STRAIGHT OUTTA’ DENVER

So how about I say a little about myself before everyone around here gets the wrong impression of me. I was one of your average run of the mill conservatives supporting the usual conservative view of the world and I still do hold true to most if not all of the typical conservative way of thinking. And that’s an easy thing for everyone around here to confirm, all you have to do is take a good look at my posts here about two years back and you’ll easily see that I had all of the talking points set and was committed all the way to the conservative cause. I’ve even been accused by Bieren of being the poster boy of conservatism and I was honored to receive that supposed cut down by Bieren (I still don’t consider that to be a cut down). I used to listen to talk radio at least 8 hours a day to the greats like Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager. And just like all of them, I still do think that Obama is just about the worst president we have elected in quite some time even though I do like the guy, I just never thought he was right for the job and with how the events have unfolded recently, looks like I was very much right about that. Along with all of the rest of the good conservatives, I fought hard to get McCain elected even though none of us wanted the guy but that we thought he would just be slightly better than Obama, and he did make us all happy with nominating Sarah Palin and calming our fears that we would just get pushed to the side once the election was done. But we didn’t win that one, and now I do find as least for myself that it was a good thing that McCain didn’t win. Not because I enjoy seeing this country going to shambles whenever I briefly have a look at the news but that I did get the chance to completely rethink the whole idea of the conservative movement and for that matter I started to find a problem with our entire political system as it is. The truth is: this system is completely unsustainable and impractical right from the time that we (as a country) started capitalizing on the industrial revolution. The unfortunate truth is that when we (as a country) started making capitalism the reason for why we exist then that’s when it started to no longer be one nation under God but rather one nation under the mighty dollar. As we keep on making the dollar and this entire system work for us, we keep finding ourselves enslaved to this system and even start finding ourselves enslaving other countries to it as well. Sooner or later something has to give, and the more and more our economical crisis continues, the more and more likely people around the world are going to be demanding more world government and more world economical integration. It’s not really a question of if this will be, it’s much more a question of when. The idea will keep looking and sounding reasonable on paper but if we start calculating the realities of human nature you’ll find that it’s just going to persist this problem. So may I suggest an alternative? How about an opt out plan?

The bureaucratic issue
We have a big issue going on in this country today! It’s just the fact that this country’s government is swollen with way too much bureaucracy that’s just sucking out all of the real freedom around here. In reality we are not much of a free country at all. We can elect a completely different group of people who say the exactly opposite thing but yet the same things just keep on happening. For example all of the people that really wanted us to stop all the wars and get out completely, they just do things the proper way and gather up support for Obama and push all the way to win the election! And Obama didn’t quite do as he promised by moving Iraq and instead did the same exact thing in Afghanistan that Bush did in Iraq! So may I ask what really is the difference here? They both say opposite things only to do the same actions. They both spend way too much money on things that don’t work and all these governmental programs just keep failing. So why exactly are we spending all of this money on things that don’t work? Why are we spending all of this money on a system that doesn’t do what it’s suppose to do?

Now it’s an easy argument for a conservative to say “well that’s because the liberals have abandoned the constitution and start making up their own law!” Now to an extent that is true because it was a liberal president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt who started a trend to nominate supreme court justices that would do as the president pleases rather than rule on what the constitution says. That sort of judicial ruling has showed up all over the country in situations like when California had used it’s supreme court to put same sex marriage in place despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens in that state voted against same sex marriage. So ruling like that one have effectively made voter initiatives practically obsolete in this country. However, liberals would argue that it’s the big business in this country that’s tearing this country to shreds and that’s also true. With how financially irresponsible that most all of the larger corporations have been, it’s lead to the financial collapse that we see today. The large banks around this country liked making all of that money they were getting off of the bad loans they were handing out so much that they didn’t check to see what would happen if the housing bubble would pop. Thus, there were a lot of people left out in the cold when they couldn’t pay the loans they had. So there is plenty of blame to go around and most certainly lots of people around the country have been making sure they push that blame out there. All you need to do is turn on the news and you’ll see somebody (no matter who it is that’s on) blaming someone else for all of the problems of the country. This problem gets so absurd that certain people have made t-shirts saying “pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.” Now that doesn’t sound so bad until you look up the verse and see “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.” Well that’s not very good sportsman like conduct there and I find anyone who would use the bible in such a manner utterly detestable. So Why do we have to put up with this failed system? But still we’re not a the root cause of what’s wrong here.

The Irony of it all
You can actually trace all of these problems back to the American Civil War and even further back to the founding of our nation. The question here is why exactly did that war start in the first place? Considering that every southern state left the union because of slavery, that does mean that we started off as a nation living in violation of one of our most core values: that all humans are created equal. In order to change this Violation, we required a Civil War so that we can remove the inequality from our nation, but have we really started to live as our principals say that we should? So that we could win the civil war Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus allowing him to detain confederate soldiers without trial so that things could operate more smoothly and allow for a victory. Lincoln had also spent money that was not approved by congress yet and kept pushing all to win the war and never held back. While I’m not wiring this to demonize Lincoln, what he did had corrected a great injustice in our society that should not have been allowed to exist in the first place but yet to correct that problem we ended up having to throw away most of our principals to win. This did create a sense of pragmatism that’s created a false mindset in this nation: that we will go to any length to achieve our objectives no matter the rules that we have. This is an American problem that both political parties adhere to and this is shown in every element of our society from the way that it spends it’s money to the way that we talk. Everything is geared to making America the bright shining city on the Hill without thinking of what’s truly the right thing to do. The political talk is always about what is best for America rather than what is the right thing to do. Just as Lincoln had done in the past, so too, every president had continued following his example up to the present day in some from by placing America before all other concerns. As a result, we have ended up wiping out most of the native Americans, we have imprisoned Japanese without cause, we detain people of middle eastern decent and we keep people from coming into our country when it is not to our benefit. We demonize groups of people when they don’t line up with our core values when we have a political difference or a cultural difference. We place that we are first, right in what we believe and anyone that sees it differently is then someone who needs to change their perspectives to our view for things to come out right. We decide that we must implant our culture into other societies, regardless of the cost to them, because we are the ones who live right. We place blame on others when things don’t go right when they are not the problem. The true problem is how we think. We are a country that holds to the ideas on individualism and we think that each of us individually can make it on our own without any help from the people around us, other countries or even God Himself. We say “yes we can” prove that we are the great thing in the world when this is not true. We are arrogant.

A deceleration of dependence
In our founding document, The declaration of independence, the defining words are “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” At the time that was written, it was intended to convey to England that they do not have the right to take life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness away from us and that is a true statement. However, as we have aged as a nation, that statement has evolved even further to mean that our government must provide these things for us when our government can not provide. In order to provide life for our citizens then that means that we must go abroad and take life from others to ensure that we have it. In order to ensure liberty for our citizens then we have to take it from our own people so as to not trample on others rights. Finally, to create the possibility of the pursuit of happiness then we create a system that leaves many loop holes and allows for people to get caught up in and they never find what they were looking for. Most of the wars that we have fought were because other people were living in a way that we did not like rather than because we had to fight that war so that we would survive as a nation. The only two wars we have fought where we would not have continued existing as a nation if we had not won was the revolutionary war and world war two. With all of the wars that we keep on fighting, it only continues to keep fueling the hatred for our nation because we fight every war with the assumption that we are right that may or may not be the case. Thus, we continue taking life so that we can provide it for others. We enforce copy write laws to ensure that people to do not take someone’s work and use it for a profit when they themselves have taken that idea from someone else. There is nothing on this earth that is truly new and in reality, everything is just a recycled idea applied in a different way like having an internal combustion engine replace a horse or replacing a mud hut with wooden and steel houses. We stop certain people from releasing a song because they have certain words that are the same to another that may be right or may not be right. Or we take the house of another person so that we can build a highway to move people faster around the country. Thus, we take the liberty from others to ensure it for others. We have created the market economy so that the people that work the hardest are the ones that reap the most reward out of this nation but yet what it all comes down to is blind luck. Everyone in the housing market was making millions of dollars and was working really hard to get there only to find that we built too many houses and no longer needed so many thus causing them to loose out on what they worked so hard on. While at the same time a kid who has never worked a day in his or her life can just get all of the money their parents earned and just waste it away. At the end of it all, I keep finding that the most ambitious people in the world are also the most unhappy. So to ensure the pursuit of happiness usually ends up creating our own unhappiness. We don’t follow what we preach in this country!

