Americans United just don't "get it" - still

Posted in response to the comments made on the article “Thou shalt drop it already” in the Washington Post on June 1, 2006:


J. Crozier on Jesus and Church/State separation: Jesus' comments were not to separate religion (church is a misapplied word) and the state.

Judaism throughout Early and Middle Judaism (Third to Fourth Century CE - depending on whom you ask, and then back in time) is a theocratic system. The king is to operate under Scriptural guidelines. The Tanakh is replete with injunctions against the king disregarding the Torah.

A Herodian (akin to today's Americans United for Separation of Church and State-types; see Mark 12:13 for the specific reference to the individual's sect) asked Jesus a question to undermine His Pharisaic doctrine (Jesus was a puritan, not a revolutionary). Jesus answered that you give back to the Roman occupiers their own coins. The answer reinforced the theocratic model by confirming the Halacha to remain separate from the ungodly by expelling their money from your possessions, while remaining true to God by continuing to make Temple sacrifices.

The people who heard the answer at the time got it; today's Americans United-types don't.
Moving on to the conversation about America and Christianity, anyone who continues to believe America up to the 19-teens and twenties is anything but a Christian-oriented nation is living in self-imposed ignorance.

It is impossible to read the writings and speeches of America's civic and business leaders and not read relentless citations of the intervention of Jesus, God's Word, Scripture, and Christianity in America's history and fate.

Perhaps most recognizable in history was the duel between positions taken to either defend or attack slavery by using the Christian Bible as the moral justification for the position taken.
In a less volatile, secularized instance (such as it is for the time-period involved), you could also include the messages sent between the mayors of New York and San Francisco with the nation's first transcontinental telegraph transmission as an example of the openness displayed by elected officials to citing Christianity as the spiritual force behind America's progress. I suggest referring to the Washington Post or the New York Times published the next day for the text.

When you read their transmissions, those things if said today would send the Americans United-types into cardiac arrest. It's unbelievable to them their rendition of American history is so far from the truth.

I could make a near endless list, so don't take the mere citation of only one or two here as the complete list available - that would merely put you into the self-imposed ignorance group.
The above referenced Americans United-types come up with a sentence or two from Jefferson, toss in the word Deist, and try to create a history of America as some secular state threatened with hijack by Christianity.

That is pure foolishness, and an insult to the intelligence of anyone who reads the actual speeches and letters written at the time. Anything said about God, even through the administration of FDR, when said today, evokes the mindless hysteria we continuously see from those types.

Their hysteria comes from their own disconnected fantasies about America's past, combined with senseless Biblical interpretations and their deluded interpretation of America's present religious convictions.


Kenneth E. Lamb


Blog index: http://www.blogger.com/profile/14444338

Web: http://www.kennethelamb.com

Refuting Stephanie Dickens

The following was sent to the Pensacola News Journal:



Dear Editor:

In a Viewpoint entitled "Escorts not the only action here - April 1," I referred to my chairmanship of the Pensacola City Council's Citizens Committee on Adult Entertainment Issues in retelling my encounter with a city councilman enraged that I wanted the city to look into the proliferation of escort services.

In a Letter to the Editor entitled "Didn't come back - April 16", Stephanie Dickens wrote, "I served on that adult entertainment committee . . . At our first meeting, we decided against a chairperson."

She continued, "Mr. Lamb came to the first meeting apparently expecting to be appointed chairperson and present his own agenda on the subject of pornography. When this did not occur, he quit the committee and never returned."

Ms. Dickens closed by asking anyone who wants to know the truth, "Our committee meetings and attendance are a matter of public record."

Taking Ms. Dickens up on her suggestion to discover which of us is telling the truth, we find in the committee's minutes dated October 22, 1998: "Committee discussed appointing chairperson - Denise Daughtry moved to nominate Kenneth Lamb; Zebedee Nicholson second; vote taken and approved 4-2 with Mary Jean Miller and Stephanie Dickens opposed."

Further in that meeting's minutes, I am referred to as, "Chairperson Kenneth Lamb."

Concerning her assertion I didn't attend further meetings, in the minutes dated November 12, 1998, following a presentation from local law enforcement officers, "Chairman Kenneth Lamb thanked Captain Johnston and Lt. Enquist for appearing before the Committee. Mr. Lamb passed out material he had obtained on the Internet advertising an escort service."

Ms. Dickens attended both meetings and therefore knew that the truth is that I was elected chairman of the committee - because she lost the vote for chairman, and that I attended subsequent meetings. The minutes don't lie.

Ms. Dickens attacked my professional reputation for writing truthfully; as a bylined writer for the Pensacola News Journal and the Pensacola Business Journal, readers must be able to trust without question that anything written under my byline is the truth. Establishing that what I write can be trusted to be the truth is now "a matter of public record."

