Pelosi Spoke To Christian Business Group

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/30/a-higher-standard-for-the-gop/

UPDATE ... UNBELIEVABLY, the top story yesterday about Steve Scalise allegedly speaking to a neo-nazi group was "fake but accurate"!

Nancy Pelosi is under fire and may have to step down after reports today that she spoke to a Christian Business group in the mid-90's. In checking into some of the people at this meeting it was discovered that over 75% believed that killing unborn babies as wrong, 90% were against "gay marriage", a number of the businesses were profitable, and a few of the attendees had even donated to organizations identified for targeting by the IRS as "conservative". 

In a statement today, Pelosi said: 

This group in no way reflects my values and I apologize for having spoken to them. I was younger, I had less staff, and was really unaware that that type of bigoted "christian" even existed -- I thought they were a Unitarian group of non-profits!   

You all know my values. I favor subsidized killing of the unborn in any manner at any time at least up to birth. I am forced at times to speak to heterosexuals, but generally try to focus on the more representative  gay, lesbian, transsexual, cross-gender and uncertain. 

I have often and gladly spoken to Black Panthers, avowed black supremacists including Obama, Eric Holder and Al Sharpton. I regularly speak to Islamic freedom fighters, as well as any type of gang not including white people.  I have been willing to speak to Asian Gangs, but continue to re-evaluate that stand as evidence of too many of their families being intact and businesses being profitable continues to mount.  

I believe that anyone that gets into this country by any method should be able to vote early and often as long as they are in a group that strongly supports the values that you and I share.  Many Felons are on my staff and regularly help with all our vote outreach projects, especially focusing on the important dead vote as well as the current growth area of virtual voters.  

I have apologized repeatedly for being white, but am proud to be a woman. 

I thank you in the media for your continued strong support and hope that you and my constituents will accept my heartfelt apology. Together we can continue to stand strong and eventually stamp out Christians and profitable business. Thank You. 

Ok, so that may have been not a completely factual statement -- but in spirit I'd argue it is pretty darned close. 

The linked article is a good one -- covering just SOME of the many cases of Democrat malfeasance that are "forgiven and forgotten" -- Robert Byrd is always one of the most amazing to me, an actual OFFICIAL in the KKK that remained a D Senator to death. The article fails to mention Ted, Mr drown your young secretary, Kennedy. His "penalty" was that he didn't get to be president! (boo hoo) 

What the article fails to point out is the absolute insanity of the Rep Steve Scalise "charge". He supposedly SPOKE to a group over a DECADE ago that had connections to white supremacists? I can't even imagine how long the list would be if we went down the list of all sorts of "Nation of Islam", CAIR, communists, Black Panthers, gang connections, etc that Democrats had TALKED TO in the past. 

But I can't imagine that anyone in the media -- nor for that matter really people on the right would even WANT to demand that Democrats not TALK TO groups that may contain or be associated with causes that the candidate doesn't agree with. Why would we? There are basically only two parties in the country -- no matter how unpopular, marginalized, disenfranchised, etc some group may be, they are likely to vote for one party or the other. 

Much like leather fetish lesbian dykes may have 401Ks, jobs and even be somebodies daughter, sister, aunt, etc, even avowed white supremacists may likewise have 401Ks, jobs, be related to people, and do all manner of things that are common to all. They likely have to vote for one party or the other, and while one may THINK that given what identifies them, you could guess which party, you may not be right. 

Nation of Islam votes D, yet a large percentage of Jews vote D as well -- go figure. Most of this is likely left over from the false idea that "Nazi is right wing" (when of course like all other forms of Statism, it is LEFT wing), but it still remains one of the "biggest tent" paradoxes -- Nation of Islam wants to kill the Jews, yet they are both generally in the same political party! 

Of course we KNOW what the purpose of the coverage of this is. The Republicans won the election and are about to take over Congress, and The Party (TP- Democrat) and it's wholly supportive subsidiary, the MSM is MAD AS HELL! So, this is nothing but a very visible innuendo smear. It is clearly a smear they would never even consider -- or even be able to conceive of from the left, because they don't see that much wrong with Arab organizations with links to terrorism, support for Sharia Law, or black organizations that condone violence against whites or Jews, etc. 

The bottom line is that the MSM hates Republicans and we can get ready for outlandish smears of all manner over the next two years! 

Postmodern Deconstructionist Rape

A Bad Week for Rape Culture | Power Line:

For those fortunate souls spared from the concepts of postmodernism, and deconstructionism, I'll be very brief ... you can look up Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida on your own and attempt to arrive at a definition of these schools of "thought" (and the quotes are VERY appropriate) that were largely created to question all of the underpinnings of at least western, if not all thought. Essentially, they say that "truth" is all a matter of perspective, mostly defined by "power" and "privilege". So morals, law and even science become targets of "literary criticism" ... the ad hominem attack being as good as any and the straw-man argument being the equivalent of mathematical proof by their logic.