Let us take a step back for a moment and realize certain truths of this world that we can not change. Life is not ensured because at any moment you can die in millions of different ways. So in reality, the very fact that you take another breath is actually a gift because you may not take another. Liberty is never ensured because anything that you want can become something that controls your actions and thus you end up enslaving yourself to your desires. To truly be independent of everything means that all of your actions must be devoid of all passion. Happiness is something that things can not provide for you but it is something that you have to choose to be on a daily basis despite what this life brings you. So the more and more that we keep on focusing in on how to fix problems that are part of a world that we can never change, the more that we will keep spending and fighting and working we keep on pushing ourselves into slavery. Every single person on this planet is a slave to something and your only choice is what you choose to be a slave to. So given all of this, what can we possibly do about our problem here? The only answer here is to take everything that we have in this world with gratitude and live the best that we can and allow forces that are greater than us to correct what is wrong in this world. We need to push aside our arrogance and admit that we don’t know everything and that we can’t correct everything in this world. We need to live a little simpler with our minds set on where we are truly headed all together as a whole. We need to realize that everything in this world is a gift and that we are only still living by grace that this world have not taken our lives yet. We need to stop thinking of what we are entitled to but rather what we can do to celibate the fact that we are still living. We need to declare that we are dependent on each other and need to keep focused on the people around us rather than focusing on things that we can not change. I propose that we change the way that we think.

Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do despite your country
We are a country were most of the population clams to be Christan but yet the funny thing is we rarely act like Christians in this country. So it’s really quite funny to see every president tout their Christaness about when they never do things that are “Christan.” For one, Jesus was never concerned about popularity and in fact usually said things to purposefully drive people away when He would start to get popular. Also, He never cared much for government workings and in fact usually attracted hatred from government officials. However, for the purpose of this post I am not talking of evangelizing people, that is a subject that I have talked about and will spend a lifetime talking about but for now I’m focusing in on how we act and think. For example, our founding fathers had the Boston Tea Party where we destroyed the property of the British to make our point that we didn’t like the taxes England was placing on us. But on the other hand, England was paying for a costly war that we had benefited from and they had bills to pay. Now was it right for England to be placing all of the high cost on us and enforcing the control on us? No but we were also not right in destroying what was not ours. And we constantly keep doing this by butting our heads into conflicts that are not ours to deal with. So why didn’t we go about this another way? Why didn’t we work off the dept that we had accumulated for that war and then continued on living our lives as if the king of England didn’t matter to us? But we can’t change what happened in the past so we can’t possibly know what would have happened if we had followed that course. So let’s just fast forward 234 years to the present and ask the same question, why don’t we live as if the federal government doesn’t matter? Well then that means that we won’t be worried at all about who’s in office and might not even bother to vote at all. That doesn’t mean that we keep ourselves out of the loop and not know what’s happening but instead of worrying about the things that we can’t control, we keep focused on what we can control. We can’t control what Washington is going to do but we can control what we say and what we do. So if we live life with the principals that government is by about and for the people (even though it’s not) then that means we don’t have to stress ourselves over everything the government is doing. We can better focus on the people around us and our local communities if we’re not worried about government. We don’t have to waste our money on a system that’s completely broken and almost useless. We don’t have to keep fixed into the 9 to 5 work week and then go home and quickly lock the door to make sure the neighbors are thous scary terrorist that we keep hearing about. No, we can get to know our neighbors and actually find out for sure if they actually have bad intentions. We can turn off the TV and and just not care about all the useless hype that we have going around the country. We can instead look to helping out the people in our own back yard instead of relying on a system that doesn’t the people that it hands out checks to. May I suggest that we stop relying on the government.

Now don’t misunderstand me here– I am not suggesting that we start another revolution or march on Washington and demand changes. No, I really mean pretend that it doesn’t matter. Not that we decide to not pay our taxes or anything illegal like that but just that we live without the government in our heads every day. So in order for us to start moving us forward in a manner that allows for us to correct our local problems despite what the government is doing I have a few points to think over.

1. First things first– smash your TV! or at lest stop watching the political news and hyped up television that will have you constantly griped by by the culture. All of the constant reports are just things that will keep you worried over one thing that you can’t change to the next thing that you can’t change and so it’s just something that’s just going to keep draining you out. It’s wise to know what’s going on in the world but news papers and other such media formats are less intrusive and allows for deeper thought than TV news.

2. Find a community– Churches or your local temple of your religious believes are by far the best places to go for this or if you happen to be atheist or agnostic then I suggest you try one, it might just be a good experience for you. And pay close attention to the people there, find out what they are like and what they need and help out if you can. Don’t look at it like it’s a place for getting good and services like your local market but more like a second home with people that you can help and can help you. Let it enrich your life with cares that have nothing to do with the government.

3. Form a new identity– We all have been living in a culture of being Americans first that overrides everything else in this life and we need to break from that habit. We need to care more about the people around us and the world at large rather than our country or creed. America is not the most important thing in this world and someday it will fall just like all of the empires and countries in the past have also risen and fallen but the world keeps on going on despite that. So don’t let that trouble you! Instead, try loving the people around you just as you love yourself and place more value on being part of your community rather than a citizen of America and this also goes the same for all of you living in other countries as well.

4. Work with others– Start living a little simpler with what you have! Instead of rushing out to buy that nice car you always wanted, find one that meets your needs. Don’t rush out to buy the big nice house but find one that meets your needs. With the excess of money that you save here then you can pour it into your local community to help out with others helping build an establishment that you all can benefit from. It’s easy to tear down but it takes generations to build up places of shelter and comfort. As you work and commit to a place to build up, you start to leave good traditions in your children and the people around you.

5. Take joy in your life– None of us was given the choice to be born into this world and none of us has the choice on when it will end. So take hold of that! Live your life as if it were all as song of praise for all that you have been given. Yes, you will have pain in your life and yes you will be hurt and will hurt others, this is inevitable but your only other option is to end it prematurely. But that would be a horrible same for you to do such a thing! If you have people around you that love and care for you, then take hold of that for that’s more precocious then all of the finest gold in the world. Fame will fade in time and countries will eventually die out but the people that you encourage and love will turn around and bless others. That’s what changes societies!

None of what I suggest is going to be easy but if we are to move forward in this country then we are going to have to start learning how to straighten out our priorities. We have lost our way completely! We no longer do what is right in this country but rather what is more expedient and easy to do and that’s caught us in a terrible snare. Life will go on despite what this country does, so why should we let us control us? There’s so much more out there than this country has to offer.

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Make love and get war

Posted on May 21st, 2009 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Ethics, Philosophy, Media, Christianity, Cultural.

We have a massive problem in this nation and it’s some that’s just tearing at the very fabric, we have one issue that we just don’t respect anymore that is killing and distorting everything that was once good and great about this nation -in fact the biggest falsehood and lie that we’ve come up with is: We’re extremely health conscious in this nation, but yet when it comes to one of the biggest health issues that we have, we throw it around like it’s a beach ball; We have to ensure that we count up all the calories and fat grams, make sure we have it down perfectly, don’t get any trans fat in there or whatever other new little thing that we need to make sure we don’t eat or do eat. We have health studies all the time and keep dumping them up to the ceiling. First, you’re not to drink any alcohol at all, then you’re suppose to have a glass of wine everyday, then you’re suppose to limit the amount of carbs you take in. On and on the studies go in an endless cycle that just drives me nuts. Yet they ignore the 500 pound gorilla in the room in favor of chasing after the nats and the reality is that it’s killing people. It’s completely tearing our nation apart and they just don’t get it. It has it’s hook so deeply sunk inside us that no one’s willing to start trying to remove it. By far the nastiest diseases come from it but for a county that freaks out over the flu and every other little possible thing, we just ignore this one. Just get tested so you know but yet people do and then they just go ahead and just keep making the problem worse. But hey they’re just going to do it anyway, right? Quite frankly folks, this nation is on a one way road to complete annihilation and there’s one thing that’s doing it: sex. Or as they like to say “making love,” which is actually quite an absurd description of it since I see many people not treating each other with love when they go around sleeping with everyone. Now if you do support gay marriage then you’re most likely ether already offended or just think I’m being absurd. In that case I would suggest that you stop reading this now because you’re most likely going to become more offended as you go along and you won’t understand me anyway. So you should save yourself the trouble and go read something else because you’re just going to become more upset and angry at me and that won’t do ether of us any good. If you read this anyway and get offended then you’ve been warned and your offense is your own fault. However if you do believe that marriage is between one man and one woman then this is a post that you should take seriously because this is a matter that killing one massively important thing that’s been keeping our country alive for over two centuries: families. I also include a lot of personal stories in this post that are just intended to make my point stronger. So please, let’s keep names off the comment line.

