Assume Surprise When Adrift

The Week of Walker and Boehner | The Weekly Standard:

Good column that points out some truth from last week  -- nobody expected Walker to drop out this and nobody expected Boehner to announce his resignation. They were surprises -- as is Trump being in the lead challenged by Carson, and Bernie Sanders supplying significant challenge to Hillary. The pundits tell us it was all obvious, but it wasn't. Their lies are an illusion of order that doesn't exist.

Most Americans feel that the country is in generally bad shape and that to the extent we have any "direction" at all, it is wrong. I'd call the problem more one of being adrift at sea on a cruise ship on which everything is still pretty much working -- the lights, the toilets, the AC, the dining halls and especially the bars -- they all are handing out booze and even weed left and right.

 But we are adrift and nobody seems in charge -- and there is no plan to get moving because there is no proposed destination.  To the degree there is "action" it seems to be deciding that some of the folks from steerage ought to be moved up to the suites with balconies -- where to move those residents is less certain, it is all a bit murky.

But other than some discussions over who ought be in what cabin and maybe how all the dining and drinking options ought to be free, there is a general unease about just how long a drifting cruise ship is "sustainable". The occasionally visible but not convincing captain just keeps saying things are fine -- but we ought to be worried about the ocean temperature if anything. He believes the ship could be entirely powered by wind.

When there is no plan, everything is a surprise. No plan, no direction, being adrift is not "sustainable" ... everyone knows that, and they know that SOMETHING is going to change it at some point. They just have a hard time imagining what it is that is worth the effort of doing something other than

But for now, just enjoy the boozy drift and wait for the next surprise. It's life in the "Lost Zone" of Central North America 2015. Eventually we will bump into something!

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Until Certain Danger Meets Uncertain Danger

John Boehner’s successor inherits a diminished role. | National Review Online:

The power of the executive has risen to monarchy, the power of the Congress has shrunk to nothing. The transfer of very little power from Boehner to "whomever" is a matter of little significance now, and it will remain to be unless something very big changes the course of what used to be America. A couple very good lines in this column ...

When they write the history of American democracy, we’ll be obliged to admit the embarrassing truth that we lost it because it’s so much easier to pay attention to one man than to a congress of them.

I'd argue that stronger House Speakers could have kept us afloat longer -- the example of Newt is discussed in the article. People can pay attention to a few people, and some real contests between real leaders. Sure, the conservative side is always hobbled by the tilt of the media, but at least every one knew who the evil Gingerich was!

The close is sobering -- it agrees with the unknown but certainly painful future that I see.

Congress no longer has the power to return the president — and the presidency — to its proper role. That power, too, is now in the hands of the president, which is why it is unlikely that our national slide into autocracy will not be reversed until the current political equilibrium is disturbed, which is to say until certain danger encounters uncertain danger.

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Throw Out Baby Jesus, Keep the Bathwater

Atheism starts its megachurch: Is it a religion now? - Salon.com:

 "“The church model has worked really well for a couple of thousand years,” Dodd muses. “What we’re trying to do is hold on to the bath water while throwing out the baby Jesus.”"

For ages, man has uttered the aphorism "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" ... man has finally become so lost that rather than keeping the baby -- the center, the sacred, the important, the motto is changed to purposely keeping that which is unclean, unuseable, and defiled.

The Atheists are working on a church -- here is what they have against the "Unitarian Universalist Community Church" :

“The Unitarian Church has this idea of ‘radical tolerance.’ It respects everything. It’s all good. Well that’s fine on one level, but at some point it becomes a little diluted.” Dodd was looking for a more robust secularism.

This is pretty much all the information one can get out of the article. Their problem with the Unitarians as stated in the quote was not enough "robust secularism" ... but it seems that the direction the "Sunday Assembly" is going is toward avoiding in your face atheism.

As the atheist church becomes more church-like, however, it seems to be deliberately downplaying its atheism. Where the Assembly once stridently rejected theism (at April’s Assembly, Jones poked fun at the crucifixion), it is now far more equivocal. “How atheist should our Assembly be?”, Jones wrote in a recent blog post. “The short answer to that is: not very.”

