Morality Is Power

Re: ACCM

Embracing God’s moral imperatives changes reality.

Not just anything or everything, but moral obedience does change how things in this world go for you. There are no nifty formulas and direct exchanges; it’s not that simple. There are no lists you can check off. The whole thing assumes a mystical viewpoint foreign to Western Civilization. It’s not easy to get there. However, it does work on something which might seem to be a sliding scale. Your level of commitment and investment of effort does make a difference. The farther you dive into this ocean of truth, the wetter you get. Instead of pretending you are some rock on the shore, which seems to weather the storm but is actually slowly dissolved, you are part of what Creation does naturally. Find your place and float with it. Let it carry you and you’ll be far better off than ignoring it or fighting it.

First, an example of moral justice on a national level. Defying God’s moral code guarantees a nation will be destroyed eventually. It’s not simplistic. For example, there’s nothing wrong with spying so long as your spying on other governments is simply a matter of getting information. Should there be even the slightest effort to steer anything that government is doing, you are already evil. There is no sin in using tactical elements of surprise in warfare, but that’s not the same thing is secrecy. There is simply no need for end-to-end secrecy, because God’s moral justice says it won’t matter if the enemies knows about your troops, equipment, capabilities, etc. God has more than once defeated an enemy despite such openness. If the war itself is justified, open honesty is not a weakness. It is the moral strength to win regardless, because nature itself, even their own human nature, will oppose your enemy.

You’ll notice almost no one has tried it in a couple of millennia at least. Instead, the US is destroying itself by casting off everything God has offered for protection. Now the US is His enemy.

On a personal level: Try out the power of forgiveness. Yes, it has a known psychological power. You’ll feel better and act better if you can get over things you can’t fix. But it’s more than that. The power to forgive according to God’s moral justice changes how nature acts with you. It’s not some silly sentimental absolutist proposition of letting everyone get away with anything. That reflects the evils of Western rationalism. Rather, you gain insight into when it just doesn’t matter; there’s nothing wrong with fighting when it does matter. The point is to understand how to evaluate what matters. Whatever you lost will be replaced and then some. That’s how the moral laws of the universe work.

This is what Christian Mysticism is about, claiming the very real power of God that changes reality itself.

Obey Today

A critical element in Solomon’s Ecclesiastes is the otherworldly advice to ignore yesterday and tomorrow, and obey the moral imperatives of the day.

It’s not as if we make no plans. For example, I have a regular workout schedule. Six days each week, barring intervening necessities, I ride my bike at least ten miles (16km). By no means would I have any imaginary intentions of competing or even sport riding. I ride because it gives me some good head space. As a side benefit, it does keep me in decent health. Doing this is obedience to one of those impressions in my spirit that is hard to explain, but forms a moral imperative for me.

Today I rode past the property on North Triple X Road in Choctaw that was washing away into the North Canadian River. The recent heavy rains caused the river to wash out the banks near this property, eating away some 20-30 feet (6-9m), making a much wider channel. The water level is typically ten feet (3m) below the land level, so it’s a significant threat when it washes out from under the buildings. The owners are named Buford, and they had to get help evacuating their movable goods when they woke up one morning to find the river very near their barn. By the time they got help, half the barn had already fallen into the river. It’s bad enough I can see it all from the road. The Bufords were worried about their dog, because it spent it’s whole life there. They had offers to kennel it, but couldn’t bring themselves to put it in cage, so they left it on the property. They still feed it daily and so forth, but the poor dog gets bored with no one around.

Most of the dogs who chase me are no genuine threat. The few who are get a face full of pepper spray, which is precious few of them. The spray works really well when you hit them in the eyes, which I’ve managed to do consistently so far. But the tactics the dogs use in chasing tells me a lot. Biters will get right up on my feet and start snapping. Other dogs will wander around in front or behind, chasing because it’s a challenge. The Buford’s dog came sneaking out between the wheeled trash bins in the driveway, but never really threatened me. So I stopped and we got acquainted. Like most dogs, if you stop and get off the bike, he was actually afraid because I was no longer vulnerable. I got him to come to me so I could pet him and talk to him a bit. He’s pretty lonely. The time lost was a small sacrifice to a higher moral priority.