The dehumanization syndrome
I always found it completely vile the way women are treated in middle eastern countries. The way they completely dress them up and force them to cover their face. Cover their face! That’s what criminals do when they’re trying to hide their identity and when they do that they become less than human taking what they want and hurting whoever gets in their way. So to force a woman to cover up completely so that they no longer bare any resemblance to someone human just makes me feel sick. It’s a disgusting practice and I would want to see someone’s face so that I can identify with someone. But yet for how much the feminist talk about how they want equal rights for women, why do they never pick this issue up? It’s wasn’t until recently that I just realized that we do the exact same thing to the women in our country only far worse. Thous counties methods of dehumanizing women is by hiding their faces while ours is to plaster up a picture and have the guy focus on the breasts rather than the face. That’s just as dehumanizing! Ever wonder why Hugh Hefner gives so much money to feminist causes? It’s because it helps him with his business. It actually all about turning women into sex object rather than real human beings. We have this picture of women that no real woman is but yet we plaster that up there like it is and we wonder why they’re so depressed lately. And that is the why we train them up to be. I was at a concert a few months back (a frockus concert in fact ) and I was there with a girl who was friends with the band. She was a really nice girl, a church girl in fact, but she was really obsessed with her looks. We were just sitting down talking over several things and then just said “you haven’t been starring at my breasts at all.” I thought of saying “well my parents raised me to treat women with respect” but for some reason we just got off that subject and went to something else (in retrospect I should have said that). But what I found so interesting was that I was treating her like a normal human being here and she kept trying to make herself into the sex object. You could very well say that she was trying to dehumanize herself and what for? Because that’s the ideal that this society keep plastering up there? That this is what you need to be in order to be happy? Everything about this girl was not happy, she was very insecure about herself and couldn’t control herself. Why was that?

What you think will free you, will enslave you
I go dancing a lot and that gives me a chance to meet interesting people and find some new friends. About two years back I had met a fiery red head that I really wanted to get to know! So I figured it would be a good idea to get to know her friends and get their approval, so I walk right up to her friend and the first thing that came out of her mouth was “I’m depressed over not getting laid.” Right then I bit my tong so that I would say some stupid one liner but without saying another word she just kept on going on and on about how she tried to commit suicide. So I thought this girl was completely crazy and wasn’t really wanting to try to get to know her any better. Now I think that should have reflected poorly on that fiery red head that I wanted to date and as I later found out that red head was quite crazy too and I’m glad that I never did date her but at the time still wanted her. So I just started putting up with the friend but for some reason she really liked talking to me. The red head pushed me off to the side so I ended up talking to her friend for months. I kept on trying to reason with her on how she was living her life. By the time she was 17 she had already had sex with 9 different guys and was always depressed but she wouldn’t ever listen to me. She was an absolutely beautiful girl but she always dated and slept with guys who were complete jerks. She had a great personality and she was fun to hang around but she was extremely selfish and the guys who really loved her she would just dump. One of her “boyfriends” was as far as I could tell a really good guy but she just took his virginity and then just dumped him. I guess he just wasn’t interesting enough for her but she never did tell me why she dumped him. After a few months that guy took a gun to his head and pulled the trigger but the clip jammed and it didn’t fire. He told her about it and her response was “how could you do that to me!” She wasn’t trying to help him she just condemned him for hurting her feeling and just pushed it off to the side like she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She really didn’t respect herself at all, she just let guys have their way with her and then she wondered why they’d call her a bitch. But the unfortunate truth is: she deserved it. And then she call me strange for the fact that I’m still holding my virginity for the woman that I’ll marry but it came down to the fact that she didn’t respect herself at all. But she always kept on talking about that first guy. She kept talking about how he promised her that he’d give her children and that he’d always love her but in the end he just left her. Left her seeking that love that she had never had but instead of letting another guy love her that way she would go for the guys that would do the same thing to her. She got addicted to feeling that same pain and wouldn’t give that up for a moment and she wouldn’t trust in the possibility that God could heal her of it.

What you think will empower you, will kill you
I had a friend once tell me that every time the issue of sex would come up I would freak out! Well he wasn’t really right about that but I have had a lot of issues with always falling in love with girls that I would never have. It always seems to me that every time that I express the slightest interest in a girl, that’s when they would flee off! That’s always been quite depressing for me, nothing ever works out and here I am at 24 and I can’t say that I’ve ever had a real girlfriend. I’d have friends that would tell me that I should just try it out! See how sex feels, you need to know what it’s like if you’re going to get married. Some of them even tried to set up situations were that would happen and thank God that they didn’t work out. Somehow I just knew that if I were to just have cheap sex it would put me in a far worse position and I’d sink worse into depression but I couldn’t figure out why. Most my friends that have done it didn’t seem to be suicidal at all but yet somehow I knew that I would start down a path that would just completely tear me to shreds if I had done the same. Thinking back over my life I did remember that I had a childhood love. In fact I was quite certain that she was the one for me! (of course I knew everything at the age of 10 ) I had remembered all of the good times I had with that girl and she was most defiantly my best friend at the time. After a few years her parents took her with them to other parts of the country and I of course lost my love there but yet thinking over it now, I don’t remember any tears over it. I found that really odd considering that I was madly in love with her and I remember fighting with my brother over it because he was trying to convince that I shouldn’t marry her. But the more the he tried the more certain I was (like I said, I knew everything at the age of 10). But it actually was very strange for me because I don’t remember a single feeling over her leaving But yet I remember plenty of tears over other girls I had known so I didn’t understand why she was different here. But she was completely different than all of the rest of them because of what I did and I just didn’t want to remember. I have some large gaps in my memory especially centered around thous years around third grade and there are plenty of time where people will bring up stories that I just can’t remember. Somehow I did have a concept of sex when I was really young and I still don’t know how I knew of it when I was that little. I just thought it was something that people do when they’re in love and I loved her and I thought she loved me too. I had a really fuzzy memory that’s recently come back to me and I’ve been trying to figure out what it’s meant for several weeks now. I just remember being in my parents bathroom and I had started getting naked in front of her and she walked out. I don’t remember what was said or anything else but I know I felt humiliated and in fact I still feel humiliated. That’s something that I’ve worked really hard to bury very deep inside myself and never feel that again. However instead of bringing that to God and allowing Him to heal me I just kept hiding it, especially from myself.

The shame that cuts us deep inside
For years I have always felt shame at the very fact that I was a male. I had always hated myself and never thought I was worth anything. It took me by complete surprise the day I learned Bieren actually thought of me as a friend. I thought I was crap. I just kept everything to myself and kept twisting it around in my mind, trying to make the past go away but it never did. I always kept looking at the girls I knew I wouldn’t ever be with as the only ones that I could go for and the ones that really like me, I didn’t believe them. I’d always ether make a fool out of myself or I’d just stay silent and I spent my days in constant hate. Nobody knew how to help me because I didn’t understand or want to know what was wrong with me. But yet Bieren really did help save my life by just deciding to hang out with me and accepting me as I was. He didn’t just write me off as some crazy guy like all the rest of my pears did, he just took me as I was, kept pushing me to do things, try out things. And from that I could start building in myself a new perception of myself: that I’m really not as crappy as I think! And it’s that broken a destructive perceptive that get us constantly doing hurtful things to ourselves and others. I call them demons or you could refer to them as black boxes, but they are thous events that make us react in ways that hurt ourselfs or others. When we hold them down tightly and hide them that’s when they have their power over us. But we can’t have them locked down and tightly secured from everyone, you need to have them out in the open with someone that you can trust. You shouldn’t necessarily go telling it to everyone you ever meet, that doesn’t help you make friends all that well, but you should talk about these things with someone that you can trust and support you. I only write these things here to try to help others and only after I have prayed about it for some time. But the only real way to get past such hurts is to bring them to God.

