Best of Spherical Model, Part I

This is my 399^th blog post. The next post is the 400^th. That’s a lot of words in about 2 ¼ years. I think my son Political Sphere is probably the only person to have read every post. But there are a growing number of regular readers. For those of you who are just recently dropping in, I thought this milestone might be a good time for review, which I'll do in three posts this week.

Today I plan to review the Spherical Model idea, and cover a few favorite posts related to the Political Sphere. Wednesday I plan to cover favorite posts related to the Economic Sphere. And Friday I’ll cover favorite posts related to Civilization. Some posts can’t be separated out, so there’s likely to be some overlap.

I recognize this will be too much reading for one sitting (or several). So I suggest making a note of the posts this week for reference, to get back to when you want a little more idea food about freedom, prosperity, and thriving civilization.

If you like what your read, please share. My purpose is to offer ideas that I believe will help people. My prayer is that those who need to see these ideas will find them, and find them useful.

 

The Spherical Model

The Spherical Model is a way of looking at the interrelationships of political, economic, and social ideologies. It is an alternative to the inadequate left/right paradigm. It’s a little more complex than that oversimplification, but it is still relatively simple and easy to visualize. The ideas are presented in more detail on The Spherical Model website, where you’ll find an introduction page, and then sections for the political, economic, and social spheres. The social/civilization sphere is big enough that it is covered in two articles. The total is probably about 50 pages of reading. So that’s a good starting place. The blog is to support, and to look at how the ideas can be applied in our real world

So, to understand the Spherical Model, I suggest these:

·         SphericalModel.com (all parts)

·         First Blog Post (March 4, 2011)

·         One Hundred (July 29, 2011)

·         Political, Economic, and Social Sphere Interact Some More (November 17, 2011)

·         Year Two Begins (March 5, 2012)

·         What Is the Spherical Model (March 1, 2013)

o   Economic Sphere Basics (March 4, 2013)

o   Basics of the Civilization Sphere (March 6,2013)

o   Recognizing Savagery When We See It (March 8,2013)

·         Amplify the Love (April 29, 2013) 

The Political Sphere

The basics of the Political Sphere concern the principles put into our basic law, the US Constitution. These include limiting the role of government to its proper role as protector of God-given rights. Here are a few favorites.

·         *Role of Government (March 8, 2011)

·         Leaders vs. Power Mongers Parts I, II, III (March 11, March 12, March 14, 2011)

·         *Political Commentary from Gulliver’s Travels (September 13, 2011)        

·         Constitutionalism (September 22, 2011)

·         * The Hunger Games on the Spherical Model (March26, 2012)

·         The “Keep Us Free” Game (April 4, 2012)

·         The Proper Role of Government—Again (July 18,2012)

·         Happy 225^th Birthday (September 17,2012)

·         Measuring Rulers (January 24, 2013)

·         You Might Be Living Under Tyranny If...Parts I and II (May 15, May 17, 2013)

__________________
* Among the most popular re-reads.

 

Three Kinds of Change

I thought we’d look at three words in relation to changing or reshaping our world, in hopes of better understanding and better choices. The words are transformation, reformation, and restoration. We might also use other metaphorical images, but I think we might get a good sense of the definitions by looking at butter.

Transformation

Trans-  refers to movement, across an expanse, or to a new destination. Form refers to the shape, physical look, or makeup of something. To transform something is to change the form into something altogether different from what it was.

Take butter. Add some things to the butter, like sugar, eggs, and flour, cocoa, plus heat, and you might transform an ordinary stick of butter (and other added stuff) into chocolate cake. Not a bad transformation.

Let’s suppose that when someone like our current president promises to transform America, he and those who support him in that effort picture chocolate cake as the outcome. Sweet, spongy, edible with a fork, great with ice cream. Utopia. But what you have afterward isn’t butter (America); it’s something else. If you need/want butter, chocolate cake isn’t interchangeable and may not be an improvement.

