Crime and Justice

Saint Mike of McPence

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How many pence there are in the wallet of political character making up the profile of the former Vice-president Pence is hard to tell. If the only response evoked by St Mike’s president’s criminal tweets and vulgarity is anger at the coup attempt on January 6th 2021 a shilling is too much.  If a VP did not serve to keep his commander-in-chief from offending the people he swore to serve his stash is meager indeed.

A shameful fawning sycophant

VPs are more than yes men, and St. Mike did not even try to find a way to erase the stain of “Mexicans are rapists”, “Muslims are unfit immigrants”, “Nazis are very fine people”, and “Black people have nothing to lose”. Christian faith may figure in St. Mike’s speeches but it can have no more divine credentials than the goals and messages of white nationalists. God did not help the insurrectionists in the civil war and he slammed the door on the attempt to crown a criminal TV personality as American saviour on January 6th.

St. Mike is the smilefree and anger-free face of American Christofacism. No synthetic entity of this kind will ever pass muster. If people keep thinking that there is an essential nexus between politics of any brand and the faith of Jesus Christ then there will be no difference between America and totalitarian regimes like the peoples Republic of China or the Islamic republics or cross-eyed Democratic states like Israel and Hungary.

The insurrectionist and their crimes

If you want to know how many pennies there are to St. Mike you should hear him say that Congress has no right to his testimony. He speaks of the coequality of the executive and the legislative bodies in the United States government but fails to recall that the Congress can impeach the president and can call any person in the United States to give testimony when crimes have been committed. We must wonder if Saint Mike forgets that his life was in danger in plain sight and with audio on January 6th. St Mike is hanging himself, clinging to the scam that 45 was good for America except for his coup attempt. The GOP is felled tree. Turn the page, all ye Pences and Farthings.

Counterpoint sleazy spin

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That trucker convoy was a criminal event you cannot spin it to be just an expression of pride and political dissent. We elect people to Parliament to represent us, and locking down a city with noise and violence and unlawful behavior cannot be spun into righteousness. The book is rightfully being thrown at conservative types who evidently want to turn Canada into the little sister of the damnable GOP-leaning United States.

Drinking up the battle sauce in Texas

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When David, king of Israel, led astray by his regal pride and human desires killed a man after sleeping with the man’s wife, the Lord took notice and imposed a penalty.  It seems to me that people think that atrocities like Israeli theft of East Jerusalem property or homicides with guns in the United States of America will have no consequences. An eighteen year old shooting up children in their classroom in Texas is another example of evil individuals trying to stop the education of the next generation.  The next generation, despite being targeted for assassination, will  be more than patriotic and insular robots and the leadership that thinks it can stack the courts with tainted judges will wax worse and worse. Who can forget Mitch McConnell’s version of impartial justice or Devin Nunes’ trips to the White House during he impeachment of the 45th president?  The homicidal outbursts in human history are the direct outcome of both of lawful and lawless obsession.   In Texas they proudly drink the sauce of armed insurrection when a crooked businessman calls, and they guzzle inaction when the lives of innocent educators and their students scream, for almost an hour, for service and protection.

A drunken stupor affects large swathes of humanity, and it is not an exclusively American phenomenon.  

What a pathetic besotted mob!

The institutions and traditions of Israel and Judah have not been adopted by any civilization, so neither Jerusalem, the original beneficiary, nor any of the capitals claiming inspiration from Sinai or Golgotha have seen even a truncated era of proven viability.  The fearful (and abominable, see Revelation 21:18) Caucasian crew that sees immigrants as a threat cannot be expected to be rational or neighborly.  If a repeated mantra could convince the public that MAGA fans were to be trusted the quasi-governor of Texas just brought the house down.

Get the narrative straight or let the police tell it

The performance behind the microphone in Uvalde was Governor Abbot’s trademark bluster and bravado but it could not hide the outrage of police holding back the parents while an eighteen  year old slaughtered their children in their classroom.  People sworn to go towards gunfire in a jurisdiction where eighteen year olds can acquire a weapon designed for war who choose to wait while ten year olds are murdered need to be sworn out.

The time is way past up

Why have you despised the word of the Lord by doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon.  Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.  (2 Samuel 12:9-10, NASB)

Perpetual violence in David’s household

The sword shall never depart from your house

There is a fantasy parading as fidelity to noble ideals is spreading all over the world.  It sneaks around in places of worship and in legislatures desperately trying to wed the underlying evils of politics to a spiritual accountability. 

Bribed to do nothing about mass murder

The revolution will not be replayed and guns have not prevented the spread of fascism, nazism, or lying ignorant people posing as experts and leaders. 

Cursed is he who accepts a bribe to strike down an innocent person. And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’

Deuteronomy 27:25, NASB

But your eyes and your heart are intent only upon your own dishonest gain, and on shedding innocent blood and on practicing oppression and extortion.

Jeremiah 22:17, NASB

Nothing to see here

Freedom denied and slavery forgotten have unsheathed a sword on the United States that will never depart and the  proof that one idolized amendment to a constitution will make an entire nation a bleeding mecca.