Forgiveness is the answer
Invot had busted out this Psalm a little bit back:

Psalm 51
Have mercy on me, O God,
because of your unfailing love.
Because of your great compassion,
blot out the stain of my sins.
Wash me clean from my guilt.
Purify me from my sin.
For I recognize my rebellion;
it haunts me day and night.
Against you, and you alone, have I sinned;
I have done what is evil in your sight.
You will be proved right in what you say,
and your judgment against me is just.
For I was born a sinner—
yes, from the moment my mother conceived me.
But you desire honesty from the womb,
teaching me wisdom even there.

Purify me from my sins, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Oh, give me back my joy again;
you have broken me—
now let me rejoice.
Don’t keep looking at my sins.
Remove the stain of my guilt.
Create in me a clean heart, O God.
Renew a loyal spirit within me.
Do not banish me from your presence,
and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and make me willing to obey you.
Then I will teach your ways to rebels,
and they will return to you.
Forgive me for shedding blood, O God who saves;
then I will joyfully sing of your forgiveness.
Unseal my lips, O Lord,
that my mouth may praise you.

You do not desire a sacrifice, or I would offer one.
You do not want a burnt offering.
The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit.
You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God.
Look with favor on Zion and help her;
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
Then you will be pleased with sacrifices offered in the right spirit—
with burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings.
Then bulls will again be sacrificed on your altar.

That’s the Psalm David had wrote after he had his affair with Bathsheba and had her husband killed and I find it to be one of the most beautiful works of poetry there is. That is because it embodies everything that my faith teaches me. The poem starts out with a cry of guilt, pain and remorse. He moves on to ask God to keep him in His presence and to give him a loyal spirit and for God to not take away His blessing from him. Then David asks God to make him willing to obey Him and then he says he’ll teach rebels God’s ways. Then David makes the point of the one thing God wants most from us: a broken and repentant heart. And as David says: “You do not desire a sacrifice, or I would offer one. You do not want a burnt offering. The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit.” Everything that we can possibly offer to God is meaningless to God when it’s compared to offering Him a broken spirit and God will only delight in anything else we do only after we give Him that broken spirit. But what exactly does giving God a broken spirit mean? How does that renew us? That’s because that’s the way that God can start to take over and start renewing us Himself. I’ve struggled for years over my self hatred. For one thing I didn’t know that I hated myself until last year. I didn’t know how broken my spirit was because I didn’t want to remember it. I was always haunted by my nature and always felt ashamed of myself and I never wanted to let go of it. I remember how violent everything was when I as addicted to porn. I hated the fact that they could do such things and not feel any shame over it when I was ashamed to be me. I wouldn’t talk about what I believed in because I hated me so I naturally assumed that everyone else did too. I started to actually like getting picked on by the bullies in my school because they helped me confirm this messed up view of my self. Like the rash that you just can’t help scratching because you just get a perverse satisfaction at feeling the pain that it makes. But yet you know that it would heal if you could just leave it alone and you so much want it to heal. It’s the same sort of wounds that we create on our souls when we don’t hand our pains to the Lord. This sort of world view that I formed of myself was one that I just wouldn’t want to let go because actually dealing with the problem was too painful. It’s hard to remember something that you’ve been burying for your whole life but if you bring it fourth and give it to the Lord, that’s when you can start to heal.

Building from the roots up
With every single problem we have there is always something that we are valuing more than God. This is the condition that our human nature puts us in and you can trace it back all the way to the beginning. One of the strangest parts about the fall of man was what the tree that caused our fall was named:

Genesis 2:15-17
The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”

It’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And that’s how we all stumble! We have all eaten from that tree because we all think that we can make things work out better than God can. That we can actually know better than He does. That we can make things right on our own accord instead of trusting Him with it. But it never works out that way. Every time that I have trusted in my own knowledge and thinking things only turned more and more destructive. I kept running into walls and I kept finding myself in more misery. My lust would only increase and always became more uncontrollable but yet now that I have remembered and given that pain to the Lord, all these things are now starting to heal. The past few weeks I have been far more capable of controlling my urges than I have in months. I’ve been looking more for a brighter future rather than wishing that I was dead and even now many things about me are starting to make sense. Continually bringing our pains to the Lord is something that we all need to do to get His blessings. We need to realize that everything we do in this life is for Him. That is especially true when it comes to the issue of sex. Right after Genesis talks about the tree that’s when it goes into how God made women:

Genesis 2:18-25
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him.” So the Lord God formed from the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and the man chose a name for each one. He gave names to all the livestock, all the birds of the sky, and all the wild animals. But still there was no helper just right for him.

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the Lord God took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the opening. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man.

“At last!” the man exclaimed.

“This one is bone from my bone,
and flesh from my flesh!
She will be called ‘woman,’
because she was taken from ‘man.’”

This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.

Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame.

And this is also why sex needs to be respected because it is an act of two people becoming one. So if you don’t respect it then it tears your soul to shreds not to mention the people that you’ll hurt by it. Every time I’m with a group of people that doesn’t respect sex, I see completely torn apart lives but yet with thous that do treat it with respect I see far more stable relationships. That’s why it’s reserved for marriage because it’s not about getting what you want out of it but satisfying the other person’s need to be one with someone. That’s why Paul said this:

1 Corinthians 7:2-9
But because there is so much sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman should have her own husband.

The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife.

Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. But I wish everyone were single, just as I am. But God gives to some the gift of marriage, and to others the gift of singleness.

So I say to those who aren’t married and to widows—it’s better to stay unmarried, just as I am. But if they can’t control themselves, they should go ahead and marry. It’s better to marry than to burn with lust.

Trying to satisfy your own need will not get you what you want in this life. That’s why I included the stories that I have because I see it all the time. But yet I have seen over in my own life and in other: that when you invest in others and love them, giving without expecting anything back from them, that’s when you’ll start seeing them turn around and bless you back.

Working for a new kingdom

Revelation 21:1-8
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”

And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!” And then he said to me, “Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.” And he also said, “It is finished! I am the Alpha and the Omega—the Beginning and the End. To all who are thirsty I will give freely from the springs of the water of life. All who are victorious will inherit all these blessings, and I will be their God, and they will be my children.

“But cowards, unbelievers, the corrupt, murderers, the immoral, those who practice witchcraft, idol worshipers, and all liars—their fate is in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

One girl that I know always keeps impressing me. In fact I’ve quoted her a couple of times here on this blog. She a very beautiful girl that goes to my church and I’ve told her that too but the funny thing is that really the reason that I have said that doesn’t have all that much to do with her looks. It’s actually much more due to the fact that she wouldn’t flaunt it like the girl I talked about at the beginning of this post. Unlike every other girl I have met she says more modestly dressed and holds herself in a respectful manner. I saw some pictures of her one time and that made it even more clear that she could be a super model if she wanted to be and make millions of dollars. Yet she chose not to live that sort of life. She chose a profession of serving others and keeps on serving other whenever she can. Instead of trying to use her looks to get what she wants she instead chooses to say “People do not exist to be receptacles for enjoyment and comfort in my life. No, quite the opposite. I exist to bless God and to bless people. and blessing people should not be something that I do when it is convenient for me, or when I know that I will get something out of it. That is missing the point!” And that was something that I had screwy in my head at that time and it still took me months to get my thinking right. But everything in this life is working to serve God and when we give Him our shattered spirits that when he’ll renew us and give us something to hope for. Ultimately our true hope is the renewal of our earth. For it to be made new just as God said He would. And we all need to come to Him to be made new. Only if we bring everything to Him. That woman will live a long and happy life if she keeps holding true to her example and you will also live a good life if you follow her example. But the only why that we can receive our renewal is for us to come to God with our pains and start allowing Him to start applying His treatments to us. Then we can live with peace in our lives.

5 comments.

Youtube Reviews #3: Let the bodies hit the floor, add your $(dollars) more and more…

Posted on March 24th, 2009 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Reviews, Media, Cultural.

Simple review:
Frighteningly comical… Hilariously accurate

As an economist, i can’t help but wonder what the cost-benefit ratio is to each and every body that hits the floor due to the master chief Benny. Seriously, I am dying to see this dudes house on MTV Cribs: TV Evangelist Edition. That thing is probably full of bling bling.

enjoy…

1 comment.

Youtube Reviews #2: How to become what you’re against…

Posted on March 11th, 2009 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Reviews, Media.