And depending on what you add to the butter, it may or may not turn out to be chocolate cake. What if, instead of cocoa, you substitute dirt? And instead of sugar, you use sand? Squish in some worms instead of eggs. You can do things to get a similar consistency and color to cake batter, but once you add the stressful heat, you might discover that this isn’t chocolate cake; it’s a mud pie. If you’re five years old, a mud pie might be just the thing you wanted to make—but probably only as a pretend copy of something your mom had really cooked for you. And I’m guessing even at five you know better than to eat it.

You started with the same pure dairy butter; how did it turn out so terrible? Bad recipe. Really bad recipe. Substituting molasses for sugar might work, and you can use applesauce in place of eggs, and with the right amounts, you can still get something close enough to chocolate cake to be worth eating. But everybody ought to know that you don’t use dirt, sand, and worms. The additions are better called adulterations.

chocolate cake utopia vs. mud pie reality
cake photo from here; mud pie photo from here

Everybody ought to know that you don’t take away people’s God-given rights, substitute the state for family, and tax away the incentive to work if you want to have a free and prosperous civilized society. You can't transform America into something better by adulterating the Constitution. 

Reformation

Re- is a prefix meaning over again. Sometimes the word means to take the original substance and recreate the original form, but it can also mean to take the original substance and form it again, differently this time.

honey nut, citrus, and raspberry butters, from here

For example, butter could start out as the typical cube and be softened and reformed into smaller patties, maybe even fancy molds. It could have a little oil added and be whipped, to make it more spreadable. Or it could have ingredients added but still maintain its basic butter-ness; it could become honey butter, or maybe cinnamon butter. It’s still spreadable on bread, but it’s different. Maybe an improvement, maybe not, depending on your taste and point of view.

The most famous reformation is The Reformation of the Catholic Church, which resulted not in a return to origins, but into a wider variety of versions of Christianity. This is not a statement of good or bad, just a description of a reformation.

Reforming the Constitution is done by amendment. That has happened twenty-seven times (including the 18^th, which was Prohibition of alcohol, and the 21^st, which repealed Prohibition, so they cross each other out). Many of the amendments are clearly improvements—the first ten are the Bill of Rights, which we consider an essential part of the original Constitution. Others are probably additions we would have been better without, like the imposition of the income tax, the 16^th, and the deterioration of state sovereignty by direct election of senators, the 17^th (both in 1913—one hundred years ago was a troubling time).

More often, when we talk about reform in the political world, it’s in relation to a specific issue or system: tax reform, immigration reform, health care reform. The idea isn’t to change the entire “butter-ness” of the Constitution, but to change an underlying aspect (like spreadability). Sometimes it’s because this underlying issue hasn’t been well formed to begin with, so reform is really creating a new form—within the overall form. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes not so much. A guide might be whether the reform moves toward or away from the original thing itself—the Constitution as guarantor and protector of our rights, and a limit to the powers of central government.  

Restoration

To restore can have a couple of meanings as well. It can be to take the original physical essence of something, and get it back to its original condition. This is the kind of thing done with old masterpieces; the dirt and discoloration are removed carefully to reveal the original painting. Old buildings or cars can be restored as well, but sometimes only some of the original physical essence is available. Sometimes replacements are built using new materials, or parts from similar structures, to fill in for the missing original parts.

Restore can also mean to make whole as it was originally. If an embezzler has stolen $100,000 from a company and is caught, he may be forced to restore the stolen money. It won’t be the same $100,000 that he stole, the very same bills; it will be the same amount, the same value of money.

If you were to mess up a pound of butter, leaving it out to melt, then spilling coffee grounds in it, or maybe accidentally spilling cleaning products on it—you probably can’t “restore” the very same butter to its original form, but you can restore—rebuild a store of—pure, sweet creamery butter. Unlike a painting, the original molecules aren’t what matter; it is the butter itself, to be valued and used as butter, to be spread over the metaphorical bread of American life.

So when we talk about restoring the Constitution, it is not about the document itself, which has historical value and is thing of beauty worth preserving. We have what it says written many places, including in our hearts and minds as free Americans. What we need restored is the purity of the original meaning, so it can be used as intended—to protect our rights and limit the powers of central government. We don’t need to “restore” it to its pre-amendment form; those amendments are part of the thing itself now. We just need the pure freedom ideas to perform as designed.

