One of the biggest frustrations I had in blogging was how could I get people to rethink their presuppositions, check the validity of their arguments and really know why they were for or against an issue, rather than repeating what news broadcasts or political parties programmed them to think. Thus the name "Provoking Thought"

Our programming in all areas has made the individual thought process almost a rarity. This is certainly has to be a marker of a society in decline. What did they say, all in all we are just another brick in the wall.

A good friend of mine sent me a email that gave me great pause:

The End of PRN
To: The Pain Relief Network Community
From: (edited)

Dec 29, 2010

The Members of the Board of Directors and I have decided to shut down PRN as an activist organization because pressure from the US Department of Justice has made it impossible for us to function. I have fought back against the attack on me and PRN but have received no redress in the federal courts; so, the board and I have concluded that we simply cannot continue. ........

Less than a month ago we were having a discussion about the faux war on patient patients. Ask yourself a question, are people with high blood pressure drug addicts? Are people with diabetes drug addicts ? Are people with renal issues drug addicts? Are people with glaucoma drug addicts? Yes, if you apply the same insane criterion to them that you apply to chronic pain patients.

Yet, what critical discussion do you hear on the topic? We just accept that the government can interfere with medical treatment and cut off medication for those it deems addicted to it.

Before I got into the political arena, I was blogging about church /state issues from a Christian perspective trying to provoke thought. Here is an article I wrote on the subject that is just as relevant today:

• Blind soldiers on the wrong side of the war?

  The war on drugs.  How can one be a Christian and be against a war on drugs?  In fact, we should be in whole-hearted support of it, right?  Drugs are bad,the government is good.  Even if the drugs were not bad, the fact that they are illegal, would say a Christian must support the war on drugs, right? And surely vote republican!

  I could recount several instances, from the resignation of high level Treasury official (a family member) citing the war a joke and fraud, to personal experiences of DEA pressures on local doctors to end long term pain management for chronic disabling pain.  The war on drugs has extended well beyond what the government lets on,  into interference with medical doctors ability to prescribe medications to patients that the federal government deems as potentially abusive or addictive. Those who don't heed their warnings end up facing criminal charges as drug pushers if they don't fit into the neat little mold the drug enforcement agency prescribes.  So just who is in charge of prescribing our medicine anyway-insurance companies, law enforcement or medical practioners?

    A long time friend of my brothers and mine came down with pancreatic and liver cancer approximately eight years ago.  He fought hard and took the various treatments, and was in and out of hospitals for the past eight years, some remissions longer than others.  About a year and a half ago we all hugged and said good-bye as he was at deaths door, but  he rebounded after a torturous hospital stay, which finally depleted his savings and his medical insurance lapsed. 

  He was determined that he did not want to go back into the hospital for anything more than clearing the shunt  between his pancreas and liver and that he wanted to be able to die with dignity.  Over the last four months his doctor had been reducing the amount of pain medications he was prescribing. They deemed he had become addicted to narcotics.  Two weeks ago the doctor refused to give him any more pain medicine-that was a Monday. Al was in disbelief-how can you cut a cancer patient off pain medications?  On Thursday he went back in pleading with the doctor , he was doubled over in pain, and vomited blood right in the  doctors office. (He only had half a stomach left) The doctor wrote him a prescription on Thursday, not for pain killers but to see a psychiatrist.

  It is conjectured Al either doubled over or passed out from the pain on Saturday, fell into something and bled to death, spending the last week of his life in undescribable pain.  And this my friends,  is the governments war on drugs. The nanny state deciding what is best for it's citizens.  Add the starvation of the former Mrs. Schiavo and this is the picture of the America we live in today, and how we care for our weak and disabled people in the country and the compassion we show them.  Again, as I have covered in earlier posts, if you think there is no repercussions in the church handing its diaconal care over to the state and remaining mum lest it lose its tax exempt status for speaking out on issues, it is time to rethink the issues.

  Yet we are so proud of how we support this war.  Again I come back to where is the church or church members as individuals in society voicing their concerns and opposition to this?  Our government is handing out clean needles to drug addicts so they won't get aids or hepatitis b or c, they are giving methadone out in the clinics to heroin addicts in a substituted addiction, yet they are interfering with doctors prescribing legitimate pain relief to patients in chronic pain over fear of arrest.  Between the DEA and the insurance companies, doctors ability to properly treat patients is being hampered greatly.