I'm not going to dwell on these definitions other than to say that folks like Foucault and Derrida wound my spirit. While there is no question that Middle Ages Christendom was corrupted by a bad series of Popes (see Borgia popes if you want your stomach turned), it has been quite clear since at least the middle of the 20th century that Secular Humanism has been corrupted to an even greater degree and part of the fruits of that are things like Postmodernism and Deconstructionism.

I believe that you have to be careful when exposing yourself to poison, and I find that very much exposure to things like Postmodernism and Deconstructionism have the effect of poison on my spirit. These concepts have however had a very large effect on our culture.

For those that have been involved in corporate life post '90s, at least the males are aware that "Sexual Harassment" is defined by "how the person reporting it FEELS".  In the case I was personally involved with, the "feeling" had to do with some mixture of discomfort in finding out that office mates who had helped care for a young lady when she had a broken leg by getting her lunch, water, etc also harbored "conservative political views".

 To make matters worse, they planned a Bachelor Party for a younger male co-worker, and they were supposedly "decent guys with wives that had kids and everything" ... a Bachelor Party! How could they! This would have been late '80s, it was my first experience of a "snowflake" experiencing the "horror" of the world not being exactly like she felt it SHOULD be!  If you have never experienced this, it may sound hard to believe, but it is a fact -- that charge is a LEGITIMATE charge of "Sexual Harassment" in our current USA corporate environs. Males can and do lose their jobs over things like this.

Fast forward to "rape" ... now sometimes asserted to be "unwanted kissing", and then sprinkle in "the truth is what you say or feel it is", "there is no objective truth", "western culture is a rape culture" and a witches brew of other bright ideas, and you get things like Leah Dunham and the University of Virginia referenced in the link.

We live in a society where at least all our elites are well versed in all manner of relativism, supposed noxious effects of power and privilege, as well as a strong desire to "be on the right ("The Party") side" and WELL aware of both the prizes of being on the "good" side (see Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and thousands of others we never hear about) and the penalties for being on the "bad" side (eg. Bill Cosby, Clarence Thomas, Bob Packwood, and a cast of thousands having lost their jobs, promotions, etc.

In the words from Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate". Those of us on the "bad" side from the perspective of "The Party" need to be VERY careful, or better yet, "get our minds right".  While in SOME (very few) cases as in the linked article, the forces of "the truth is what I feel it is" will go so far out on a limb that the elites can't quite strain credulity far enough to accommodate them, but it won't be often, and it certainly won't be for lack of trying!

The historical end of this is that reality finally becomes too great for the masses to ignore  and there is a revival -- of Christianity at least, if not some form of conservative republican government, ala the original founding of the US or Burke's England. But it usually takes starvation, killing and lots more badness before that comes to pass.

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Shivers of Eternal Awareness

WATCH: After His Owner Died, Everyone Was Shocked By What This Dog Did. I Have Goosebumps. [VIDEO]:

I'm re-reading one of my favorite books on how to think about meaning / the universe, "Ideas Have Consequences". I'll do a review on it here in a few days, but the basic element is that how we live personally and even more importantly, as a society/culture, is defined by how we answer the question: "Is man the measure of all things, or are there "universals", "transcendentals" that provide the ultimate forms of our existence?".

The layman version of that is "God, yes or no"?

One of the questions that I have is if all people actually feel a shiver of extra awareness when they see the light hit the dog in the linked video, or if it is only some of us? Christians? Other? My belief is that it is universal and that some either deny or have managed to suppress / alter the natural "shiver of awareness" over the course of life to suppress that feeling or convert it to anger, hurt, derision, etc as they declare "it is just some trick", "it is an accident", etc.. They have "killed the shiver" and now it is a negative that makes them want to strike back and what they are convinced is "fake".

In song, my prayer for myself and those I love on this subject is well embodied in this song -- which I think hints at accepting and believing in the shiver -- if even some of them turned out to be "fake".

Naturally, it COULD all a be a big accident, and we no longer have to feel small beside the ocean  -- the transcendent does not force belief, yet ignoring it can be exceedingly hard I think. Hard enough to turn hopeful loving people into insolent haters -- because maybe there was something about Gods purity that made them feel smaller than they wanted to.