Tonight I’ll go out after bathing in insect repellent and try to pick some blackberries. I’ll have to wear long pants, knee-high rubber boots and gloves in this heat because that’s the only way to avoid poison ivy and some of the ravenous insects, all of which grow alongside the blackberries. I’ll share some raw with the neighbors, but most of them will become jam. I’ll share that, too.

Later this summer I’m hoping to pick pears from a couple of trees in the area, whose owners invite folks to do so. When it comes the fall and we have a freeze or two, the persimmons will be ready to pick. All of this fruit is rather easily preserved in various ways, and I hope to put up enough to last until next picking season.

That is, if nothing much changes in my world. And I’ll keep blogging pretty much every day, and I’ll publish more books — if nothing stops me. Frankly, I’m half expecting things to get ugly here in the US this summer, but I have no way to estimate how it will affect me. That’s because I can’t really estimate just what will become ugly, or how ugly. I figure we’ll have some economic troubles we have seen before, maybe some political troubles we haven’t seen before, and likely some other unexpected events nobody dreams of yet. I can’t plan for that stuff, aside from making sure I understand the generalities of moral imperatives with more clarity. Who knows? I could die between now and then, or during the hullabaloo. And maybe the Internet will become impossible for some reason. Meanwhile, I expect such things in the general sense of a prophetic message of which I’m utterly certain, though I can’t explain how it came to me.

I’m sure the proper course of action will be apparent when the time comes. I’ll obey the moral imperative of that day same as I do it now.

More Cynicism, Please

Most people have no idea how government works, much less clandestine government agencies.

Moral excellence includes not being easily fooled — wise as serpents and harmless as doves. You know you are being taken for a ride, but you go along because there is little to gain by fighting some things. You might know the drunk is going to blow your contribution on more booze, but giving him your loose change may still be the right thing to do. It’s less what you do and more how you do it, in the sense of what you value. Saving the world is the stupidest hope anyone can have. You should know striving to make life better for folks won’t really change anything if you are gripped by the divine moral imperative to focus on the higher plane of existence. Don’t believe the lies; they are aimed at consuming your soul. You can’t fix this world.

You can only show this isn’t the whole story. We live in the Shadowlands. This is a prison of falsehood, billowing curtains of deception and smoke intended to keep you from seeing any truth. A thousand half truths and lesser truths are routinely offered to prevent you thinking about what really matters.

The government of the US is not a monolith. The plutocrats are not all friends, keeping to one sheet of music and following a single script. They are more ambitious than the general run of the population, more likely to cut each other’s throats than you can imagine. It’s highly competitive, and they accept the risks because it’s how they get more of what they want. They have no sense of unity and trust is always conditional. They use each other all the time. The competing agendas are seldom a matter of genuine belief in some greater good or even a genuine evil dream. The agendas are virtually always a collective aspiration of personal benefit. People join a team for what it offers them personally, and switch to another team if the offer seems better. The partisan squabbles are almost entirely fake; what you see in the news is seldom the real point of contention.

The best of us are fake in one way or another. It’s part of being human, and you need to get used to it. That way it’s not so hard to imagine someone like Ron Paul has his own moral blind spots, as would any other of the legendary sterling statesmen of our time. Ron Paul is better than just about the entire range of other politicians, but he’s still willing to play by the rules of a fixed and tightly controlled game in which the rules are for suckers and losers. He should know that, but acts like he doesn’t. The system cannot be fixed; belief in the system guarantees you’ll be fodder for the grinding. That includes Ron Paul. I don’t support him because he isn’t radical enough; he doesn’t begin to understand the biblical message and morality. He’s just another Westerner supporting a dying Western Civilization, a wholly and utterly lost cause.

The things we can and should do under God’s moral laws are not what the majority of humanity would expect. That’s because the vast majority of humanity thinks in the wrong terms completely. See the world, not on its own level, but from a much higher level. Live with your commitments outside this world and you’ll begin to understand what you should do.

The clandestine services of the US government are loaded with the same competitive, conniving lost souls as the rest of government. Bradley Manning? He knew to keep back from disclosure the material that would genuinely threaten security. He might not have known what his superiors knew about that, but we can see in his selective disclosure an educated and trained eye on what was actually too much. That was part of his training. The IRS persecution of certain political groups was not news; it’s been going on for decades. It was known for decades, if people bothered to pay attention. It’s been in plain sight the whole time. Snowden and the NSA Powerpoint slides? Controlled release to distract, because we were told as much a long time ago.