WEBY AM-1330 becoming area's "Link to Life"

For Escambia residents west of Ninth Avenue in Pensacola, and north of Nine Mile Road, it's here, it's gone, and then it’s back again. What’s going on with the signal for WEBY 1330 AM, “Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio,” this week, and into the next two?
 
"We are field testing for our new 25,000-watt transmitter," explained station owner Mike Bates. "We will pump up the power to its full strength while we take FCC-required readings. We project final approval sometime in May. Then we will be at 25,000 watts everyday.
 
"But for now, we will switch between our old 5,000-watt transmitter and our new 25,000-watt transmitter for tests through the rest of April. Sometimes listeners will get the 25,000-watt signal, and sometimes not, depending on whether or not it is being tested that day, which will be most days in the week."
 
Once the station gets the OK from the FCC to stay at 25,000 watts, WEBY will be the most powerful AM radio station on the Gulf coast between New Orleans and Tampa. Bates reports he is already getting calls from listeners burrowed inside downtown Pensacola's steel-framed buildings, and north into Century and Brewton, Alabama. In fact, one caller told him WEBY and WRNE 980-AM are the only AM signals he can get on Perdido Key.

The total coverage area will blanket all of the Pensacola Bay Area, fully covering Santa Rosa and Escambia counties into the southern half of Alabama’s Escambia and Baldwin counties, and the western portion of Mobile County including the city of Mobile and Dauphin Island.

This coverage will make WEBY particularly valuable when tropical storms hit the area. Bates is ensuring Santa Rosa residents in particular receive EOC information. He has arranged the station’s own network of hurricane experts to explain what is going on in the Gulf.

“Radio stations forget Santa Rosa County,” Bates said. “This year, WEBY will be primarily focused on the county, with the strength to also cover residents in the rest of the Pensacola Bay Area. Our mission is to be the community’s ‘Link to Life’ with its hurricane coverage.”

Bates is asking for help from area residents in getting the station’s signal coverage tweaked.

“Listeners can help us with our hurricane coverage by calling the station whenever they pick up our 25,000-watt signal during this test period,” Bates said. “Give us your location. This will validate in real-world conditions our theoretical projections.”

The station’s phone number is 850-623-1330.
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Mr. Lamb will serve this hurricane season as one of WEBY’s hurricane experts. Be sure to set your dial to WEBY 1330 AM, “Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio,” – watch for word when the station goes to 25,000-watts and covers the entire area.

You can try to get the station now if the testing is active at the time you try to tune in WEBY. But if you don’t get it now, it will be available sometime in May. Call WEBY for details on testing and for information about when they will go to 25,000 watts of pure power.

Stay abreast this hurricane season by clicking on the following hyperlink and then bookmarking Mr. Lamb’s “Hurricanes and the North Gulf Coastline” blog – or copy and paste this URL into your browser’s address box: http://hurricanesandthenorthgulfcoastline.blogspot.com/

Click on the hyperlink to reach Mr. Lamb’s index of all of his several blogs – or copy and paste this URL into your browser’s address box: http://www.blogger.com/profile/14444338

They want to be Americans - They are just like us

The biggest political rally in recent memory: More than 1,000 people showed up at the Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza Monday on the immigration issue. Just as the Civil Rights Movement caught up Pensacola then, this one catches Pensacola now.

Already people speak about what “they” want from “us.”

After Ivan, people hailed the presumed Mexicans a Godsend. Not that they were all actually Mexican nationals; if their skin was brown they got the label. Born off the beaches of Santa Rosa County, USA, or Santa Rosa, Peru, no one I know asked to see a Green Card from the people putting our lives back together.

But before long, anti-brown fever began to spread.

You know its symptoms: They walked late night in “gangs” at food stores, startling us. They spoke a language foreign to us; were they talking about us, laughing at us, plotting against us?

They were hard-working dirty, paid with big rolls of cash, and seemed too loud, or too quiet, for us.

We liked the idea they worked for cheap. We didn’t think the contractors were cheap; we thought they were legalized extortionists. But, we said to ourselves, just think what the price would be if they didn’t hire that cheap Mexican labor.

The brown-skinned profile shrank when many headed west, itinerant manual labor in Katrina’s ravaging wake.

But many stayed. Many, many more than many non-Hispanics ever imagined.

When 1,000 gathered in the plaza, it shocked many non-Hispanics. “They” were still here. And they wanted to stay here.

On the intellectualized level of theory and photographic images recalled from youth, immigration doesn’t bother white non-Hispanics. The word conjures up old daguerreotypes of huddled masses -- Italian, Russian, Irish, German, and Slavic, mixed among the other European bloodlines flooding Ellis Island.

But Monday’s rally replaced theory and nostalgia with visible reality. It brought home that these immigrants don’t look like us. They don’t speak like us.