Hard to define yourself purely by what you are against. Certainly those that "poke fun" at those who think differently from themselves are widely respected in secular culture depending on what it is they poke fun at -- the Bruce Jenner Halloween costume was so open mindedly received!

Either way, Sanderson Jones is confident that the model will spread. “We have the most natural human urge to do this,” he insists: to organize ourselves around institutions of meaning. I am inclined to agree that “Live Better, Help Often, and Wonder More” is a lovely motto to build around.

We live in a "Goldilocks Universe" tuned precisely to our existence ... to unimaginable numbers like 10 to the minus 128 needing to be "right on" for us to be here. Amazingly, on top of that we have this common urge to "organize ourselves around institutions of meaning" -- or, as we did for thousands of years, worship God.

The atheist looks at a universe impossibly built for his existence and declares it a matter of pure random chance against all odds. He then realizes that he has a "soul hole" -- something is missing, his life lacks meaning. So he postulates that against all odds, on top of his impossibly random universe, random selection has put a "God shaped hole" into his consciousness -- meaningless and randomness has most strangely selected to imprint a drive for him to seek some sort of "meaning" for his life in this universe that he has decreed to be meaningless and random.

So he grabs his bootstraps and pulls. The futility brings tears to my eyes ... and I'm sure to Christ's as well.

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Not With My Kids

Brooklyn Public School Battle: Progressives Are Opposing Integration | National Review Online:

"Liberals" are quick to apply the hypocrite label to any Christian that fails to live up to the moral code of Christ -- one wonders why they think Christ died on the cross if people could just live up to Christian morals by self restraint? Hypocrite is a label that the MSM never applies to "liberals" -- they never signed up to have any morals, so how could they be hypocrites?

They did however create A LOT of POLICIES and LAWS, all often screaming loudly of "equality" and "fairness"!  ... and since government is the closest thing they have to a god, one might think that "all" might apply to "liberals" as well. But one would be wrong.

The linked article is a short read -- Brooklyn has wealthy and poor citizens living in close proximity, though certainly not "integrated". The city would like to integrate a school -- the fight is joined.

Liberal policies have real outcomes -- often outcomes that are detrimental to all, but especially to those upon which the supposed beneficial social experimentation takes place -- destroying marriage and freeing women to copulate more widely was deemed especially liberating. Apparently some collateral damage has been found ...

Though children in some multi-partner-fertility families thrive, Cherry has observed that multi-partner fertility is associated with high levels of father abandonment and child maltreatment. Boys with absent fathers are far more likely to engage in aggression, rule breaking, and delinquency than boys living with both parents, and they are also far more likely to face multiple suspensions.

Liberals often like the idea of their policies being forced upon others, but are loathe to see fruits of their policy darken their doors. 

NIMBY -- "Not In My Back Yard"

NWMK -- "Not With My Kids"? 

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The Historical Hockey Stick of Capitalism

Perhaps the most powerful defense of market capitalism you will ever read - AEI | Pethokoukis Blog » AEIdeas:

BS (Bernie Sanders) and the Pope gets thrown around making people believe that market capitalism is somehow "bad". The large point they totally forget is that if you want to spend a lot of time complaining about how vast wealth is distributed, you FIRST HAVE TO HAVE VAST WEALTH!

For most of history, 90%+ of people had NOTHING -- little or no shelter, regular hunger and often starvation. They didn't even IMAGINE "leisure goods", sports, travel, entertainment, etc. -- in fact, even the rulers could not have imagined the technological wealth of the common man today.

The reason for all this is Reading, Reformation, Revolution and Revaluation.

1. Because of technology (printing press), people learned how to Read and write. 
2. Because they could read the Bible, the Reformation happened and the hold of the centralized Catholic Church was broken. 
3. Since the church had acted with centralized monarchy type governments, the literacy and ability to operate outside of centralized catholic doctrine allowed government to be made less oppressive. There was a Revolution from far left wing (control) kings, queens and bishops, to center right (less control) liberty -- the US was the biggest example. 
4. Because the masses could now read and write, and the strict centralized hierarchy of Church - King - Peasant had been broken, there was a Revaluation of the worth and potential of the common man which vastly increased the productive work force. 