Snowden and his ilk are professional liars; deception is the whole job. Maybe Obama is being thrown under the bus. He was always an empty suit, a man for sale to the highest bidder and slimy enough he wouldn’t even stay bought. His predecessor was too stupid to run a business even with a masters degree. And so on back down the line. All of them had handlers, often from competing teams, and the only thing they all have in common is some invisible wavy line marking what they won’t reveal about government inner workings. You don’t betray your meal ticket, but you might betray some of the food handlers. Somebody in the system is still sponsoring Snowden and helped select just what, or what version, of information he would leak.

Never believe any leak was unplanned. Things like that make a good bargaining chip for infiltration. Credibility with your espionage target is critical. Somebody in the system, with whatever agenda they might have, sponsored this whole charade and we still don’t know the worst of it, nor will we ever.

What difference does it make to a committed Christian Mystic? Recognize a distraction for what it is. Don’t be suckered into lending moral support to a false cause. Chances are Manning is the real deal, but being used as yet another propaganda tool. The system was waiting for someone like him to come along for just this purpose. Those revelations of IRS persecution? The IRS itself is a fraud, never legally ratified in the first place, but a fact of life under which all Americans live. It’s a private agency with government powers. DHS and tons of bullets ordered? That’s more complicated, serving multiple agendas. It really boosts the profits for the big arms dealers and their investors, and exposes the erstwhile patriots willing to resist. Upper level bureaucrats know they don’t have the manpower to do anything the screamers fear they might do.

One of the biggest lies of all — Modern Israel — is really little more than a huge distraction to keep genuine faith and morality off track.

Most Americans aren’t cynical enough. They care too much about what doesn’t matter and are careless about things to do matter.

Humorless God

Warning: Star Trek reference ahead!

In the original TV series Star Trek, we encountered the character of Spock, half human and half Vulcan. His people mastered reason and logic to overcome a hideous emotional nature, according to the background legends. So Spock seldom expressed the slightest bit of emotion, but seemed to understand humor well enough to use it on his human associates when the dry, literal facts weren’t necessary.

Western evangelical Christians tend to regard God as something like Spock. It’s not so much what they say, as what they imply in their literature, and what they don’t say. The Christian evangelical mythology equates our brutish Germanic background as the only alternative to a rather sterile and dry rationalism. In their minds, they conflate the entire Ancient Near Eastern cultural legacy as pretty much like the Germanic warrior tribes prior to the Fall or Rome. By the time these evangelicals become adults, the foundation has been laid such that intellectual learning is unable to correct their assumptions.

The visceral hatred for anything not Western is what keeps people from understanding that the God of the Old Testament is the Father of Jesus, and that dying on the Cross was entirely consistent with everything God did from the beginning of Creation. Our cultural mythology reads Germanic brutality (itself largely myth) back into the Old Testament, so that God’s character is rather like something out of Norse legends. Jesus did not moderate His mean and brutal Father; Jesus expressed fully once and for all the character of His Father. Evaluating the God of Ancient Hebrew literature by Postmodern Western cultural values is begging for damnation.

It’s not as if God has no sense of humor. I can get evangelicals to say those words, but I can’t get them to change the underlying unconscious assumptions they bring to the task of talking about God. They color God’s sense of humor as urbane and modern American, and can’t imagine how God created that “nasty old Hebrew culture” as the primary necessity for humans to approach reality. So they simply read their biases back into the Bible and talk all nice about how it was so wonderful, all the time working from false assumptions that are entirely contrary to their conscious thoughts. Yes, modern evangelical Christianity is schizophrenic. Evangelicals make God out as some kind of Spock figure, and He’s not permitted to use sarcasm. It’s okay for Him to use figures of speech, but they can’t be too flexible in meaning; ambiguity is not permitted. And He damned sure isn’t permitted to use legends and mythology to get His point across.

No, the Bible has to be read as baldly literal, say evangelicals. Otherwise — why, it makes God a liar! Calm down folks. God can speak in legends if He likes.