We don’t want those ideas to be transformed into something altogether different, unusable for our purposes. We don’t even want those ideas to be reformed into something close but not as purely ideologically functional. Wherever there has been deterioration or unconstitutional adulteration, we want restoration of the Constitution we love.

 

Another Counterfeit

It would have been more insightful for me to have divided Monday’s post, Counterfeits, into two parts, with this being added as a third part. That would have made a neatly planned week of posts. Unfortunately, I don’t always organize that far ahead what I will say. So, less neatly, here is another example of a tyranny/southern-hemisphere counterfeit.

Equality

As Americans, we have practically born in us a sense of fairness and equality. We don’t have an aristocracy—a class of people who receive special privileges and immunity from various laws based on their parental heritage. We honor our government leader, our President (even the current one) based on the position. But we expect that person to be subject to the same laws as the rest of us. If he robs a bank, he goes to jail. If he murders his secretary, he suffers the weight of the law. If he lies before Congress, he is prosecuted for perjury.

That is what we mean by Blind Justice. The law doesn’t look to see who the accused is—what their wealth, position, race, religion, gender, ethnic heritage, or other special interest category may be—before weighing the evidence. We are equal before the law.

Blind Justice, Alabama
photo by Scott

We don’t have a class system—a stratified society based on arbitrary, permanent conditions. The concept of avoiding people who are beneath us seems unpleasantly foreign. We don’t call one another “uppity” for “trying to rise above our station.” Rather, we have the American Dream, where hard work and brains put to good use in a free marketplace offer the opportunity for rising above current conditions for anyone.

The southern hemisphere counterfeit for equality is something else altogether—equal outcome. “Leveling the playing field” is the lie. It is the claim that, if someone else has more than you do, it is because they had some unfair advantage, that their level of work and yours are irrelevant. There’s an unspoken claim that, just one time if we redistributed the wealth and started fresh from the same starting line, then everything would be fair.

But outcomes will always be different—because individuals are different. I used to see this clearly in relation to my children’s education. When we moved to our current school district, and I attempted to continue their gifted education, there was a lot of resistance from the teachers. They seemed to believe that every child deserved the same input from them. But if the goal of education is to help each child gain the education that will help them reach their potential, then every child’s education is different—customized. Some teachers seemed to think, if a child was already reading well and doing the required level of math, then the teachers' duty was done, and they could turn their attention to students still struggling.

That meant that bright students spent hours every day sitting around waiting, often bored, rather than engaged in learning. “Fairness” in this common classroom setting means paying attention to some students while ignoring others—in an effort to make the outcome of the education the same: the limit of the slowest learner.

The elementary school report card actually said, “performing at grade level” or “not performing at grade level.” When my daughter showed up there a couple of grade levels above her age in several subjects, the report card practically implied she was getting stupider by sitting in that classroom—and that was OK as long as she wasn’t slipping behind the slower learners. As a mama bear, I never said, “Oh well, I’m sure the professionals know best”; I got her the heck out of that non-learning environment and saw to her education myself. Some might say I unfairly unleveled the playing field.

Fairness in economics is likewise not holding some people back to keep anyone from getting ahead. Even if you could start everyone at the same level, some people work hard, use their creativity, save up resources to invest in capital improvements, and come out ahead before long.

You can see this historically in frontier America. Homesteaders would start out with a few tools and basic belongings. They would clear the land, build shelter, plant crops, raise animals, and move ahead, if they could, from subsistence to prosperity. Sometimes misfortune got in the way—a hailstorm, a fire, an accident, a drought. Sometimes a family would have to move on and start over multiple times. But eventually some people prospered. Was it because they were given an unfair slice of the overall economic pie, thus depriving otherwise deserving individuals? No. It was a combination of hard work, mental and physical, along with some good timing.

Equalizing outcomes isn’t about fairness; it’s about coveting, that last of the Ten Commandments that tells us it’s wrong to be jealous of our neighbor’s good fortune.

The southern hemisphere counterfeit of “equality” is about using the covetousness we’re trying to rid ourselves of, nurturing it, and using it to persuade us to give power to some entity that promises to take from someone we’re envious of. Maybe to give to us, maybe not—it’s often enough for them just to stick it to the person with more. And for doing so, they get an unequal portion of power/control over the people.