The effects of this DEcentralized  power and economics and the Market Economy (Capitalism) broke out the strongest and earliest in the US, then in Europe, and in just the last 30 years we have seen it reach Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, China (BRIC) and beyond ... causing the curve in GDP per capita in the graph.

It is really not surprising that the Pope thinks going back to the bad old days is a good idea. Perhaps he will move to restrict reading as well "for the good of all" -- best to have "those in the know" make all the decisions! The common man might get confused!

The motivations for BS are probably just the old human standards -- lust for power, envy of those who make more than he does, wishful thinking about how things might work if he was in charge and in his case, just being a cantankerous old coot.

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Hillary Able To Display Facsimile of Empathy

Campaign Staffers Making Progress Conditioning Hillary Clinton To Replicate Emotions - The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

This is AMAZING progress! They were never able to get this far with John Kerry, and Obama still just lapses into meaningless self referential reveries when they attempt  to get him to recognize the presence of other humans.

We may yet have a dictator that can feign concern for others!

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Hillary Supports Stoning Gays

Ben Carson Caused a Firestorm with His ‘Muslim President’ Comments. Critics Should Look at This Map.:

Oh ... and cutting off the hands of thieves, killing those that leave Islam, women wearing burkas, etc. She disagrees with Carson that Sharia is not compatible with the Constitution and US values, so one has to assume that she thinks it IS. Right?

That is what Sharia law says, and unless you are somehow a "Muslim" that repudiates what your religion teaches, then that is what you believe. Only in the mind of the left or the insane could such a "Muslim" exist.

The left in this country believes that there is some Constitutionally mandated "separation of religion and life". They have no understanding how anyone can live by any religious tenets at all beyond the pablum of "do unto others" and "judge not". Naturally, they don't follow those either -- and believe that the "golden rule" is really "vote to have things taken from people at government gunpoint and distributed to serve the state". Oh, and on "judging", they believe that anyone that doesn't see the world as they do ought to be put in jail -- but hey, nothing personal!

The left is convinced that there MUST be "a  BIG majority" of Muslims (somewhere) that believe as they do -- that you can call yourself a "Christian", but follow none of the Bible, maybe darken the door of the church on a holiday or two a year, and otherwise "do what your heart tells you".

The same heart of which the Bible says in Jeremiah 17:9 "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"

Consistency is NOT an issue for the left!

But what IS an issue is POWER. So deep down, they like Sharia a lot better than a Constitution or certainly the Bible. Sharia gives the state total power -- and once the state has total power, they assume "good things will happen" ... like in Nazi Germany, the USSR, China, etc ... their "enemies" will be killed, and they see that as "the good". Or they just don't think much -- always possible.

I like Ben Carson, but we can't have another president with no executive experience of any kind like we have now. Ben would be "better" than BO, but after BO, we need someone with A LOT of capability -- we need the political equivalent of Aaron Rodgers, and I just don't see any candidate with anything CLOSE to that potential. Walker was the only (remote) shot I saw. He is gone, so the situation is grim.

Only in the current surrealistic fun-house of America could someone be attacked for saying what is obviously true -- no practicing Muslim could possibly take an oath to support the Constitution -- let alone the depraved and rotting "values" of current America. Even crazier, the ones that attack him are not asked to explain how it is in their fevered imagination that they believe that a practicing Muslim COULD take such an oath!

If you want to understand the "values" that those attacking Carson apparently espouse, go take a look at the linked article. Sanity has left the building.

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Age Of Rodgers

Aaron Rodgers, Maybe the Best Ever, Makes Packers the Best Right Now | Bleacher Report:

When you live in Minnesota, you know that the warmth of summer is short and fleeting -- it makes summer special. People from Florida or California think we are idiots -- we may well be.

When we look back on life, most of us have moments of pure joy to look back on -- getting married, birth of a child, winning the big game, special degree, promotion, big fish, etc -- for a usually brief moment, the universe shone on us and "all was right with the world". As we age, we all realize that our lives are very much "lived in Minnesota". Death touches us -- grandparents, parents, friends, maybe even touches us closer -- spouses, children, near death diseases for ourselves or those close to us -- we meet the Reaper. We know that life is fleeting -- so usually, and wisely I think, we make like those of colder climates and resolve to live while alive.