Let’s try the figure in Scripture known as the Antichrist. It’s not as if the Bible precludes having a singular being who eventually rises to fulfill the prophecies of Antichrist. However, the Bible presumes you know better than to demand there must be a single ultimate figure near the end of time who is The Antichrist. They envision images from Rosemary’s Baby or other fictional entertainment. 1 John 4:3 should serve as a hint: In John’s mind, the Book of Revelation was not meant literally. Antichrist is a characterization, not a single figure in some future history. He takes quite seriously the notion Antichrist is more like a demonic character, a non-human that can inhabit the actions and thoughts of people who make themselves available. Reducing this down to a single human manifestation would miss the point entirely. The Antichrist was already in the world at the time of John’s ministry.

By the way, the theologically liberal feebs who want to judge the Bible against their socially and politically correct mythology are also too stupid to take seriously. Don’t bother talking to them until they repent of their arrogance. They are the controlled opposition to evangelicals, and either or both are a bigger threat to genuine Christian faith than all the Muslims in the world together.

Human evil is too complex to reduce to simplistic mythology. Western Christianity bears a vast burden of false mythology, often more heathen than Christlike. Jesus was a Hebrew man, not a German. And if you try to reduce this discussion down to something so silly as hating modern Germans, of Nazis and anti-Semitism, you really are trying hard to avoid understanding.

Epistemology, in a Manner of Speaking

My use of the term, and the implied question, of epistemology is an accommodation to Westerners. It’s an attempt to speak their language.

Frankly, the question itself is circular reasoning. That is, the common Aristotelian evaluation of the answer to the question assumes Western values. Eastern Mystical epistemology is prepared to answer the question, but rejects the fundamental assumptions by which Aristotle and his kin arrive at their solutions. They define the answer outside of mystical terms in the first place.

Eastern Mysticism isn’t too concerned with whether things work out too well in this world. Sure, we can discern God’s moral laws and construct a frame of reference guaranteed to bring optimal life in this realm of existence. However, we assert the whole point is not the better life here, but what it says about things beyond this universe. Aristotle rejects any discussion of anything outside this universe, as it were.

Aristotle’s epistemology is just another silly logical game.

Moral Intelligence

You can get a degree in all kinds of things, but it seems no institute of higher learning recognizes any need to develop moral intelligence.

When you examine any particular issue in light of moral truth, it changes all the answers you get. It was the one thing that kept me from accepting several offers to work through a masters program at a couple of different schools. I was offered three different shots at a masters in History, one in Economics and one in Secondary Education. This is not boasting, because anyone willing to do just a modicum of work got the same offers. That stuff is in easy reach, but it was always reaching in the wrong direction. I also could have easily gotten several different brands of Theology and Divinity degrees, but even those don’t quite cut it. That is, they were all cerebral about things which simply aren’t on the path God called me to follow.

You can call it what you like, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have an imperative burned into their soul. Most never paid any attention to it, including an awful lot of seminary students and graduates. They might have been sure they felt something, but never knew what it was, simply bought the standing assumptions everyone else put in front of them. If your moral choices aren’t your very own, and if they don’t cost you much in terms of psychic suffering over the inevitable confusion of the human condition, then you have chosen not to choose.

You cannot let someone else choose it for you. Least of all would I suggest you need to take my path. I talk about mine so folks can get a clue about their own search. I want you to see the results in whatever terms you can understand, but please recognize it’s worth the agony of setting aside all those pre-packaged versions of reality to find yourself.

Here’s a clue I hope helps you: Morality is not rules. Morality is a living thing. It’s a chunk of your own soul responding to what you experience according to imperatives bigger than yourself. You recognize that you are participating in something that came long before you, and you’re doing your best to chase down the trail behind it. This thing is invariably contrary to what everyone else is selling because virtually no one in our current world wants you to be free to follow that thing which calls your soul. They want to control the outcomes of your search.

Let me be one of that less-than-1% who say otherwise. You don’t have to pass through the same trauma I did, but you do have to escape the prison at whatever cost that is to you. If you are one of those rare few people who grew up in a context where this was “normal” then count your blessings, because I’ve not met a single person like that. I’ve only heard of them. Moral intelligence is recognizing your reality for yourself, and pursuing it against your contrary inclinations. No one is without some internal conflicts; morality is the search for a referee.

The conflict is eternal; there is no degree because you are never finished puzzling it out.

Truth Seizes a Few

Whether you seek it consciously or not, truth will seize only a few at a time.

That’s pretty much the meaning of the twin parables of the Found Treasure and the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:44-46). The other point is that you typically have to shed a lot of dead weight in favor of embracing the truth. The most valuable truths often demand a radical departure from the past.

