Anybody that has to use a gas can knows that government has wrecked it. What I liked was this:
Ask yourself this: If they can wreck such a normal and traditional item like this, and do it largely under the radar screen, what else have they mandatorily malfunctioned? How many other things in our daily lives have been distorted, deformed and destroyed by government regulations?
If some product annoys you in surprising ways, there’s a good chance that it is not the invisible hand at work, but rather the regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself
Over the weekend, Trump made good on his promise to restrict Muslim immigration and increase vetting. As with most of what he did in week one, this was following through on clearly made campaign promises. The nation has become so expectant in campaign promises being completely meaningless, or just out and out lies, following through on them is shocking! (eg BO, "I'll close Gitmo on day one!". "If you like your health insurance you can keep it!"). It's now a shock to the nation to see a successful candidate do what they said they would do.
There were demonstrators out in Rochester and accross the country, special call in shows on NPR, and the lefties on Facebook blew up in anger, sadness, fear, etc. Over?
So what do we need to know about this order?
Like anything in the first week or two of a new president's adminstration, it is largely based on things that BO either did or did not do during his administration. He did a similar ban on Iraqi refugees in 2011, he discriminated against Christians (Trump is mildly reversing that).
"On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when the United States let in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trump’s list — and all countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 — only after he was safely out of office."
What he is doing is in line with what he has done all through the campaign, written about in his books, and used during his business career -- staking out a position beyond what he expects to get and negotiating. Scott Adams covers that in detail here.
Most people are completely unaware that BO executed a similar order in 2011 because BO did it, so it HAD to be good!
I highly recommend to read the Adams link. While I am still not convinced that Trump is playing 3-dimensional chess while the rest of the world is stuck on Tic-Tac-Toe, it IS possible.
You start the negotiation by throwing a cherry bomb into the room -- because it puts everyone off guard and it makes them LOOK at you.
You take a position that 70-80% will think is "crazy", but 20-30% will think "did not go far enough" -- eg, why not Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries as well? The 20-30% will see the rest of the world going nuts over what they think is not enough and realize that Trump tried very hard to give them what they wanted, but it was a bridge too far.
Because everyone is looking at you and thinks you are crazy, things will come out that would not have otherwise; BO's Iraq order, the discrimination against Christians, the fact that BO had radically increased Muslim immigration on the books for this year, what our historic rates have been, etc.
I would like Trump to do a speech focused on the the 40K over the last decade and the over 100K planned for this year alone and say; "BO pulled the pin on an immigration bomb and left it in the Oval Office. I fell on it as soon as I found it and there is collateral damage. I can live with that, my mission is to protect the American Peoople."
Much like during the campaign, the most entertaining thing about Trump is to watch the fireworks. I've always enjoyed fireworks!
I understand the sentiment expressed in this column very well. It opens with:
There's a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It's an Alinksy tactic called, "Make them live up to their values." Now, living up to one's values isn't a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you'll sometimes fall short.
The left loves to exploit these shortcomings--every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.
What I tried to do at the end of my blog was indicate what was needed to "all get along" ... "shared values, Constituion, figuring out what we are "FOR" rather than just what we are against.
At that time, I would have never believed that Trump would be elected -- and now that he has been, the left is responding exactly has I would have predicted. We are definitely a tribal state and what tribes do is make war -- which is what Western civilization was created to rise above and did.
Everyone knows that Republicans are "Pro-Life". Everyone also knows that Democrats are "Pro-Black".
At least that is what "everyone knows".
If we look at the top most murderous cities in the US ... Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, DC, New Orleans, St Louis, etc, they are all Democrat fiefdoms of welfare, urban blight, failed public schools, drugs, crime and single parent households. Democrats like it that way -- being "pro-black" means encouraging blacks to live in a manner that keeps them voting over 90% Democrat. Why worry about anything else?
On the Republican side? Why alienate the "moderates" by giving the wacked out pro-lifers anything but flapping lips and broken pormises? What part of "politician" was it that the rubes failed to get anyway? There is always a "good excuse" for not REALLY nominating SCOTUS judges that will overturn Roe V Wade and return the infant slaughterhouse rules to the states. The Democrats won't let us get through the Senate, we will lose the woman vote, we will lose the "libertarians" (all 2-3% of which they lose anyway), etc.
We were assured by the MSM that Trump would not actually appoint a pro-life judge to the SCOTUS ... for the reasons above, and because "he doesn't care'. Of course we were assured there was no way he could win as well.
Perhaps being taken only flew for a little over 40 years!
In this time of mass media and the internet, human life is one of constantly being persuaded/manipulated/marketed than it ever has been. Marketing streams at us pretty much every waking moment, the media has an agenda, the political parties have an agenda, and certainly Trump has an agenda -- he is preseident because he is a better persuader than either party or the mass media.
I'm not at all certain HOW he manages all he manages. Sure, some of it is obvious -- the fact that Trump is able to have the media chasing around like a cat after a laser pointer by tweeting. His tweets have the same effect on the media and much of the hard left as seeing a squirrel does on Doug the talking dog in this clip.
The linked article points out a classic media manipulation technique. Numbers are important when THEY say they are! Pro-Life rallys for over 40 years? Numbers completely unimportant. Obama's inauguration, VERY important! Trump rallys conmparted to Hillary rallys? TOTALLY unimportant. Number of women at women's march? Hugely important!
We could just keep quoting -- number of Chicago murders vs a single black killed by police, gun deaths vs heroin deaths ... the use of selective numbers is a constant form of the manipulation we deal with. Likely voters or straight poll of "Americans"? Deficit in raw numbers or as a percentage of GDP? All these and more are used to attempt to get people to think what the manipulator of the moment wants to have us think -- and the biggest manipulator was always the MSM prior to Trump.
The use of polls or not using polls is another. I wasn't even aware that controls on abortion had a strong plurality over abortion on demand -- not one of those messages the media is interested in making clear.
Not much of this is new, but what is new is TRUMP. Does his incessant apparent obsession with the crowd size at the inauguration have an actual purpose, or is he just "insane / stupid" as the MSM tells us? Could he really be purposely holding the media on the "numbers thing" to force them to pay attention for the March for Life?, or if he can't get them to do so, reduce the media credibility even farther? Does it actually work for him to "stupidly focus on the numbers" so that even the most media addled see at least subconsciously that "it takes two to play the stupid numbers game"? I mean, if it is "ridiculous to focus on crowd size", then why is the MSM interested in it sometimes and not others?