  Let's just look back to the prohibition era, when all the church folk jumped on the WCTU bandwagon.  Yet one man had the courage to stand up.When a multitude of “theological quacks, including not a few eminent Presbyterians, sought to read support for [Prohibition]into the New Testament,” Machen “attacked them with great vigor, and routed them easily.” He not only “proved that there was nothing in the teachings of Jesus to support so monstrous a folly: he proved abundantly that the known teachings of Jesus were unalterably against it. And having set forth that proof, he refused as a convinced and honest Christian to have anything to do with the dry jihad.”

   Machen not only defended Calvinist orthodoxy against the sentimentalism and moralism of theological modernism, but, more pointedly, he opposed Protestant strategies designed to preserve a Christian nation which sacrificed doctrinal fidelity for cultural influence. Machen, thus, recognized the implicit tension between the other worldly message of the gospel and the affairs of this world. This is not to say that Machen ignored earthly matters as he pursued eternal salvation, or that, in anticipation of postmodernism, he thought common cultural standards were merely disguises for power. Rather, having repudiated the mainline Protestant vision of Christian civilization in America, Machen looked instead to local communities.

  Machen’s reasons for opposing Prohibition are indicative of his understanding of culture.While he believed that the church had no business going beyond Scripture in the things it condemned as sin or becoming involved in political matters, he also opposed federal regulations of the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages because as a man with deep Southern sympathies he believed in states’ rights. This is a shorthanded way of saying that Machen believed local communities should decide their own affairs and set their own standards. So, for instance, if citizens in Evanston, Illinois wanted to restrict the sale and distribution of alcohol, they had that prerogatives members of that community. But there was no sound reason why Evanston’s views on alcohol—or the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s for that matter—should become national policy.

  “The present time,” he wrote, “is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.” “Despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology,” he went on, “modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.”

  In addition to contesting the Eighteenth Amendment, he opposed the policy of military conscription during the first World War, the Child-Labor Amendment, the creation of a Federal Department of Education, as well as the New Deal on the grounds that the growth of the federal government made the United States more uniform and prevented local communities and minority perspectives from flourishing. An inveterate opponent of paternalism—the idea that governments would force on their constituents what was “good” for them—Machen believed the nationalism America was experiencing during the 1920s and 1930s would ultimately replace all human and cultural differences with one huge “main street” where spiritual adventure would be discouraged and democracy would be regarded as “consisting in the reduction of all mankind to the proportions of the narrowest and least gifted of the citizens.”Hence, he opposed all efforts to silence dissenting voices, from Socialists to Roman Catholics.“What absurdities are uttered in the name of a pseudo-Americanism,” he wrote. “The same right of propaganda which I desire for myself I want to see also in the possession of others.” While Machen’s opposition to the centralization of the federal government and to the standardization of American culture made him a libertarian, his defense of freedom was designed to preserve the autonomy and integrity not of individuals per se but of mediating structures such as churches, religious schools, and families.Machen was no advocate of liberty for the sake of securing greater rights for individuals to do or become whatever they desired. Rather, he advocated liberty for the purpose, as has been typical of conservatism more generally, of restraining the coercive and homogenizing powers of the liberal nation-state.

  Machen crossed the edge with the Presbyterian Church when he went after Pearl Buck and removed her from the mission field and then started his own missionary board. Pearl Buck, despite his opposition, wrote a tribute to Machen for The New Republic, concluding that he “was worth a hundred of his fellows who, as princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church politics and trim their sails to every wind.

  When are we as Christians going to start taking stands like Machen did again, and say the governments war on drugs and interference with medical treatment is wrong and unbiblical?  Where have our church leaders been since the Terry Schiavo case in protecting rights of those unable to protect themselves?  For the inconvenient and disabled among us?  Sitting in the easy places, playing their church politics and trimming their sail to every wind, laying in the safe harbor.  Their silence is deafening.  Machen's they are not.

  Well, at least we kept our 501 (c) tax exempt status.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

A nation of sheep is governed by wolves..plenty of wool for the eyes being spun by what you call the media.