Those of you that read this Blog know that this is NOT my strong suit -- I know it intellectually very very well, but my emotional makeup is that of the skeptic, the questioner, the cautious one who attempts to look at all sides of all issues. Accepting the gifts that life hands me for the moments in which they are present and being joyful and grateful for those moments -- as opposed to attempting to hold on to the fleeting, protect against the unforeseen and imagine all that can go wrong!

So we come to the linked article, "Aaron Rodgers, Maybe the Best Ever, Makes Packers the Best Right Now".  If you are a Packer fan, go read it ... over the top, yes, but you will get a smile for sure. A sample ...

As long as Rodgers stays healthy, two things are certain: Rodgers is better than anyone at the position playing now, even better than Tom Brady. And the Packers will be the best in the conference because he is the Escape Pod, whisking his team away from all flaws.
This won't change all year. 

We are in the era of Rodgers. God isn't a Packers fan. If anything, she's a Rodgers fan.

I'm blessed to be a Packer fan. It was random for me to be born in NW WI, and with my makeup, it is a certainty I would have become a fan of whatever team was prominent in my area -- my sense of tradition and loyalty to where I was planted is wired in. So being a Packer fan was a gift.

As a youngster, of course it was a dim awareness, but central to the idea was the known fact that the Green Bay Packers were the ultimate football team, Bart Starr was the ultimate QB and Vince Lombardi was the ultimate coach. Such things were obvious -- and they really were obvious to most everyone, even many who didn't like the Packers. On Lombardi at least, it seems the world decided it was indeed true.

Then, from the time I was out of Jr High until well into my IBM career, the Packers sucked! It was a soul crunching truth -- the assumption was that "small market teams" had no hope at all. The age of Dallas, Pittsburg, San Francisco, New York, -- certainly the Vikings fans were certain that tiny Green Bay would ever return to anything even respectable, let alone great! It seemed that my lot would be to always pine away for the "glorious past".

Then came the '90s ... Ron Wolf, Holmgren, Favre, Reggie White, a 3rd Super Bowl trophy and another Packer team in perennial contention. Then Rodgers, a FOURTH Lombardi Trophy, and here we are.

As the article says, "if he stays healthy" -- one of the many things that makes it hard for me to truly bask in the joy of what is happening right now. Much like MN summer or life itself, the very next play could easily be his last -- he has already had a couple concussions. But that is ALWAYS true ... for all of us. We kill the joy of the gift with that sort of thought.

The linked article makes some claims of his historical significance, and while I believe that what we are seeing at this moment is indeed the greatest example of what an NFL QB can be, he will not be remembered (by others) unless luck and fate hold out for some period of time and more trophies come to Green Bay. While Rodgers definitely pushes the envelope of possible artistry in the QB position, it is WINS that make "the greatest of all time".

Which brings us to the TRUE JOY ... the joy of POTENTIAL and anticipation, the joy of the child anticipating Christmas. While each game is a delight to be savored, the potential is so awesome that it makes one fearful to consider it.

He is 31. He claims to want to play to 40. As we saw in Seattle last January, the list of things that can go wrong is indeed infinite -- although I sincerely doubt we will ever go down again due to conservative play calling during the age of of Rodgers. I'm not going to guess a number of potential added Lombardis ... zero of course is the "smart number", but also the joyless number.

When Mr Rodgers takes the field, the number that comes to mind is ALL OF THEM!
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Pied Pontiff of Poverty

The Left Has Its Pope - Thomas Sowell - Page 1:

Not one of Sowell's best efforts IMHO, but then I hold him to a VERY high bar. It's a bit like a game when Rodgers doesn't break 100 QB rating ;-) Here is a very impressive nugget though:

Any serious look at the history of human beings over the millennia shows that the species began in poverty. It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining. Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things -- none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society.

The natural state of man is poverty, with equality being maybe the only sop to a life that is pretty much equally  "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". Everyone else is in the same boat, isn't that wonderful? A lot of folks seem to believe that Hell will be OK because everyone is in the same boat ...