Up until Trump was elected, the MSM story was that "he doesn't really care about abortion" -- I suppose similarly to them saying that "BO isn't really against gay "marriage" in 2008 -- he just SAID he was'. What I find interesting is that even though Republicans were supposed to be "the party of life" for the entire time since Roe, Pence will be the FIRST VP to talk to the March for Life rally! Taking a base that you feel you own for granted has been one of the tried and true methods of both political parties for a long time.
The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”
Satan is a huge fan of reason -- when he shows up in the Bible, he pretty much sounds like a lawyer. We now know through science that we can't make decisions without emotion. As Jonathan Haidt showed us in "The Righteous Mind", even "liberals" who will TELL you that disgusting things don't disgust them are lying. Put a PET scan on their brain and the moral modules light up just like they do in the person that admits that they have morals! Denying your natural moral nature is very costly.
I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you put a PET scanner on even the most supposedly pro-abortion woman out there, the scanner will show that she inherently knows it is murder as she watches one. That is going to be hard to prove, but if you take the little time required to watch this video, at least YOU will know that it is murder -- this woman, Gianna Jessen, is a survivor of that attempted murder.
Why did Christ have to come and die on the Cross? For the cosmic version of the reason that Gianna had to survive an abortion. So you could FEEL the TRUTH of Gods Love and Grace! Because thinking about things never actually allowed anyone to make a decision. We don't decide on reason!
Satan wants to give you a long list of "logical reasons" to not believe in Grace, Love, Redemption, Truth, God, Spirit, Eternity, etc. At the head of the list is "If you don't believe in those things you can be "god", or at least your own version of the idea -- and you can be smug". For a season -- really just an "instant" on the cosmic scale. Pride. You can be proud!
And then you die -- alone. More alone than is possible to imagine from this earthly coil. Satan knows you will be alone. Take the class or the gathering or the trip where you felt the most alone in your life and multiply it by a few billion, and then possibly you can imagine a mere wisp of how alone Hell is. God is surrounding you here -- generously gifting you your breath and your pulse, holding you in this mortal coil and begging you to acknowledge that Grace already won and available explicitly for YOU!
Have you ever noticed how critical it is for Satan to have "more numbers"? Since the election we definitely know that BOistan is ruled by Satan -- both Trump and the left are ALL about "numbers". "We won the popular vote"! "No you didn't, there was fraud!". "The inauguration was sparsely attended"! "No it wasn't"! "We had a MILLION marchers!" ... and so it goes. There are MORE PEOPLE on MY side!
We all know that the road to Hell is wide and easy -- with busloads of marchers. If you know Truth, it matters not at all if others agree. God and one is an extreme majority.
The linked article is well worth reading. It makes the case in one section that abortion is a sign of extreme sickness in our society. If you were a naturalist who came upon an area where all the creatures were harming themselves, maybe eating some poisonous plants to abort their young, you would not say "this is wonderful, I should help them"! You would realize that something had gone horribly wrong and look for the cause of this clear abomination of nature!
If you were a Star Trek sort of space traveler who saw such a planet where sentient life was killing their young in the womb, I can pretty much guarantee you that you would also find mass killings, rampant and rising, drug abuse, families falling apart and an extreme lack of love and caring for others "outside their tribe". All of these things are endemic to loss of meaning, respect for life, and hope. Welcome to planet BOistan.
I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”
Much like the animal, the woman who chooses to murder her child lives with the gnawing that she did. Unlike the animal, unless she allows redemption to wash her clean, her wound will fester for eternity.
I close with this.
The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?
I've written about the phenomenon that our emotions are required for decision making more than once in the blog -- I've certainly read about it more than once. Here is a version of it from this linked article.
A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.
At some point, I hope to do a thorough review and tie this factoid together. I actually think all of us are pretty intuitive about this. Our "guts" or "right brains" give us the answer, and then our left brains, the logical part make up a story was to why it was "rational". Thus my oft used quote "we are rationalIZING not rational!".
For those of us in the Christian Right, we have known this since at least 2008, if not 1999 when we failed to impeach Clinton for perjury and the crime of sexual harassment that would have gotten any kids having sex at McDonalds fired. We could even go back to 1973 and say that when a nation embarks on a holocaust that quickly surpassed that of Germany, any person who still has a moral compass knows that war will eventually result.
There are those on both the left and the right who call for American “unity.” But these calls are either naïve or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the Right and liberals, but not between the Right and the Left.
How does one make "peace" with those who will kill 60 million innocents as has happened with abortion? By winning.
Liberalism – which was anti-Left, pro-American, and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America, regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement, and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism – is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.
I think Praeger is a bit of a Pollyanna as he looks at "liberals of old". Certainly there WERE many such liberals, but even at the time of Buckley writing "God and Man at Yale", it was clear that belief in God was becoming unacceptable at "liberal institutions", and Marxism was considered the winning hand over Capitalism. He is certainly correct however that the modern US and European Left is against every one of those values in the paragraph above at this point.
As long as conservatism was losing, the war was covert -- but with the Trump win, we see it heating up. Can conservatism win without firing a shot as Reagan did against the USSR? I doubt it, but we can always hope. Apparently Praeger doesn't agree with me that the elected government of BOistan has become a SERVANT of the Administrative State and the courts. We shall see.
The article is not that long, highly recommend reading it all. This is how he closes.
With the defeat of the Left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the Left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives, and the Right have to defeat the American Left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.
If Trump was a Democrat, this would be VERY exicting news! As it is, it is awfully muted. As US News says though:
But the achievement wasn't tough to see coming, considering stocks have boomed in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's electoral victory. The Dow has climbed more than 1,600 points since Election Day – up more than 9 percent over the course of a little less than two months.
It is good to remember that one of the reasons for NOT voting for Trump was "econmic disaster". Over at the NY Times on election night when market futures went down, former Enron advisor and Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman was certain they were going down and never coming up.
It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?
Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
The Times advertises all the time as "Truth" -- in this age of "fake news", one wants hard hitting accurate reporting from experts like Krugman!
He isn't the only one ... poor muti-billionaire George Soros managed to lose one of his billions betting against Trump markets, and a lot of millions supporting Hillary and other left wingers.
Ah yes, things that make you go "boo hoo".
Does this mean that presidents make markets? Certainly not before they are elected, no ... we are talking "sentiment" here. In the long run? Well, that is why we have the sentiment -- while Hillary was the darling of Wall Street and the wealthy, Trump has promised to bring back some economy for the little folks.
If he can follow through on that remains to be seen, but people are voting again with their money and driving the markets up at this point, while the elite wealthy like Soros are unhappy and grumpy.