Which is better?

·         Subjecting ourselves to a controlling force that takes from the prosperous and uses the spoils as it chooses? (southern hemisphere controlled economy)

·         Allowing individuals to prosper from their hard work, ingenuity, and frugality, with the possibility that any of us, even all of us, can prosper? (northern hemisphere free enterprise)

Next time someone says it has to be equal or it isn’t fair, ask whether equal relates to equality before the law or equality of outcome. There’s a hemisphere of difference between the two.

Counterfeits

I propose that, for every principle that leads to Spherical Model northern hemisphere freedom, prosperity, and thriving civilization, there is a counterfeit southern hemisphere claim. Here are just a couple of examples.

Rights

Our Constitution does a good job of spelling out many of our God-given natural rights relating to life, liberty, and property: freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom to defend self and others with arms, freedom to feel secure in our persons and papers, and more. The counterfeit was put forward by FDR, using the word rights that we were used to recognizing as a positive part of our free country. But he skewed it.

In our day certain economic proofs have become accepted as self-evident: a second bill of rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station or race or creed. Among these are:

·         the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to earn enough to provide food and clothing and recreation;

·         the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living;

·         the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom—freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

·         the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care, and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

·         the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age—sickness, medicine, and unemployment;

·         the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights to new goals of happiness and well being. For unless there is security here and home, there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

 

What is a right? Something you are entitled to just by virtue of being born a human. God has granted it to you. Others are required to respect your rights, but not to provide them out of thin air. So when Roosevelt uses the term, what does he mean? Something that we’d all like to have. And if you assume these things are rights—must be given to everyone—then government takes the place of God as the provider of rights. Government gets its power—and its money—from the governed. So, what FDR is saying is, you are required to give up whatever portion of your life’s work the government confiscates so that the government can grant that as a gift to someone else, in order to claim it is a better provider than God.

You do have the right to seek a good job; but if you have a right to a good job, regardless of your efforts or abilities, that means someone is required to hire you regardless of your efforts or abilities. That doesn’t square with the business freedom “right” he lists just below. You have the right to purchase a good home or a good education, but if you must be given those purchasable things, someone must be enslaved to pay for them.

Family

Family is the basic unit of society. It is the way we get a new generation, and pass along the values and principles required for civilization to that new generation. It is based on, and bound by, love for one another.

If there’s going to be a southern hemisphere counterfeit, it is going to appeal to the sense of belonging we crave. But instead of feeling the sense of belonging to parents, ancestors, siblings, and posterity, the counterfeit version is belonging to the collective—the state in the southeast quadrant, or the gang, mob, mafia, or other cabal in the southwest quadrant. The principle is the same: the collective wants/needs override the individual wants/needs.

I saw the latest Star Trek movie this past weekend, always fun. They re-enacted in a different way a scene from an earlier movie (that is set in a later time), where Spock had sacrificed himself by entering the hot nuclear reactor. He had said, “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” But what has happened here? An individual sacrifices himself, because his love for the many he can save is greater than his love for his own life. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” John 15:13 (King James Bible). That is the northern hemisphere version. Our soldiers do this for us. Our police take this risk. Last week we tragically lost four Houston firefighters who were acting on this honorable premise.

 

The southern hemisphere counterfeit takes the choice of sacrifice away from the individual, and replaces it with, “Because the collective is more important than the few or the one, the rights/wants/needs of the few or the one can be overridden at the will of those in control for the benefit of the collective.” This shows up in health care. If the collective is paying for health care, a costly and limited resource, then it is to the benefit of the collective to refuse care to whomever it deems less likely to benefit the collective: the elderly, the handicapped, the mentally impaired, the seriously ill. Everywhere in the world there has been state-run health care, there has been rationing, poorer service, loss of service to the elderly and seriously ill, and enforced euthanasia. There is no sacrifice involved; there is imposed punishment for being ill or elderly.

