How To Not Be Secular; Reading Charles Taylor, by James K A Smith

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JJ1RIO2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I often describe my pilgrimage as from a 1974 tiny rural HS, 1978 no name university BS graduate, culturally flat technical hick; to autodidact idiot savant pseudo-intellectual student of Western civilization, Christianity, Philosophy, Literature and Science hick, as a series of pitches going up a mountain on which I often THINK that I have seen the peak, but realize at various junctures that all I have seen are outcroppings, many of which involve yet another LONG pitch I must traverse to gain a glimpse of the next dizzying (to me) height. I've ceased to imagine it will be the peak -- that will be in the life to come. 

This is a review of  Smith's sort of of extended cliff note narrative summary of Charles Taylor's 874 page mountain of a book, "The Secular Age" which I now have on order (don't expect the review blog anytime soon)! Here is a review of The Secular Age"  if you want a different / more extensive take on the larger work. 

Smith says that Taylor "gives us an account of our cross-pressured situation -- suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence". Immanence meaning "matter and the physical is everything" and transcendence meaning this is not all there is -- there is a higher Platonic /  spiritual / metaphysical reality that is more real than what our imperfect senses can apprehend. 

Taylor perceives and makes plain to us "that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so;" ... 

"Employing a kid of intellectual colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening by disenchantment. ("Graveyards of the gods" are always highlights of this tour)."

My favorite diagram from the book is this one -- I apologize for having to resort to taking a picture of it. 

I think a reasonable attempt at tiny summary of the Smith book is that Taylor tells the story, AS A STORY, of how it became possible to exist in a disenchanted immanent world where the most important thing is the Buffered Self -- meaning the self devoid of attachment to culture, history, religion, or even family. A detached self that is never the less haunted by being "pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if it might just be an echo of lost transcendence". 

We all live by a narrative -- the pure humanist narrative of "progress" is that we once lacked physical vs metaphysical explanations for what we saw around us, so we imagined "enchantment". Spirits and  gods were all around, but we were only children. The definition of "progress" or "maturity" is NO ILLUSIONS ... we live in a cold meaningless universe that is ONLY matter. Meaning is only about matter ... man is the measuring creature, measurement is meaning. If it can't be measured, it is an illusion, and therefore does not exist! 

"If one were to preserve God's sovereignty, one would have to do away with "essences", and with independent "natures". And the result is a metaphysical picture called "nominalism" where things are ONLY what they are named." 

If you can name it and measure it, it exists. If not, it doesn't. So, with the Nietzschean "demise of God, we are the only authorizing agency left" ... these two paragraphs give the barest thumbnail of the "CWS", Closed World View -- it's matter and us, that is all the material available to try to construct meaning.

And so, the disenchanted immanent "meaning" constructed is the "Modern Moral Order" (MMO) -- it is pure humanism, bootstrapped from matter and human thought and ruthlessly applied to all as a dogmatic religion,  with much more restrictive dogmas, pervasive in all areas of society, especially schools, media, and law ( like gay "marriage", transgender grooming for kids, etc).  

"Because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates or moral articulation -- a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior .... we don't know how to make people moral, but we do know how to specify rules, articulate expectation, lay down the law. This happens in policy, but also informally in cultural codes of political correctness ..."

What is lacking is any sense of inner motivation -- it is all external, we will yell at you if you fail to meet the ever growing MMO -- or maybe worse, we will pass more and more laws, you MUST NOT use plastic grocery bags, you MUST recycle. you MUST drive an electric car"! Thus saith the MMO. 

It becomes clear that the CWS / MMO / Buffered Self, etc ARE a form of metaphysic, and thus effectively a "religion" -- the self is not actually "buffered", unless they can exist as an effective modern hermit of constant distraction, escape, and self-delusion.  The Buffered Self must BELIEVE that all of this is "the good", but part of the CWS itself is that it is a "good" completely made up of whole cloth.

Man STILL cannot live by bread alone, but must have a some sort of "social imaginary" (Taylor term), metaphysical dream, or every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So what exactly is the advantage of the certified manufactured illusion with ZERO parts transcendent content of the MMO, over thousands of years old moral order that at the minimum leave the thought of transcendence open to the psyche? 

Well, in an immanent sense, of course NOTHING -- since there can't be anything that isn't made up by randomly developed creatures out of nothing except "stuff" (matter). Taylor -- and Smith believe that there actually aren't any honest humans that fail to sense the haunting of the transcendent. Is it real, or is it just side effect of some old caveman brain circuits that would be best excised in our modern world to allow us to be completely "grown up" as a Nietzschean disenchanted, immanent buffered self that deserves to be tamped down and unacknowledged -- even if it means they must lie about it to make it seem that the fiction of pure rational atheism exists (which it doesn't, at least since Quantum Mechanics). 

Unsurprisingly, no answers are given. The task of the book is to make Christian faith POSSIBLE in our flattened, disenchanted meaningless world, essentially by just making it clear that EVERYONE has "faith", it is only a question of "faith in what". The intellectual playing field of the world today is purely secular. Taylor sees us at the possible cusp of faith no longer being "allowable", although he does not predict that will be the actual outcome ... he believes that even the merest ghost of the transcendent cannot be ignored because "this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a wasteland for subsequent generations, and young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries ..." 

Even for the subject Smith book of a mere 139 pages, I have but scratched the surface lightly. Yet again, I find myself regularly running to the Internet to bone up on my definitions in order to begin to understand what I am looking at. I feel as a non-english native speaker, who after a couple semesters of English is thrust into reading Shakespeare and asked to provide commentary. And this AFTER 100's of books over decades of my attempted intellectual improvement.

In the 500 years since the Reformation, science, philosophy and religion have sold us the chimera of "reform / progress" with no concept of "to where"? It seems that in some circles the thought was "to a mature human vision of a morality built on "facts" rather than "superstition" -- however, morality is more than a set of rules, and mature human vision is perpetual change toward an unknown objective rather than a "goal" ... and it likely is merely going in circles chasing its tail.

We remain lost so tragically we often fail to even detect our lostness. Does my quest for knowledge lead me forward, or into the abyss? My prayer is that with Christ holding my hand, there can be no truly uncharted abyss (Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me). I know the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Can this mountain of human knowledge be somehow be translated into a form that allows modern man to see the truth of transcendence in Christ? or is my quest just an old guy attacking the Everest of knowledge alone without oxygen? 

Better to die on a quest than in disenchantment? 

Catholic Wisdom, Truth; Perspective For Our Time And God's

What’s next: Catholics, America and a world made new – Catholic Philly:

If you have ANY time and inclination, BYPASS ME and just GO READ THIS! It may well be the best reading of this length that I've read this year, and as you know, I read a lot. 

I grew up in a church that thought Catholics were devil worshipers -- joined with the Harlot. I've come to believe that they are "THE Church". As a Lutheran, I'm still staking my faith that they are not the ONLY church.

What I love about the Catholic Church is HISTORY and PERSPECTIVE -- and the linked article is a great example of both. A huge failing of Protestants is that our churches are all certain that Christ is returning "soon", which is certainly true in God's time. After over two thousand years however, the Catholic Church well understands that God's time is not our time (which is also true). One would hope that in this 500th year anniversay of the Reformation, perhaps Protestants could begin to fathom this other important truth. 

The Protestant failing that is destroying Western civilization is the idea that everyone deserves and can fashion their own god. Sure, they may often do it in a myriad of sects, splits and schizms, but at base it comes down to what I see as a heresy -- although Jesus saves each of us personally, God the Father is ONE GOD, eternal and unchanging -- we do not get to make him, and futhermore, fear of him as the **I AM** is the beginning of wisdom.