It’s not a question here of which truth, but something you simply cannot escape. The Army guard who converts to Islam after seeing how the Gitmo inmates cling to their Islamic faith has discovered a great treasure. So far as I know, Holdbrooks the only one talking about it out of all the guards who’ve worked at Gitmo. The point is too many people never think about it in the first place.

Lesser truths are still worthy of pursuit if only because they could help move you in the right direction. Then again, it may lead to some of the most frivolous stuff. So long as it’s offered as fluff — plenty of my blog posts are just that — that’s fine. Such is the conversation of humans who don’t feel threatened by anything significant. Trying to make it sound important, and getting others to take the discussion seriously, is a little disturbing. The bikini-or-not question made a big splash on my FB page through linkage with a friend. None of those discussing it are likely amenable to my input, since I have embraced one of those shockingly different treasuries of truth.

Wanna stop men staring out you, babes? Don’t go swimming in public places. A slinky one-piece is still exposing way too much if you are shapely, and way too much in another way if you aren’t. Ripping away Western social assumptions offers a totally different response, because it’s a totally different morality. And virtually no Western Christian realizes that the morality of Jesus is at least superficially much closer to that of Islam than anything they might imagine. That’s because when it comes to the broader question of human sexuality, Islam shares a broad common assumption with Ancient Hebrew beliefs — and with reality itself, if you ask me. I won’t miss Western Civ when it finally passes away.

My whole life long, I’ve been torn between searching and bumbling. Sometimes I stumbled along, poking at the earth for things I never understood. At other times I had a burning desire for things I hadn’t seen. The truth for me, the understanding that offered peace and sanity in a crazy warring world, was some of both. It didn’t arrive all at once.

Either way, if there were any real truth in Western Civilization, there would be precious few people looking for pearls or capable of recognizing treasure when they dig it up.

Poison People

There are some people you cannot help.

I rode my bicycle on the bike path. As I approached the cutout for a street crossing, he carefully pulled his small pickup against the curb, blocking the path. I could have ridden across the grass and jumped the curb, but something in my spirit said to be patient. So I denied him even eye contact, and simply turned my head to stare at the clover growing among the grass blades on my left. I waited calmly, betraying no emotion at all. Eventually he drove away.

Who knows what motivates high school kids to be so hateful? It’s not as if he didn’t see my graying beard or that I was twice his size with an ancient tattoo on my arm. I wasn’t going to play his game, but played my own. My flesh wanted to confront him and “teach him a lesson” but my spirit warned me it wouldn’t happen that way. So I gave him to God and rode on to my destination.

Then there was the lovely single lady who lived nearby, young enough to be my daughter. I would never kid around with her because she was always trying to analyze everything I said, looking for a subtext that simply was not there. She lost her well-paying job and slowly her life fell apart. It didn’t matter if she used drugs, because she lost control the same as any addict. She would ask for me to fix things on her house, and I would agree to help her, doing it with her, but not to do it for her nor let her pay me. She never called on me for those things. As she sank farther into crisis, she began acting crazier. She was not above trying to play seductive, played it well and had the assets for it. But I kept her at arm’s length, because I could see she was out of reach. That is, I knew if I got close enough to actually help, she would consume me, get me twisted up in her crazy life. I helped her move out, though.

I volunteer to help my neighbors with things I can do. An equally lovely lady across the street from me lives alone and often asks for help. She jokes with me and doesn’t take things too seriously. She tries to manage on her own, but sometimes can’t quite get it. I have no trouble doing stuff for her because it’s a gain, not a loss. Helping her does not breed an unnatural dependence; it builds friendship and blesses me more than her. If I can’t help, she thanks me for listening and somehow works it out.

There are others who use me and even abuse me, but as long as I can afford it, there’s no problem. Jesus warned there would always be poor people on this earth. Fallen humanity is just that way. It won’t matter how you calculate a redistribution of wealth, because redistribution changes the variables. Besides, some folks never get enough. It’s not that we can’t create enough for human need; we cannot create enough for human demand. Some people are poison to the whole world; some are simply poison to you.

