Blueways: Agenda 21 is Coming to a River Near You!

UPDATE!: The Washington County quorum court approved this issue to move to the full quorum court on June 20, 2013. This is a victory, but we need everyone to attend--expect opposition this time.
Here's another informational video that will help you understand the ultimate plan:

The Great Outdoors Initiative. The National Blueways Initiative. Once again our nefarious politicians are crafting innocuous or even cute names for Agenda 21 projects to fleece the majority of Americans.
Tomorrow I'll attend my first quorum court to hear the pros and cons of the White River's designation as a Blueway.
If you live in Missouri or Arkansas, this concerns you. All of you. Because everyone who owns property on the White River watershed will be subject to regulations instated from powers on high, without your consent or input. Please check out Secure Arkansas' posts on this important issue.
Devote just a moment to educating yourself about the Blueways, and at the very least, you'll not be a fan, even if you think Agenda 21 is a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Skip quickly through this first snooze-fest of a video documenting the first designation of the Connecticut River as a Blueway. Pay particular attention to Ken Salazar and "Rock" Salt, the muscle behind this Obama-UN initiative. The self-congratulatory remarks and fawning over then-Secretary of the Interior Salazar make this 23 minutes a waste of your time. But notice what is conspicuously absent: any explanation of why the river necessarily needs "restoration" and why the river needs Blueway designation to be a "job creator." How many times within 23 minutes is Obama cited and praised?

Now spend a little more time watching this short video. Its soothing soundtrack and footage of urban children kayaking a river is syrupy sweet propaganda.

Think for a moment about two key quotes from Matthew Rice of American Rivers:
1. "You know, just like hiking trails are ways to help people explore the land, Blueways are water trails [that] help people discover rivers."
Discover rivers? Private property has already been carved up and paved for public access in the form of walking trails in Northwest Arkansas. What are we to expect will happen to make the White River a "water trail"? The public can already canoe or float down such waterways as the White River, Buffalo River, and Mulberry River. Increasing foot traffic on riverside trails and on the rivers will not make kayaking or canoeing more enjoyable; in fact most people complain the rivers are already too crowded.
2.  "Lots of folks have rivers that go right through their backyard....virtually everybody lives within half a mile of a river. You know, so the opportunities for these types of projects are endless."

I believe he literally means YOUR BACKYARD may be used as a trail and access point to water. What "types of projects" is he referring to? The video shows trails, water access, and free kayak lessons for urban children. You should fully expect that if you own property next to a designated Blueway river, the public will have access to your yard.

American Rivers posted these videos to obfuscate the real objective: restoration. The USDA has already seized private farmland for "afforestation" of the Arkansas Bottomlands (http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/sustain/conf/ppr/stanturf/). It's a dry article but here's the essential passage: 

"The benefits of restoration are usually identified in terms of government priorities or social benefits; seldom are the diverse objectives of landowners recognized. In most market economies where rights and obligations of ownership rest with private landowners, what is appropriate for public land may not be the most attractive restoration option for private landowners. Nevertheless, there can be considerable overlap in the expected benefits to society and the affected landowner."

How might the "affected landowner," stripped of his property rights, find government takeover of his farmland beneficial? Wait for it...

"Other income can be realized by some landowners from hunting leases and potentially from carbon sequestration payments." Yes, by leasing land to the public for hunting on their property, and by getting involved in the super-hip carbon credit trade, landowners can expect record profits that will mollify their disappointment over losing land that has been passed down for generations. 

Now are you interested? If you find this as fascinating as the IRS scandal, don't miss this video from America's Voice Now.

If you're a praying Christian, please pray that tomorrow Arkansas will begin the pushback against this unconstitutional initiative that was speedily instated without much ado.

Christian Tactics for Political War

While attending my first Tea Party meeting this week, I found myself struggling to describe this blog, which has all of three posts (when I post this one). "My posts are reflections on my changing political views," I finally explained, partly to discourage further curiosity, since I haven't merited the title "blogger." I see myself being like those unpublished poets who haven't written much, but whose minds and journals are teeming with jumbled ideas they'll write down...some day. Until the words manifest themselves on paper, or on the screen, all the ideas are but fancies of an idle brain.
I listed all the ideas teeming in my brain, and this one asserts itself as the most consuming: Christian responsibility in American politics. I'm forever questioning whether my words in social media in response to politics are Spirit filled. Venture into the contentious political blogosphere and Twitterverse without the armor of Christ and you'll quickly become of the world, not just in the world.
My view of this worrisome issue expanded again last night, unexpectedly, at a one-night women's retreat. Featured Bible teacher Donna Gaines painted a panoramic view of the Bible, highlighting the motifs that symbolize God's presence from Genesis to Revelation. What made me sit up on the edge of my seat was her current mission: partnering churches with Memphis public schools. As she talked, I realized she was describing another tactic of the political and cultural war we are facing in America. Christians in the Tea Party are valiantly battling on the political front by educating the public via social media, organizing rallies, supporting candidates, and starting petitions. These are our defensive tactics. Equally, or more importantly, we have powerful offensive tactics that promise to release our country from the strangling grip of liberalism. Unlike the offensive tactics of the Left, which are destructive and catastrophic, our offensive tactics are constructive and life giving.
Jesus sends us "as sheep in the midst of wolves," and instructs us to "be wise as serpents and harmless as doves" (Matt. 10:16). Most Christians are pretty good at being doves, though not so much harmless as useless. We need to train ourselves to be wise as serpents by looking for opportunities to infiltrate Satanic strongholds.
This tactic begins with prayer and fasting. Gaines admits she could never have organized what is happening between faith organizations and public schools in Memphis. The only explanation possible is that this is God's strategy, and he was looking for the humble and willing servants who would band together with the unity of the Spirit. Failing schools are places of apathy, poverty, hopelessness, and even violence; but by virtue of being such a burden, apparently, these schools have become a weight the government might willingly unload onto churches by allowing them to adopt schools in which Christians will tutor students.
Socialists are wise snakes who, for nearly a century, have employed an effective tactic of targeting American youth through the educational system (see the film AGENDA: Griding America Down). Anyone with even an elementary understanding of history knows tyrants educate the youth to turn the next generation into thralls, but instead of using the same approach with the mind of Christ, we Christians are submissively bowing to the Supreme Court mandates citing "separation of church and state." Serpents are not so easily crushed underfoot.
We should be ashamed at the way we have cowed and retreated from the battle. We should bow before God in fear instead, and with prayer and petition, ask for serpentine wisdom to see breaks in the enemy's line. The God who parted the Red Sea will part the enemy's offensive line.
Political involvement shouldn't be abandoned; we need to support the Palins and Carsons and Bachmanns who have suffered brutal attacks on their character to defend our freedom. Some of us, though, may be called to fight behind the lines in less conspicuous, but no less significant, places. No matter how oppressive our government becomes, remember there are always loopholes, and God always reserves a remnant of his faithful children.