Their real crime is that they don’t fit into the mental pictures of immigrants at Ellis Island whose progeny is us.

The Founding Fathers instructed us about becoming an American. The 1790 Naturalization Act made it crystal clear.

If you were free, white, and male, lived on this side of the border for two years – no matter how you got here, with one year lived in any particular state, territory, or district, didn’t break any laws, and told a court of record you swear allegiance to the US Constitution, you are a bona fide US citizen.

No muss, no fuss, no multi-billion dollar bureaucracies.

The dirty little secret of immigration legislation your congressman won’t confess is the law only changes when they – the immigrants who don’t look like the current us group in power, becomes too visible.

History tells the truth, even if the members of Congress don’t.

The 1798 Naturalization Act increased residency to 14 years. Why? Because the Federalists wanted to keep French and Irish immigrants from becoming citizens. They voted Democratic-Republican. America’s second revolution, the election of 1800, swept it away when Congress repealed it in 1802.

The law didn’t change significantly until 1882. Congress declared they, Chinese in America, were taking the West away from us. The Chinese Exclusion Act’s motivation is self-evident.

Congress passed The Immigration Act of 1917 to protect us from Asiatic and British Indian geographic zones -- unless the immigrant was white. They could come in; they were like us.

Eugenicist Madison Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race promoting northern European superiority maintained through racial hygiene, focused the next two changes.

By 1921, Grant inspired Congress to believe they who threatened us were southern and eastern Europeans. The Emergency Quota Act cut their allowable numbers by 75 percent. The 1924 Immigration Quota Act squeezed them further. If that’s your heritage, be glad your grandfolks got in, before Congress kept them out.

Since World War II, Congress has passed more immigration acts than it did in the entire prior history of America. Each new bill worsens the situation’s downward death spiral.

Dan McFaul, US Rep. Jeff Miller’s brilliant public front man, brought home the issue’s tortured convulsions of corkscrew thinking. We knew they wouldn’t take the Republic away from us because his boss, courageously, “supports legal immigration.”

So who doesn’t? It was a no-brainer embarrassment of a brain-dead position.

He could respect our intelligence enough to say that just like every other immigration fight from the moment our nation was born, this one is about the fear that they will take away our lifestyle and power from us.

There are two lessons here. First, this is the Founding Fathers’ American Dream: After two years, if you abide by our laws and then swear to support our Constitution on the record in open court, you are a bona fide American. They never passed any law making the act of being here, by itself, a crime.

The second is shorter, but incredibly more powerful: The Hispanics in the Plaza are exactly what our Founding Fathers wanted. They want to be Americans.

They are just like us.
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Kenneth E. Lamb hosts the news-interview program “Sunday Morning” broadcast on NewsTalk 1370 WCOA, produced in cooperation with the Pensacola News Journal.

Find the entire index of various blogs at his Blogger Profile (http://www.blogger.com/profile/14444338) or visit his personal site, KennethELamb.com for great portal links and his full bio.

“We are The Borg - resistance is futile."

Recent headlines, particularly this one from the Washington Post’s washingtonpost.com column Fast Forward entitled “Have Your Mac and Windows XP, Too” about the Mac adopting a program routine that allows users to run their computer on the same Windows XP the rest of the world uses, prompted this exchange with a number of prominent computer journalists:

“We are The Borg - resistance is futile."

So it is that the Mac becomes just another WinTel machine.

All the fuss about the Mac has been for years just giddy chattering by elitist writers. They think that knowing what so few know - or more accurately what so many have no care whatsoever to know - about the Mac makes them "special" in the true Gnostic sense.

Rubbish.

The truth is that the Mac survives on cachet. It is style over substance, supported by fanatical users who deny anything negative about owning a machine rejected by 97 percent of the marketplace.

To them, that 97 percent rejection merely reinforces their self-anointed place as the "true holders of special knowledge" that the rest of the unwashed mass fails to grasp with their innate intelligence - being so much lower than that of the Mac fanatics' . . . so the Mac fanatics tell themselves anyway.

But reality being what it is, the collapse of the Mac myth is accelerating with irrepressible speed. First, it was the Intel chip, now the switch to Windows.

The dirty little secret is that the Mac has always been on a path separate from the rest of the computer universe; it is a path replete with quirky ideas promoted by quirky people desperate to reinforce their quirky image as quirky computer geeks. Mac fanatics lust to be known as isolated pseudo-intellectuals expressed through their quirky concept of contrarian rebellion.

It is proven true again as Mac adopts Intel at the same time the universe is now adopting the AMD chip as its processor of choice. Its uselessness would have made the Mac just another Commodore 64 but for the by-lined writers in major publications who exercise the power to promote their quirky personal tastes to an audience of readers miniscule enough to spike any other story.