More pardons than the last 12 presidents combined. BO wanted MORE gun control ... yet he pardoned many that used guns to commit felonies. "Law" is an oxymoron to the left -- POWER, that is their coin.
Worthy of a read. I have no understanding of gayness, but assume it is looking at a man like I look at a woman in "desire mode". There tends to not be lot of deep thought related to that ... looking at a tall cold glass of beer on a hot day comes to mind as a similar sort of non-intellectual endeavor. If the species needed very much intellect for feeding, fighting, fleeing and, er "procreating", we would likely either be a lot smarter or "not" (as in not existing).
Liking beer, scotch, tobacco, chocolate -- or not, never seemed to be hugely intellectual to me either. There is the "addiction factor" of course -- I used to really enjoy smoking a pipe, but I gave that up and it wasn't too hard. I still enjoy the occasional cigar, but it doesn't average out to "weekly", so not much addiction factor. Eating too much for emotional reasons? BIG addiction factor -- really hard to give up eating though -- and it tends to not end well. Sometimes we have to totally fight STRONG urges to even survive, let alone be "moral". Just ask a "recovered" addict.
I can imagine that the "secrecy factor" can be significant -- the long term religious person doubting their faith, marital infidelity, being a victim of abuse, and likely an abuser, lots of addictions, etc. It would be interesting to note the percentage of the population that has "no secrets" vs "significant secrets" vs "secrets that are thought to be at an acceptable level"(whatever that means!). It's difficult to even put categories on such things. Having had some personal experience plus experience in talking to others, I'd guess that the totals for "having done or been the victim of something that has or occasionally causes moderate or greater guilt" is well over 50% of the population, possibly close to 90%? Who knows? They are called "secrets" after all! "Redemption" is an idea that doesn't apply if there is no sin -- and it doesn't apply politically. As Hillary reminded us, Trump voters are not merely "deplorable", but "irredeemable".
As the guy in the column says:
Worse than Mr. Trump’s inconsistencies, however, are those of his detractors. They cite his lack of inclusiveness yet discount that tens of millions of Americans voted for him, and he won 30 states. I am as afraid about acknowledging that I voted for Mr. Trump today as I was about being gay yesterday. There seems to be as little understanding of my political views as there was about my sexual orientation.
I suppose there is really no irony there at all, but it feels that way to me. If we take the old "10% gay" number that is thought to be VERY high (1-2% being closer to reality), 30 million out of our 300 million population would be gay. Therefore, that a significant percentage of 60 million Trump voters now feel reticent to "come out" would be considered to be "progress" by the Hillary voters. People feeling uncomfortable because they have desires that go against nature and human mores for thousands of years is "unacceptable" we must love the sin AND love the sinner. (actually, it often seems that the Christian ideal of loving the sinner is not really understood at all by non-Christians -- it is the sin that must really be loved)
However if 2x+ even the inflated the old number of gays have thoughts counter to recently expounded "progressive" positions, then they OUGHT to feel uncomfortable and be "closeted"!!! From the "progressive" POV, all that is required is to increase sanctions against them until they TRUELY "get their minds right" -- the idea that people would CONSIDER a position different from "progressive" orthodoxy is bad enough -- that they would find the gall go "come out" and admit it is totally beyond the "progressive pale"! It is as if the very worst of any sanctions formerly used against gays have suddenly become nearly mandatory from the left if used against Trump voters!
Certainly Trump supporters know that they are a "minority" in any way that counts, the much vaunted Hillary "3 million" more popular vote being the most meaningless part. As I lament to boredom, at this point, Trump support is DEFINITELY counter-cultural. You can lose your job, friends, social standing, etc -- and as "progressives" would say, that is only the beginning -- as evidenced this last weekend, they may want to attack you physically or even attack your kids. Proper thought must be maintained! My guess is that their big worry is that it might actually become acceptable to think differently from them! (the horror!!, I assume this is what they mean by "normalizing")
Is being a "minority" really bad? Women are in fact a MAJORITY, yet a million of them marched yesterday because they don't feel enough like a majority after the inauguration. The Davos crowd is in somewhat of a funk because Brexit and the US election didn't come out as they wanted. Eight of them have as much wealth as the bottom half of the planet, and if we counted the whole 3K attendees, it would likely be 2/3's or even 3/4s, yet they don't quite feel "powerful enough" since not everything is going their way.
My Packers are getting killed while I write this -- yet when Rodgers claimed they could "run the table", I thought he was crazy. They did WAY better than I would have expected getting to this point --- but since they didn't win it all, I feel the pangs of disappointment.
My current section of study in DBT -- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (a class I'm teaching) is "Distress Tolerance". Life is painful, sometimes very painful (like your spouse or child dying), sometimes ridiculously smallish painful (like your team losing). Even when you are part of an elite that has over half the wealth on the planet and fly around in beautiful private jets, life comes with "distress". The higher our expectations, the greater our distress. For the elite, the election of Trump is like someone dying ... even when discussed on a private jet flying to Davos.
As we have known since Genesis, our nature is to believe that each of us has a right to "be like God" -- or at least like what we assume God is like. When others are not what we want -- they vote for Trump, they cheer for another team, they don't worship as we do, they practice something (typically sexual) that makes our skin crawl, they don't "look like us" (they are way too fat, way too beautiful. the wrong color, smelly, etc), we feel various levels of "discomfort, disgust, hatred, anger, etc".
DBT would tell us that "our feelings are valid" -- they ARE the feelings we have. Claiming that we "shouldn't" have them is counterproductive. Nobody as ever used reason to create love or remove disgust. Most all of us have tried to overcome feelings with logic and reason, and we can often do a darned good job of "faking it" -- or at least we think we can. Usually, everyone pretty much "knows" at some level so we are really ALL just thinking we are faking everyone else out while everyone else actually knows about the faking. We live in an age where "The Emporers New Clothes" is no longer cautionary, but rather "kill the little kid being honest! He is a deploreable!"
In DBT, the idea is to "breath deeply", allow time to pass, "allow the solution to find us". This somewhat mumbo jumbo is called "wise mind" ... we all know what they are reaching for. (2:50 is the admonition from Obi Wan if you are in a hurry).
Christ went over all this 2K years ago and offered to change us so that our "still small voice" was aligned with good rather than evil. So aligned in fact, that it was just barely possible to see the potential to ACTUALLY love our enemies!