Thus ends my short paen to the Cathoic Church. The linked column is WAY too deep and rich for me to summarize. I see it as nothing short of basic blueprint of what is required for Christians to save the remnant of a tattered and bleeding Western civilization, as well as the realization that it is ONLY Christ and his followers that can save it if that is Gods plan. If we want to recover, have to find a foundation of meaning to build on, and it is not "information" or even knowledge.

Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom, not knowledge, is the framework of a fully human life; the architecture of interior peace. Scripture is the Word of God, and Ecclesiastes tells us that “the words of the wise in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools.” Wisdom is more powerful than might and better than the weapons of war (Eccles. 9:16-18). Wisdom is more precious than jewels, and once we have it, then knowledge becomes pleasant to the soul (Prov. 8:11; 2:10).

I VERY grudgingly select this 7th point to share -- I want you to READ IT ALL, because this point is in no way a summary.

Here’s a seventh point: Democracy advances equality by flattening out injustices and social inequities. But it goes much further than that. It also tends to flatten out distinctions and hierarchies of every kind. Unguided by religious faith, democracy flattens out even the human spirit because any kind of divine transcendence or human excellence also implies a kind of inequality. This is why Alexis de Tocqueville said that democracy creates not just a new and different kind of political order, but a new and different kind of humanity.

Much of our people and culture are like a cartoon person flattened by a cartoon steamroller. God's universe is infinitely dimensional, hierarchical, celebratory of TRUE diversity -- diversity of spirit, gifts, thought, experience, blessing. Spirit can't be manifest in a flattened cartoon projection of being human, and so very many of the people in our age have been totally and tragically flattened.

I can't resist one last quote, however, please realize that overall, the column is POSITIVE, unlike what my quotes might lead you to believe.

If you want to see the face of Europe in 100 years, barring a miracle, look to the faces of young Muslim immigrants. Islam has a future because Islam believes in children. Without a transcendent faith that makes life worth living, there’s no reason to bear children. And where there are no children, there’s no imagination, no reason to sacrifice, and no future.

Read the linked and ponder the richness of Grace and possibility that God wants us to live!

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Teen Suicides, Depression, Anxiety, Religion

Teen Suicides, Depression, Anxiety Rising: Religion Can Help | National Review

The idea that a life without meaning is not likely to be worth living is nothing new to a reader of this blog. It is also no surprise that depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide are at epidemic levels, especially in the young. A worthy read.

:A far stronger case can be made for our society’s decline in religious faith as the cause of these mental pathologies in the young. The decline in religion that began in the ’60s has accelerated in the past 15 years and is especially great among young people. A recent Pew report noted that over a third of its young respondents described themselves as “believers in nothing in particular.” Schrobsdorff’s omission of religious decline is one indication of how great the decline in religion has been — and how much our secular culture is in denial on the issue. The media just doesn’t “get” religion.

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Orange Is The New Black

Michelle Obama discusses emotional scars from critics | WUSA9.com:



I'm sure that Michelle's pain is real, and it is too bad that she has pain and apparently doesn't understand that it comes with public life, especially political public life. Everyone is never going to be fully on any of our sides, black, white or orange.



I'm guessing that the market for Trump or Melania's sharing of their pain is going to be limited -- especially in Denver.



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Name The Six BOcare Weasels

Sen. Ben Sasse rebukes Republican colleagues who voted against health care repeal legislation | Health | omaha.com:

When you vote for a bill to make the fake claim that you would repeal when you know it will be vetoed and then vote against it when it will be signed, you are a WEASEL! I don't care what you may have done in the past, or how "great a person" you are, you have no character and can't be trusted. Those people are.

• Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.;
• Susan Collins, R-Maine; 
• Dean Heller, R-Nev.; 
• John McCain, R-Ariz.; 
• Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska;
• Rob Portman, R-Ohio

As Sasse puts it in the linked column: 

“How can you possibly explain that to people with any intellectual integrity?” Sasse said in an interview with The World-Herald.

Obviously, you can't! Which is why the media loves John McCain. Yes, it is too bad he has cancer, but weasels die too. He may well have once been a standup guy and a war hero, but it has been clear for a long time that today he is a weasel -- he sells out when he thinks it is going to benefit him.

These 6 people are why the Republican Party has ZERO integrety! Republicans promisted that they would repeal BOcare in 2010 and on, and they won elections on that promise! When it came time to fullfill that promise, these 6 that voted for repeal in 2015 when they knew BO would veto it, proved that Republicans can't govern.

Here is McCain, the "Weasel In Chief" running on a promise to repeal BOcare

THIS is why we desperately needed Trump -- at it's core, the Republican party is too full of weasels!
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First Cultural Wartime President

He Fights - Evan Sayet:

This is one that is worth just going out and reading top to bottom. If you need background, I cover that here. Just go and read it -- a teaser.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

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Judgement On Sources, Fake News, MPR

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/414687786/m-p-r-news-with-kerri-miller

If you go out to that link and search for "anonymous sources" you can find the hour long show. I only listened to part of it, I believe I got the "important points", and I don't really have the stomach for more. 

The best description of NPR is that of covering the left and the far left -- this little segment included all lefty participants agreeing wholeheartedly that what the "good news people" (NPR, WaPO, NY Times, etc) use are "confidential sources", why, their EDITORS approve them! There you go -- it is the classic 4 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner -- only in this case they didn't even invite a sheep to add another perspective to the discussion before they dealt with the flock! Naturally, Trump claiming people should take such things with a grain of salt was DANGEROUS! (an "attack" on the "legitimate" media)

For example, NPR says "Trump's Travel Ban" multiple times a day, and persists in calling BOcare "The AFFORDABLE Care Act".

Trump has gotten temporary restrictions on travel from 7 countries, most of which also had travel restrictions under at least part of the BO administaration. "Travel Ban" is completely Fake News -- yet they repeat it like a mantra, since they know their audience likes that designation ... and realize that with enough repetition, everyone will just accept it.

Certainly they have the fig leaf of saying that the ACA is what it is named! However, they have no problem at all using "so called" or simply leaving the name off it comes to a program from the other poltical side. At this point we have not just the fact that ACA never did ANYTHING to reduce costs and make care "affordable" beyond assigning ten years of revenue to 7 years of program and claiming it "saved" money for the government!

 ACA added a whole host of new benefits -- kids under parents plan until age 26, pre-existing conditions, substance abuse treatment, birth control, abortion, etc, etc which made plans for people that pay for them HUGELY more expensive -- like from $8K per year per couple for a BETTER PLAN (lower deductables, lower co-pays) to being $20 or $30K now PLUS big co-pays and deductables!

"Affordable" my ass.

MPR / NPR is a great source for news of the left and far left. Listen to it regularly and you know what one side thinks pretty well, and you get to hear a lot of abuse of the other side. The typical NPR listener can be very smug in that their position is the ONLY "reasonable, smart, caring, educated, etc" position to hold.

The nice thing about NPR is that as a taxpayer, especially for MPR in MN, you get to PAY to hear the sound of one left hand clapping every day! ,,,, and the Buddhists thought it was a koan.

Wayback To 2009 -- Why We Have Trump

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/227836/i-still-hate-you-sarah-palin-david-kahane

It seems insane to me that there are still people out there that don't understand why Trump is in the White House. So lets make it completely simple:



1). Democrats abandoned rules / cilvility / decorum / decency / etc at essentially Watergate. The "Rules for Radicals" took over.



2). Republicans have been and remain pretty much "The Stupid Party" -- Yes, Reagan was brilliant and made it seem that "decency could win", and yes, W was an extremely decent guy that BARELY squeaked out 2 victories, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.



