Courage

brings you through adversity

“I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” ~ Saint Paul, 2nd epistle to Timothy, chapter 1

This week a voter replied to one of my notes here on Substack and took the time to misquote Edmund Burke. You may know Burke as a somewhat conservative British aristocrat who hated the rabble engaged in overthrowing the Hanoverian usurpation’s colonial gooferment (of no consent and of no authority) in the new world. His Thoughts on the Present Discontents was published Anno Domini 1770, a full five years after Patrick Henry suggested that Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the first his Cromwell, and George the third would profit by their example. About the same time Burke was being published, a group of British regular infantry deliberately fired into a crowd of civilians in Boston, killing several.

Now, some might question whether Burke was an aristocrat in the strictest sense. I don’t mind. He was educated, worked, and wrote as an aristocratic English gent, and therefore I regard him as having taken station with the other evil demon worshipping mass murderers who put on airs and call themselves lairds and ladies.

After correcting the voter with a more accurate rendering of Burke’s actual words, I was informed that not voting is cowardly. Reviewing the profile of this soul, I discovered that it works as a glorified plumber for the sewage department of some locality. Thus, it eagerly accepts stolen money in every pay packet, since all taxation is theft and all gooferment fees to agencies that restrain free competition are evil. It is always interesting to me what sort of thing chooses to give questionable moral guidance.

What is courage?

Is it courageous to go into a voting booth and choose some names to hold pubic office and hurt the people in your community or country? No, it is not. Voting is idiotic, not clever. Voting is not brave.

Assuming responsibility for yourself would be brave. Refusing to comply with acts of tyranny is brave. Standing against a sea of fools who eagerly crave to have an overseer beat them into submission is brave. Voting is cowardly and foolish.

Is it courageous to work for the water and sewer department? No, it is not. In the film “Brazil” which is named after the song “Brasil,” the brave guy is not the one who refuses to fix the utilities without a “twenty-seven B stroke 6” which is presumably what the gooferment worker in every case will always insist upon. The comparatively brave fellow is the rogue ventilation repairman, Sam Tuttle, who notes, “This old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even turn on the kitchen tap without filling in a 27B/6… Bloody paperwork.”

Indeed, to work for any gooferment at any level is to be a parasite, a part of a communistic system that imposes itself on the rest of the community, a tax funded bit of nuisance who makes the lives of other people worse by accepting funds from “the general revenue” in every pay packet. I use the term “gooferment” in reference to those things that impose themselves because to be a “government” would require the unanimous consent of the governed. But parasites don’t care as long as they get paid, get off work on time, get to spend much of their work day watching the clock, get paid holidays, get paid “benefits,” and get their weeks of vacation every calendar year. Parasites are cheap and grubby and deserve much less than they receive.

Voting is doing nothing. For all any of us know, any particular vote is lost as soon as it leaves the voting booth. We have no way of verifying that our votes are counted, nor that they are counted as we cast them. Nor do we get to vote for actually good people, at least not since 1988 when Ron Paul was running as the Libertarian party candidate. I stopped voting after that, because it was clearly pointless and stupid.

Be not afraid

It comes up again and again in the Bible. God says it hundreds of times. For example in Isaiah 41, God says, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

For example, in Joshua 1:9 we have the prophet Joshua saying, “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

My friend Karen Rynearson on the Tweetie bird app says that the “oath keepers” are cowards because they endorse and support Trump’s various unconstitutional actions. I use the name she gives in her profile in the event you want to look for her posts on the topic. No, she is not “verified” and neither am I.

I would suggest that “verification” is a bad idea, bad for your privacy, bad for your individual liberty, and is a sort of scam on the part of the mElon to hurt as many people as possible. The app which is now called “X” after the 24th letter in the alphabet and a film rating from the 1968 to 1990 period in America and to this day in Australia, the UK, and France, may require government issued identity documents to verify an individual account. Well, friend, getting government ID is not courageous, and is not wise. Among its many other difficulties, government issued identity documents multiply entities unnecessarily.

If you don’t trust me to tell you that my name is Jim Davidson, why would you trust a government document that is issued by people you’ve never met, that you seem to think I should carry around, which purports that my name is DAVIDSON JAMES and has other assertions about me regarding height, weight, eye colour, gender, and date of birth? What is it about a hunk of plastic which might have an embedded hologramme and some other gimmickry that you feel is more reliable than my word as a man? Have you not seen any of the films about “brave” espionage agents moving about the world, crossing borders on falsified papers, raping women, murdering children, and stealing from the poor? Did you think it was even slightly complicated getting a photo ID that says anything and has any picture of anyone?

Were you thinking that it was a good idea to tie every single thing you post on the Tweetie bird app, including all direct messages which are never encrypted and always available to be reviewed by members of the Tweetie staff to evaluate your character, to your strawman gooferment paperwork identity? Is that wise? Seems dubious.

Of course, your gooferment parasites will say that not posting in your own name is cowardly. What they want is to be able to cancel anyone for any reason or no reason, which is the entire purpose of “verification” and for having an entire separate column for notifications in the Tweetie app for responses and retweets from “verified” parties. It is unclear whether you must pay for verification but it is certainly true that the subscription model is prevalent. Presumably if you are in possession of tens of thousands of followers to your account, you may be able to negotiate a special deal.

In my replies to Karen on her thread, I mentioned that the people who signed up to be in the gooferment were, in many cases lied to and deceived. Also, Jesus says not to swear an oath, but let your yes be yes, your no be no, more than that comes from evil. So I am not expecting much good from “oath keepers.”

Is it brave to obey secular authorities?

Nope. It is particularly cowardly to disobey God, to engage in acts of violence against your neighbours, to accept stolen money as pay, and to enforce unethical laws. So there is a great deal that passes for “courage” that is anything but.

At the top of this essay is a photo featuring a character from a film called “Wag the Dog.” I don’t think it spoils much to say that the character is a murdering psychopath. It might spoil the film a bit to say that he doesn’t deserve the adulation he receives from those who hold him up as the great hero of a fake war they’ve started. But even if you know how it ends (and we really don’t) it is a fine example of Hollywood pretending to criticise the excesses of the military industrial financial pharmaceutical complex.

Although the film comes out in 1997 (about the time Billy Clinton was done playing games with Monica Lewinsky) it depicts a war put together to distract the voting public from a presidential sex scandal. Everyone not under the cruise missile strikes of “operation infinite reach” suspected that the 1998 bombings were meant to deceive the public about Clinton’s escapades and distract from the investigations about them. Of course, those missile strikes killed dozens of people, destroyed a large aspirin factory “in error,” and kept many thousands of people from having access to medicines, which may or may not have helped them survive better. People I met in Yemen, Somaliland, and Djibouti referred to it as “Monica’s war.” But, of course, the filmmakers have the film “end well” with the director who wanted to go public murdered by the fictional film producers, the war hero psycho killed, and the system going on and on, deceiving, betraying, harming, and getting incumbents re-elected which is how the Hollywood psychophants (hat tip Margaret Anna Alice for the portmanteautally awesome coinage) of mass murdering, baby raping, blood drinking, cannibal politicians want things. Rather than being any sort of call to action for a free society, or for a return to traditions of goodness and decency, “Wag the Dog” is about filthy men and women being filthy, celebrating filth, and getting rich in the meanwhile.

On the sweater in the photo above are supposedly the words “courage mom” in Morse code. Allowing for some leeway for sweaters on bodies not being flat, it is fairly close imo. And, of course, no, the character portrayed isn’t brave, or good, or decent. Then again, what can you expect from a prisoner of military “justice” working for a fictional military unit in a very strange film? Not much. Courage none.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.