So we developed social organization, which right off the bat means inequality -- somebody rules, somebody "keeps the order" ( using or at least threatening violence), labor gets specialized to tasks with different rewards, etc. Technology adds to the inequality -- some invent technology, some build and sell it some are experts in it's use, some never figure it out, some get addicted to it. Once humans have anything, inequality is guaranteed -- but the alternative is the "state of nature" -- poverty.

The rise of man is based on the rule of law and technology, but then you have those who don't like the fact that rising wealth means rising inequality -- when the income was zero, everyone was equal, the greater the income becomes, zero will remain zero and the natural wage for the very bottom is zero. Any wealthy nation will have significant inequality, the more wealth, the more inequality since zero remains zero.

So along come those that have no understanding of where all the wealth came from, and seek to redistribute it -- the socialists, communists, etc. They find that the goose laying the golden eggs is "doing it wrong", so they kill the goose to be able to use and distribute this wealth as they see fit. It is a very old story.

As I've pointed out before, this Pied Pontiff is not a Biblical man ...

Matt 25:28 So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. 29 For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. 30 And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

Remember that "talent" in the Bible is a measure of money -- but like all scripture what it really shows us UNIVERSAL TRUTH. Think of the knowledge of reading -- without that, even the knowledge you have is likely to be "taken" -- because you can't write anything down and read it later, or just refresh and deepen what you have.  The servant that knows how to EARN in the parable is given more. The one who does not, loses what he has -- in the real world, to inflation of nothing else. 

The current pope was infected with "liberation theology", the more general version of "black liberation theology" espoused by BO's old pastor Reverend Wright (Reverend Wrong). Like all attempts to make the Bible say what it doesn't, these are heresies, profitable to destroy men and nations. 

Capitalism is the "Goose That Laid the Golden Egg" and the wise servant from the parable of the talents. It is the wisdom of EARNING vs the evil of theft and sloth! 

Matt 25:21 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’

Or, in a more recent example, we have the parable of the lost pontiff's own Argentina ...

A scholar specializing in the study of Latin America said that the official poverty level in the United States is the upper middle class in Mexico. The much criticized market economy of the United States has done far more for the poor than the ideology of the left. 

Pope Francis' own native Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions he is now promoting around the world.

What ruined Argentina is ruining Europe with Greece being one of the coal mine canaries. We see what is happening here in "Central North America".

 Let's not follow this Pied Piper into the sea of Socialist destruction!

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The Question Nobody Answers

The Question Candidates Won't Answer | National Review Online:

Readers of this blog know that the US is brokest nation on earth financially and there is no plan that is even REMOTELY viable in either party to address it.

The most likely "solution" remains the standard solution of governments through all of history -- massive inflation, debauching the currency so that tens of TRILLIONS of real debt piled up with valuable dollars can be paid off with worthless paper. Maybe some of it with a picture of a woman on the front! A few 100 trillion with Susan B Anthony, Harriet Tubbs or some such fine fine lady on the front ought to make everyone feel better about seeing a million dollars buy a loaf of bread!

The article isn't really all that much help -- means testing would be a tiny start, but let's face it, nobody is even going to propose that until this pig piles into the mud a whole lot deeper than it is already.

Ah, the "Jimmuh Solution" ... always good to go back and see the wisdom of Billy Carter's dumber brother!

Hey, I'd like to be a millionaire! Wouldn't you ???

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An Allergy to Political Alternatives

The Republican Party has an allergy to facts - The Boston Globe:

The specifics of what are in this column are really not all that important -- what is important is the assumption of the author, the editors, and no doubt a good many of the readers of the column that there is one truth, and "The Party" (TP - Democrat) is its prophet. Naturally, listening to infidels makes those faithful to TP become uncomfortable. A sample ...

I seethed as one candidate after another offered more heartless and uncompassionate plans for how to treat illegal immigrants.

Here is the "money paragraph" ...

It’s one thing to marvel at the unprecedented and stupefying levels of GOP know-nothingness on display this election season — the misstatements, the untruths, the exaggerations, the falsehoods, and the straight-up lies. But these vaccine comments represent a legitimate public health menace. And it’s indicative of the allergy to facts, data, and evidence that is the real story of the GOP debate, and indeed of the Republican nominating contest — and we need to be talking more about it.