The point is, you should know your limits. How much has God put in your hands? If He does not build in you the faith to tackle mountains, stay in the foothills until your path higher is revealed. He most surely can and does tell folks to back off and don’t mess with something He didn’t fit them to handle. If you are not disciplined in the ways of the Spirit Realm, you’ll never understand where to draw the line. The spirit-Spirit communion always knows where to find the threads of God’s moral fabric.

There are some people in your life whose sole purpose is to test you, to tempt you into folly — they are poison to you.

Annoyance Is Not Sin

The repercussions of the Fall reach far and wide.

If you met me in person, you might not enjoy my company. I have strange habits and my motivations perplex almost anyone deeply infected with Western reasoning. It’s quite possible my best friends in cyberspace are people I couldn’t bear very long in meat space. Liking my blog hardly means you’d want to be a Facebook friend. There is nothing wrong with enjoying my work here but otherwise having zero interest in me as a person.

Often enough we are annoyed at our own weaknesses. To be annoyed by other humans and their foibles is simply expected. Only if you suffer under some evil mythology would you presume to vanquish human nature. Some issues are simply not within range of human power, and we are not evolving to anything higher. This plane of existence is just temporary.

Meanwhile, you shouldn’t take your own revulsions that seriously. Learn them so you can be reasonable with people who get on your nerves. Know what you can’t tolerate. This is critical in recognizing that friendship is not holy and sacred. Like marriage, it is one of the few things God granted to all humanity as some measure of mercy. It serves only to whet our appetites for something beyond this life.

By the same token, that someone annoys you does not make them evil. It’s not as if they singled you out and chose intentionally to get on your nerves. There are precious few people like that; most of the world never gave you a thought in the first place. Don’t be like them. People are people, and so you are. You have limits and God is not going to demand you do something He didn’t give you the ability to handle. He’s not angry or embarrassed that there are others in this world you encounter that you cannot help nor bear their presence. Rest assured; He has placed someone else on this earth to take care of them.

We can be friends or not, and it really doesn’t affect my positive regard for you as a fellow human. It’s easy enough to move off my radar completely; I will give you plenty of room. Social stability does not depend on us liking each other. Tolerance in some measure is enough. Deal with things you can’t change, and that includes most of what you encounter in the human race.

If I annoy you, avoid me. It’s that simple. You can be sure I’ll return the favor so much as I sense the need.

This War We Can Fight

The consequences of cyber warfare are wholly different from fighting in meat space.

Yes, there can be knock-on consequences into meat space, but that would be true of any human activity. I am not against violence, per se; I’m against violence which springs from any part of Western reasoning. That there will be violence is unavoidable in a fallen world. The point here is, cyberspace lends itself to God’s justice much more easily than meat space does.

I have no trouble telling you that most entertainment media is sinful. I’ve made it plain I generally hate TV and movies as a media form because they are inherently very dangerous. They weren’t designed that way on purpose, but it is a very bad side-effect discovered after the fact that humans are not wired to handle it. We remain fully accountable to God for how we respond, but we cannot remain fully in conscious control of our response.

That fact has been seized upon by the rapacious plutocrats as a means to control, control for the sake of milking us dry. We should hardly be surprised when the media moguls, so used to treating us as slaves to be manipulated at their whim, are demanding the right to install rootkits as a matter of course, as Sony Entertainment once did. You knew this was not going to die.

The true pirates of cyberspace are the major media corporations. They are the enemy, and you should not willingly accept their abuse. There is little likelihood governments will resist this move; one way or another, it’s coming. So you had best make sure your personal computing devices are well defended. I’m not sure how much the AV and computer defense vendors are with us or against us, but you need to study the situation and be aware of the measures you can take.

For myself, the shortest answer is running Debian Wheezy on my computer. I fully admit the tiny market share of Linux in general is part of the protection, and that Debian in particular refuses to cooperate with such nonsense. That is, if there is any way possible to play media and bypassing such controls, Debian will enable that. If the media moguls take notice of Linux as a problem for them, things could change.

Too often already here on my blog I’ve lamented how the sheeple as a whole have handed control of the Internet to marketers. Not all marketers are bloodthirsty, but the advertising industry does tend to attract psychopaths. The balance of distrust is against the entire industry, but most people never give it a thought. Fortunately, thoughtless folks tend to avoid this blog, so you dear readers are likely to think about this and take appropriate action.

While I still say we cannot use the typical means of facing this issue, this is one battle I find worthy of engaging.