The linked article is well worth a read. It documents the destruction of Palin and McCain's surprise that his "friends" in the media were NOT his friends.

In Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” This is the book that “Reset” Rodham (what ever happened to her?) and BHO II grew up reading and continue to live by. If you don’t understand that that’s the way we see you — as the enemy — then you’re too dumb to survive. Remember that for us politics is not just an avocation, or even just a job, but our life. We literally stay awake nights thinking up ways to screw you. And one of the ways we do that is by religiously observing Alinsky’s Rule No. 4.

Sure it is ancient news -- hell, back then BOTH BO and Hildebeast were totally on record as AGAINST gay "marriage". (wink wink, nod, nod), but amazingly, some "Republicans" still don't get it.



For Example  little Jebbie Bush has been "calling out" Republicans for not piling on Trump over "Russia"!

"If your opponent does things that you, your head explodes on, if Barack Obama did something as it's related to Russia, you say 'this is outrageous,' all this stuff, then when your guy does the same thing, have the same passion to be critical," Bush said.

It's hard to imagine Jebbie "calling out" anyone except maybe the "bad girls" from the glee club, but let's humor him. Back in 1776, our side took some real abuse from the Brits for not lining up in bright colored uniforms and getting mowed down in ranks. Our guys (THE HORROR!) hid behind trees and shot their officers -- bummer.

**IF** all sides -- media, "The Party" (TP-D) but I repeat myself, are playing by the SAME rules of engagement, then Bushy the younger's advice should be considered. As it is, he is cheering for R's to attack TP's Panzers with horse and lance -- heroic, sure, but effective?  well, no. (see McCain and Mittens Romney).



As I've said before, since certainly the Slick Willie era (and well before in my book), we have been operating in a political system with NO RULES.



Is this a very dangerous state to be in? ABSOLUTLEY. However it is WAY more dangerous when you don't realize where you are and mount up your charger, brandish your lance, and attack the tank!









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The Kids Are Alt-Right

Angela Nagle’s “Kill All Normies” Explores Alt-Right’s Roots & Rise | National Review:

I assume the title (which I love) is a play off of this.

Although nobody was planning it, the messages extant in the culture said that you had to be a rebel to be truly authentic, while to be good you had to conform to ever-more elaborate norms defined by a new class of campus deans and human-resource administrators. Every culture has its contradictions, but this was bound to bewilder people; unsurprisingly, many of them decided it was better to be real and bad than tame and good.

 From Satan on, "the rebel cause" is ALWAYS alive. even if it needs to be "Rebel Without a Cause" as in the famous James Dean movie. Humans are rebels at heart -- what they are being a "rebel" against has never mattered much. You DID however have to REBEL to be "authentic" ... I mean how could a brand new human being conform to the old values of parents / school / church / etc?

So, unsurprisingly, as parents became far left wing haters of Western civilization, white people, religion, America, etc, what better way to rebel than Alt-Right? When any concept of timeless morality is abandoned

Nagle quotes Marxist critic Mark Fischer’s observation that the online Left is “driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.” She then adds that the witch-hunting tactics that shame people into silence have the effect of creating social and economic “scarcity” in an online world where virtue is treated as currency. If everyone has value in this medium of exchange, then the only way to accrue more yourself is to burn a few friends.

Part of the human condition is that the heart of our world views are based on emotion -- how does something make us FEEL. Oh certainly, many of us have suitable intellectual, possibly even reasonable and somewhat "factual" defenses of our views, but none of those give us that special feeling in the gut when we are attacked by "the other side". A failure of our world  view has eternal consequences -- for those of us that believe in eternal life, it could call it into question, and for those that don't, it might make them wonder if they TRUELY have "facts" to support what they believe to be a perfectly rational lack of belief. (one doesn't have to read that too carefully to see a problem).

At the base, we are all about BELIEF! That is what ALL our worldviews are founded on.

I find the view quoted from the left to be a remarkably accurate view of human nature; "A priests desire to condemn, an academics passion to point out errors, and a hipsters desire to be "in"" ... when all three can be combined, it is simply grand for human emotion.

Thus, Christ preaches the opposite. As Chritians, we are not allowed to judge and condemn, we are to be humble servants of others, and we are to expect to be hated and detested by the world.

It is never clear where a breakdown of tradition and culture will take tribes of people -- however human nature is a constant. Judgement, finger pointing and shallow / fragile "popularity" are a given.

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The Youth Are Anti Capitalist

Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem?:

In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

I can only guess that Trevor and even the author of the column do the "breathing thing", and I further assume that their feet were on the ground .... however it seems questionable if their "heads are there to move them around" -- although I'm sure Trevor has a higher IQ than me, "measures vary".

So what does Trevor conclude?

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

"Understanding and measuring progress" begs many ancient metaphysical questions of "the good". For large majorities up to say "1950", "the good" was "God, Family, Vocation, Community, National Identity / Culture ..." or similar in some sort of similar order. "Vocation / money" were there, but "vocation" did not equal pure income/consumption ... it included elements of service/purpose/meaning. Books like "The Sane Society" at least give some insight into how difficult that might be.


Assuming this, they are also subject to the effects of markets -- and government, which they conveniently fail to talk about. The US economy was definitely "mixed", the BOistan economy is about as "capitalist" as a casino in Vegas. It is rigged to allow DC which our founders would have thought would be full of "servants" to be the wealthiest area in the country to win, just like "the house" in Vegas. It can't be otherwise -- if you don't MAKE, you have to TAKE -- in Vegas from your gambling patrons, in the case of government from the citizens and future citizens.

There are a set of things in the universe that "just are" -- they aren't "good or bad", they ARE! Accepting the reality of what IS can be hugely helpful, both personally and societally -- it is like having basic clue on reality. (a REALLY high bar for 18-29 year olds!)

Therefore, "Government" is IN the market system as well, as everything/everyone is, and obviously has to be. The government takes resources from some parts of the economy, takes a portion for themselves,  and gives to others to protect and expand their interests through buying/selling goods, votes, benefits, taxes, just as all of us do. The big difference between government and the rest of the market is that it never produces anything -- it only moves resources around. It is a bit like the financial sector with no profit motive.

Before BOistan, there was a nation called the United Sates. That nation had a magical thing called LIMITED government. There were checks and balances as well as Constitutional restrictions  (that nation actually followed a written constitution) on how powerful the government could become.

These restrictions were modelled after markets. When there is a huge need for a product, the price goes up and more providers start to provide that product causing the price to go down until there is a "balance" where price provides a constant indicator to the market as to how much to provide. If there were really big needs, the government could get things like "2/3 majorities" or "Constitutional Amendments", but otherwise it had to live with it's limits.

Government got rid of the limits, so it is now like the Mob entering a market. The market is  STILL "a market", it is just "black / corrupt / criminal" -- like the market for drugs in prison. Let's take healthcare as an example -- first The Mob (government) decides who can play in the market through licensing, regulation, fees, taxes, etc. Then they execute "pay-offs" -- certain groups, say unions, elderly people, the poor, doctors, etc are "paid off" ... provided "protection", or "deals", with at least the tacit assumption that they will support the Mob (government). Some are provided lucrative deals -- like the Doctors. Think of them as highly paid hit men.

Sometimes other "protection rackets" rise up -- to provide "insurance" for a price. In the medical crime area we call it "insurance" (wink, wink). There is usually an uneasy peace with the various insurance providers -- the Mob (gov) would like to have ALL the action, but given proper kick-backs, cover, etc, they see it as beneficial for the "insurers" to have a piece of the action.