Politics, branding, advertising, sales, mythology, story telling, etc, etc are ALL much less about anything like "facts" than they are about convincing others. Marxists believe that history is "wired" by "something" (they believe in no god) so that the "progress" to communism is inevitable. "Progressives" likewise believe in "progress" -- due to "something", we are guaranteed that history is somehow getting "better". We certainly don't know what that means -- having seen something north of 100 million people slaughtered in the 20th century due to the more "progressive" forms of government -- National Socialism, Communism, etc, but their faith is not shaken.

Certainly TP would like to tell everyone that "it has the facts" -- they were confidently sure we were out of oil in the '70s, even more sure the USSR would be around forever, Reagan would be an economic disaster, the age of big government was over, if we liked our healthcare we could keep it, red lines in Syria, ISIS was the "JV team" ... and on it goes.

The point here is more that those in the dominant political party -- TP, with the media like the Boston Globe and the universities generally on their side ACTUALLY BELIEVE that they have the "facts". The real truth is that there is NOTHING about the future that is 100% predictable, even that the sun will appear to rise tomorrow AM (see major meteor impacts, gigantic solar eruptions, etc) ... precisely NOTHING in this physical world is certain, so anyone that claims otherwise is doing politics, branding, story telling ....etc.

The author of the column ends it this way ...

We joke about this stuff, but after a while it’s no longer funny. The Republican Party is dominated by candidates who are proudly, even boastfully ignorant. Rejecting the clear science on vaccines or climate change is practically the price of admission even to be considered a legitimate presidential candidate. Playing on xenophobic fears of immigrants by lying about the economic costs and threats to American workers — pro forma. It reached a point Wednesday night when a candidate actually saying something true was an event worthy of note. 

But make no mistake, the descent of the Republican Party into dishonesty, lies, and cravenness is no joke. It’s a national crisis.

Sadly, I'm guessing he doesn't realize that a whole bunch of the things he believes are "true" are -- politics, marketing, myths, etc ... he is a TRUE BELIEVER!

I'm a true believer too -- in Jesus Christ. All other information is highly questionable, often inaccurate and in many cases downright false. Often intentionally so, but also often just because people have "good intentions" that don't work out. They (for some reason) were certain that if they raised taxes a lot on cigarettes they would drastically reduce smoking, but were equally certain that they could massively raise taxes on income and profits without having the taxes cause a reduction in income and profits. They believe taxes behave according to their wishes!

The author of the column is obviously a TP true believer -- he would find my statement about taxes having the effect of reducing income or profits to be as foolish as the idea that just because Global Warming predicted more hurricanes and we got less that it somehow reflects badly on Global Warming being "settled".

The point here is I have a Religion -- Christianity, and so does he -- "THE PARTY"! It turns out that the discussion on vaccinations is an old one -- and in fact the LEFT tends to be more inclined to have concerns, (I covered it here) ... if you really want to go off to the left wing tinfoil hat set, see GMOs. Unlikely the MSM will ask Hilly or BS any such questions though.

What the left has is a STRONG allergy to political alternatives. BO has been the farthest left since Carter -- it remains to be seen if any of the Republican alternatives even has a ghost of a chance as being as much of a turn back to the right as Reagan was. No doubt this columnist thought the '80s were a "disaster", but there are a lot of very real people and very real numbers that would call that view into strong question.

That is the difference between politics and what science USED to be (before it entertained the idea of being "settled") ... politics is NEVER settled, even after you start rounding up people and shooting them to get them to agree with you -- see USSR. The author of this column apparently doesn't understand that, and THAT is the dangerous problem -- because people that make politics their religion always end up shooting the infidels sooner or later.

The American difference is that here, we SHOOT BACK!
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Arrest Those Climate Skeptics! (Power Line)

Arrest Those Climate Skeptics! | Power Line:

Short, well worth the read. Bottom line, a set of Climate Scientists ... including one who was involved in the "Hide the Decline" email scandal, think that people who disagree with their positions on Climate ought to be locked up using the RICO statutes created to attack organized crime .... "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations".