1984 - Apple puts out a SuperBowl commercial that becomes seemingly more important than the Raider’s 38-9 victory over the Washington Redskins, due to its great anti-socialism and totalitarianism within the computer industry.

2009 - Apple becomes what it was against. Limiting activity and ability on Apple products, socializing/unifying formats, so as to hurt free spread of ideas and files, as well as attempting to monopolize the computer market, throttling competition.

Luckily Microsoft is putting up a fight, and keeping the computer world open to discovery and freedom.

Maybe we need a new commercial, with Bill Gates throwing an apple slicer at some large MacBook…

17 comments.

Youtube Reviews #1: The Amen Break

Posted on February 4th, 2009 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Political, Film, Reviews, Media, education, Economics, photo/video, Cultural.

Read AFTER watching video:

As defined by Dictionary.com, a market is trade or traffic, esp. as regards a particular commodity or idea. So what does this 6 second drum beat loop have to teach us about markets, you ask? It actually brings great understanding to a system that has been ruined in so many ways by so many people. To some extent, the goal of a market is to bring the quality of an object to the greatest potential it can; really, increasing to some unknown and unreachable infinite value of quality. This drum beat proved that regulation on commodities or ideas is criminal and only hurts the quality of a product or object in the long run. Had the spread of the drum beat been cracked down on and regulated, who knows what would have happened. Now, there is a possibility that the fathers of hip hop and marketers of commercials would have just found another drum beat loop, but how would that have sounded different? Maybe better, maybe worse… Due to the extreme success of how the styles of music and marketing outlets has turned out, I don’t think we really want to know how it would have been without this Amen Break. Sub-consciously, the public has grown to enjoy this rhythm, this timing of sounds, and thus it has been able to transform certain aspects of media, increasing the quality, as judged by consumers, over a period of time. The Amen Break has done great things, even if people do not recognize its depth of influence.

So what does this have to say about regulation in the larger sense? Well, with this example, and countless others, we are able to see that regulation only hurts the quality within a market. Regulation on music, such as harsh copyrights and limits, have only hurt the spread of music and the quality there in. The same can be said of numerous products within our economic system. As Pepsi copied Coke, and Qdoba copied Chipotle, the de-regulation of commodities has only increased competition and thus quality. In art, regulation could have done much damage. What if people had rejected Shakespeare due to his great amount of plagiarism of the time, what would have happened to poetry? What has the spread of certain techniques done for painting and photography? In most all cases, if there has been large amounts of regulation, the product’s quality is weakened, whereas, with no regulation, the quality has increased to an amount we may not even recognize.

So can this idea of the greatness of de-regulation be applied to the much broader economy as a whole? The government, especially now, with stimulus packages and business regulations, seems to encourage the halting of commodity and idea flow. We may not even recognize the damage that is being done. What would a system without harsh regulations really look like? I believe it would be a beautiful thing, that would increase quality and bring glory to our market as a whole. Just look at certain cases where ideas have been able to spread, de-regulated. Wikipedia has become one of the largest sources of information available due to its great freedom. Not just Wikipedia, but the Internet as a whole has shown the greatness of the free spread of ideas. So I have a great hope that people will begin to recognize the destructive nature of regulation, and accept the idea of freedom that our country was largely founded on. May this freedom cause the quality of the market and ideals within the country to sky-rocket in value and increase in worth. The Amen Break is a great symbol that, although seemingly unknown, will hopefully bring greater understanding to how people run markets in the future.

The Amen Break was a 6 second loop that transformed music… What are we stopping from spreading now, that could transform our lives today and into the future?

In the end, the only thing that should be strictly regulated is the New York Yankees…

4 comments.

New Sufjan, Iron & Wine, and Feist/Ben Gibbard of Death Cab songs from upcoming compilation “Dark Was the Night”

Posted on January 30th, 2009 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Media, Music.

I can’t wait for the compilation to come out!

Dark Was The Night will be released on February 17th, 2009. It’s comprised of 31 exclusive tracks and it will be available as a double cd/triple vinyl/download and will benefit the Red Hot Organization – an international charity dedicated to raising money and awareness for HIV and AIDS through popular culture. They are the people responsible for albums including No Alternative, Red Hot and Blue and many more, and this is their 20th year, and this is the 20th release!

DARK WAS THE NIGHT

THIS DISC
1 Knotty Pine – Dirty Projectors + David Byrne
2 Cello Song (Nick Drake) – The Books featuring Jose Gonzalez
3 Train Song (Vashti Bunyan recorded, written by Alasdair Clayre) – Feist + Ben Gibbard
4 Brackett, WI – Bon Iver
5 Deep Blue Sea – Grizzly Bear
6 So Far Around the Bend – The National (arrangement by Nico Muhly)
7 Tightrope – Yeasayer
8 Feeling Good (popularized by Nina Simone) – My Brightest Diamond
9 Dark Was the Night (Blind Willie Johnson) – Kronos Quartet
10 I Was Young When I Left Home (Bob Dylan) – Antony + Bryce Dessner
11 Big Red Machine – Justin Vernon + Aaron Dessner
12 Sleepless – The Decemberists
13 Stolen Houses (Die) – Iron and Wine
14 Service Bell – Grizzly Bear + Feist
15 You Are The Blood – Sufjan Stevens

THAT DISC
1 Well-Alright – Spoon
2 Lenin – Arcade Fire
3 Mimizan – Beirut
4 El Caporal – My Morning Jacket
5 Inspiration Information (Shuggie Otis) – Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
6 With A Girl Like You (The Troggs) – Dave Sitek
7 Blood Pt 2 (based on original song “You are the Blood” by the Castanets) – Buck 65 Remix (featuring Sufjan Stevens and Serengeti)
8 Hey, Snow White (Destroyer) – The New Pornographers
9 Gentle Hour (Snapper) – Yo La Tengo
10 Another Saturday (traditional song) – Stuart Murdoch
11 Happiness – Riceboy Sleeps
12 Amazing Grace (traditional song) – Cat Power and Dirty Delta Blues
13 The Giant Of Illinois (Handsome Family) – Andrew Bird
14 Lua – Conor Oberst + Gillian Welch
15 When the Road Runs Out – Blonde Redhead + Devastations
16 Love vs. Porn – Kevin Drew

6 comments.

Excitingly Clean, Disturbingly Healthy, So Full of Life

Posted on January 19th, 2009 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: Media, Cultural.

Psychological warfare never sounded so good…

Ever heard of Brylcreem? ->here

I was watching TV yesterday, being that I only actually “watch TV” about once every few months (usually football at my parents house), it’s becoming for me a very interesting window into society, the commercials being most interesting. Obviously this being that commercials are explicitly psychological persuasions targeted at human desire. I love seeing old commercials far removed from the current thinking/vocabulary/symbolic network of one’s current society - because without the camoflauge of one’s own culture, the psychological manipulation and design is laid bare.

Consider this recording of one commercial break during an episode of the A-team (1986): here

Besides the ridiculous nature of these commercials viewed through a cultural lens some 20 years removed: The MacDonald’s commercial targeted at kids presents Ronald as some kind of pederast, Brylcreem is now transformed to “hip” and natural… And chocolate bars used sex much more powerfully through implied meanings of adjectives whispered in one’s ear - rather than direct shots of sexual objects. And finally, a girl gets high of her cream soup. And then the ironic fade out of a black man in soldier or working class clothes… maybe he would like a candy bar or some hallucinogenic soup.

Now I’ll let brylcreem take even further into new and different worlds (to boldly go were I haven’t yet gone) - let’s risk moving a little closer to home. Contrast these two commercials targeting different modern cultures:

This one obviously targets the British Indian or modern Indian culture in which ’slick” is still cool (”natural” slickness). However, here brylcreem is marketed to a modern western culture as “effortless” - seemingly natural - view it here. It’s interesting how the same product can be “natural” - but the meaning of natural is completely different within the two cultures (e.g., wet vs. dry)… How can brylcreem have so many faces?

Is it not surprising that brylcreem is most effective with it’s old british message of slick and “clean” looking in it’s recent colonial nation of India (seemingly adopting the styles of its old colonizer, here is another example). What really bothers me is that … the “effortless” commercial is close enough to my own culture, I can’t dissect it - suffice to say, “it’s pretty cool” which is probably what my grandma said of the commercial from the 50’s and hip 20 something are saying in india about their commercials…

4 comments.