Our days on this rock have a number of  "light on the dog" or "stand beside the ocean" kinds of moments  -- all clearly explainable by coincidence, random chance, good wine or a momentary chill maybe. Phenomena like humor, music, love, consciousness, etc are all  "explainable" by "random selection" -- or  just "accidental artifacts, side-effects" ... nothing to see here, move along. Don't give faith a chance -- but really, it is just THAT faith that links us to the eternal that "the other" is going to work hard to get you to deny.

Our very existence remains a matter of faith. That the universe that we live in is teleological (goal directed/has a purpose), is rational, predictable and can be understood by reason/experience  are ALWAYS matters of faith! Those matters are not provable by experience -- induction can falsify, but it can never prove. We can ALWAYS deny -- 3 times, hundreds of times maybe, but no matter how angry that shiver may make some, does it ever really really go away?

Accepting the existence of God is called a "leap of faith". I personally find atheism, the ultimate faith in the non-existence of God to be a MUCH greater "LEAP of faith" since as Nietzsche explained when he lamented "God is dead", it is known by thinkers to be a lamentable decision. A leap and a tumble into the the abyss. No God, no center, no meaning, no purpose, no direction ... the faith of nullification. Indeed the HOPE of instant annihilation. But can even rejection really kill the shiver? I don't know, I certainly don't want to walk that dark path, but my sense tells me no -- the shiver will keep calling, keep trying to bring you home. At least I pray it does!

No doubt I will have to read the book discussed here, but the link is worth following for the "8 explanations of the universe" which I'll cover another time. The book is prompted by the fact that there are numerous features of our universe that must be "just so" (like the porridge in Goldilocks)  ... some of those values are:

• N (ratio of strength of gravity to electromagnetism), 
• Epsilon (force binding nucleons into nuclei), 
• Omega (ratio of universe mass density to critical mass density), 
• Cosmological Constant (starts being significant at 10 to -122), 
• D (number of spatial dimensions in spacetime) ... etc

Our scientists believe many of these were "set" during the Big Bang, and were they set to tiny different values we would not exist. But ALL of them were set "just right".  Again ... as the 8 ways to deal with that indicate, it COULD all be an accident ... in fact, the discovery of the precision of anthropic "setting" is one of the larger reasons that the "Multiverse Theory", where there are gigantic number of UNIVERSES -- like 10 to the 400 or so has gained consideration primarily because many scientists and atheists realized that something like that HAD to be true if their position of no God was to remain tenable.

Murdering the shiver can take a lot of ammo!

Do we all feel the "shiver of awareness"? I  believe we do -- for Christ came for ALL. I believe we all have both the "shiver" and free will -- thus the opportunity to make THE choice of eternal significance in all things, those as mundane as a dog in a picture or as immense as the cosmos itself.

Still just a small thing next to the power of God.

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BO: Narcissist or Psychopath?

Obama persists | Power Line:

Unfortunately I ended up hearing part of his press conference in the car yesterday. I ought to have shut him off as I have ever since he dissed the SCOTUS sitting right in front of him being civil and proper at one of the SOTU addresses. I wanted to believe that the day after the American People had spoken LOUDLY, there would be SOME measure of recognition. There was not, I ought to have trusted my instincts.

The opening in the linked article about how BO can't even let a comment by an aging basketball star (Jordan) roll off his back gives one pause relative to the line between narcissism and psychopathy. Anyone that writes two autobiographies prior to turning 50 is clearly a narcissist. Listening to the part of the press conference that I heard, I'm afraid that it is worse that that.

Note that while psychopathy is definitely a dangerous mental illness diagnosis, they are all around us and you no doubt know one or two ... read the "Psychopath Inside" if you want a very entertaining, enlightening and a bit scary detective story (it's non-fiction) where the detective finds out that he is not who he thought he was.

One form Obama’s anger takes is disparagement of the election results. “[T]o everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.” In the radio interview above, Obama describes the nonvoters as those sitting at home on their couches. What does he hear them saying? They aren’t saying, and neither is Obama.

The sitting president of the US "hears" what the 66% of Americans that didn't vote are saying? Really? What are they saying and what other voices is he "hearing"?

Try to even imagine BO having 1/10th the graciousness of this exchange which Peggy Noonan commented on (her column is linked in the PL column):

For those who think Mr. Obama has faced unusual levels of rhetoric, consider this question from a reporter to Mr. Bush:

“Thank you, Mr. President. With all due respect, Nancy Pelosi has called you incompetent, a liar, the emperor with no clothes and, as recently as yesterday, dangerous. How will you work with someone who has such little respect for your leadership and who is third in line to the presidency?” 

This is how Mr. Bush replied. “I’ve been around politics a long time. I understand when campaigns end and I know when governing begins. And I’m going to work with people of both parties. You know, look, people say unfortunate things at times. But if you hold grudges in this line of work, you’re never going to get anything done. And my intention is to get some things done, and soon—we’re start visiting with her Friday with the idea of coming together.”

