many old songs that we have heard before. Bob Dylan singing “the times they are a changin’” was the first I remember. The most irreverent moment related to the soundtrack in the film was the song used for the big love scene between Night Owl and Silk Spectre. If you listen to the lyrics, the song is about King David composing a song of praise to God with the refrain of Hallelujah. So what you get in the movie is a song that keeps repeating Hallelujah while the passionate couple is going “oh yeah baby”. This song choice tells us about the director’s view of God and contributes nothing of substance to the scene.

The film features some bit parts of characters that you might remember from the 1980s.One scene includes characters doing an episode of The McLaughlin Group. It features: Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan and John McLaughlin. In another scene we meeting several captains of industry including Lee Iacocca right before Mr. Iacocca and several others are murdered by an attack on the group and their host. The infamous Apple computer ad from the 1984 Super Bowl makes an appearance in the film also.

The portrayal of Richard Nixon as a blood thirsty President that decides on a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union is not in character. Neither is the depiction of Nixon using of Dr. Manhattan as the weapon that ends the Vietnam War. Nixon was the one that started nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviets and Henry Kissinger was close to a settlement in Vietnam before Nixon resigned. Had Nixon remained in office, the timeline in Watchmen would never occur.

At this point stop reading unless you want to know some more details of the film including my take on the ending.

You know who the bad guy is in this film the first time you see him. He is not revealed to the characters in the movie until the end of the film. Frankly this spoiled the film for me.

Rorschach is the character that actually moves that plot along in the film as he tries to discover why someone would kill a 67 year old retired crime fighter called the Comedian. In flashbacks we get to meet the Comedian. How he got the name is never explained. The Comedian is never funny or likeable. He is a selfish, murdering S.O.B. that gets his kicks hurting others.

Rorschach reminds me of Charles Bronson in Death Wish or Eastwood in Dirty Harry. He is a vigilante that sees the world in black and white. His search for the truth is compelling. He operates outside the law and delivers the justice that “the system” is too weak to administer.

The villain in the movie reminds me of someone that you would find in a James Bond flick with one major difference. Bond always stops the bad guy at the last minute. Good eventually triumphs over evil. However, in this movie not only does the bad guy get to nuke several major cities and frame Dr. Manhattan for doing it, he gets away with it! Rorschach protests and Dr. Manhattan kills him! Then Dr. Manhattan leaves earth for greener (or redder) pastures. In the final scenes of the movie, we then see that the villain’s corporation gets the contracts to rebuild the cities that he just nuked five minutes before.

Watchmen is yet another film that does not deliver a comic book ending for “Truth, Justice and the American Way”; instead it embraces relativity, moral ambiguity and materialism. I really wanted to like this movie but it left me empty and unsatisfied. If you want to see it, save some money and wait for the rental.

Theft is Building Block of Obama’s Utopia

In the course of getting through my MBA program I have run across some really good teachers and some that are so removed from reality that I can’t seem to find much common ground to even communicate with them.

I rarely listen to Michael Savage but I know that he contends that liberalism is a mental illness. I am now not only willing to concede the point but wholeheartedly agree with his assessment. At its root however, I think that liberalism is the result of spiritual death that comes from rejecting God and his Word. Put another way, Christ is the cure to liberalism.

A case in point is my current instructor. He has multiple degrees—including economics—and a doctorate. He looks at the spending spree of the federal government and his only gripe is that President Obama is not spending enough money to effectively rescue the economy. He claims that Obama is beholden to the right wing of the Republicans because he allowed a few token tax cuts amongst all the pork. Let me get this straight, every Republican in the House of Representatives voted against this bill and the three most liberal Republicans in the Senate voted for it and Obama caved to the Republican right?

The effective debt of the US government exceeds 65 trillion dollars—which is greater than the gross national product of the entire world—and he has the stones to say Obama is not spending enough money? In adjusted dollars, Obama has spent more than FDR in the New Deal in less than two months!

Furthermore, my instructor thinks Obama should nationalize every financial institution in the US and then after a few years the government should divest then (make then private again) and create one thousand small banks. These banks would not be allowed to merge to form larger banks by aggressive use of anti-trust legislation.

My instructor feels that all our problems can be solved by government central planning of production and aggressive use of wealth redistribution. He wants the outright confiscation of all wealth from the top five percent of all income earners. He asserts that we need to be more like France and Germany. We need more days off, nationalized healthcare and more government control of the economy. This conveniently negates fact that France and Germany are demographically on the verge of extinction due to legalized abortion and other social factors that resulted in low birth rates. For many decades the birth rate has been below replacement levels for all European countries. In addition the large Moslem populations in these countries are pressing for recognition of Sharia Law in these formerly Christian nations.

Of course my instructor is also a believer in “green” energy. He seems to want the personal use of automobiles banned and replaced with mass transit. To facilitate this, he wants housing to be changed to cram as many people as possible into the smallest amount of space. Gaia forbid that we should have yards around our houses and waste water keeping them green.

These are just some of the issues that I can recall my teacher advocating. So why you may ask do I contend that these beliefs are symptoms of a spiritual illness? Let me briefly try to explain.
God has created three institutions to govern man: government, church and family. For a healthy society, each of these must be in balance. Each has an exclusive area of responsibility but there are areas where each intersects.

All law is religious.

“…in any society, any change of law is an explicit or implicit change of religion. Nothing more clearly reveals, in fact, the religious change in a society than a legal revolution. When the legal foundations shift from Biblical law to humanism, it means that the society now draws its vitality and power from humanism, not Christian theism.” RJ Rushdoony

Any change in law is a change from one god to another. In the same book, Rushdoony states, “…it must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society”.
The basis of Western civilization is rooted in biblical values.

Given the above, what my teacher is advocating is removing the last vestiges of biblical Christianity from our society and replacing them with the power religion of the secular state.

For many, it may be a distant memory but the Ten Commandments are still one of the pillars of Western Civilization. What my teacher is embracing is inverting the edict “Thou shall not steal” and making it the basis of implementing social change. His whole vision of utopia is built by wealth redistribution at the point of the sword wielded by the State. This is the formula for tyranny not liberty.

My teacher thinks by abolishing much private property and nationalizing businesses and thus investing the government with the power to plan our lives he can solve society’s ills.
One can’t help but recall that the Scripture proclaims, “Professing themselves to be wise they became fools “.

At its root, my teacher seems fixated on jealousy and envy that others have more material possessions than he does This whole scheme that my teacher has dreamed-up is the result of years of sin eating away at his insides. Clearly the focus of his worldview is based on a violation of the Commandment “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” Clearly my teacher covets his neighbor’s house and he covets his neighbor’s employees and he covets his neighbor’s job (ox) and he covets his neighbor’s mode of transportation (ass) and everything else his neighbor has.

My teacher’s utopia can only end in a tyrannical society based either on fascism or socialism. You would think after the hundreds of millions that died in the last century for these two belief systems men would reject such evil. Unfortunately, my teacher thinks he can get it right where Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest got it wrong.