They write, but nobody reads. It is self-delusion feeding the egos of journalists otherwise sensible about honestly assessing the import of a story by the depth of its readership reach. It has no reach because the Mac has so few users; ergo it is ego, not essentialism, which drives the waste of ink and paper.

Mac fanatics will still argue they are a different species because it is essential to their self-concept of being themselves a separate species than the rest of humanity, but reality trumps their delusion: The Mac is just another WinTel machine. And as such, there is no reason to own a Mac other than to delude oneself into thinking he or she is part of something intrinsically different, intrinsically superior to everyone else.

No, there is no reason to own a Mac. Nothing exists but self-delusion.

They assimilated into The Borg - resistance proved futile.

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This appears in Mr. Lamb’s blog, Staying CyberSmart! (TM) with "The CyberMeister" (R) at http://cybersmart.blogspot.com/

See all of Mr. Lamb’s blogs at http://www.blogger.com/profile/14444338

Escort services’ economic muscle trumped by one cop’s integrity

I was wondering if they were ever going to bust the local escort services. On Tuesday, Sheriff Ron McNesby answered the question.

Yes.

I first saw what a growth industry escort services were when I was the chairman of the Pensacola City Council’s Citizen’s Committee on Adult Entertainment Issues.

During one report to the council committee overseeing the topic, I brought up the idea of adding escort services to the adult issues agenda. They were already proliferating wildly.

But what I thought would be a “mom and apple pie” cultural issue for a Bible Belt community, turned ugly. I’ll never forget the rage in one city council member’s eyes when I brought it up and he shouted it down. Obviously, I hit a nerve.

I’m sure he won’t remember it that way – but it was so startling I’ll never forget it.

It was a message no one could possibly miss: don’t mess with the area’s escort services.

Over the years, other things I saw reinforced the idea that this area is a thriving nexus for the national and international sex trade.

I’m in the computer repair business, and plenty of wives and girlfriends catch their husbands and boyfriends web surfing where faithful lovers don’t belong. They’ll drag the rascals into the store and let them try to explain away those endless sexual pop-ups on the computer screen.

Through these experiences in domestic conflict, I’ve learned that one of the world’s largest hard-core porn sites shoots its movies in this area. The site takes in over $6-million a month – more than $72-million a year - from subscribers, and has 250 top-of-the-line servers in Denmark.

When it makes a movie, it pays out $5,000 for the female “star” of a half-hour film; the men get $100. The site’s owners produce about 20 movies a year.

And they’re only one of several operating locally.

As for the local escort services, the going rate for customers is $150 per hour. Of course, I’m sure the customers only book the escorts so they can have a stimulating discussion about 18th century English authors.

These services cater to doctors, lawyers, students, vacationers, “Working Joes,” convention attendees, top Republican and Democratic politicians and their operatives at every level of government, business owners, civic leaders, lonely old men and inexperienced young men . . . you get the idea – people from every walk of life living as pillars of the community in public.

Many of these customers love to bash the sex trade for contributing to the decadence of our culture – but in private, they become the very people they bash. Think of them as you would Rush Limbaugh buying narcotics from his housekeeper in a dark parking lot while bellowing on his radio show about the need to lock up people who buy narcotics in dark parking lots.

One local escort service even lists in its files a mass media preacher who pays in quarters.

Pensacola’s headlines about a university football coach and an “exotic dancer” from Arety’s Angels nightclub is just one of thousands of sex worker encounters that happen regularly in the Pensacola Bay Area. He just happened to get caught.

But actually, everyone who walks into Arety’s Angels gets caught – on her security cameras. I’m waiting for the up and coming young Pensacola professional in his 30-somethings running for public office on a “family values” platform try to explain what he was doing stuffing dollar bills into the thong of a topless dancer at Arety’s Angels back in his 20-somethings.

Busted – who knows who else is on those locked-up tapes from Arety’s candid cameras?

Given the size and massive dollars the sex trade generates here – and there is no doubt in my mind there are some very big local fish swimming in those waters – I thought no one in law enforcement would have the integrity to bust the game wide open.

It felt good to read about Sheriff Ron McNesby proving me wrong.
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Jeff Miller: Prisoner of His Own Success

I’ve posted an item on the Pensacola News Journal’s Community Forum entitled, “Jeff Miller: Prisoner of His Own Success.” It posts a letter I wrote to him two years ago predicting exactly what we see in Iraq today.

I will post several other letters to Jeff written from about the time of the invasion forward, all dealing with predictions that came true.

In order to save space, I will post the hyperlink to the forum in my blogs. I hope you will read them, and comment here and on the forum. You can always replicate the post on either and put it on the other.

Here goes: I wrote this letter on May 4, 2005. If only Jeff weren’t a prisoner of his own success.

“Jeff Miller: Prisoner of His Own Success”

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