Hey Xanga:

Been a while. Been pretty busy with life.

Let me tell you about Kid Shock.  Last night my daughter walks into my office with a look on her face that is a cross between puzzled and mortified and says.  "What do you think your doing Dad?".  I glanced over and just acknowledged her but did not say a word. The music wasn't that loud and she wasn't studying.

I went back to reading a post and she was still standing there, so I looked back over and said "What?". She said why are you listening to him? What are you doing..that is our music. Almost like I can't like music her friends like.

Anyway, on the way home from camp Sunday I am listening to the FM radio in my Blazer trying to get the last half of the Steelers-Raiders game, and came across this song

What is even worse for her is the fact she knows in the late 80's this could have been a song about me in Northern Florida on the Lake Chain.

She hates my hats too. Like I told her, I had them before Justin Timberlake and now Kid Rock.

I guess she ought to be glad I still don't drink whiskey out of the bottle and get rowdy when they play Sweet Home Alabama once again!

Here is my election analysis :

                Karl Rove got his ass kicked on November 2nd.

Most of you know as a rule, I do not watch television, especially cable news. Election nights are the exception to the rule. It normally takes all of two minutes for the talking heads to open their mouths for the self imposed rule to be justified once again. Tuesday November 2nd was no exception.

As the returns were coming in, Mr. Rove, starts being critical of both the Angle and McDonnell Campaign and the "Tea Party" for losing races they should have won if they took his advice.  Forget that the size of the win was larger than anything Sir Karl engineered, he was whining about people not taking his advice.

Karl Rove outdemocrated the democrats in many of Bush's Campaign Positions. Mr. Compassionate Conservative was a red flag that trouble lay ahead for fiscal conservatism.  Karl roped in the social conservatives who were assured that President Bush would  protect the rights of the unborn. That was until Bush wanted his surgeon general approved and the cost for his approval was Plan B.  (Plan B is the morning after pill)

The Compassionate One also was no friend of those who believe that this country actually has borders and laws that protect them. President Bush saw the illegal workers as a way to help save the social security system. President Bush failed to enforce and defend our borders,  violating his oath of office. In the end George Bush was to the economic and social left of John F. Kennedy.

He also left us a legacy gift here in PA: Arlen Specter- the guy "we needed to support".  Rovian tactics said that the republicans needed Arlen Specter more than Pat Toomey . Bush and Rick Santorum got involved in the razor close primary backing Arlen Specter. It cost Santorum his seat.

Anyway, after 5 minutes of watching the returns at a victory party for the campaign I worked on (78-22% percent) one of the talking heads was trying to explain what the TEA Party was. 

I looked over at the people at my table and said that is simple, it is a rejection of the politics of Karl Rove. And Karl Rove knows it.

They are finally talking about this. Our Pension Crisis hits in 2012 in PA. Many elderly homeowners will lose their homes unless the tax structure is changed.

We have had several proposals to eliminate property tax. I have to be honest with the addiction to spending by government, I don't take them very serious. They spend vaulted funds all the time. The bottom line this was government making the contracts with money they did not have.

Remember this principle: there are no tax increases, there are only pay cuts. The government cuts your pay to get more money to waste it here and there as they choose.

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2010/10/busted-conyers-meets-with-marxists-how.html

Bud busy doing the peoples business in Harrisburg, voting for a openly unconstitutional bill. I guess someone should remind him that all revenue raising bills must originate in the House.

Bonded security for county officials

IN FAVOR

HOUSE DEMOCRATS

HOUSE REPUBLICANS

AGAINST

HOUSE DEMOCRATS

HOUSE REPUBLICANS

HOUSE LEGISLATORS WHO DID NOT VOTE

http://www.pennsylvaniavotes.org/RollCall.aspx?ID=510386

When I first joined xanga blog rings were highly utilized and kind of meant something. Since the change in the front page and the reply to feature have been added the way people used xanga has changed.

The rings were useful when they were utilized, now they are not. Theefore, I will be leaving my own Blog Rings. Nothing wrong. Not upset. Why should I host something that I don't host? Why should I belong to soemthing I don't participate in? I don't do that irl, not going to do it on xanga either.

Change happens.