War – homicide – death

It is questionable that homicide – The American War of Independence –   cut the ties between brutal England and her North American colonies.  The military and peace officer services of the United States have not failed to keep alive atrocious attitudes, policies and practices. Texan official leadership publicly wants to be the Keeper of the Keys of the Right of Violent Insurrection, which only means that the rule of law is bovine fecal matter to such people.   By their repeated kicking their responsibility for all the people and especially children down the road the people’s representatives – Democrat, Republican and Independent – are mired in genocidal icecream. They think that guns will save them when their day of decision comes.  The civil war and the world trade center inferno have taught them nothing.  So political hacks can say there’s nothing to see here. Whoop de do! Another bad guy committing a crime while they have done nothing to make sure that that crime can be reduced.

Resources to reduce murders are not in place but access to  weapons of mass destruction is a rite of passage in Christian America.   Politics and faith are strange bedfellows no matter what cliches believers use to prostitute themselves to the state.  They really do not know what JESUS thinks of the enablers of the massacres of innocent children and non-Caucasian people. They ought to know what he has to say to the National Rifle Association and the political charlatans it bankrolls.  Time’s up, pals.

Make no mistake

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Some people count to three and still screw up. Others do not count at all. They plant a knee on your neck and calmly watch you die. Raw and unvarnished bondage and violence has their distinct looks. What messenger of God pulls out the wrong covenant to talk about eternal life? None. If the subject is pardon for sin and friendship with God there is no accident that people are talking about Christ and the Cross. When a police officer yells “Taser! Taser! Taser!”, pulls out her service weapon and kills a man it is what it looks like. Make no mistake.

Photo by KoolShooters on Pexels.com

We grieve with the family in Brooklyn Center. We do not accept “accident” as an explanation for choosing the wrong tool. We know that lethal force has a certain look and feel. Lethal force sits on the right hip and the respect for life sits on the left hip. Having trigger-happy neighbours is one thing but police officers who chose to use force on Black people at the drop of a hat need to be purged from law enforcement. Let it begin with the pastors who also have been yelling “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” and filling the air with the stink of human futility.

When our words get jumbled or we seem tongue-tied there is no shame, but when we say “egg” and pick up a venomous snake there is justice locked out and good sense buried deep in . Who drinks vinegar instead of water? How many white people have a gun in their face when they are pulled over by law enforcement? It is not an accident that a law enforcement officer takes a life, says “Holy ****. I shot him” and gets due process. Justice for Daunte Wright must be swift and unequivocal and cleaning up the services of dishonest departments begin in earnest.

Like that 20-year peace officer there is a host of spiritual guides, teachers, preachers and motivational speakers who need to get their act together. People can see through the spaghetti throws and the soft-pedalling of Jesus’ victory, deceptive theories about God and justice, and golden rule philosophies. That is no accident. That is damnable malpractice. People who are mindful and properly motivated and prepared make no mistake.

I commit myself

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Now that a peace officer has done with his knee what deranged potus45 suggested he could do with a gun on a city’s main drag Americans are quite likely going to sleepwalk through their next opportunity to set their nation of a righteous path and end their navel-gazing and self-aggrandizing. The United States has settled for a right to kill Black people by outlaws like the KKK, by police officers, and by ordinary citizens who assume the right to be judge and jury, the latter carried out with regularity under the guise of some version of self-defence. Do I exaggerate? If I were a United States representative I would be committing myself to introduce legislation to pay all the families who have lost someone to lynching and murder by peace officers, to pay all the African villages from whence the slaves for American industry were taken, and to compensate all the American familes who have been kept in the dark about fair wages, the truth about the epidemic of innocent bloodshed, and ending the carreers of all rotten law enforcement officers.

No-one should underestimate the disgust that violence is to God. Moses wrote that violence was the trigger that set off the judgment of the flood. Violence was one of the offences in the holy city in Judah that resulted in the destruction of the temple and the exile of the people of Judah.

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Gen. 6:11-13

One needs to see how the simple terms of prohibited behaviours (kill, sleep-around, and steal) are not enshrined in secular law. Most governments only care about homicide under certain circumstances. It is not illegal to commit adultery in a state where a religion does not dictate the terms of secular law. Stealing happens under our noses thousands of times each day. For example, the hard-earned cash of citizens is constantly being siphoned off by merchants of motor vehicles, fuel, and common necessities such as food and clothing. It must be a hard sell for spiritual people to be legislators when their equally conscientious colleagues are willing and eager to create loopholes, for example, for lying and dirty energy. A preacher, a politician, a political pundit, or a television commentator can lie through his teeth daily but lying to the FBI will land a person in considerable trouble.