Search your heart -- what do you "know to be true" about the "million woman march" or the protests at the inauguration? Do you feel the love and understanding for the vast majority of those 60 million Trump voters by the marchers/protesters, and a strong encouragement for them to "come out" so they could practice "radical acceptance" of their views of religious freedom, the need to maintain a culture that can somehow be identified as "American", the value of hard work, thrift, as much self determination and responsibility as possible? How about the radical concept of local and even individual control of who uses a bathroom or even associational freedom as to if you need to bake a cake for a wedding that is against your religious sentiments vs selling a dress to Melania Trump that is against your political sensibilities?
What is "progress"? Having 60 million in the closet vs 30 million? Who decides that is "progress"? Davos Man? The New York Times? Harvard? George Soros? How many people you can get to march or break windows and burn cars? It looks like the left no longer even wants to honor elections? How are things decided when elections are no longer honored?
Will there ever be diversity of thought and love for even our enemies on a broad spectrum, or is "war" either via politics or direct means the lot in life of the failed state of BOistan forever? Reason will never get us out of our pit -- yet Christ created a way.
Rev 3:20 Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
The NY Times is all "just the facts you decide" on a physical attack of a Trump supporter during an interview. They usually aren't much for that sort of angle -- rather preferring to tell their readers exactly what to think. We can be pretty sure that they are just not QUITE ready to say directly "violence against Trump and his supporters is A - OK".
Their headline proudly proclaims that Richard Spencer is a Nazi -- he might be nationalist, not clear at all he is socialist.
Will it escalate? It is hard to see what "The Party" (TP-D) position on this really is. Ever since the election there has been a sense that riots, looting, violence, etc are at least "understandable".
The rather tepid "Tea Party" opposition that arose around tax day in '09 was quickly labeled strongly as "racist, unhinged, un-American, etc. BO was just too good to oppose!
The left is still on the "no opposition will be allowed" path. How much farther will they push it?
MN has two left handed Senators that we so richly deserve -- this is a state that needs to spend a decade or so to try to earn it's way back to being worthy of having a voice!
Franken digs the hole deeper here -- he thinks having a tobacco stock in a mutal fund is a sin ... and then finds out that HE has a tobacco stock in the mutual fund.
Naturally, Senator Clowns situttion is DIFFERENT ... he is a left handed clown, so his tobacco stock is just fine!
Male or female, we have all experienced the noxious skidmark on the skivies. Our national skidmark ends tomorrow, saints be praised!
We didn't end up eating roasted rat as I suspected we would -- Gods mercy is indeed beyond measure. BOistan is a failed state wholly undeserving of that mercy -- yet as evidenced by Christ, Gods mercy flows to the totally undeserving. Praise be to God!
We know that the stench of BO will linger -- but it's power has received a major freshening blast. Can the noxious stench ever be removed? Through God all things are possible!
Will Trump be an improvement? I really have no idea -- he will be DIFFERENT, and that is to be praised at this low point!
In the old military saw, the good news is that everyone is getting a change of underware. The bad news is that you change with the person on your left.
At worst we just pick up a new skidmark. Given the past 8 yars, that is wonderfully positive news!
Appartently Trump is considering brilliant Jewish Yale PHD David Gelernter, who was injured by the leftist Unibomber, for National Science Advisor. Anyone that has a wisp of independent thought is "anti-intellectual" to the WaPo, because we know that if you are intelligent and well educated, you are ipso facto left wing!
I've got a good start on the first book in the Churchill series on WWII, "The Gathering Storm". Winston is even more fun to read than he is to read about!
The linked article is a common sense discussion of how the Davos elite could decide to work WITH the disgruntled world wide "Bourgoise" if they so desired. Still have "trade deals", just make them "good deals", not 100% optimized to line the pockets of the Davos elite and their most favored friends. Much as in the Bible, let a few crumbs fall from the table to the hard workers who just want to maintain some Christian values and keep their families together.
Will it be so? It certainly could be -- as WWII would have been so easy to stop for 10 years when it was obvious as to what was coming to anyone that had bothered to read "Mein Kampf" as Winston had. Here he is on page 55:
"All was there -- the programme of German resurrection; the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combatting Marxism; the concept of the National Socialist State; the righttful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with it's message."
Those of us that had read BO's "Dreams" equally knew that BO would do all he could to destroy the "The Colonial Powers", and based on his fealty to Saul Alisnsky, to attack the Consitution, the Separation of Powers and Chrisitanity in the US.
There is ALWAYS a "Gathering Storm" -- today it is Islam, Iran, North Korea, China, and probably Russia in that order. I've been reading through Samuel, Kings and Chronicals the last few months -- a repitition of serving the Lord and prospering, failing to serve the Lord and being utterly destroyed. Most of the Kings opt for utter destruction -- we are fallen by nature, and the "Fear of the Lord" is not the natural oath, hubris and our own way is.
It's a good article. The Davos people are generally very high in IQ and unfortunately equally high in hubris.
BO put us in a very bad place -- as has the EU, the global climate industry, the UN and a few others. It is a LONG way to dig out from here and a great time to be get busy!
As the end of the stench comes blessedly closer, NR reviews the scandal list. My comments are:
The WORST scandal is that this was the presidency in which the MSM and "The Party' (TP-D) ... but I repeat myself, went "all in". They utterly didn't care about long list of scandals of BO -- they were BO's "plumbers", always busy on the coverup.
The BO scandals turned the corner where TP under the direction of BO routinely used the power of the government against their poltical opponents -- IRS being a large one in that column, but there were others. Nixon WANTED to use the IRS against his enemies, BO was able to.
In the case of Begnhazi, people died and it was STILL not of any concern to the MSM.
The article is worthy but a bit long. I wanted to have it int he blog for future reference.
Democrats can't really say that the idea of calling a Republican "illegitimate" is new -- they did it with W in '01 as well
But this is also part of a pattern. Lewis and Lee, along with some other Democratic lawmakers at the time, also boycotted to make a point when President George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001. The Washington Post reported at the time that Lewis "thought it would be hypocritical to attend Bush's swearing-in because he doesn't believe Bush is the true elected president."
Naturally the Democrats have all sorts of excuses! The Republicans opposed BO! Er, well, none of them boycotted his inaugurations, but McConnel said he wanted to make him a "one term president"!
Notice any difference with statements relative to Trump?
"The Party" (TP-D) is all about power all the time. The ONLY thing that is "legitimate" for them is 100% TP power 100% of the time. They consider anything else illegitimate.