I don't expect BO to come close to the standard of graciousness of W, but equating those that voted with those that didn't and claiming he "hears" both? Narcissists are VERY hard of "hearing" when it comes to what others say ... they pretty much only hear things that reflect positively on the narcissist.

Psychopaths OTOH have no anxiety or concern about what others say, no respect for external rules beyond using them for their own benefit (eg. the Constitution), are very willing to act boldly on their own with little concern for the future (BOcare?), AND ... exceedingly mean and very prone to revenge, especially secretly "getting the other guy" ... always holding a grudge and being unwilling to "let things go".

The sitting president of the US can't let an off-hand comment from an aging well loved basketball star go? Or, as I think anyone has a right to expect from a man in BO's position, turn it into self-deprecating humor ... "Well, Michael is a much better athlete and golfer than I, and even a better basketball player!"  ... it doesn't even have to be sincere -- it is a softball opportunity to get a political "hit" (looking humble and loveable like Underdog) that even minor league pols regularly hit out of the park.

But not BO. Perhaps we don't really want to know why. 

The next two years remain a very  dangerous time for America!

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Hayek: The Fatal Conceit

Hayek is a very precise and organized thinker, I'll open with his statement on what the book is about:

This book argues that our civilization depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation , on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism. To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection – the comparative increase of population and wealth – of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting , reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be ‘fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1: 28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

He points out what in many ways ought to be completely obvious -- that humans have no more control over the economic systems that were evolved by trial and error have been selected because they were more successful than than we control our lack tails or gills, or that we tend to enjoy sex. Capitalism wasn't designed, it was evolved (or created by God).
Worse, like disease, dying, not being able to fly, etc in life, there are aspects of Capitalism that we tend to dislike. SO, we WANT to change them! We don't want to have to "unintentionally conform to certain traditional and largely moral practices" -- we want to create what works and is better, NOW, intentionally!

Contrast that with his statement on Socialism:

The demands of socialism are not moral conclusions derived from the traditions that formed the extended order that made civilization possible. Rather, they endeavor to overthrow these traditions by a rationally designed moral system whose appeal depends on the instinctual appeal of its promised consequences. They assume that, since people had been able to generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts, they must also be able to design an even better and more gratifying system.

And so we have a "Conflict of Visions", described excellently by Sowell in his book of that title which I reviewed here. "The Fatal Conceit" is this idea that "we can do better" -- in the large, as in the replacement of Capitalism with Socialism.

Fatal Conceit can be viewed as source work for Sowell's "Conflict" ... Sowell is more readable and easier to follow, but Hayek is worth the effort. There is a FUNDAMENTAL difference between the visions of people that believe in either a created or evolved state of human civilization and social mechanisms like Capitalism, and those that believe that humans are completely capable to create any form of civilization / mechanisms they desire, including Utopia -- usually socialist/communist.

Fatal Conceit covers a good deal of detail on how the two sides view economics and the kinds of problems with production, motivation and outcome that command driven (Socialist systems) have and will always encounter, and how/why the distributed Capitalist system surmounts those problems.

Hayek was an agnostic, but he closes the book with a chapter that he put in reluctantly -- since in general he is not religious, but I found quite interesting. He makes a point I've tried to make a few times:

In any case, the religious view that morals were determined by processes incomprehensible to us may at any rate be truer (even if not exactly in the way intended) than the rationalist delusion that man, by exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to achieve more than he could ever foresee.

and

even an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals, and the tradition that has provided not only our civilization but our very lives, to the acceptance of such scientifically unacceptable factual claims.

There are many intelligent thinkers from history that finally admit (often grudgingly)  that even though they are not believers, Western civilization was not possible without Judaeo / Christian religion.

Well worth the read, but read Sowell first.

Google and RDB Mated, TP CATALIST Is Their Offspring

Rule of Law » ‘CATALIST’: Obama’s Database for Fundamentally Transforming America:

A few years back we heard a decent amount about "Carnivore", an FBI terrorist search program that scanned vast amounts of data -- emails, texts, voice, etc looking for terrorist connects. The Party (TP-Democrat) hated it, W was president back then and it is always "chilling" if there are any "privacy issues" with an opposition president in the WH.

Small matter that 90%+ of those building and operating Carnivore were dues paying union TP members.

Well, there is a semi-private version of "Carnivore" now called "CATALIST" that is a "Big Data" program -- claimed to be fully legal, and may well be, that is wiring elections for TP. The linked article is pretty fair on the subject, I'll try to be really brief on the synapsis of the threat.  A lot of formerly thought to be brilliant pollsters and pundits were blind sided by BO in '12 ... the numbers looked like Romney ought to win. The analysis is that CATALIST is the big reason he didn't and it may be a big reason why this election is another "surprise".