As we know, the left doesn't like to see discussion, they like to see whatever their position is codified by law, and anyone who disagrees at least fined / fired / boycotted / etc .... and if possible jailed and ultimately killed.

The odds of them being able to pull this off YET are fairly low, but as we have seen in WI, they WILL try! They are often wrong, but they are NEVER in doubt, and their willingness to use force a critical hallmark of the left.

Read it all, but if you just don't have the time, the conclusion ...

I don’t think there is any serious danger that realist scientists (let alone oil company executives who have nothing to do with the debate) will be criminally prosecuted, but the fact that liberals are so anxious to shut up their opponents, with prison terms if necessary, is the ultimate proof of the bankruptcy of their ideas.

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Britain 49th Poorest "US State", Per Capita GDP

Why Britain is poorer than any US state, other than Mississippi - Spectator Blogs:

I've always liked to look at simple data with proper relative scaling. Just listing the GDP of the US is misleading, we have 320 million people, Germany has 81 million, England 65 mil, Sweden 10 mil and Norway only 5 million. If one divides the wealth of nations ... and states, how is everyone doing relative to others?

Turns out England is just ahead of Mississippi and just behind Alabama. Next to the bottom of poorest US states by GDP. Norway comes in between #7 Massachusetts and #8 New Jersey, Switzerland is next between #20 Virginia, and #21 Iowa.

The article promises to tell you "why", but it doesn't really -- it is written by a Brit last summer during the Ferguson debacle, it is really just admonishing Brits to not be so smug, since for all but the very poorest, every income group in America is doing better than their counterparts in England.

Readers of this Blog know why ... European countries have different cultures and have been playing with socialism for a lot longer. We know that socialism reduces GDP -- we have over a century of evidence. The THEORY is that the "more equitable distribution" of money under socialism is worth the cost. In countries like Norway and Sweden, there is some level of truth to that -- they have cultures of reasonably strong work ethic, they have cold winters that tend to encourage people to do something productive rather than sit in "the sun" (being "the dark" up there), and they are small enough where the temptations of the elite bureaucracy doing the robbing from the productive to give to the unproductive is limited by both proximity to those being robbed, and the "take" being smaller.

Even the Scandinavian nations however have been forced to make adjustments to be more business and work friendly over the past few decades, same with Canada. "The Ant and the Grasshopper" is a fairy tale, but it is a fairy tale grounded in real principles, unlike the tales told by socialists!

Due to the power of "The Party (TP - Democrat)" and it's control over the media and education, the vast majority of Americans have no idea of simple and widely available facts like this. They are told that everyone in Europe has it BETTER than they do, and that the policies of Europe relative to government, economics, etc pretty much put the US to shame.

We are indeed marching toward shame -- but our downward trend is still behind Europe. The US is large, and it had built up a powerful momentum over 200 years. It even got a super shot in the arm in the '80s with Reagan that delayed the demise by a good 30 years.

Most of the US population has no awareness of where we are actually at economically, no idea of how we got here, and absolutely no concept of where we might want to go. Our ability to govern ourselves relative to economics has been destroyed -- we know we need an economy, but generally have no idea of how an economy works! This is exactly what TP wants -- they are happy to continue to take total control.

So we have a real danger of going from BO to BS (Bernie Sanders).

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Muslim Clock Maker Shot by Pop Tart

Ahmed Mohamed's Clock | National Review Online:

A good column covering the obvious "made for outrage" coverage of poor Ahmed Mohammed for taking a bunch of circuit boards and wires to school around 9-11.

It is worth a read, it is entertaining ... it would be more so if what was once a nation peopled by massive common sense had not become such an asylum of the ridiculous. A teaser and the conclusion ...

This is an age of overreaction. It is, unhappily, also an age of race-hustling and grievance-mongering. Thank goodness that felonious Pop-Tart in Maryland was one of the strawberry-flavored ones with rainbow sprinkles and not brown sugar/cinnamon or marshmallow hot chocolate or another of the flavors of color, or we’d be having a national discussion about white-frosting privilege.

and the conclusion ... we are mostly a nation of fools, bouncing to the beat of a "made for left wing politics"  narrative.