So 8 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet. They are:
Bill Gates (US): co-founder of Microsoft (net worth $75bn)
Amancio Ortega (Spain): founder of Zara owner Inditex (net worth $67bn)
Warren Buffett (US): largest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway (net worth $60.8bn)
Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico): owner of Grupo Carso (net worth $50bn)
Jeff Bezos (US): founder and chief executive of Amazon (net worth $45.2bn)
Mark Zuckerberg (US): co-founder and chief executive of Facebook (net worth $44.6bn)
Larry Ellison (US): co-founder and chief executive of Oracle (net worth $43.6bn
Michael Bloomberg (US): owner of Bloomberg LP (net worth $40bn)
They are likely all at Davos this week, and in general, while the media might report the 8 having the same wealth as about 3.75 billion people, they are all pretty well liked. Ellison maybe not so much, but Gates, Buffett, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Bloomberg are seen as "decent progressives" that support "the right causes".
Bloomberg is kind of an interesting case. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about his wealth:
In March 2009, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth at $16 billion, a gain of $4.5 billion over the previous year, enjoying the world's biggest increase in wealth in 2009.[25] At that time, there were only four fortunes in the U.S. that were larger (although the Wal-Mart family fortune is split among four people). He had moved from 142nd to 17th in the Forbes list of the world's billionaires in only two years (March 2007 – March 2009).[26][27] In September 2013, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth as $33 billion and ranked him as the 13th richest person in the world. In March 2012, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth at $22 billion, ranking him 20th in the world and 11th in the United States.[14] In September 2015, his net worth was $43.3 billion, ranking him the 6th richest person in the United States
I'm wondering if Trump enjoys the world's largest increase in wealth in any of the years of his presidency if it might hit the press at all? Probably not ... we know they are "fair and balanced". Strangely, I could find nothing on the business genius that Bloomberg had run all his businesses when he fully divested to be Mayor? They must have been a real financial wizard to have him enjoy the WORLDS biggest increase in wealth in '09!
This sort of thing is what knuckle dragging Trump supporters and stupid Brexit types get angry about. As I've mentioned before, Davos man wants to see the masses of Americans drastically "lower their expectations for life" as I've written of before.
See, our betters in TP ("The Party"(D)" and the MSM know what would be better for us, and they LOVE the Davos sorts. Those folks are "the right kind of rich" -- no need to put any taxes or controls on THEM!
There are two possible stories -- one of them simple, but false, the other more complex but quite obviously true.
1). Comey and "Russian Hackers" torpedoed Hillary and gave the election to Trump.
2). Hillary and her party were extensively corrupt and criminally careless, but BO and company "ran cover", jerking Comey around, giving him pieces of this and that, denying him others, all the while certain that Hillary was going to win, so none of this would matter.
The Inspector Generals investigation of COMEY, as well as the related investigation of "Russian Hacking" are nothing but misinformation campaigns designed to de-legitimize Trump's election.
The only hope here is that a large enough segment of the US population TRUELY has correctly decided that TP and the MSM are one entity, united in bullshit, and they aren't going to bother to listen to them.
The article is long, but it does explain it pretty well if you want to understand the sordid details.
I saw the Bleacher Report article and it saddened me at the time. I've long said that I worried about what sort of "problem" existed in Rogers life, because he seems WAY too perfect and we all know that such doesn't exist in humanity.
"Ed Rodgers described as accurate a Bleacher Report article published in November, which revealed, among other things, that Rodgers had not spoken to his family since the end of 2014, a few months after he began dating Munn, who has appeared on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, in “The Newsroom” on HBO and in the film “X-Men: Apocalypse.”"
I have no idea what the problem is, but in my book there are no valid excuses for not speaking to your family since 2014 outside of "fear of violence".
It is just sad to see. I pray that he works it out.
The power of the left is on plain exhibit here ... you would think they would wait at least six months to give at least the "patina" of legitamacy to what has always been an obvious criminal corruption shakedown. When NOBODY in the MSM even reports it, why even bother with cover?
We are talking totally obvious "Pay for Play" here and since the "Play" just got her ass kicked, why would one pay?
And since Clinton’s presidential election loss in November, other donors have cut back or stopped giving to the overarching Clinton Foundation, too. After 10 years and more than $88 million in donations, the Australian government decided against renewing its partnership with the foundation, news.com.au reported. Norway reduced its giving from $20 million in 2015 to $4.2 million in 2016.
Anyone not completely bleating in unison with TP knew this all along -- and not doubt they STILL don't care. That is what corruption means.
Apparently some believe in the existence of a congressman named "Lewis" that I have negated. Were he to exist, he might be either a hyper-partisan black Democrat, or some "Civil Rights Legend" -- like the Headless Horseman or something.
Anyway, if you believe he might legitimately exist, this would be good coverage of that theory.
Why is it hard for the right to understand the left and vice versa? Well, for one reason, because at least the left doesn't understand itself. They do however know "they're against it".
Most people on the right have never thought protesting much of anything was worthwhile. The closest that I've come to it personally is going up to the MN State Capitol to voice displeasure to state legislators as they attempted some new gun grabs.
The two videos in the linked are well worth looking at. For the left, getting out and protesting against somebody that you have no clue about is worth your time -- which likely means your time isn't worth very much. Most of them would likely have some identification with Marx, and as the second clip shows, on that they would be correct -- it is just that their "philosophy" seems to align more with Groucho than with Karl.
After "Face of God" and this fine effort, I'm a confirmed Scrutin fan. In "Soul", Scruton continues his analysis of what it means to be human as opposed to atoms, cells, chemicals and adaptive evolutionary programming.
"I know that I am a single and unified subject of experience. This present thought, this pain, this hope, and this memory are features of one thing, and that thing is what I am. I know this on no basis, without having to carry out any kind of check, and indeed, without the use of criteria of any kind -- this is what is (or ought to be) meant by the term "transcendental". The unity of the self-conscious subject is not the conclusion of any inquiry, but the presupposition of all inquiries. the unity of consciousness "transcends" all argument since it is the premise without which argument makes no sense."
The paragraph is a bit longer than "I think therefore I am", yet I see it as gaining commensurate meaning from that added length.
As humans, "we" have to start somewhere, meaning we have to find some way to postulate that we actually exist from "nowhere". If we sit quietly, focus on only "our" breathing, watching our breaths happen on their own, our thoughts come and be acknowledged/dismissed as "we" return to watching our breath, our emotions pass through us as we acknowledge them and gently return to calm attention on our breath, the question arises as to "what or who" is doing the watching?
We will discover as millions have discovered throughout history (and millions more have not), that "I", is not our physical body, not our thoughts, and not our emotions. We each "have" all those things, but we, ARE something else. Another version of this realization is covered in an Atlantic article that I reviewed not long ago. Reality IS experience.
So if what we experience IS all there is, then how might we think about that?