The big picture here is that we can understand the import here since the left already went bonkers on this as far back as Reagan in the form of the "Religious Right" was getting out votes for Reagan -- never mind that Unions, The Sierra Club, Black Churches, Universities, etc had been doing this for Democrats for eons. Word of mouth and peers is the BEST way to get your voters active and out -- negative advertising is like junk mail. It moves the needle a few percentage points AT BEST, and it costs a lot -- it is a shotgun approach, little targeting.

But programs like CATLIST that know if you shop at Whole Foods, have a family member with a mental illness, don't attend church, own a Prius, etc are able to target you in a way that was never possible without what the computer industry calls "Big Data" -- at a very simple level, Google and Relational Data Base (RDB) mated and their offspring is Big Data / CATALIST.

The ability to gather vast amounts of data on people, identify their "hot buttons", and LINK THEM to like minded political workers is HUGE.  "God, Guns, Gays" was the old cry from the left as to how evil Republicans got elected. On the left it might be "Environmentalism, Atheism, Veganism, Pro "gay marriage", anti-gun ...".  But the funer the appeal, and who it is that makes the appeal, the more powerful it is.

There are reasons that this is an asymmetric battle space with a huge advantage going to TP,  I'll touch on a few here.

• TP owns the universities and government. The brainpower to create and operate this kind of operation is pretty much in their camp. 
• The agencies that hold the data are government and government IS TP. We likely see a tiny fraction of the situation with little hints like the IRS scandal.  Your IRS financial data, your FBI data, your medical data -- they are all sitting in big government data bases. At the VERY LEAST, this can be "mined" (scanned for trends, correlations, etc without direct use of your ID) -- in the very likely case, items can be "leaked" across data bases with no record of "how we got that" WITH Idenity. We are only talking about "helping the voter connect with TP" after all -- a very good purpose if you are TP. 
• Conservatives may well have an easier time building a big data operation to track terrorists or make a profit. Like ALL technology, there is a lot that can be done here that is "good" or at least innocuous, but when used by the government, conservatives tend to get nervous. Their level of trust of the government is FAR lower -- and in fact their trust of large organizations of people is FAR lower. It likely stems from remembering things like the USSR and Nazi Germany were government operations, and the core belief that mankind is fallen and not infinitely perfectible in this world. 

The simplest aspect here is that since over 50% of the population is now getting a check cut from the government in one form or another, all that is really required is for some especially dedicated TP "public servants" to be sure that those names are leaked to CATALIST so that the correlations have a good "seed".

Domination of their true enemy -- conservative opposition in this country, is what TP does best. They may be unwilling and ridiculous when it comes to foreign enemies (like telling them what we WON'T do, eg "boots on ground") but against what they see as domestic enemies, rest assured they are positively ruthless.

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Fascism, BOism, The NFL

The left prepares to cash in on Ray Rice | Power Line:

The last couple of weeks it has become obvious that it is time to brush up on our "isms" ... Fascism and Socialism being the main ones that need to be re-understood from time to time, because the last thing The Party (TP) and guys like BO want is truth in political labeling.

If you tend to not believe a lot of what I say (ALWAYS a very wise decision!), you can access some of my own brush up source material from Thomas Sowell and Jonah Goldberg (his excellent book "Liberal Fascism"  (Moosetracks review) ought to be read by all thinking Americans).

First a simple way to sort these out ... and we will throw in Communism for good measure, is:

• Communism -- The State owns everything. No individual property. 
• Socialism -- The State owns "the major industries", you get to keep your house (maybe). 
• Fascism -- The State decrees and regulates business, private life, etc. but it doesn't "own it" ... only the credit when things go well, business owns the blame when it goes bad.
• Freedom -- The State is the servant of the people. It is limited by a Constitution to what it is allowed to do. Man is free because government is limited. (Reagan)  

I actually think that Fascism ought to be re-defined as BOism today, because he is really the perfect embodiment -- it could also be called "Scapegoatism". Here is Sowell on the subject:

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time. 

Like all human institutions though, these get muddy. Nationalism, a form of Tribalism is a endemic to all humans but especially Fascism. Christianity was a GIANT leap forward because it allowed all mankind to be part of a single "tribe" or "extended family" ... blood brothers in Christ's blood.  BO is an avowed Luo tribalist whose declared identity is in the anti-colonial tribalism of his father and grandfather ("Dreams FROM my Father").