Bieren’s Stuff You Should Know #2: Wong Kar-Wai

Posted on December 2nd, 2008 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: Film, Reviews, Media.

A’ight here’s a few things you should know! and it’s movie directors this time…

I’ve always had a thing for directors with what sounds like three names, whether it be a hyphenated name or set of asian characters that didn’t transliterate so well. Starting with Gus Van Sant’s Goodwill Hunting I’ve been on a cinematic trek across the world to find the best of the three name sounding directors. As it just so happens, most of my favorite directors have such peculiar names. I’m going to do a series on a set of four of them: Wong Kar-Wai, Lars Von Trier, Jean Luc-Godard, and Chan-Wook Park

Wong Kar-Wai: (Hong Kong)

Having already written an exhausting essay on wong kar-wai I’ll keep this brief and mostly nude yet tasteful. Wong Kar-Wai is my chosen ordering and pronunciation for his name. One might choose a mandarin standardized Wang Jia-Wei or even anglicize the ordering to Kar-Wai Wong, with the family name coming last - but since he’s generally considered a hong kong director, I stick to the Cantonese transliteration.

First off, he’s a total film geek - much like me and Quinten Tarantino, directors who form themselves through extensive critical observation of their predecessors. This theory of understanding movies to make movies was pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard and his french cenophile buddies while writing reviews for ‘Les cahiers du cinéma’ in the 1960’s. Indeed, Wong Kar-Wai has studied Godard in detail and this can be seen in his style (however, I don’t see it as directly as some do)… and then along with Godard, Wong Kar-Wai can be considered an influence on Tarantino who has stated his own personal respect for Wong’s work. Wong, while eclectic in style, threads the same major theme or question through all of his movies: the continual search for relational and emotional satisfaction, which tends to end in frustration, destroying itself just as it is about to be realized and then popping up again, un-invited and when least expected. In this respect, every movie he makes is a tragedy in the classical sense, ironic.

The essential Wang Kar-Wai:

If you are a romantic in the sense that you like romantic comedies or embroidery, watch “In the Mood for Love” first - or if you’re romantic in the sense that you like innocent fantasy filled with prelapsarian frivolity, start with “Chungking Express” which is generally considered his best. If you watched “In the Mood for Love” first, then move to Chungking Express - but if you watched Chungking Express, watch Fallen Angels and then “In the Mood for Love”. If you are following the latter or former track and forgot which one I was referring to, or not, then watch 2046 - and then make a full round trip and watch the edgy and possibly most artistic film - Happy Together…

Things to watch for:

Pay special attention the cinematography, Christopher Doyle shoot most of his films. Doyle is an Australian, who spent his younger years traveling the world, drunk in jail, or as a sailor and ended up randomly becoming the cinematographer generally considered the best in asia, and he got his start with Wong Kar-Wai.

Pay special attention to the acting. Wong Kar-Wai has a unique relationship and works with the *BEST* chinese actors, namely Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, Gong Li (mainland), Carina Lau, and Briggette Lin… which make up a large part of the history of hong kong film over the past 30 years, they are the golden age of film there. (note that I DIDN’T mention Zhang Zi-yi).

Pay special attention to his music selection, it’s amazingly eclectic and also EXCELLENT!

3 comments.

America’s Two-Party System: Going 90 Miles an Hour down a Dead End Street

Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Political, Party System, Law, Constitutional Law, Philosophy, Media, Republicans, Democrats, education, Economics.

A famous American novelist in the mid twentieth century, named Gore Vidal, once said that “It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people”. It is this idea that has scared many people concerning America’s current two-party system. These skeptics of the two-party system say that it is wrong due to its tug on all politics to one point on the political spectrum that lacks representation of a big part of the country’s political wants and needs. However, is a two-party system inevitable for a nation like America? Since the beginning, from Hamilton’s Federalists to Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, America has had a two-party system to some extent, and it has brought many years of successful governing to a country based on freedom and liberty. On the other hand, France, which has had a multi-party system since the French Revolution, has undergone over thirteen changes in their governmental leadership and style, damaging the progress and development of their nation. Obviously, in order to successfully rise to power and rule according to the people in a nation where a democratic voting system is in place, a party must win over a majority of the political opinion within a country. A two-party system seems to be the most natural and obvious way that this can work out. Although not all extreme political views of the society are represented, a two-party system is able to easily represent the middle, moderate, and majority of the opinions of the people. On the contrary, a two-party system can effectively, if both parties move too close to each other, become a one party system, where someone, even many, who disagree with the one prevalent political philosophy that embodies the two major parties, will not be represented. So the question is: Is America still a positive and productive two-party system, or is it moving more and more into the realm of becoming essentially a one-party system?

On the surface America is seen as a truly dynamic and productive two-party system, where all have a say, vote, and an opinion. Its government is seen as being truly representative of its people and the popular political opinion. It is seen as an un-manipulated, fully representative system that fits the ideals of freedom and liberty that the country was founded on. However, a deeper look into the political system, as well as some manipulative factions of the country’s political mobility shows a possibility of the opposite being true. Yet a few small changes to the political system and process could rid of these negative contributions to the nation’s political progress. So although the idea of a two-party system is somewhat inevitable, the present two-party system of The United States of America is ultimately a negative contribution to the progress of the nation and should be changed through banning polling, allowing third party candidates the same rights, rules, and privileges as the primary parties, and reducing the size of each district in order to represent the peoples’ opinions more clearly.

The first way to positively change the system is to ban polling and clear up the corruption within the media. The media is the single most effective political motivator within the American political system. It is due to media coverage, opinion, and polls that many candidates are able to achieve the support and votes of the people. But the media is ran by people who have opinions themselves and a majority of the time fit the center of the political spectrum, either Democrat or Republican. So it is rather puzzling that these few, the people who run the television and radio stations, have such great power in swaying the nation towards their own political opinion. Polling is one of the most widely used tools by the media to manipulate elections and political opinion. Yet many do not see the corruption within the very idea of polling, that is that “polls are an addiction that also distort our political feelings and actions even as they trivialize political campaigns, and they allow our political and media suppliers to manipulate us ruthlessly” (Schwartz). The fact that the public political opinion can be highly manipulated by corrupt polling shows how it negatively influences the true representation of the peoples wants. Polls should be banned by the public media due to its proven manipulation and corruption. The deep problem with the media and polling is that “poll bashing is still a frequent phenomenon in the media, polls are ubiquitous, and attempts to mislead deliberately occur” (Erikson 47). Although in itself polling is obviously not a corrupt action, it is now used by the media to sway the public toward its own opinion. Due to this, any ideas or candidates that differ from the center of the political spectrum are shot down by manipulative polling that has nothing to do with a fair representation of the public’s actual opinion. However, even within the two major parties polling has been used to discriminate against candidates who are not popular to the centrist views of the media.

The discrimination used by the popular media towards certain candidates, even within the Democrat and Republican parties, is unfair and proves to be another reason why public media polls should be banned. One strong recent case of this was that of Ron Paul in the Republican primary election. Although “Ron Paul led all other candidates by a more than comfortable margin in the online polls, [he] was hardly even considered a ‘dark horse’ candidate by the offline ‘scientific’ polls” (Bowery). It is bewildering to assume that the online polls could have been that much different than the public media polls. Had the television channels even reported the activity that was going on online, Ron Paul may have been given a more equal chance in the primary. Ron Paul is an old style Republican congressman with Libertarian tendencies which makes the media polls even more suspicious, seeming as though they were not wanting to allow a candidate whose opinions differed from the ‘norm’ to have a chance. The media should not have the power to put any political candidate at a disadvantage due to a disagreement with the popular opinions of the media.

Each American presidential election should strive to represent the country’s citizens’ wants and opinions as closely as possible. Any factors or tools that can exist or be used, by the public media, to incorrectly manipulate the opinions of the country on a certain candidate or issue should be banned, due to how they skew the results of the voting process. Tools such as polling, which the television stations and other forms of public media has wrongly used, should be changed and outlawed, in an attempt to better represent the peoples’ wishes. Although there are others, polling really is the most obviously manipulative tool that is presently being used. It is clear that “polling certainly deserves a critical look. Many surveys are badly conceived, poorly executed, and incorrectly interpreted” (Erikson 24). Polling has created a discriminatory, systematic problem in the voting process of The United States of America that has put many candidates who have attempted to change the system at a disadvantage. Overall, a political system being centered on the political spectrum is obviously not wrong and may be inevitable in certain cases, including America. However, discouraging, as well as unfairly hiding, progressive and un-centered ideas and candidates is un-democratic and eventually will kill the progress of a once positively evolving political system. This would, in actuality, create a one-party, media ruled system that discourages diversity and distorts opposing ideas to its artificial ‘norm’.