Mobs (gov) tend to be greedy. Where individuals formerly went to a doctor who dealt with their problem one on one with minimal mob/gov oversight, good doctors that provided good service at a good price were successful, and bad doctors found other employment.

As gov/mob increasingly entered the picture, certifications, costs of entering the profession, limits on how many doctors there could be, regulations, taxes, fees, records, kickbacks, requirements for increasingly expensive "insurance" (mobs breed mobs), etc grew without bound -- more and more players desire a piece of the action, and since the gov/mob is getting pay-offs from all of them, they encourage that generally non-productive "growth".

"The Real Problem" always comes down to human nature -- we tend to fall into believing that "someone else will solve our problems" -- and the "someone else" always becomes corrupt and creates greater problems than what they were supposedly solving. Eventually economic collapse, violence, poverty, hopelessness, etc result because the "Real Problem" is **US**!!!!!

If that wasn't bad enough, look at the people who the article is listening to -- Americans 18-29! The eternal fount of a lot of things -- wisdom definitely not being one of them!!

You will always see the "mob/government" trying to increase the set of people who support them, which will always mean things like surveying younger people, lowering voting ages and reducing any sort of restriction on voting (citizenship, ID, etc), because while there is indeed a "sucker born every day", as the suckers age, some of them learn by experience and become aware adults -- no matter how much the gov/mob works to prevent that!

Dayton Makes Case for Unitary Rule

Minnesota cage match, 2017 edition (3) | Power Line:

One might think that even far lefties like the Red Star Trib would be against the prospects of unitary rule by having the excutive just zero out funding for the other branches of government. One might think that -- especially with Trump as POTUS, but one would be wrong.

So the SCOTUS of MN will decide if our state is ready for any king that decides to follow Gov Goofy's lead and just zero out both the legislative and judical branches.

You wonder how anyone that would support such a move has any credibility? No need to ask "left is RIGHT (as in correct, just, etc)" ... it is just a pure statement of faith if you are on the left. It's like the Resurrection for Christians ... only without any forgiveness, morals, love, and any of that sort of trash.

The left just cares about absolute power -- "justice" to them means absolute state power, because to them The State is god.

Hater, An App For Our Time

Hater App

Increasingly our developing BOistani culture is defined by people getting together based on what they hate -- Trump, racists, white people, black people, immigrants, people who want borders, gays, Christians, rural folk, city folk, etc.

Hating your "enemies" is considered a BOistani virtue -- or as BO himself intoned. "We need to reward our friends and punish our enemies" -- this has often been called "The Chicago Way", but I believe it to be "The BO Rule" ... the BOistani equivalent of the Golden Rule.

It only seems "right" that in this brave new BOistani world that couples would find shared hatreds as a great foundation for a relationship:

That's the premise of Hater, a dating app that matches you with other users based on things you both hate. The app is only about a month old, but it's amassed about 200,000 users in the US and abroad — it's the No. 1 lifestyle app in Germany right now, the company says — with plans to "take on Tinder."

Only seems fitting for a rewrite of 1 Corinthians 13:13 for the BOistani wedding vows:

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

And now these three remain: faithlessness, hopelessness and hate. But the greatest of these is hate. 

Police Shooting Identity Politics

A police shooting with a difference | Power Line:

In BOistan, EVERYTHING is political, ALL the time!

Thus when a white Australian woman is shot and killed after making a 911 call, everyone rushes to their own tribal conclusions -- Then, OOPS, the officer is BLACK! Somali even! Everyone re-shuffles accordingly because, well, it is ALL POLITICAL ... no "facts" exist separate from politics in BOistan. Race, privilege, gender, income, ethnicity -- BOistan is big balkanized mess of identiy politcs groups, and that is ALL that matters!

So this article casts a little doubt on my theory, but only in rumor:

I reached out to a trusted law enforcement source for any insight he might be able to offer. He responds: “My first thought was that it was accidental, but rumor has it [Officer Noor is] denying that it was a negligent discharge.” He adds: “If there aren’t some sort of mitigating circumstances, and I’m struggling to imagine what they could be, this may be the most egregious police shooting in my lifetime if not longer…But not many facts are known at this point and it’s hard to pass judgement before knowing more than what’s being leaked to the media.”

The column does a pretty good job of covering how Gov Goofy sees this one completely differently -- no passing judgement on police here vs the Castile shooting! I think we all know that the Goofus Gov's "judgement" is sadly lacking in connection to reality in any case, and unfortunately what tattered shreds of "judegment" remain can best be described as "impaired".

We are LONG past a world where officers are hired and fired because of COMPETENCE vs race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Who knows about Yanez -- the "elephant in the room" was that he is hispanic. While I never heard anyone mention that while castigating his completence, I think we all know that the "hispanic" designation didn't hurt him getting a position as an officer at all.

Likewise Noor ... would he even BE a cop if he was not Somali? I'm quite sure that it is even LESS likely to find out any factual information or even conjecture about that because it is RACIST to ask such objective questions.

BOistan operates under the requirement that "affirmative action" in ANYTHING has "positive effects" on quality of whatever it touches. That is a FACT in BOistan, and it is a FACT that demands that there never be any scrutiny or even the thought that such a thing could or should be verified.

Hey, Islamic Terrorism is NOT "Islamic"! In BOistan you have to not only believe 5 or 10 insane things each day, AND, you have to castigate other people if they step out of line and observe that the emporer is naked!

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NeverTrump ... Pro Wrestling Not Real

The NeverTrump Outrage of a Disappointed Elite | Frontpage Mag:



As I've tried to point out may times, the ONLY solution is LIMITED government, which means SMALLER government. "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have" (Jerry Ford).



And my corollary, "the more you have, the more true that is until you make over 2x the top tax bracket" (currently about $225K) ... once you make over that (like $450k), you highere accountants and tax lawyers and they soak you for a couple $100K a year, but allow you keep money and interest pretty much scott free from then on out.



Politicians from BOTH parties, plus the judicial branch, plus the Administrative (Deep) State, + media, + captains of industry, big time entertainers, etc have WAY more in common with each other than they do with you and I.



My preferred example is the O-lines of the Vikings and the Packers ... they are all huge guys with speed and reflexes that make any of us look like children to them. Our best bet is just to make sure we don't get between them and the dinner table.



Do they hate each other? Hell no ... football is THEIR JOB. They may well be traded to the same team at any time and play together. The only time their name gets called is when they screw up -- holding, false start, or getting beat so bad that their QB gets hurt. The wide receivers or some back "pre-dated" every girl they ever wanted to ask out from middle school on up. They are there to protect the QB and open holes for the guys people care about. "Joe bag O donuts!".



The linked article uses pro wrestling to make the point. The elite has been fleecing all of us even "slightly above average" Joes forever -- and they definitely want to keep doing it! Hey, we are NOT supposed to notice!



So expect a LOT more "outrage" from both "sides" -- just remember, the elite HAVE a side, in actuality, we have none at all. They could care less if their policies kill millions of the "common folk" -- they have vacations, dinner parties, entertainment, kids to move into their power structure, ...



"White privilige"? Hey, go drag a $100 bill through a trailer park as James Carvelle once intoned --- see what kind of "privilige" you dredge up.



Not happy with Trump? Well, at least he is giving the IMPRESSION of pissing off the elite -- that is WAY more than we have had since at least Reagan.



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White Heteromasculism

Why these professors are warning against promoting the work of straight, white men - The Washington Post:

Realize that this is the WaPo before you jump to what one wishes was a valid conclusion -- this was published in some backwater whack job women's college campus paper. Ooopsie!

Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that doing so also perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

The WaPo is a bit behind on "cis" -- or as I like to say it. "People who might reproduce". NPR tends to use a term a good deal. As for the rest of the 58 odd and fluid genders, it is mainly "Hold my beer while I fail to reproduce" ... I submit it as the "Darwin Who?" award vs the plain old Darwin award for stupidly removing yourself from the gene pool.

The far left is sort of the secular equivalent of the "Shakers" who made some really nice furniture, but no kids. The Shakers had a better excuse though -- they thought Christ was coming more quickly than other people.

The left? I'm guessing they are hoping for "Sweet Meteor of Death" or something -- they can't REALLY have forgotten that reproduction is kinda required if you want your views to matter in a hundred years.

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Somali Officer, White Woman, WTF??

Mpls. police officer who shot, killed woman identified | KARE11.com:

Well, this unfortunate tradgedy will likely be a learning opportunity. First, DON'T BELIEVE FIRST REPORTS!

Some random thoughts:

• My prediction is that this fades from news rapidly. Doesn't really fit any narrative. She called, so it wasn't a "stop". Officer black, dead citizen white ...   Huh???
  
• What the hell went wrong seems as hard to imagine as the destroyer getting hit by the container ship a month ago. After the videos in the Yanex / Castile shooting, that was NOT the case. What went wrong there was a person high on weed blurting out "I've got a gun" and then at least appearing to go for it.
  
• If I had to guess, it may have been an AD (Accidental Discharge) ... officer had gun out because of situation as they stopped, trying to re-holster the weapon and "somehow" it went off. If it WAS through the drivers door from the passenger seat,  we will find that Noor (the officer) was left handed, his partner was one very lucky SOB and the poor lady was beyond imagination UNlucky. 

Again, I'm guessing this will just dissappear, however who knows. 

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Clothes Look Better On The Hanger

The media’s martyr complex is embarrassing - The Washington Post:

Good column, worth reading -- nothing I haven't covered a few thousand times. MSM heavily biased, thin skinned, ignores anything good about a conservative, piles on them with trivia and fake news. We know all that, and even though it is just one guest editorial at the WaPo before they return to their  own regularly scheduled martyrdom, it is never the less refreshing.

Coverage of the president’s overseas trip and participation in the Group of 20 summit offered numerous examples, with major media outlets focused more on minutiae — Ivanka sat in the president’s chair! — than on substance, giving comparatively short shrift to his powerful remarksin Poland and the important Syrian cease-fire agreementbrokered between Trump and Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. 

And later, the wall-to-wall coverage regarding Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a private Russian attorney was the definition of overkill, considering no one has brought forward any evidence to contradict the accounts of the participants that no substantive information was exchanged and there was no follow-up by anyone. But it was another opportunity to repeat “Russia, Russia, Russia,” the media’s magic words for conjuring, Beetlejuice-fashion, the genie they hope will vanquish their bogeyman.

After the MSM tells you for months that the sun doesn't rise in the east, it is at least refreshing when they have a guest stop by and give one editorial column letting us know that that yes, even though their biases and emotions won't let them recognize it these days, it is STILL rising in the east, and all their reporting of fake news (which will continue) actually is fake, and they have no choice but to keep reporting the fake news.

It is like the old guy whose wife keeps asking him how she looks in that dress and he responds "great honey!". Unlike my 90 year old father reported about someone at the nursing home he was at, that "Like pretty much everyone our age, the clothes look better on the hanger than when we are wearing them".

For much of the left, fake news is really all they can possibly handle at this point! Just like an elderly person whose clothes would look better on the hanger, the MSM just can't accept that Trump is having a good deal of success!

Even if their stories would look better if they just reported from the hanger of reality vs the fetid imagination between their ears.

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The Global Swamp Vs Trump, Whose Russians Are These?

The new meaning of collusion | Power Line:

A shady lawyer from a foreign power offers a political campaign potenentially treasonous dirt on the opposition candidate. There is PLENTY of evidence to suspect that such hard evidence might be avaiable -- 20% of the US Urainium reserves transferred to Russia in a pay for play $50 million dollar deal -- all that is needed is solid lock her up and throw away the key proof. Her husband with a totally known history of womanizing having visiited Russia, laughed with Putin on deals unknown -- not hard at all to imagine all sorts of documentation on blackmail known that could embarrass the assumed future madame president.

There is no question that any Democrat politician would check it out and nobody would even be concerned. Teddy Kennedy is documented to have tried to get the Russians to help Mondale in '84. Simple -- just threaten the US with war, it will be bad for Reagan! Nobody really cares.

Are we supposed to have forgotten Slick Willie and "Donor Maintainence" events in '96? As covered in this article: 

Do they remember Chung — he was the one who in the pre-farecard era said the Clinton White House was like a subway because you had to put in a coin to open the gate — testified before the House of Representatives that the head of Chinese military intelligence told him: "We like your president very much. We hope to see him re-elected. I'll give you 300,000 U.S. dollars. You can give it to your president and the Democratic Party."

We could waste a lot of time on "facts", but why bother? Everyone that cared in the least knew that the White House was completely for sale in the Clinton years, and at least half the country cared not at all -- ho hum, it's our guy.

BOTH sides are against Trump and his supporters, here is National Review on the subject ...

My colleague Jonah Goldberg has given perhaps the best one-sentence advice for conservatives in these troubling times: “Trust nothing, defend nothing.” We don’t know the truth. We don’t know the extent of the Trump team’s misdeeds. We do, however, know enough to reject the administration’s spin. Donald Jr.’s meeting was, in fact, a “big deal,” and Americans who aren’t troubled are Americans who need to check whether their tribalism has trumped their good sense.

Got that? National Review has gotten the "good sense" to have very little to say about a Republican party that swore they would repeal BOcare if they got the House, then swore they would repeal it if they got the Senate, then FAILED TO EVEN PASS SOMETHING FOR BO TO VETO! Then essentially fought Trump tooth and nail, and STILL can't repeal it!

Were NR even remotely "conservative" or "small government" rather than just being ELITIST, they would be embarrassed, as every other real conservative / small government person is. ABSOLUTELY we don't want to trust NR, and why the hell would one defend them? The idea of politics is to have "your side win" -- obviously NR's "side" -- Hillary, failed to win, and they are still in a tiff.

Justice Gorsuch ALONE is such a huge accomplishment for Trump compared to what we would have got with Hillary that anyone remotely conservaitve is willing to do a lot of "defense". One doesn't have to "trust" anyone to defend your obvious self interest. 

The other question  is "Whose Russians are these "???? There is "Natasha" circled with with "Boris" near her during a foreign affairs meeting in DC 8 days after Trump Tower. Both of these fine Russians were involved in  the "Trump Dossier" caper where the ex-British spook worked with Russians to "leak" a tawdry tale involving hookers urinating -- something a little hard to buy about germaphobe Trump. Orbis, and Fusion GPS were involved, and both Boris and Natasha have connections with Fusion GPS. 

But never mind -- clearly "The Party" (TP-D), the Deep State and nearly all the media including erstwhile supposedly "conservative" outlets like NR hate Trump. He is not the status quo, and ALL those groups, which at this point it is clearly obvious also included the bulk of the Republican Party, have been riding the same gravy train, and they DON'T want it to stop! In fact, they are REALLY worried about what happens to them if it stops. 

Clinton Cash for the whole time from when they took office in '92 up through '16? Not an issue for anyone in the elite, including the Republican Party. BO using the IRS to attack conservative organizations like the Tea Party? Didn't bother any of the elite including the Republcian Party -- hell, they hated the Tea Party worse than the Democrats anyway! 