For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America— the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago— all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.
Obama, Barack (2007-01-09). Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Kindle Locations 7524-7529). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

In this post-Christian, post-Constitutional America, led by a Fascist Luo Tribesman, even the NFL feels the lash of the Fascist overlords. This is a quote from the linked article:

Whenever an institution becomes as massive as the NFL, the ideologically driven will attempt to enlist the institution for their own purposes. There was a time when some conservatives enlisted the NFL in an ideological sense as a symbol of American virtues. Nowadays, though, it’s the left that wants to use football, not as a metaphor for American virtue (in which it doesn’t really believe), but to advance specific agenda items and/or to shake the NFL down.

The  Powerline column is well done, but I fear it fails to make the proper connections ... in a Constitutional Republic America, there would be no such ideologically driven power, in a Socialist America, the government would own the NFL. Only in a Fascist America is what we see possible :

But the NFL is not in the message-sending business and has no duty to send correct messages to “society.” If the criminal justice system is functioning properly, “society” will receive the proper message about domestic violence. If it isn’t, that’s not the NFL’s fault.

Ah, but in a Fascist / Tribal society, it IS the NFL's responsibility! It is the responsibility of all in "the tribe" to be on the right message -- be that environmentalism, gay marriage, gun control or the war on big-gulps! In MN, Marx Dayton has similarly weighed in on Adrian Peterson.

The non-Christian reader might say, "Well, I don't see how being a Christian nation is any better than this, it is just different rules".

I'm not going to do a long answer to that, but for a few points -- Christianity is a couple thousand years old, Fascism is a "tribalism of the day / the man", it's rules are arbitrary in a way well beyond Christianity, even if you don't recognize divinity. Since Christianity is transcendent (at least in time for a non-believer), it is much more immune from the day to day whims of individuals and groups  -- it short circuits the "a lot of people agree with me" approach to "right" (just a version of might (numbers) make right) ... the question of right and wrong becomes more than only a matter of the biggest armies.

One of my favorite turns of history was Stalin's "How many divisions does the Pope have"?  It turned out, just enough to consign the USSR to the ash heap of history!

May we constantly pray that enough divisions rise up to do the same to modern BOism.

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A Nice Simple Diagram of Liberal Inconsistency

The Law of Supply and Demand In One Venn Diagram | Power Line:

Replace "Krugman" with "liberals" and it just about covers it. It is much worse than this picture -- liberals are consistently inconsistent because they believe that they can take all sorts of actions in the real world and somehow pick and choose the results -- often claiming they will achieve the exact opposite result of what their actions are guaranteed to achieve in the real world. Or, they know what they are doing and simply want to create a dependent voter population that will keep them in power.

Thus, on one hand they claim that the ONLY effect of raising the minimum wage will be to help minimum wage workers by giving them more per hour. However, when the price of something is raised (labor), the demand for it WILL go down -- the only question is how much, which economists attempt to answer by "elasticity". Demand for cigarettes was often used as an example when I was taking economics, however there isn't anything that is perfectly inelastic -- it would have to have no substitutes and all consumers would have to have infinite wealth relative to the price of the commodity -- ie. be ABLE to pay whatever the price rose to.

But I digress. The fast food market is quite elastic and there are lots of substitutes -- technology being the obvious one, less people eating more expensive fast food, etc. Raising the minimum wage always reduces the number of people working -- a win-win for Democrats, since both the minimum wage workers and the unemployed tend to vote Democrat. BUT, the fiction given to the public is that raising the minimum wage will not cause more unemployment, when it is a given that it will.

Which as the chart points out, might mean that people that don't understand economics are fooled -- but the flip side means that can't be true. Cap and trade argues that "supply and demand works!" -- that by raising the price of using carbon, the demand for carbon will fall.

So if liberals were reality based, they would say that they are fine with the economy being vastly slowed by taxes and fees on carbon, because they care about warming in 100 years more than they do about jobs, income, etc today.

On the raising the minimum wage they would admit they are fine with a LOT less people having jobs as long as a few can have higher wages.. Or they would admit that they are absolutely fine with the lowering of productivity and national wealth via high taxes on corporate and personal income, because having everyone's standard of living being generally lowered by redistributing income so they are more government dependent is perfectly in line with their strategy to be a one party socialist state!

The left is well on it's way to achieving it's goals -- inconsistency and force are the two cornerstones of leftward thought.
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Saving The World, Hating Your Dad, The Humanist Bootstraps

Ask Andrew W.K.: My Dad Is a Right-Wing Asshole | Village Voice:

This is an excellent article by someone that has a lot of wonderful sentiments but I fear has not studied much of human history and has therefore a naive view of what is humanly possible. It is the ultimate division -- humanities perpetual hope that it can think itself to heaven on earth -- in this case by a "will to love", but no matter, the concept is that man unaided by any transcendent entity or factor can pull itself "up" (assuming man even has a clue as to which way that is) by his own bootstraps.