As well as polling, many other discriminatory factors within the political process put third parties and ideas at a major unfair shortcoming within the electoral competition. Although, obviously, no third party will have a great opportunity to win a major election any time soon, they should not be dejected from the process or put out of the competition. Third parties do a wonderful job of keeping the Democrat and Republican parties honest and pure. Third parties bring up issues that the two major parties could not bring up for risk of being labeled extreme or out of the ‘norm’. Throughout history, “it was third parties who first introduced ideas like restricting slavery, granting suffrage to women, establishing minimum wages and controlling child labor” (Lichtman). Though third parties have not had many victories in major elections, they have introduced ideas and philosophies that have proved to positively affect the country as a whole. So the limitation on them and discouragement of them is un-democratic and will only hurt the development of the country. One way that the third parties are limited is the difficult process set up for them to get on the ballot. Both major parties are easily passed and let onto ballots due to their past popularity and financial success, whereas, third parties are forced to gain large amounts of signatures and pay dues that put financial strain on their campaigns once on the ballot. It is clear that “the difficulty of getting on the ballot state-by-state is surely a barrier deliberately erected by the major parties to keep third parties out of the field of play” (Lichtman). It is a serious problem that a party has to be financially successful just to be put upon the ballot. If third parties are given easier opportunities to get on election ballots, it will encourage the competition of parties that is so necessary for a strong two-party system. For “in order to enjoy the benefits of a healthy two-party system, we must encourage the growth of new parties. And if we are ever to replace one of the two major parties with a new party (something that even the opposition acknowledges is possible, and something that we, the voters, ought to have a right to do), it will only be done if we life the current ballot-access restrictions on third political parties” (Winger). Third parties are actually a very positive and helpful thing for a two-party system and it only hurts a two-party system to deny or make difficult political accomplishments for third parties, such as easy ballot access.

The financial strain of ballot access for Third parties is a definite blockade for their ability to positively affect the political system and process. The electoral process should allow for equal opportunity for legitimate Third parties who would be able to better the development and progress of the political establishment as a whole. Presently, the scary aspect of the electoral system is that “it seems that in American government, one must buy their ‘equality’. Only the wealthiest parties and individuals have equal access to the electoral system” (Sandusky). America should take no pride in the fact that it has established an electoral procedure where only the wealthy may influence it, unequally putting the poorer intellectuals at a major disadvantage. For what reason should one’s socioeconomic status govern whether or not he or she should be able to run for office? If all other credentials are met, financial strains should not be able to hinder rising politicians in their goal of running for political office. If the large fees are removed from ballot access, the political system would benefit through having a wider span of political ideologies and greater representation of different social classes within the country. It would allow third parties to be able to be more competitive with campaigning due to the money they would save, not having to spend it on ballot access. This competition would, like the American capitalist system itself, enrich the politics of the country and give a wider range of people the ability to become the influential leaders this country needs.

The final way that the electoral process should be changed in order to promote Third Party competition is through allowing Third Party candidates to participate in the Presidential debates. The Presidential debates have recently become more and more about physical appearance and image rather than political intellect and intelligent responses. If a candidate can look good, then what that candidate says means a lot less. A lot of the deterioration of the positives of the Presidential debates is due to the fact that the Democrats and Republicans are the only two parties represented and mostly agree with each other. So the debates have become less about the content and more about whether or not they can make the opponent look bad. In the recent election this was made tremendously clear. It was obvious that “one problem was that in a debate, it is important for the debaters to actually disagree. Yet Senators Barack Obama and John McCain substantively agree on many issues. That is one major reason that the debates should be open, and that major third-party or independent candidates should be included” (Goodman). What’s the purpose of debating if both candidates in the debate are very close to the middle of the political spectrum and have little disagreement? If Third-party candidates were allowed to participate in the debates it would not only be fair to them, in giving them a equal chance in running, but it would also enrich the debate for the other two candidates, giving them actual positions to disagree with. Once a major party candidate is forced to disagree with someone, it is more clear to see what that candidate actually believes. So even if Third-party candidates didn’t necessarily win elections due to benefiting from debate participation, they would enhance the whole process for the Democrat and Republican candidates, achieving a better election process altogether.

The final way in which the American two-party system is failing is that it seems to be harmfully moving our nation is into easily corruptible waters. Two-party systems automatically are set up to be vulnerable to corruption. If the two major parties of a system move closer and closer together, as they are in America, it becomes a simple task for them to dictate corrupt and wrong political ideas that will hurt the country. It is this monopoly of power that is being created in the American political system that all should be afraid of. The two parties are seen as the only capable parties now and that, in itself, can lead to corruption. The debate over which party is better than the other wages on, stronger than ever, when the “truth is that one is no better than the other. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our system is no longer set up to benefit or protect us” (Wade). The system now is more about profits for political icons and for the wealthy in power more than for protecting life, liberty, and property, the nation’s early ultimate goal. It is for making those who want to be represented fit the two parties in power, rather than allowing other parties, that truly represent different sects of the people, gain potential leadership. The more parties there are that have a chance, the less likely the system is going to be easily degraded.

Corruption can also spread through the stereotyping of parties. In the present American political system people are seemingly forced to support a party, and along with it, all of its stances on all of the issues. People are looked as outsiders of the party if they disagree with even one of the issues, so they, on purpose, conform their views to fit their parties. This causes our political leaders to represent an image of the people rather than just the peoples’ opinions themselves. This is why “Representatives and voters have come to the conclusion that all Democrats and Republicans are the same, more or less, and that they all have the same ideology” (Bechtold). The way the two parties have moved together as one ideology that is supposed to represent the whole country is a negative and has discouraged people from thinking for themselves. It has caused great disagreement over petty issues, while big issues are ignored and left for the greedy politicians to gain power off of. This marriage of ideology of the two parties will only create a bigger, more powerful government that is sure to use its power in guiding the country. However, as history tells, ultimate power is followed by ultimate corruption. This idea is clearly evident in examples such as Stalin’s communist rule in Russia and Hitler’s fascist rule in Germany. America better heed the warning signs of the harms of big and powerful governments, and better change its policies now, in order to make sure it won’t become what it has opposed in the past.

In the end, if policies aren’t put into place to stop the media from using fallible polls to manipulate the system and control the political opinion of the populous, then the country is going to be harmed through an established unanimous political camp that rules all and represents far too little. If policies aren’t put into place that give third parties a greater chance to be represented and to be competitive possibilities for leadership, the political system will be debilitated to the point where both parties could become essentially one ideology that un-democratically rules over the nation. Finally, if policies aren’t put into place that stop the potential corruption of this country’s two-party system, then each and every citizen’s democratic voice and opinion could be ignored altogether. However, it is not just the establishment of a two-party system that brings about this negativity, for that establishment may be inevitable, it is the way in which the American two-party system is moving that appears detrimental to the ideas of liberty and equality in this country. Just because third parties have a great chance and voice in a political system does not mean that it has to be anything more than a two-party system. If third parties are given that chance they will enrich the system and craft the major parties into parties that would better represent and lead according the people. It is this great outcome, of two truly different parties that accurately represent the populous, that once flourished in America and must be attempted to be put into place again by this country. For democracy may only exist if those that vote are those that govern the policies of the country and republics may only exist if those that are put into leadership positions actually represent the people. So is America’s Two-Party system headed in the wrong direction? Is it becoming more and more un-democratic? Is it becoming essentially a ‘one-party’ system? America must proceed with caution and a great critique of itself if it wants to thrive as it so successfully has in the past.

Works Cited

Bechtold, Joe. “The Flaw of the Two Party System .” 23 Feb 2008
emid=83>.

Bowery, James. “Ron Paul Demolishes Other Republicans In Online Polls.” Majority Rights 05
May 2007 .

Erikson, Robert. American Public Opinion. 6th. New York: Longman, 2003.

Goodman, Amy. “Open Presidential Debates to Third Parties.” Seattle Pi 10 Oct 2008
.