"There is a culture of long-term thought and abstract conception, represented by Moses; and a culture of short-term pleasure and easy communication represented by Aaron. The first points to the transcendental ground of being; the second reduces beings to idols.:
In this section of the book, Scruton uses music as the example of how to know the difference. I believe however that this quote goes a long way toward the heart of the matter:
"... the difference is between preventing silence, and letting silence speak. Music in the listening culture is a voice that rises out of silence, and which uses silence as a painter uses the canvas ..."
Scruton is seeking to capture "the ghost in the machine" of physical creation, as many lovers and believers have before him. (and what are true lovers but believers?) I think we all understand that if we step back and let the silence speak, it DOES speak -- which is why the forces of Aaron work incessantly to make certain we never stop and listen!
"In music as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is is a culture of idolatry in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response."
"We are spirits living in the material world" (as "The Police" once put it). Much of modern man's time is spent trying to anesthetize that knowledge via clicks, games, music, drugs, media, work, relationships, ANYTHING!
"The Fall did not occur at a particular moment in time; it is a permanent feature of the human condition. We stand poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, end and means, beauty and ugliness, sanctity and desecration. And these distinctions derive from the same ultimate fact, which is that we can live in openness to others, accounting for our actions and demanding an accounting for theirs, or alternatively close ourselves off from others, learn to look on them as objects, so as to retreat from the order of the covenant to the order of nature."
Why is it critical for the left to cover their ears and scream "safe space! Nah, nah, nah, nah"? Because in a fallen world, even a fig leaf is imagined to provide "covering" of the nakedness of corrupted nature denying it's soul. The unbeliever MUST deny their soul, the pain of it's corruption is unspeakable, so they can ONLY "cover", never account for their fallen state until they accept redemption.
For the lover and the believer, the idea of hiding our true face and soul from others, especially those we love, is painful in the extreme. Many of us must do this in order to maintain any relation at all with family, to hold our jobs, or to interact socially.
The question "Why"? is addressed from I to you. It is thrust upon us in those moments in extremis when the order of creation irrupts around us. It is then that we cry out to God -- who will tell us why we suffer, why we live, and why we die. Within the envelope of nature there are only causes. But for the eye of faith the envelope has a telos, a reason for being as it is. And to have faith is to believe that the worlds teleology will account for my afflictions too.
"Irrupts" -- to enter forcibly or suddenly.
In this week before inauguration day 2017, the year of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, I stand in awe of the power of God and of Satan. My sense is that "The Fall" was the "reification" of the spiritual perfection of creation. "Reify" is a dangerous word which I believe holds a paradox within itself. The literal meaning of the word is "to make something abstract more "real" as in "understandable" ".
Since I believe that what we see as "reality" through our fallen senses is what scientists might call a "quantum flux" and God calls "spirit and truth", the act of "reification" is the act of making MORE FALSE -- making something seem to be more physical, or "quantified", "measured", "real".
In my world view, mathematics is closer to "truth" than engineering (applied physics). Reification as it is commonly used is actually "making a graven image" from a spiritual perspective.
Scruton has helped me immensely in trying to "un-reify" my world ... as in "sanctify", or "recover the spirit".
HIGHLY recommended to those who seek to recover the spirit.
We've been over this more than a few times. The assertion is that "Secular Humanism", "The Party" (TP-D), "Blue America", "progressivism", etc, have become very much a religion, and not a particularly tolerant one. TPism is pretty much like Islam -- It demands that the State and the religion be one in the same -- in Islam, that is called "Sharia Law", in the TP Religion it is called "Secular Humanistic Administrative Law" with Political Correctness enforcement as one of it's branches.
Cults get very unhappy with members that leave, especially if they publicly say bad things about the cult -- and Trump was a definite member in good standing of the TP elite until he "went rogue'.
The whole linked article is not all that long, but still not very worthy, but I found the following to be the highlight:
Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it's got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism.
Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right.
The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don't go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you're on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform.
Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel's voice whispering, "You're right, you're better, you're winning."
Hollywood award shows are like church talent shows - the skits and jokes aren't really funny, but it's fun to look at the pretty girls, and you're all on the same team.
When you have been ensconced in a blue bubble through all your educational years (and for many, in your comminity and job as well), fully assured that you were on the "right" (meaning correct) "side" of history and heading inevitably to nirvanah, an event like Trump can be REALLY disconcerting!
The "Blue Church" has it's own escatology (description of the "end times") that is rooted in concepts like the old Hegelian / Marxist Dialectic of "Thesis->Antithesis->Sythesis" or "Problem->Reaction->Solution". Since most of the post-moderns are not aware of much of history, theology or philosophy, many of them think this is also "new".
This all assumes that "history" somehow has some sort of "direction" apart for the one in Christianity. Historicism asserts that somehow, not just plants, animals, etc are "evolving" to a "better" state. How did it get this "direction"? ... big mystery. It "just is", or "somehow" in 10 to the 400th UNIVERSES, this one with all these cool Goldilocks characteristics also has some mysterious built in "random teleology" that pushes it toward "better", and "better" just happens to always align perfectly with whatever "progressives" are thinking as being "better"! A very very happy accident indeed!
The bottom line here is that as finite and very limited beings, ANY explanation of our existence is at some level "fantastic, improbable, paradoxical, etc" ... which is why when I went through my greatest faith chllenges, I eventually settled on belief in things that have a history (meaning 100's or thousands of years) of WORKING! 'via Blog this'
10% of what we spend as a nation on providing "food" to the poor goes for soda.
That means a household that spent 10 percent of its SNAP money on soda could buy at least 20 two-liter bottles of orange Crush soda at a Fine Fare supermarket in New York City, or about 50 cans of Sprite at a Walmart in Oakland, Calif.
One might think that given government's propensity for "controls", there might be some ... however:
But the food and beverage industries have spent millions opposing such measures, and the U.S.D.A. has denied every request, saying that selectively banning certain foods would be unfair to food stamp users and create too much red tape.
The "government" (more explicitly it's employees and elected officials) have an even greater propensity for graft and kickbacks. Besides, SNAP is part of the payout to supporters of "The Party" (TP-D) ... BO got a record number on Food Stamps 45 million people!
It would be great if BO would really go away, but this is a stench that is certain to linger.
Is Barack Obama the worst president in the history of the United States? A strong case can be made that the answer is yes, but in any event, he is undoubtedly our most delusional. You have to take your hat off to the man: going eight long years without ever acknowledging reality is no mean feat.
Tim Scott, first black Republican Senator since reconstruction from S Carolina is no stranger to hatred -- racial and otherwise. "The Party" (TP-D) doesn't cotton to blacks leaving their plantation and thinking independently -- let alone going so far that they become actual REPUBLICANS!