My Mother Marched in DC to Protest Vietnam...

I attended CPAC 2013. What's remarkable is I don't think my mother's flower-child views and mine are all that different. I think I would have been right beside her in those hippy-dippy late-60's, protesting our government's effort to export freedom at the cost of our nation's men, despite public opinion. I have to credit my sister with opening my eyes to this paradoxical similarity between my Tea Party consevativism and my mother's anti-war liberalism. I'm not stuffing flowers into the barrel of a National Guardsman's gun, but I am on Twitter telling the establishment to stuff it. I'm not delusional; I know my tweets never make the slightest twitter in the ears of a single politician, but my mother's marching didn't end the Vietnam War, either. She was driven with the same patriotic fervor that now energizes me: the unbridled American spirit that compels and even demands that I care deeply about what is happening in Washington. Because what those men (and few women) are discussing, signing, and bargaining away is my freedom and safety and future.
Righteous Indignation and Demonic were two gigantic doses of schema-altering literature. I felt like my brain exploded, reading those two books back-to-back. A veil lifted. I could see the machinations of sordid politics that had been working behind the scenes to undermine true liberty and religious freedom in America since the nation's birth. I also felt a tremendous sense of my own responsibilty to at least pay attention to what is happening locally and at the state and national level, and not to rely solely on the main-stream media, not even on Fox News, but to search wide and deep for broader coverage of everything that's going on behind closed doors, under the rugs, in the nooks and crannies where politicians and other crooks hide their dirty, nefarious deeds.
Everything my history teachers taught me was altered and distorted to fit the liberal narrative. The truth about who supported the Civil Rights Movement, as one example, was never brought to light. Either my teachers blatantly lied or purposely insinuated that those big, bad white Republicans had been oppressing blacks since Lincoln's assassination--a crime probably committed by a right-wing John Wilkes Booth--failing to mention that oh-so-insignificant detail that the Southern Democrats had always been the enemies of desegregation. Breitbart and Coulter tore down all those faulty, misconceived edifices and left me desperate to completely reconstruct my understanding of our history and our current condition.
Now I'm consuming as much literature and blog media as my brain can handle--more than I can process, really. I read Levin's Liberty and Tyranny, Beck's The Overton Window and Arguing with Idiots, Malkin's Culture of Corruption; I watched Occupy Unmasked and Runaway Slave.
Then, on a whim, and at a good friend's urging, I booked a flight to DC for the last day of CPAC, where I would meet Phyllis Schlafly, Dr. Ben Carson, and Ann Coulter, among others.
The convention wasn't all sunshine and tea parties. I left knowing Republicans are going to lose the next election, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum. They are going to compromise and prostitute themselves in a desperate attempt to win over liberal voters, "independents" or "libertarians," Hispanics, gays, and everyone else who holds up a middle finger to the GOP. I struggle to even find the right word to label my political beliefs. For simplicity, I call myself a Republican or a Conservative, because those are terms people identify with the Right, and at least that's the general direction where I'm standing. But those words are muddled because like the liberals, Republicans are twisting and bending words until they have an entirely new meaning, leaving us wondering why the "conservative Republicans" are sidling up next to our enemies on the Left (see Gingrich's say-nothing speech at CPAC 2013). The Tea Party deserves credit for the motivation and hope I now hold with the likes of Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, two tremendous speakers at CPAC, I might add.
There's a growing voice of dissent coming from people just like me, and it's not rumblings from the aged and uneducated, as the Left would like to believe. The voice of dissent is rising in young people, educated people, and we've never lifted our voices before. We're on Twitter, we're on the blogs, we're watching and listening more intently than ever. We're still drawing encouragement from the defeated candidates and from the badgered bloggers, and even from Breitbart, because once you've heard the truth, you know you're willing to go the distance, even to Washington, to stand, and to keep standing, no matter what they throw at us.