The basic pulling by bootstraps argument is old and common -- for Nietzsche it was "the will to power", for William James, "the will to believe".  For all our basic problems with human frailty including even getting up, procrastination, organization, weight, drugs, alcohol, etc, we humans really really want to believe in our "will".

The world isn't being destroyed by democrats or republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist -- the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world. The world is being hurt and damaged by one group of people believing they're truly better people than the others who think differently. The world officially ends when we let our beliefs conquer love. We must not let this happen.

The mechanism that has moved masses of humanity in unison and at least for large groups of people converted masses to a common goal historically is religion. There is one world religion that comes very close to the paragraph above, although the author is loathe to mention it.  Christianity. The rest of them answer this basically as follows:

Buddhism -- Ignore the world, don't be attached
Hinduism - It's a big cycle, do good and it will get better eventually
Judaism - God has a plan, follow his rules and it will work out.
Islam - Win Baby win -- convert or kill everyone else and Sharia will be superb.
Secular Humanism -- Essentially the view espoused in this column. We are asserted to be very capable of loving one another (they may have to redefine "love" for you a bit)  ON OUR OWN if we just pay a lot of attention and focus on "love is the answer", "walk a mile in your oppositions shoes", or maybe John Lennon's "imagine".

Or to use the column authors words ...

So we must protect and respect each other, no matter how hard it feels. No matter how wrong someone else may seem to us, they are still human. No matter how bad someone may appear, they are truly no worse than us. Our beliefs and behavior don't make us fundamentally better than others, no matter how satisfying it is to believe otherwise. We must be tireless in our efforts to see things from the point of view we most disagree with. We must make endless efforts to try and understand the people we least relate to. And we must at all times force ourselves to love the people we dislike the most. Not because it's nice or because they deserve it, but because our own sanity and survival depends on it. And if we do find ourselves pushed into a corner where we must kill others in order to survive, we must fully accept that we are killing people just as fully human as ourselves, and not some evil abstract creatures.

The basic flaw in the authors wishful view aside from the insufficiency of "will"  is the existence of evil. Really? ISIS is "just as fully human as you are"? Hitler? Pol Pot? Your favorite serial killer? The authors view requires that man is "basically good". Christianity asserts we ARE all equivalent to ISIS, Hitler, etc -- equivalently evil at heart and 100% in need of a Savior to fix our broken condition.

Rejection of that Savior condemns the world to the condition that the columnist seems to abhor -- but he is clearly not willing to accept that, and instead fervently hopes that SOMEHOW the obvious result of what he recognizes as the characteristics of humanity -- the need for simple answers, the need to be on the "winning side", the apocalyptic view of the world engendered by our own mortality,  the oft proven insufficiency of our "will", our nature to each see our own personal views as "special",  etc can be modified by "will, thought and love".

He fervently wishes and hopes that somehow, good words and intellect can rise above the human condition with no transcendent God or religious practice/framework and manufacture "love".  It would be an interesting trick since we don't  have a handle on consciousness, and one hopes that the authors definition of "love" would require consciousness. We certainly can't manufacture consciousness.

I too fervently wish that children could manage to love their parents even if the parents were so backward to hold differing political, religious, economic or other views, but aside from Christ, it is simply not to be. I've seen it time and time again and way too personally -- children reject God, and very quickly they reject their parents in all but the most shallow of connection. "Honor your Father and your Mother" is just one more tired old doctrine to be rejected.

No, there is one division that counts. Christ. Those that have Christ have love, those that do not will always both hate Christ and his followers -- no matter how much they may claim to have "open minds", "love", "enlightenment", or some other high sounding thought or emotion, the reality of their relationship to those with Christ will always be something along the lines of hatred, avoidance, condescension, discomfort, etc, while those with Christ will continue to fervently love, hope and pray -- with a deep sorrow for those that they love that have been lost.

The world isn't BEING destroyed -- it WAS destroyed, by sin, and Christ and Christians have been trying to save as much of it as possible for two thousand years. There have  been long periods with a lot of success, and there are periods such as now when darkness seems to be ascendant, but ultimately the end will be according to plan -- not our plan, but Gods. Thanks be to God.

The author of the column would likely protest, "See, there is the problem" -- which is what humanists have been protesting for at least a few hundred years. The 20th century was a century of extreme optimism in the secular community. Their perceived historic foe of religion was seen to have been finally vanquished -- "God is dead" as Nietzsche shouted (although he was well aware of the terror involved in that phrase).