Ahmed Mohamed was mistreated by imbeciles, and he’ll be famous for it, for 15 Warholian minutes, and then again for a 30-second spot when he graduates in a few years and goes off to MIT or wherever. The fact is that he is not worse off because his name is Mohamed, but better off: Nobody would be paying attention otherwise, and he might very well be in jail. Being mistreated by imbeciles is the sine qua non of American public education today, but that fact is of political use only periodically, as in this case.

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Hitler the Ecologist

Timothy Snyder's 'Black Earth' Offers a New Theory of Hitler's Anti-Semitism - The Atlantic:

I'm in the midst of "The Closing of the American Mind" ... it is my 3rd or 4th reading, but it has been over a decade since the last, or I'm sure I would have blogged it, although it will be HARD to summarize since it covers the breadth and a good deal of depth of all of Western Thought ... Plato, Socrates, Hegel, Weber, Heidegger, Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Calvin, Rousseau. Marx,  Nietzsche ... etc.

One of the fundamental things that must be understood is that "reason" is a TOOL that can be used to "rationally explain" most ANYTHING! What counts are "first principles" -- the "leap of faith" ... postulates that are not testable but taken as a priori FACT  like "the universe is predictable and understandable" ... the basis for science.

The other thing that is hard to accept, but I find very true, is that it all comes back to God or it comes back to Nietzsche ... who unfortunately, although NOT intentionally, led to Hitler. If you "kill god", then you enable new "Supermen" -- creators of new myth. Men who are "beyond good and evil", but rather DEFINE the new "values" (morality) -- using the "will to power" (the scare quotes are around the statements of Nietzsche).

“There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings … come[s] from Jews,” Snyder told me in an interview. As Snyder sees it, Hitler believed the only way for the world to revert to its natural order—that of brutal racial competition—was to eradicate the Jews.

Hitler saw the idea of "man as man" -- "universals" to be a "Jewish idea" -- the idea of abstractions being "beyond nature". Hitler was a naturalist ... an ecologist. He believed "survival of the fittest" and that humans were NATURAL ... not "chosen", "specially created", etc.

There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land.

Hitler is very wrong of course ... the idea of the world as we see it being a "projection" of universals or "perfect forms" goes back to Plato ... but Augustine, in "City of God" synthesized the Judaeo / Christian vision with Plato ... Augustine realized that the God of the Bible was the reality of what Plato apprehended dimly.

He sees the Jews as being the thing which destroys the world, which infects the world. He uses the term “pestilence” in this sense—the Jews have infected the world. They’ve made the world not just impure in some kind of metaphorical sense—he really means it. And so the only way to purify the world—to make things go back to the way they’re supposed to be, to have a natural ecology, to go back to this struggle between races, which Hitler thinks is natural—the only way to do that is to physically eliminate the Jews.

 All our "big questions" of the day come back to "God or nature" -- Religion says God, ecology says nature. Hitler was an ecologist. One needed listen to an ecologist very long to hear that MAN is a "pestilence" -- Hitler was just a more selective ecologist. He felt that once the Jews were eliminated, nature would take it's course and the fittest would reign.

I worry a little bit now about, just very generally, that with the financial crisis; with the instability in the Middle East; with the Chinese economy tanking; with Russia breaking all the rules in Europe; and with people in Russia, in Europe, in North Africa more freely expressing anti-Semitic views—I worry a bit that we are tilting towards some kind of anti-globalization where the Jews, or somebody else, could become the explanation for why things are going wrong.

Humans LOVE to have a scapegoat! The Jews, the 1%, "the right", Christians, etc

Once you abandon God ... or the idea of  the "transcendent" if you just can't buy God, then you fall into what Nietzsche so courageously but tragically discovered -- the abyss. The utter meaninglessness of existence. Then you are DRIVEN -- to self destruction,  or to "the will to power" ... the creation of brand new mythology that comes from outside of reason.

A quick glance at mythology -- be it Nazism, Islam, Marxism, Progressivism, Atheism, Scientism, Historicism  ...  or from the non-believer POV, Christianity will inform you that they are not all "equal".

You WILL pick one ... or perhaps you have a great "will to power" and will invent your own, but it is at least incumbent on any thinking person to know what they serve.

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