Lichtman, Allan. “3rd Parties: What They’re For and What They Do.” The Jim Lehrer Newshour
22 Oct 1996 .
Sandusky, Trent. “Why the Two-Party System is Un-American.” 12 Nov 20 .
Schwartz, Michael. “Polling: The Opiate of the Electorate .” Common Dreams 06 Oct 2004
.

Wade, Anthony. “Corruption-Lite and The Two Party System That Has Choked the Democracy
out of this Country. ” Oped News 23 Oct 2005
.

Winger , Richard. “The Importance of Ballot Access.” Massachusetts School of Law Spring
1994 .

3 comments.

Within Him (or Without Him)

Posted on November 19th, 2008 by invot.
Categories: Ethics, Media, Religon, Christianity.

Under a box on the top of my closet I found an old notebook. It was filled with my thoughts of being a second grader and whatever else I felt like writing. It amazed me how there was an entry almost every day.

As I flipped through the pages, the content became less important. I closed the cover and looked at the picture printed on it for a moment. To describe the computer-generated landscape it depicted would be close to impossilbe, you really just have to see it. I remember spending hours looking at the art on the cover, dreaming of what life was like within that animated landscape. I remember running off to the the library during lunch just to spend time with my notebook –sometimes writing in it, and other times just dreaming of being in it’s colorful world.

It’s weird how something that was so important to me is now nothing more than an artifact that remained lost among my possessions, never to be seen again for years. It proved relevant to my newfangled, first grade life. There were days I wouldn’t have wanted to live without my notebook. But it’s not all that important anymore. I’ve grown up. I’ve moved on. And my poor little notebook now takes the role of a dust collector as with many of the other artifacts from my past.

I was told once that the things we love the most are the things that we remember the longest. Those are the things that matter.

I asked my friend Ben the assistant pastor what he planed to talk about the first time he made it behind the pulpit. He seemed surprised that I asked, and answered, “I’m going to talk about the gospel! What else?” What better place to start, right?

Back when Ben and I were in school, and when my roommate would be gone for the night, Ben used to take the bed beside me and we’d spark a conversation wich would commonly go on for hours. We’d discuss all those things that people in Bible college discuss: God, The Bible, Church, french fries…

“Do you know what the gospel is?” He asked me one night.

He said it almost as an afterthought, to cure a silence that was only momentary as we thought of what subject to bring up next.

My mouth opened to answer, but all that came out was air –and suddenly I realized that I didn’t have an answer. I really never thought about what it is exactly, though I knew that I believed in the gospel and trusted it unto salvation. It was like someone asked me to define the word “if.” I use the word all the time; but what does that word really mean? I’ve been a Christian for about a year, and have lead Bible studies, even gone evangelizing, but I just couldn’t define “gospel”.

“You mean, like… the four spiritual laws?” I said after a very long pause.

“You mean to tell me the gospel is a series of laws?” He responded.

“Oh, well, of course not…” And then another pause. Dang, that was a good point, I thought to myself. “Well, no. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.”

To that I believe he then quoted 1 Titus 1:15: “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners…” and then went into John 3:16 and the likes.

After that, I began to think about what I knew about Christianity when I first became a Christian and what I felt was the most important part of my faith. What was important? What could I define? Where did I start?

To be honest, I don’t really remember. For a time those questions were so vital; but after a year or so, they lost their importance. I’m sure all those questions, at one time, I could answer, but just like that old notebook, they’ve been tucked away. And though I could remember the artwork on the cover, I couldn’t remember what was written inside –and that’s what the whole thing’s about. There is a story. There is a message. There is something that must matter most.

To kill time, sometimes I log onto sermoncentral.com and read -you guessed it- sermons. The site has a neat little feature where you can search through the sermons according to category. It even has a category devoted just to the Di Vinci Code and how to refute it. However, one category is yet to appear: the gospel. You can search for the word, or words like it, but there is no sermon defining exactly what it is. There are some sermons that now and again refer to it briefly, but it seems like pastors are just not writing many sermons about it these days.

Us Christians do a great job at missing the point. The gospels are littered with accounts of Jesus saying things and people taking it the wrong way –people missing the point. Jesus has a lot of sayings structured like this: “you think life is like this, that God is like this, but let me tell you how things really are…” It makes me think about those people who think they know everything about God and life and the world, and how if they ever met Jesus they would probably find Him incredibly annoying –people who think they know what they’re talking about.

Lately, Christianity has become less and less about Christ and His gospel and more and more about things like clothing brands or fancy websites. And though we really know a lot, and possibly more now than we did for ages… the word “gospel” is found in only 414 of the 80,000 sermons on sermoncentral.com! That’s a fraction of a percent. Yet the gospel is crucial! It is central to our faith!

For so many people the word “Christian” evokes images that really have nothing to do with Jesus Christ. Some people think of fat baptist preachers throwing another potluck, they think of Mother Teresa bobble heads, or they think of those crazy Pentecostals wiggling on the floor during a church service. This has to change. And that change has to take place within the Christian community, because we have severely missed the point. We have forgotten what our faith is all about:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” - John 3:16

How many people, when asked “what is the gospel?” can answer that question? It took me over a year, as a Christian, to discover that answer. So many of us just skip over the gospel, assuming that everyone already knows what it is and how to define it. We don’t want to dwell on it, I assume, along with the life and teachings of Christ, because there are other, more advanced things to cover; But I think Jesus would start flippin’ tables if He heard someone say the gospel is not important enough to cover habitually.

We, the Christians, are the ones who responded to Jesus’ command in Matt 11:28, “Come to Me…” and we are also the ones who must discipline ourselves to follow the commandment Jesus gives to his disciples in John 15:4, “Abide in Me…” The idea is not just for us to come to Jesus, but for us to stay with Him.

What is the point of packing up everything you own, enrolling in a new school or getting a new job, and moving to a new city, only to leave days later and return to where you were before?

Jim Jones became a preacher sometime in the 1950s. He sold pet monkeys door-to-door to raise the money to found his own church that would eventually be named The Peoples’ Temple. The church was noted for its equal treatment of African Americans, which was radical for its time. Jim Jones started a struggle for racial equality and social justice, which he dubbed apostolic socialism.

He claimed to be an incarnation of Jesus, Akhenaten, Buddha, Lenin, and Father Divine and performed supposed miracle healings to attract new members. Members of Jones’ church called Jones “Father” and believed that their movement was the solution to the problems of society and many did not distinguish Jones from the movement. However, he was later forced to move his ministry from Indianapolis to San Francisco, and then to the wilderness of Guyana, a small country in South America, after people began to question what went on behind closed doors.

On November 18, 1978 the residents of Jonestown, his small communal camp in Guyana, took part in what became one of the largest mass suicides of the twentieth century. Jones was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head among the 908 corpses there. A third of those corpses were children.

I found myself asking how a church could become something like that. Towards the end of his life, Jesus was hardly mentioned at all by Jim Jones, nor was Jesus mentioned by his followers- though they never cut their ties with the Disciples of Christ, a very Christian organization. What began as a church that made radical social and political statements for that time, like equal treatment of African Americans, became more focused on their own social and political statements than the statements of Jesus Christ.

They missed the point. Instead of abiding in the truth of Christ and His gospel, they moved on to other, more “grown up” issues, only to be lead into massive deception. I wonder how many of the occupants of Jonestown knew what the gospel was. I wonder if the people who did know the gospel became too afraid to share it, or worse, thought it wasn’t all that important and just didn’t feel the need. Isn’t that such a sad, sad thought?

Yes, to abide in Christ is a very important thing. Without abiding in Him, you cannot continue in Him.

As a Christian, you experienced that His word is truth; all his promises He fulfilled; He made you the reciprocate of His blessings and the joy of His love; He kept you far from the troubles of this world. Speaking of the joys of coming to Jesus you can only say that not a half can be expressed. But, recently, you find yourself complaining. You find yourself wondering where all that went. I did, and sometimes still do, and probably will every now and again.

I ask, if you found yourself complaining, to sit down and think to yourself: “What is the gospel?” While thinking of your answer, read John 15 (yes, the whole chapter, it’s not long). Think about where you are in relation to Christ. Are you in Him or just around Him? Think about what it means to abide in His love. Are you in His love, or just around it? Think about what you’ve been doing lately to make sure you don’t stray far from Him and what you can do to stay, not just near Him, but in Him.

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