I’m in the middle of yet another youth novel, with the enemy being some entity trying to take over the world, ostensibly to “help” mankind (while incidentally giving unlimited power to the controlling bad guys). This one is Michael Vey, by Richard Paul Evans. The bad guy says things like, “Want is a thing of the past…. It’s a brave new world… with endless opportunities.” There’s a collection of young people with special electrical powers. They’ve been kidnapped and manipulated, and are essentially imprisoned. But the collection of them is called the family. If they don’t use their powers as required, to harm people and even murder, then the young person is punished and imprisoned. Most of them have succumbed, and the ones found at earlier ages were more easily manipulated. They’re made to feel “special,” told that they are eagles, among the chickens, and shouldn’t choose to act like chickens, or even worry about the chickens—because eagles eat chickens, after all.

When confronted with the discomfort of being asked to do something harmful, one who had been there from a young age said, “You get over it. At first you might hate it but before you know it, you’ll volunteer to do it…. Why do you care? We’re better than them.”

Ah, the old “we’re the important people and the others are subhuman” ploy, found in all savage tyrannies, wherever there is mass murder, genocide, or halocaust.

Belonging to a real family is something we’re designed by our Creator to respect and enjoy—where we can develop loving relationships that will help us in everything we do. The counterfeit is belonging to some replacement collective, with controllers that either tell us why we can disregard the rights of those supposedly beneath us, or why we are too insignificant to have our rights respected. There may be an inculcation of adoration for the collective. But real love—giving and receiving love—is missing.

Find something good in a society of freedom, free enterprise, and civilization, and there will be a correlative counterfeit in a society of controlled behavior, controlled economy, and savage disregard of the value of human life.

Coordinated Targeting

I continue to watch for further information to come out about the various scandals swirling around this administration. Today I want to take a further look at the targeting of conservative groups, focusing on True the Vote, which I have participated in personally. [I’ve written about TTV here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

This will lead to a question about how the administration goes about business: Who is doing the targeting, and how do they go about coordinating?

There are two nonprofit organizations started by Catherine Engelbrecht, here in Houston, Texas, in 2010 that have grown nationwide since that small beginning. One is True the Vote, with the mission of helping people learn how to verify free and fair elections. Its purpose is nonpartisan and educational and should qualify as a 501(c)3 organization, which would allow donations to be tax deductible. The other is King Street Patriots, a nonpartisan but conservative group helping to share information and advocating on specific issues. KSP has been holding weekly meetings, with speakers, and annual conferences. It does not endorse candidates or parties, and welcomes all interested comers. KSP should qualify as a 501(c)4 organization—nonprofit for the organization’s tax purposes, but donations would not be deductible.

Filing for nonprofit statuses for these two organizations was done in July 2010 (almost three years ago). I have applied for nonprofit status before. We organized a homeschool support group in December 2005. We were able to apply online and qualify as a Texas nonprofit organization while the organizing meeting was still underway. It took a few months to put together the paperwork (a few pages) to apply for federal 501(c)3 status, with educational purposes. We received that status about two months after applying. There were no IRS visits, phonecalls, or examinations of our personal IRS filings. Our organization handled very little money—enough dues to cover basic insurance and facility rentals; there were no employees, and most activities were paid for by participants. So it was simple—also quick. (We also didn’t have a president then who makes it clear he believes parents do not have a natural right to school their own children.)

TTV and KSP are much bigger, and more complex. But their purposes are no more nefarious or suspicious than our homeschool group. I can understand a few additional clarifying questions, to make sure the group does what it claims to do. But those could have been simply answered by IRS people visiting the website, where videos of meetings are archived, or having someone drop in to observe. Meetings are open. Rolls aren’t taken, although there is always a sign-up sheet to get emails, if you want to get announcements.

These organizations have done everything required by the law—as well as everything required by the harassing IRS. And still they have not received their nonprofit certification.

It’s odd enough that the IRS has taken three years, has acknowledged knowing about the targeting for well over a year, and still hasn't ruled on the status—either way, granted or denied. So clearly the IRS problem isn’t cleared up yet.