It is a burning shame that well-equipped governments do not have a handle on violence. Humans have the right to be free from deceit and violence, and to be treated as precious, according to Psalm 72 verse 14. Way more shameful, from my perspective, is the number of people who, in the name of caring in the pattern of Christ the Saviour, just continue to preach feel-good messages and fantasy victories over the common human conditions. It fits perfectly: the knee on the neck of anyone gets no play in American or Canadian churches, but the dream job and the mortgaged life does. If I did not hope that Derek Chauvin pays the price for causing George Floyd’s death I would not be human. If there is no in the next few weeks a spate of firings of rotten peace officers we will know that American justice is a spoiled child’s game. God’s justice will not be satisfied with a bipartisan or multipartisan deal, and he can smell a jury’s bias before it shows up. Justice can be anything people want in a democracy, and democracy is a dirt-eating snake pretending to be a spotless lamb, a most ridiculous act and cast which I commit myself to continue exposing.

GOPaper lions and capers stop

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The centuries of trying to keep segments of society blind, homeless, destructively employed or unemployed, out of the halls of power do not need pardon or forgiveness,  only a speedy and public end.  A nation that shed blood for the right to call Black men “boys” must confess that (a) the perfume they have been spraying everywhere masks reality and (b) admit that  they in the shed and cannot find the toilet paper.  The seemingly endless capers of toothless lions bragging about defeating ants and commiserating about not finding health care for all, and not seeing homes for all under the spacious skies, does roll to an abrupt halt.

Impartial counsel is beyond most leaders.   It takes a great deal of discipline to establish excellence, a great deal of humiliation to achieve superiority, and a great deal of optic disability to create a culture of lies.  The state defines the limits of what people can say and where they can say those things.   Just because people are talking about excellence, superiority and deception does not mean that they have taken the medicine.

Remember Mitt Romney “Trump’s a fraud” or Ted Cruz’s savage denunciation of the orange threat, other senators expressions of disgust with the 45th president?  It is going to give you whiplash if what politicians say tops your list of things to feed your joy and safety.  Please remember too the watchmen – religious leaders – who said nothing or the wrong things about the corrupt use of power, the thefts, the trashing of trust in public service, and the divisions sown by the 45th president and his party.

The whole European narrative of persecution, flight, discovery of new lands, settlements and pioneer genius has been a smelly concoction that kills both the ones telling it and the ones who are essential to the story. “Go, paper lions” I say, “and park your capers where the sun shines a lot or not”.

America’s Balding Cult of Death

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  • Alaska, sexual assault capital
  • Washington, DC, crime capital

First of all, let us cut the fat.  Judeo-Christian principles are not so sophisticated that we cannot say “Moses said” or “Christ said” and know with certainty that they can be on opposite sides of an issue. If a thing is Christian it has Christ as source. I have learned that the buck stops at Christ’s desk.

Where exactly is the Judeo-Christian contribution to the system of government that calls a 200k death count “what it is” and tries to remove health care coverage from the poor and middle class, and stacks the supreme court with right-wing neo-Nazis? Are people supposed to believe that supreme court justices only interpret the law and never break new ground? The fact that US law contains amendments tells us that it is not a monolith. It is a deceptive and idolatrous gambit to talk about simply interpreting the law as written.

We understand covenant and legislation well enough to reject the popular belief that any nation that has laws against theft, murder and covetousness is a moral entity.

The cues from the Sinai covenant

  • Refusing counsel
  • Saying yes and meaning no

Alaska, the land of the pioneering lover of   freedom and independence, has little character and performance that is impressive.  Its rugged beauty and spacious skies were not sufficient to create a haven or refuge for people loving daylight and a quiet and peaceful environment.

With the law in hand, judges and executioners

Any Jew, Aboriginal, Black, or person with an accent is at risk of losing life and limb for no crime at all.  How many of us have been judged by Americans with the law in their hands we may never know but the sea will give up its dead in the exposé of the ages.

Every known prison yields to investigation

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds.

Revelation 20:13

All kinds of homicide cover the walls of research and the happening news.

Shades of the great Babylon!

ALL NATIONS CONTRIBUTE TO THE INMATE POPULATION

For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the passion of her immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed acts of immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich by the wealth of her sensuality.”

Revelation of John 18:3

ONE MASSIVE PRISON

And he cried out with a mighty voice, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place of demons and a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hateful bird.

Revelation of John 18:2

Chief of the assassins

It does not help anyone to have law-enforcement operatives solving problems with fatal violence nor does having unscrupulous heads in the departments of state, justice, urban development and the executive mansion. All the democratic hedges have not prevented nations with sizable Christian populations from allowing Christianity has no official political preference.

Remembering Saul of Tarsus and the Risen Lamb who arrested him renders the error of putting anyone to death an utterly inconsistent refuge for an enlightened society.

A mouthful of feet

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There is a foot in the mouth when the subject is justice for Africans

For many people in Christian leadership there is just no sense of justice beyond that of the state’s. The pot pourri of Christ’s teaching and Mosaic legacy cannot address the plight of Africans. We are infected with a virulent version of the fatal disease that we recognize as Gentile harassment and ignorance of the truth. In plain sight James tried to circumcise the church and failed, yet most churches have a similar hypocritical barrier policy.