Scott is a TRUE "profile in courage" and CLASS!
So someone calls him a "house N-word', one word tween response ... Senate.
As an avid MPR listener, I'm always impressed by their balanced and diverse coverage of the the left and the far left. It reminds me of the eclectic tastes of Bob's Country Bunker in "The Blues Brothers":
Trump has already increased the entertainment value of National Liberal Radio enough that if I wasn't required already to pay for through my taxes and and MN sales CONSTITUTIONAL sales tax, it might be worth paying for!
Why each day gives me a chance to hear them right next to tears and HORRIBLY worried about how we will all survive under this disaster of Trump! It is sweeter still, since I remember this time after the election of BO, they were having a hard time figuring out if he was going to be more like Washington, Lincoln or FDR, or quite possibly as good as 10x all three of them rolled into one.
Turns out, like Jimmuh Carter that gave us Ronald Reagan, BO's only accomplishment turned out to be the election of Trump! It just took him two terms rather than one, so maybe Carter wins there.
Anyway, the New Yorker, WaPo, NY Times, NBC, ABC, etc are pretty much in the same boat. Glum, despondent, afraid, angry, confused, apocolyptic, depressed, outraged, incredulous -- it is just such a joy to listen to them and read what they have to say. It reminds me of the midnight dessert buffet on a Cruise Ship!
This is just a lovely turn of phrase:
Some saw the tweet as self-pitying and pathetic. Others saw it as a frightening attack on the First Amendment by the man who will soon swear to defend the Constitution.
When you write something like that AND PUBLISH IT, without any thought that you MAY not quite be aligned with even much of the country, you might be "in a bubble"! Some people saw it is "self-pitying and pathetic", others saw it as a "frightening attack", end of story, all bases covered.
I really didn't find the tweets to be a good thing, yet it becomes increasingly obvious they are genius. Just how stupid does the New Yorker look to anyone not made insane by the election of Trump? And if you are insane, then what really matters?
God, I do love it, I love the smell of burnt liberal press in the morning! It smells like .... VICTORY!
In looking around for the Apocalypse YouTubes, I ran into this. OMG! People, if you can't get a clue, GET A LIFE!
Perhaps this would make them feel better as the inauguration theme music?
Romeo Foxtrot, Shall we dance? !
Today in "news of the surreal", the "Trump Dossier". Yesterday on MPR, this was all the big deal ... "unprecedented". Indeed., Unprecedented in former Constitutional Republics -- totally common in backwater third world banand republics.
"For at least five years"—in other words, starting no later than 2011, Vladimir Putin believed that the host of "The Apprentice" was the linchpin holding together NATO. You see, Putin has special insight not only into Trump but also the American electorate. Unlike most every other expert who handicapped the 2016 elections, and gave Trump zero chance of victory, Putin knew Trump would win—and he knew it five years ago.
If Putin is truly that smart, I hope he DOES have a very close relation with "The Donald" (TD) and gives him advice. We could use A LOT of help from someone that smart.
Imagine, FIVE YEARS AGO! Why in that dim and distant piece of hitory, "The 1980's called for their foreign policy"
AND, BO was promising those Russion friends "more flexibility after the election"!
Here we see a classic example of "tolerance" from the left. What they "tolerate" are people that think in lock-step with all the dictats of "The Party" (TP-D). Others deserve to be maligned in any way the left desires, including calling their granddaughter a "prop".
The whole article is worth the read, it covers the attacks on Bobby Jindal well. In TP doctrine, "Thou shalt not be a Republican if you are not lily white saith TP! Such is an abomination before TP and requires that you be put to at least political death as painfully as possible by any means possible".
As we know all too well ...
For far too many standard-bearers of their movement, disagreement with any conservative on policy need not be tempered by basic civility, since the Left is always entitled to be mad about whatever it is they’re mad about, and thus, the ends always justify the means.
The left got pretty excited about some "Fake News" (FN) stories from the right for the same reason that the government prosecutes crime -- they hate the competion.
This week shows us that we are back into the regular FN cycle. First of all "The Golden Globes".
A buddy and I working out at the local health club were asking each other what they heck they even are ... we knew they were an awards show for the entertainment types of some sort, but we didn't know. We suspected that they might be for women who were well endowed. Had to look them up, it appears that they are sort of the "Junior Oscars" where TV gets a award as well. "newsworthy" in the sense that People magazine and TV Guide are "news".
What we see though is the symbiotic relationship between entertainment and the media arm of "The Party" (TP-D). It would take 50 to 100 years of Republicans being dominant in order for a return to anything like "cultural equality". The entire federal bureaucracy, 80% of the media and academia are under total TP domination. Mere elections don't change that as the Streep FN incident shows.
I covered the manufactured story of "Trump mimics disabled reporter" before. I think the article linked from there does a good job of debunking that claim, but even if he did drop into mimicry as his opposition does of him all the time, or the left does constantly for the poor slobs who live in "fly over country", greater and lesser things have happened. Hillary mocked dogs, and if I was a dog lover, I'd be REALLY pissed about that! BO talked of "Special Olympics Bowling" ... as I covered in the Trump mimic link ... when you are TP, apology always accepted, when you are not, don't misspell "potato'.
For the easily led, just create a negative narrative for the opposition, and historically it has been OVER. Trump has broken that mold -- perhaps we are in a new era where the stranglehold of TP and the MSM is weakened, or more likely Trump is just an exception, in either case it is fun to watch.
The linked article is by the conservative BLACK sheriff of Milwaukee, David Clarke. Ohio State disinvited him from speaking because he has referred to"Black Lives Matter" as "Black Lies Matter". Hard to imagine how a black conservative sheriff might find the BLM narrative to be less than truthful.
The paragraph that caught my eye was this:
“In some cases, the deceased may have committed acts of violence against others before they were killed. Perhaps they were domestic abusers, perhaps they threatened or killed others. This possibility is not something to shy away from. The protest against police brutality extends to the innocent and the guilty alike, because we know that no matter the crime, justice and due process don’t come from a cop’s bullet.”
When you attack police, you have just waived "due process". When you employ force, both those you attack, and certainly authorities have total and complete right to meet that force with superior force.
This is not even a societal law, but rather the "law of the jungle", that of tooth and claw. See what happens if you corner a racoon, woodchuck, or even a bunny. In pretty much any case, the creature will fight for it's life with all it has. Self defense is as basic a creaturly right as exists.