But the real scary part is how many other federal agencies got involved. The full timeline of encounters is available. (This article is also a good summary. Also, watch the 13-minute interview on Huckabee, above.) Besides multiple encounters with the IRS, and the hundreds and hundreds of pages of answered questions still not qualifying as enough, there has been scrutiny from the FBI Domestic Terrorism Unit, twice, asking about attendance by a specific person. (Don’t know who this person was, but no information was available except that this person had attended, according to a sign-in sheet.) Plus there were four additional FBI general inquiries.

Then there were personal audits by the IRS of the Engelbrecht’s small business. Let me say that, in the dozens of times I have attended events at King Street Patriots, Catherine Engelbrecht has never even said the name of her family business or what it did. All she has said was that she stepped away from the family business to do this volunteer citizen work, and her husband stands behind her and continues without her. I have never been aware of his attendance at any event; if he’s been there, he has remained anonymous. I saw her children only once, at an all-day presentation by another organization, educating on the US Constitution.

Her family has stayed very separate from the nonprofit work. She has done nothing to connect her private life with the nonprofit organizations. The personal audit ended up giving them a small refund—that’s how squeaky clean they were, even under scrutiny.

Then came unscheduled visits and audits by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. The business has a class 7 license, which would allow them to manufacture gun parts, if they chose to—which they do not do. They were required to open their safes and provide serial numbers of any personally owned firearms. ATF made more than one visit.

OSHA dropped in unannounced, even though they’d never found the need to make contact in the first 20 years the family business was in operation. They wanted to see the family farm, count animals, examine fence lines, and a great many things unrelated to running a small manufacturing business. Violations were found: the seatbelt on a forklift was the wrong kind. They were using safety goggles as required, but not the right kind.

Result: fines of $25,000. They were able to talk those down to $17,000. They feared arguing further, because who knew how much further the persecution would go? It was not an insignificant amount for a small business of 30 employees.

The cost for the nonprofits has probably reached into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for accounting and attorneys. Note that this is all in response to questioning, with no accusations of crime or wrongdoing. They do not have that kind of money; they do not even have employees. I believe (not sure) that much of the legal help has been provided pro bono; Jay Sekulow of American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has been involved with this and another couple dozen similar cases.

Another agency, puzzling to me because the name makes it appear to be a state agency, not federal. In November of 2012 was an unscheduled audit by the Texas Commission on Environment Quality. In response to yet another unrevealed complaint?

Only the IRS and FBI made contacts related to the nonprofits and their activity—pretty intrusive, but at least related. But the family and family business got harassed by the IRS, OSHA, ATF, and TCEQ. Never happened before, but at the same time scrutiny follows the nonprofit applications. Coincidence?

On radio yesterday a caller reached Sean Hannity’s radio show (around 3:45 PM CDT, 5-30-2013), saying a similar harassment happened to him a few years ago. He and his wife own a small mom-and-pop business. They support traditional marriage and made a donation to the Prop 8 campaign; within a month they also made a donation to a church. Shortly later they were suddenly targeted by OSHA, the IRS, and another agency I didn’t catch. It cost them considerably in accounting and legal fees, fighting accusations like “you have too much money in your account,” when they kept only three months of working capital. Sean Hannity responded that there are a great many untold stories. Some of them he has collected in a studio audience for Friday’s show (TV show, on Fox News, I believe). These are people who have reason to believe they have been targeted purely for their political views.

There are three possible explanations:

1. There is no targeting based on political beliefs; this is all just coincidence (which pretty much no one believes anymore; even the IRS has admitted to targeting).
2. There has been targeting based on political beliefs, but it was limited to low level rogue employees in a specific IRS, acting on their own (pretty unlikely, considering all the evidence from various places and various agencies).
3. There has been targeting, beyond the IRS nonprofit office, beyond even the IRS as a whole, coordinated among various agencies, including private citizens and their businesses aside from their nonprofit activities.

I think the evidence grows stronger that it’s the third explanation. So the question is, who coordinates, and how do they accomplish it? Over and over the White House declares it knew nothing. But all of the federal agencies involved come under the executive branch; the President is ultimately responsible for their behavior.
 

Technically, it’s possible the President remains hands off, but it’s hard to imagine he maintains his ignorance in any other way but with a wink-wink, “we never had this conversation,” “you know what to do without it being spelled out; that’s why you were hired—for your initiative” kind of machination. It’s also possible that there’s some specific coordination going on that is being covered up and lied about. The Chicago Way (which our president is much more qualified to teach than he ever was Constitutional law) includes both versions.