We could waste a lot more time here, but there is ONE LEADERSHIP really -- the elite. It encompasses TP, The Republican Party, media (largely "both sides" as the NR article shows), business, education, etc ... and then there is the anti-elite -- TRUMP. How was the whole "Trump Dossier" funded? This from here:

According to a Vanity Fair article, Fusion GPS was first funded by an anti-Trump Republican donor, but, after Trump’s nomination, Fusion and Steele were paid by Democratic donors whose identity remains secret. Writes Satter: “Perhaps the time has come to expand the investigation into Russia’s meddling to include Mrs. Clinton’s campaign as well.”

The elite are nothing if not "bi-partisan", it is ALL about THEM, and Democrat or Republican are labels they are happy to wear in the service of themselves. Is Trump any different? Who knows -- he may just be doing the bidding of the elite for his own gain as well -- however it certainly LOOKS like all sides are against him.

Does ANYONE anywhere think that ANY political campaign would refuse to LISTEN to potential dirt on the opposition candidate, no matter what the source? I can't believe that anyone including NR actually believes that -- they just feel that they have to STOP TRUMP, so they fake like this is somehow "unusual" or "wrong".

It's a GLOBAL swamp folks -- from Davos on down.

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Trust In Government Erodes When Government Not Trustworthy

FBI's reputation crumbles with Clinton email fumble: Glenn Reynolds:

One of those "News at 11" healines. 

"The Party" (TP-D) controlled, and in some cases funded (NPR) media often sheds huge tears over "loss of trust in government". They hate to see the sheep not have tons of trust in their increasingly lavishly paid, gold class benefited plus wined and dined at public expense bureaucrat "shepherds"  just because the bureaucrats whose salaries they pay call them "deplorables" and fail to do their jobs.

As Reynolds puts it:

Politicians have a short-term focus, seldom looking past the next election. But for those of us with a longer view, this is a serious problem. As The Atlantic recently noted, trust in government is collapsing around the world. The reason for this, I’m afraid, is that government isn’t trustworthy. We used to try to do better in the United States, but lately the powers that be seem to be rubbing our noses in their untrustworthiness and their ability to avoid the consequences. This, I predict, will not end well.

This is anything but a new problem. OT era rulers in Egypt in Babylon had lots of problems with their feckless beauracracy and often ended up choosing advisors from the Jews ( Joeseph, Daniel, etc). The reason that Rome lasted so long is that they effectively worshiped the Greeks, who were the philosophic parents of the idea that "this is NOT all there is" ... eg. there is a dimension beyond our dimension in which perfection is reality, and what we see is a mere projection ... "shadows on the wall of the cave".

The job  of the true "elite" -- the priest, philosopher, royalty, upper class, etc, was to see this transcendent dimension and use it to rule with true justice. As with most things, Christ said it best in Matt 20:26 "Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant."

Without transcendence, it is all POWER, which in this context means POLITICS. The linked is not very long and Reynolds is an excellent writer ... it's a sad litany if you care about competent government,  here is a teaser:

The FBI had interviewed Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, after being warned by the Russian government that he was a threat, but still did nothing. Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured as a result. The FBI also investigated in advance but failed to prevent mass killings by Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and Arkansas shooter Carlos Bledsoe.

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Most Republican Part of the Bible

Politico Attacks Rubio, 'Social Darwinist' Book of Proverbs:

Politico took Rubio to task for tweeting verses out of Proverbs because it was allegedly the "most Republican part of the Bible", since it asserts that good character and hard work are more likely to bring riches than wickedness and sloth.

The article is pretty funny, though I suppose not for Democrats -- I have to admit that I'm always impressed with a Democrat that knows a Bible verse beyond Matt 7:1 "Judge not lest ye be judged".

Naturally, they usually use that verse in their judgement of what they see as someone elses judgement, however it IS still actually in the Bible. If they read more of it, I have faith that God would show them the light. Complete verses are good too ... Slick Willie quoted Prov 29:18 in his inauguration, "Where there is no vision, the people perish", but neglected to quote the second part of the verse ... "but he who keeps the law, happy is he".  I wonder why?

I find the most Republican verse in the Bible to be Ecclesiastes 10:2 "The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left."

;-)

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Gray Lady "Mistaken" Relative to Attractive Lady

NY Times: Hey, blaming Sarah Palin for that shooting was "an honest mistake" - Hot Air Hot Air:



Hey, it was an "honest mistake" to connect the Gabby Giffords shooter to Sarah Palin, TRUST US!



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Hamilton vs "Hamilton"

The Hamilton Hustle - Why Have Liberals Embraced America's Most Reactionary Founder? | Zero Hedge:



Anyone with a passing knowlege of the founding knows that Hamilton was totally against democracy. So why do the current "Democrats" love him? Well, it isn't very surprising to readers of this blog, because we know that "The Party" (TP-D) is about POWER, no matter by what means it is achieved. "Democracy" is great as long as it gives your side power -- when it doesn't, it is bad!



Good article if you need a refresher on reality. See if the closing paragraph sounds like any political party you are familiar with:

Set in contrast to the actual life and career of its subject, the play Hamilton is a feat of political alchemy - as is the stunningly successful marketing campaign surrounding it. But our generation’s version of Hamilton adulation isn’t all that different from the version that took hold in the 1920s: it’s designed to subvert democracy by helping the professional class to associate the rise of finance with the greatness of America, instead of seeing in that financial infrastructure the seeds of a dangerous authoritarian tradition.

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Russia Out, America In, Germany Down

NATO Russians Out, Americans In, Germans Down: Updated, Reversed | National Review:

The title is the famous assessment by Lord Ismay of Britain as to the purpose of NATO after WWII. Churchill and Ismay understood that "peoples" tend to have a character. (Churchill called them "races" as in the English race, the German race, etc)

In Ismay’s time, such aggression was different from lesser Fascist movements in Italy and Spain, largely because of the central geographic position of a unified young German nation-state, its sizable population, its national wealth, and what we reluctantly in today’s politically correct landscape might call “German character.” That stereotype originates from the time of Caesar and Tacitus: the ability of the German people to create economic, military, and cultural influence well beyond what one might expect from the actual size of even an impressive German population or geography. And such dynamism is often expressed by eyeing neighbors’ spiritual or concrete territory.

In science, if a "stereotype", like "temperatuire getting warmer" holds from say 1865 to like 2K (150 years), it tends to be called "a fact". Since the "stereotype has held since the time of Tacitus (100 AD), or basically 2000 thousand years ... ???

Recent Pew international polls reveal that Germany of all the countries of the European Union is by far the most anti-American, with scarcely 52 percent expressing a positive appraisal of the United States — well before Donald Trump ran for office. Media polls show that the German press ran the most negative appraisals of Trump of all global news (98 percent of all coverage was critical). A fair summary of current German views of the United States would be not much different from the stereotypes of the 1930s: undisciplined, prone to wild swings in policy, a bastardized and commercialized culture of poorly informed and highly indebted consumers.

Germany has tended to have a pretty low opinion of the US for ages. I tend to generally agree with their opinion of current Americans, the big question is if push comes to shove, will that opinion be wrong 3 our of 3 times, or only 2 out of three since the WWI and WWII opinions fell on hard times relative to military prowess.

No one quite knows the strange driving force behind Angela Merkel’s demand that the European Union open its borders to millions of mostly young men from the war-torn Middle East and the chaotic lands of North Africa. Cynics might suggest that a shrinking Germany wants young, cheap manual laborers. Post-war guilt may play a role as Germany’s cure for its past becomes nearly as obsessive as the behavior that led to the disease in the first place.