So even the snowflakes writing the drivel of that paragraph would fight if they were ever faced with an ACTUAL existential threat that they could not subdue with tears and "safe spaces".
We live in a FAKE WORLD and folks like those that wrote the paragraph above are increasingly unaware of that fact!
Some of the mouthpieces of "The Party" (TP-D) are still doing some navel gazing, and this column is an example. For any actual practicing Christian that pays attention, it has been obvious for a very long while that it is impossible to be politically associated with a party that considers the killing of 60+ million babies in their mothers wombs a sacrament which competes in secular holiness with only homosexuality. Quaint ideas of God creating heaven and earth are constantly derided as "backward" in TP, and any concept that religion might have an impact in a believers life outside of the walls of an appropriately leftist church for an hour on Sunday AM on rare occasions is beyond the imagination of TP.
Thus, it unsurprisingly happens that even what a leftist liberal "christian" might assume would be a very important scrap of scripture plucked from an otherwise abandoned Bible is totally unfamiliar.
"Some of his colleagues also didn’t understand his work, he writes. He once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it “Economic Fairness and the Least of These,” a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible. Another staffer repeatedly deleted “the least of these,” commenting, “Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?”"
Well, an example of "these" would be the 81% of evangelicals that voted for Trump because they really don't want to be forced to bake cakes for gay "weddings" or let men shower with their daughters in public locker rooms! Especially not while TP celebrates dress designers, entertainers, etc bragging about not working with the Trumps. Freedom of Association for all or for none!
The following paragraph fully summarizes for me what happened to nearly all actual practicing Christians in the 2016 elections. We realized that this was no longer "America", which WAS a Christian nation, and voted accordingly.
Many of those 81 percent are accommodating cultural changes in America that are deeply problematic. Liberals have been trying to convince Americans, and evangelicals in particular, that America is not a Christian nation. The 2016 election was evangelicals saying, “Yeah, you’re right! We can’t expect to have someone who is Christian like us. We can’t expect to have someone with a perfect family life. What we can expect is someone who can look out for us, just like every other group in this country is looking for a candidate who will look out for them.”
The whole article is worthy of a read. It makes what I regularly say in this blog clear ... TP is no longer interested in actual Bible believing Christians, only in "social christians". Since TP lives in it's urban bubbles, it doesn't realize how many actual practicing Christians there are, so it remains shocked it can lose an election. The article goes into some detail on the fact that it is impossible to be a pro-life TPer these days because TP no longer even affirms life. (and this is the ATLANTIC!)
One of the somewhat surprising but very true things about human nature is that we can know a truth at a very deep level, yet not apply it in some area because we are totally blind to it right in front of us. I'll use gayness as an example. NPR quite regularly talks about the importance of "gay outreach" -- making sure that people meet and know gays and have gays talk to them about how important gay "marriage" is to them because it "puts a face on the issue".
They regularly say this, yet the vast majority of them don't know a practicing Bible believing Christian ... and don't want to. Being gay is only of this world ... like being an alcoholic, workaholic, adulterer, etc. If one is willing to humble themselves and seek repentance, our earthy demons can be battled and we are ultimately assured of victory, at least in eternity. Belief in the saving power of Christ and Gods Truth is eternal -- so perhaps THAT is why they shy away from Christians. They seek "heaven on earth", and their "heaven" damned sure isn't the one that any Christian would desire.
I see us as at a new transition point. *IF* Satan has become real enough to the secular christian left that they can "walk in the garden" as Satan did with Eve, and converse with practicing Christians about how important it is to doubt God on issues like homosexuality and gender (did he REALLY say ... ?"), then there is a major prospect for the descent of this tribal territory (BOistan) to continue and even accelerate no matter who is in political power. The "ace in the hole" of Christ in the modern world may well be that the dark forces are even more distracted by the physical "pleasures of the flesh" and world than the Christians. We can pray it is so -- secular "chrisitians" avoiding actual Bible Christians cuts off one avenue for Satan. Unfortunately it also reduces the chance for the prodigal secularists to return to Truth (Christ).
Secular "christians" being willing to sit down with Christians and do their best to convert them is more dangerous than having them disassociate, shun and unfriend them. Secular (social) "christians" are often very intelligent and well able to discuss and influence. As CS Lewis covered so well in the "Screwtape Letters", Satan and his demons are very willing to help those who serve him to believe that they are serving God and are oh so pious in their service of "the good of our father below".
What the article does not mention is Ephesians 6:12
12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
Typing away on a laptop ready to post to a blog that lives in "the cloud" of the vast internet makes it seem surreal that this physical (and virtual) modern world is only a "lens", and not reality. Reality is eternal and spiritual.
We are spirits having a physical experience -- we need to remember that every day in fear and trembling. I love the main message of this old song ... it's particular theology is vague to non-existent (likely just as well), but it is basically true, assuming the "material" part is even what we think it is.
Pretty much all well covered ground relative to this blog, but it is good for me to see that I'm not completely the lone voice from time to time.
Suddenly, after eight years in which their secret mantra seems to have been “Make America Hate Again,” they protest that the notion of stopping their immoral destruction of our country is itself immoral and hateful. Many of us have noticed that the damage they forecast, the shredding of our national fabric, has been well underway for eight years, and that their unhinged reaction to being stopped from finishing the job is far more morally disgusting than anything Donald Trump could do to make us the United States again.
"Morality" used to have something to do with transcendent values that were thousands of years old, however left wing "morality" is whatever situationally provides more power to "The Party" (TP-D). Thus, deviant sex practices, strange/imaginary "genders", dependence, celebration of tiny minorities combined with lack of ever tolerance for large majorities and attacks on the few remaining institutions with any remaining respect (police) were put in the place of actual morality.
The column is worth a read ... he has a different voice saying much of what I have said many times, but naturally in a somewhat different way. He closes with the following, I much agree we have A LOT to be done, and the "lectures" will be the least of the problems. The entire BOistan media, bureaucracy, educational and legal systems are already working to destroy Trump before he even takes office. It's going to be a nasty war.
There is much work to be done, but we needn’t pause to consider lectures on morality from amoral people. Those who are still Americans will rebuild what was wrecked by those who have become something else. While we do so, we would be wise to remember that those who are transitioning from Americans to “something else” are determined to finish the job. If given another chance, they will happily force us to live in their corrupt, coercive Orwellian zoo. They won’t rest until they control everything, and we are compelled to do whatever they want, for whatever reason they say. That is, they won’t rest until we are no longer free people living in the United States, but rather are just a means of funding the overthrow of a country designed to prevent the corruption and tyranny they showed us for eight long, morality-free years.