Questions are arising concerning an unusual number of White House visits by the former IRS Commissioner, now counting up to 157 (compared to one by his predecessor during the eight Bush years). He’s not supposed to be a policy maker. So what is there to talk about? And we’re supposed to believe neither he nor any White House person knew anything about the targeting? Just another odd coincidence?

I don’t want scapegoats. I want truth about what is actually happening, so we can learn from this history and never suffer repeating it.

What Is Power?

During one of our Sunday lessons this week, the teacher (a good friend of mine, who embarrasses me by saying I’m one of the smartest people she knows, but who is also very smart in various less sedentary ways) put this word equation on the board:

Belief + Action = Faith, and Faith = Power

This was a religious lesson, about not feeling ashamed that your belief is not yet knowledge; if it is a strong enough belief that you then act on it, trusting it to be true, then that is faith. And it is by faith that the world was created and all miracles happen.

But the Faith = Power part intrigued me. I have written here before about the word power; specifically about the difference between leaders and power mongers. Leaders serve, while power mongers act in ways to increase/protect their power over others. So I wondered if this equation could be applied also to power in a more general sense, or whether there is an actual difference.

Phenomenal Cosmic Power; Itty-bitty Living Space

What is power? In a lot of youth literature, people have special powers, maybe magical or super powers, or at least special talents and abilities beyond normal humans. And then there’s the dilemma that, “with great power comes great responsibility,” (according to Spiderman’s Uncle Ben). I don’t think I want to deal with that kind of issue today. I want to deal with something closer to real world power. I went to the handy dictionary. There are a lot of layers in defining power. So I think I’ll pick and choose how I mean it here.

Power is the ability to act, produce, accomplish, do. It can also be the ability to influence the behavior of others, which could be either very good or very bad. In the world of politics—which most of us would prefer to avoid but can’t if we care about our own freedom to act, produce, accomplish, and do—power might also mean the authority to act, or to control the actions of others. Such power is like fire, important for use in certain limited circumstances, but dangerous in the wrong hands or in the wrong situations.

I’ve previously asserted that seeking power is evil, but I think I need to clarify the definition, because having the power to do good, and wanting that ability, is not a bad thing. The power to act in a positive way is good, but power to act in a negative way is, well, bad.

So how do we make sure that we’re seeking power for good? And how do we prevent others from gaining power for evil?

Power needs a source. So if we’re going to a good source—THE Good Source—then we can be pretty certain our power will be for good. If you have something Good to do, and you ask God for the power to do it, when that power is granted, you know you didn’t supply it yourself; you put in the work, but you got the ideas, the energy, the opportunities—the power—from the source for good. There’s a sense of humility in the heart. If you’re missing the sense of humility and thankfulness, and in its place find a sense of superiority or entitlement, you’re probably seeking the wrong kind of power.

I don’t think there’s any problem with wanting power from God to do His will. That is very different from power mongering—loving power for self. But power to do God’s will is always about serving His children, even when leading and influencing them. The evil kind of power is about controlling, rather than serving. Originally, I said it this way:

A power monger is the polar opposite of a leader. He/she uses coercion as a basic tool. A power monger uses deception to gain power, not trusting honest persuasion to get people to give it to him/her. A power monger doesn’t recognize God-given rights, but only the privileges he/she decides to grant, usually to those most likely to return political favors (money, votes, support). A power monger can coerce at any level from family to international, but those with an appetite for power generally seek it over a larger and larger circle of minions.

A power monger sees him/herself as elite and superior over the other lower beings, as opposed to seeing him/herself among fellow citizens as a leader would do. A power monger doesn’t avoid chaos, but rather uses it (sometimes even creates it purposefully) as an opportunity to cause more people to succumb to the desire for protection, which he/she offers. A power monger is selfish, doing good for others only if it will increase his/her personal power.