I think the developed world elite is of the opinion that Islam will fall to western decadence just as Christianity largely has -- they assume that those young male imports will indeed be cheap manual laborers, and they will suffer along in stagnation -- as have blacks in the US and increasingly the abandoned red state lower class whites. Maybe.

Could also be that they are look at the US miltary being currently 40% minority with the percentage rising, remember that a lot of Germany's WWII army was conscripted from conqured countries, and dream of a largely Muslim force under the command of "real Germans". 

As the column closes we are reminded that those who fail to study history often get to repeat it. 

He would warn about what happens when NATO withers on the vine: Russian is a bit in, America is somewhat out, and Germany more up than down — as Ismay feared when he helped offer the remedy of NATO at its creation.

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Sowell of A Sage

The Education of an American Sage - WSJ:

Definitely one of the heroes that I worship just a bit too much. Now 86 and no longer doing a column, interviewd here by WSJ. A sage indeed.

"How has America changed over Mr. Sowell’s lifetime? “Oh my God,” he responds, “that is truly a depressing subject.” He laments the “huge degeneration” and what he sees as the spread of “the grievance culture to low-income whites—and even to places like Great Britain.” 

An idea has taken root “that you’re entitled to certain things, that you don’t necessarily have to earn them,” he says. “There’s a belief that something’s wrong if you don’t have what other people have—that it’s because you’re ‘disadvantaged.’ A teenage dropout mother is told she has a disadvantage. But if you’re going to call the negative consequences of chosen behavior ‘disadvantage,’ the word is corrupt beyond repair and useful only for propaganda purposes.”"

Excellent discussion on school choice and how it could move blacks that care about their kids to the R colum.



READ IT! I hope he lives to a 110 with all his faculties intact, however I intend to keep listening to him as if this was his last day!



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Gettysburg, Brandenburg, Warsaw -- Historic Speeches

Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland | July 6, 2017 | whitehouse.gov:

When we live through history, we tend to not notice the major mileposts until they are well in the rear view mirror. I'm not going back to Gettysburg today, although I have been there both physically and intellectually. I will return to Brandenburg for a bit, because I think it is the most recent model that helps us understand the potential parallels to Trumps speech in Warsaw.

Reagan and his battle against the forces of socialism and communism had a very happy ending for those of us who believe in God, Family and limited government. I covered a good book on the subject here, a key quote from that book is a message between an East German leader and the leader of the USSR, Khruschev:

"The experience of the last years have proven that it is not possible for a socialist country, such as the GDR to cary out peaceful competition with an imperialist country such as West Germany with open borders".

My contentiion is that the forces of "progressiveism" are generally intelligent, (or at least their leadership is). There have been WAY too many historic (USSR, East Germany) and current (Venezuela,  North Korea) examples of the failure of Godless Socialism to provide anything but both physical and spirital poverty to the bulk of the people under its control, but they feel their superior intellects are just too great a blessing to deny the masses their" benevolent" authoritarian rule. They know what the common man needs, FAR more thant he common man.

Trump calls out these adversaries here:

Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger -- one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies. 

Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are. (Applause.) If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.

Trump is making Trumpism, which is essentially a return to Western civilization, very clear in the above -- and here as well:

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?   

 Our elite generally hates Western civilization, covered well here. Their attacks on this speech are largely along the lines of "Western civilization is Christian and white, and therefore exclusionary and racist, and it, along with Trump, must be repudiated".

The whole speech is WELL worth taking the (fairly short) time needed to read it. It also covers the little reported fact that we are now deploying Patriot missles in Poland.

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Who Loves Russia? Poland, Missles, Obama, Trump

Our MSM tells us that the Russians love Trump -- always have, helped get him elected, he is in their pocket -- lots of MSM stories on that narrative. Reminds me of when Reagan was totally dangerous buffoon for suggesting that the USSR would be "consigned to the ash heap of history". Gotta love our media -- always certain, frequently VERY wrong. They do however really understand that everyone needs a narrative. Push theirs, block their opposition -- anyone not worshiping at the progressive altar. Simple.

Here we have a quote from a former Czech official decrying Obama's 2009 decision to abandon a missle defense system which included missles in Poland.

Alexandr Vondra, a former Czech deputy prime minister and ambassador to Washington intimately involved in the negotiations with the Americans, said he was surprised. "This is a U-turn in US policy," he said. "But first we expect the US to honour its commitments. If they don't they may have problems generating support for Afghanistan and on other things."

BO was certainly a reliable enemy to our friends and a reliable friend of our enemies.

Here we have an article covering Patriot missles being deployed in Poland, and a quote from Putin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, has called the missile defense systems in Eastern Europe a "great danger." Putin also threatened to enhance Russia's own missile strike capability in response.

I have no doubt that Russia is always happy to cast doubt on our elections by any means possible -- leaking actual emails showing that Democrats rigged their primaries, colluded with the media on the debates,  and colluded with the media to have Trump as their opponent certainly doesn't make our poltical system look "fair and balanced". Those of us not in thrall to "The Party" (TP-D) pretty much knew that already.

My contention is that the Russians fully expected Hillary to win like everyone else. My guess is that they were much happier with that prospect than with Trump winning because of things like the above and the fact that his policies are much more likely to make them have to confront a srtonger BOistan.

No doubt what they are REALLY unhappy about with Trump is that he is certainly going to "drill baby drill", "frack baby frack", and even put in pipelines to transport the oil! As one of the big energy producing nations, Russia HATES competition, and has spent millions of dollars trying to stop fracking.

Their main mission on this front (and ours in reverse) is to make us weaker -- and making it look like our elections can be "manipulated" is a great way to do that. So relative to elections, Russion mission accomplished. Relative to actual interaction on the world stage, not so much.

A little more detail on the whole Russian nothingburger here ... obstruction of "justice" (witch hunt) is really all that remains.

Lizard At White Castle

Gov. Dayton, don’t honor Philando Castile | Power Line:

If a white Castile was high on pot, stopped, yelled out "I have a gun" and started reaching for it, he would be dead and outside of friends and family, nobody would know or care. Let's call him "White Castle".

Naturally, lefties will claim "profiling" ... the description of the robbery suspect was that he was black (eg black and male), so until we get to descriptions like "subject was humanoid, certain height, weight, etc", that will be a problem.

When people select their race, gender, and sometimes species, how can any observer make descrptions like "black, male, large, etc" ... I personally identify as 5'10", 180 lbs with a full head of hair. Certainly nobody in society would disrespect my right to identify as such -- however, it is quite likely that they might err in describing me were they not to check out what I identify as!

Perhaps we could name a program at the U to study this important area after Castile -- however, I'm afraid the combo of being stoned, smoke rolling out of your car and saying out of the blue "I have a gun" then reaching for it is likely to cause problems no matter what you may think you are.

Perhaps if he had yelled out "I'm a lizard!"?

In honor of the general surrealistic state of our world today, I vote we name the new program "Trans Lizard At White Castle" -- in honor of, well, the "reality" which our times have created.

Defending Civilization

The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump's Poland Speech - The Atlantic:

I'll start out with two quotes from the linked article:

"The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white. "

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.”

This is the Atlantic, so naturally the conclusion is that Trump is a racist using religion to increase paranoia. If you want that view, go read the article.

First, what is "Western"? At one time we would have all agreed it was "Western Civilization" ... Judeao-Christian, Greek, Roman, Enlightenment, England followed by the US as leadership in it's latter centuries. Now? Well, we will get to that, but "the modern enlightened" ("liberal", "progressive", etc)  know they hate it. This is from this excellent article, "Yes They Really DO Despise Their Civilization".

I mean, really, how ignorant and provincial do you have to be, Messrs. Beinart and Bouie, to hear Trump’s speech and think of it as a #MAGA version of a Nuremberg Rally Address? Is the degree of self-hatred of the West required to be a virtuous, woke person such that you cannot tell the difference between Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus and the Horst Wessel Song? Do they really think Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (all of which is available on YouTube, starting here) is a plummy version of Triumph of the Will? If standing against this kind of liberal insanity means I have to stand with Donald Trump, well, okay, I’ll stand with Donald Trump. I won’t like it, but at least Donald Trump doesn’t hate his own civilization.

So if you hate your own civilization,  where do you go? We need a cartoon reminder:

What "other civilization" are they after? One without Trump and his "supporters"? They make it pretty clear that it IS NOT "Western Civilization", because that is "Christian and white". So what is it? Islam? Marxism? Black Lives Matter? I suspect they would vaguely say it is "A new fully tolerant, equal, secure, well educated (with progressive education), environmentally friendly, gender free, priviledge free, moral judgement free, etc ... culture/civilization".

I've not really heard them say in any detail though, and certainly not with any discussion of "how" -- essentially, the message of the left continues to be "pull the trigger, we will figure something out on our descent into the abyss" ... trust us. The police are playing the role of Western Civilization, the Terminator is "progressivism" ... they don't tend to honor their "promises", and they have some BAD feelings about Western Civilization!

As the quoted paragraph says -- it is pretty damned easy to support Trump as opposed to people that hate their own civilization, and maybe worse, consider civilization to be their enemy, and VERY disposeable in  order to reach their goals.

The Trump Warsaw speech is WELL worth reading the whole thing -- here is my take on it (Hint, think Reagan at Brandenburg gate!)

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I Still Love America, I Just Miss Her

America: Can You Stop Loving Her if She Changes? | National Review:

Jonah Goldberg is having a tiff with the editors of NR over "What is America" (Rich Lowrey is editor in chief). The editors declare they would still love America even if it had a completely different set of ideals -- and Jonah apparently doesn't realize that the area of N America where the nation of America used to exist DOES have a completely different set of ideals -- which is why I call it BOistan.

Rich started by saying that America is a nation, not an idea. He then went on to demonstrate the ways in which America is a nation (it’s got borders and a people and a culture and the like). That’s fine with me, I suppose. I concluded a while ago that the “Nation vs. Idea” argument is poorly framed. If all you have to do is cite borders, roads, and a post office to prove it’s not an idea, then what’s the point?

Every philisopher understands neccessary vs sufficent. Philosophers all breathe, sweat, defecate, etc -- which are neccessary conditions. NONE of those is SUFFICIENT to call yourself a philosopher. All nations have borders, people, culture, post offices, etc -- those are neccessary conditions, not sufficient to being called "America".

"Idea, ideals, values, principles" -- The TRUTHS that America held  to be self evident and endowed by GOD. To believe in America is to believe in divine founding -- else there are no transcendent truths, and America could not exist without transcendent truth. The founders certainly allowed people to live in the territory of America (the neccessary but not sufficient borders) without acknowledging God -- they were just to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and declare that the founding principles were self evident "just cuz" ... like created equal without any creator, rendering "equal" just another man made thought changeable by the only remaining moral authority when God dies -- power. "Might is right" with a ballot or a bullet.

Roe V Wade, Obergefell, BOcare, not impeaching Bill Clinton, 20 trillion in debt and a few hundred other things finally convinced me that "We weren't in Kansas (America) anymore".

The unwillingness of someone of Goldberg's stature to even recognize that we are fish swimming in a BOistani rather than American pond is traumatizing -- failure to recognize and accept reality is not a good sign for ability to remedy our situation. Jonah ends his column rather whimsically for such a serious matter.

Imagine one person tells you that his ideal form of government would be to get rid of the Constitution and make Kim Kardashian queen. You’d think that person is silly, probably even deranged. Now imagine that 270 million Americans believed that and, having the necessary supermajority to pull it off, voted away our Constitution. As the coronation of Queen Kim, First of Her Name, unfolded on every channel, would you not change your view of America, her culture, and her people? Might you not fall out of love with America as it is? 

My hunch is Rich et al. would still love America, but you know what America they would love? The America That Was. They might even join the resistance to the regime of Queen Kim (I’m fairly certain Charlie would) in an effort to restore self-government to America. And here’s the funny thing: They’d be fighting against the American nation in the name of that great and glorious cause, the American Idea. And that’s the crucial difference.

It would really be nice to have a discussion about what ideas/values/truths/etc that we seek to return to -- I think we need a much clearer picture of the America that we see receeding away from us ... sort of a philosophical version of this shot of Queen Kim ... only in this case a picture of  "The America That WAS" (TATW) receeding -- what would she look like in your mind?

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Prayers For Scalise

Rep. Scalise readmitted to intensive care unit | Power Line:



Steve Scalise is back in intensive care listed as "serious" with infection concerns. While the MSM has pretty much forgotten the politically motivated assassination attempt because it is not "their team" that got shot, it would be nice if there really was still something more important that politics in BOistan.



We all heard that he was shot in the "hip / pelvis / bullet went through him / etc". Depending on just where, there is a LOT of bone, nerves, blood system and unfortunately bowel to increase the infection concerns.



Heavenly Father, God of all, we humbly pray for healing for our brother Steve Scalise, wisdom for the doctors attending him, and peace for his family. Please heal Steve and help our nation to see that only in you can we hope to continue on. In Jesus holy name, amen.



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Ban Fireworks, Legalize Weed!

Gomberg: I don't care if you love them; it's time we ban fireworks | The Salt Lake Tribune:

Along with the belief that ANYTHING can be legislated by government -- from health, to wealth, to happiness, to peace; -- the faith that what I like ought to be mandatory, and what I don't like should be criminal, is deep in the liberal psyche.

Philando Castile, high on weed with a gun, a girlfriend and kid in the back of a car has a traffic stop that isn't as fun as the Cheech and Chong version in "Up In Smoke".

In the big liberal spinner of "who / what to blame, cuz we are never responsible for even our own actions", this time the spinner came up "racist cops". This one happened to be hispanic, which seems inconvienient, but never mind -- that was the story, and they have stuck to it.

Weed causing a problem? Uh, like was I speeding man? ... You are parked! ... Wow, heavy man!

Back in the '70s, college kids liked to get stoned and listen to "Firesign Theatre" ... lots of speaker to speaker, foggy background stuff, odd interruptions -- just the stuff to make people stoned out of their gourd (and I use that term with apologies to gourds) giggle and laugh uncontrollably.

Without the "benefit" of mind altering substances, it seems a little well ... "odd", however the fact that is HILLARIOUS to stoners, might give some insight to the thought that driving while stoned and carrying might not be the safest way to go.

My suspicion is that the liberal brain is pretty much like Firesign Theatre 24x7  -- here is the "important part" of the fireworks ban column ...

I get that this might be annoying because this land is your land ('Merica!), but this land is also my land; it was made for you AND me (and our pets and veterans, and the people who want to go bed before you're done celebrating). So, regardless of how much we might love fireworks, I think it's time we find new ways of celebrating the Fourth and 24th of July.

There we have it ... fireworks scare dogs and veterans, so we need to ban them nationally and find "new ways" to celebrate the "4th and the 24th of July" -- hey, one day is pretty much the same as the next when you are stoned. Perhaps we could all go out, drive around with our guns while stoned and yell out "I've got a gun!!" to scare the cops if we are stopped.

Weed is safe, guns and fireworks are dangerous. Guns and fireworks give people weird ideas and cause them to do bad things. Weed has no such complications.

Everything you know is wrong.

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