I think the Spherical Model helps explain the difference. Those who choose to dwell only in the southern hemisphere, in either statist or chaotic tyranny, think there are only two choices: control others, or be controlled by others. They seem perversely unaware of the entire northern hemisphere where people work and live freely among one another—using limited government to help with the limited times people fail to consider one another’s rights and self-govern. It’s the hemisphere where freedom, prosperity, and civilization thrive. It’s not a dog-eat-dog world there; it’s a mutually respectful world. Unlike the power mongers in the tyranny hemisphere, leaders in the freedom hemisphere must be servant leaders, who lead by persuasion, information, and example.

Why don’t we simply choose that? Some of us do. But we live in a world where we do not have a critical mass of people choosing the better way.

I believe God used the faith of righteous people to establish this country in the first place. God has power to do anything. I believe He can bring us back to the freedom zone; I do not know if that is His plan, or if some sort of disastrous version of natural consequences is more likely.

But this will continue to be true:

Faith in God → Power to Do Good

We can act on our desires to do good in our homes and communities and country, and He will give us power to accomplish enough good that we can still enjoy many of the blessings of that northern hemisphere that so many others are too blind to see. If we act on faith, miracles will still happen.

Not Just Another Monday

I read something yesterday,* about Memorial Day, reminding me that it wasn’t until 1971 that Memorial Day, along with several other holidays, was changed from a specific date to a particular Monday, allowing for three-day weekends. The author hypothesized that something of the meaning began disappearing with that change.

Fallen Warriors Memorial--Houston
from their Facebook page

I started thinking about that, for other holidays as well. Presidents Day was one; we no longer celebrate the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington on their actual February birthdays, learning about them in school classes and elsewhere. Instead we have a holiday for family vacations, a brief college break, an extra shopping day, during which we have pretty much nothing in the way of traditional ceremony reminding us of those two extraordinary presidents.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, celebrated on a Monday in mid-January, came after the change, so has never been truly connected to his actual birthday. Having a holiday for a single American, no matter how influential, seems odd when we only bunch our greatest, and all, presidents some Monday in February. It’s better when the day is referred to as celebrating equal rights or something—something worth teaching about in schools. But again, it’s a day off from schools, with very little in the way of traditional celebrating.

We tend to keep traditions alive better when they are date specific, rather than a convenient Monday. Christmas tends to be full (overfull, at times) of traditions. The Fourth of July, Independence Day, could hardly be celebrated on a different day, and it does retain traditional parades, fireworks, and brass bands in addition to summer cookouts and family time together.

Thanksgiving is on a changing date, but always the fourth Thursday of November; it remains full of tradition. It can be anywhere from a single day off during the week to a four-day or even seven-day vacation. Easter is day specific as well, a certain Sunday after the spring equinox. There’s enough meaning attached that we get together for traditional family celebrations whether we get time off or not. So it’s possible, even without specific dates. But the three-day weekend does seem to have lessened, rather than increased, our ability to pay attention to the purpose of special days.

What if we had kept Memorial Day on its original May 30^th? Would we remember it is as something much more than the first good cookout day of summer? Would we meet together somewhere in reverence, at a cemetery or monument, and tell stories of fallen heroes? Would we remember how solemn this day is, compared to July 4^th, and compared to Veterans’ Day? I don’t know. And I don’t suppose it’s likely we’ll go back.

But here in Texas we say, “Remember the Alamo,” and of the current war against radical Islamists who attacked us 9-11-2001, we say, “Never forget.” Memorial Day was officially instituted after the Civil War, to honor soldiers who had fallen on both sides, so we would never forget their sacrifice that brought us toward full freedom, and all the soldiers since who have made that ultimate sacrifice.

On a personal note, 32 years ago, on Memorial Day, after I had decorated graves at the cemetery with my family, I drove the hour home and went to a church activity—and met Mr. Spherical Model. [When he tells it, he says we met in a dark bathroom, which, while accurate, begs for a lot of explanation. You’ll have to ask him sometime.] So the day has an added, happy reason for remembering.

We plan to see grandkids, have some Texas barbecue, and enjoy the Monday off. I expect many of you will do the same. But I hope we can all also do some grateful remembering.

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*The link had video/audio of three mournful but beautiful pieces of music honoring fallen soldiers, worth listening to.