Communism, Fascism and Socialism were all seen as related and nearly certain to be successful utopian plans by the elite. Hopes were high -- human confidence for social and political science was as high as engineering confidence was in the early century for the unsinkable Titanic. By mid-century it was obvious to all but the most doctrinaire peddlers of "isms" that after 100's of millions dead, the project was at least going to be much more expensive in lives and treasure than any had imagined. The fall of the USSR near the end of the century might have given some social science alchemists pause in their plans to turn human nature into the embodiment of love -- but as we see in the column, such is not the case.

Secular Humanism, the religion ashamed to claim it's faith, continues as optimistic as ever in spite of the cosmic body count.

Humans WILL cleave to a religion -- one that explains their universe and transcends the day to day informational noise that seeks to pound all meaning from their existence. As we see above, it will be a religion like the great world religions listed (or some thinly updated variant), or it will be the modern biggie -- some variation of Secular Humanism  -- man as god, earth as heaven, with only a little more fervent wishing and appropriate education (or sometimes RE-education) required to close the deal. Let's call it "love".

Christianity begins from the other side -- with humility. "The Fear of God" -- acknowledgement that what the author of the column believes that we "ought to do" -- love those that hate us, realize that the world is WAY to complex to be understood by man, and accept there may well be more that exists than what we can even perceive  -- is just not possible without something that transcends our existence. Pulling ourselves by our bootstraps is futile, so God humbled himself to human form, died on a cross and rose as the first fruits of a life that is what the columnist dreams of. We ALL dream of it -- we are homesick for heaven, and many -- politicians, media people, self-help charlatans, and even the columnist in his own way -- prey on our souls yearning with false promises.

Christ is the side of love. Christ is the side of the ultimate open mind -- of belief in more than this mortal coil, which is the only way to rise above the constant noise of thousands of viewpoints demanding equal attention -- the authors desires for man are reachable, but not by man without Christ.

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45 Years Ago, The Pinnacle and The Premonition

Forty five years ago I was a 12 year old with only one thing on my mind. THE MOON! America was the nation that took on the USSR, and even though no US politician had really had the guts to say it yet, we knew in our hearts it was indeed an "Evil Empire" and eventually it would be "them or us".

Politics were FAR from my mind while in giddy excitement and a good deal of anxiety I listened to the crackly voices from Eagle as it descended to the lunar surface. We were still a Christian Nation -- there were a lot of prayers going up from the USA for a successful mission that evening. I'd felt and heard nothing but joy the previous Christmas while Jim Lovell and the crew of Apollo 8 had read from Genesis 1 while circling the moon. We knew our place in the universe -- America was great, but God was greater.

At age 12, Chappaquiddick didn't register ... (nor does it STILL register on Google spellcheck!) America was at it's pinnacle, but just like I'm sure Egypt never recognized it when they built the pyramids, Greece when they built the Parthenon, nor Rome when Hadrian reconstructed the Pantheon in like 125 BC, the seeds of our destruction were well planted.

Our nation was at once so just, so capable, so dedicated and so focused that we could go to the moon and back multiple times in that era. We were also so corrupt, venal and disgusting that we could allow a sitting US Senator to effectively murder a young woman on his staff and not report it until the next morning, YET, still continue in what was once  "The Greatest Deliberative Body" for nearly 40 years beyond his crime!

"Justice is mine saith the Lord". People ask "Why are we so divided today"? Look at the Moon and remember what we once were. In those couple days, July 18-20 1969 we see the greatness of America and it's demise, clearly and plainly laid out for any that want to see.

But mostly, we as a nation do NOT want to see, so we are "divided". Unless a people is willing to accept a higher power than themselves and their nation -- even a nation that builds the Pyramids, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, or yes, goes to the Moon, it is doomed.

History shows that nations can be great without Christ being in that position (USSR, China). Although Western civilization and especially the USA did reach the absolute pinnacle of what was possible for human kind -- in technology, power both economic and military, and more importantly vastly superior opportunity, justice and living standards for even the poorest citizens.

Nations require some version of "we hold these truths to be SELF EVIDENT". Human leaders are mortal and often corrupt. Even the good ones die, and the bad ones MUST be replaced and identified as FAILED quickly and surely, or the rot expands and destroys all that was once great.

I'm so thankful to have been alive to experience the landing in '69, and to have been too young to even care about the premonition. To have been alive to see and feel what was and is possible for a great nation with purpose, meaning and FAITH! How sad to see how far we have fallen. The moon? We can't even put a man in orbit 45 years later.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" -- and losing that fear is the end.

W Cuts In Line At Franklin's, Banned for Life

Obama Cuts In Line At Franklin Barbecue, Makes Up For It By Paying It Forward:

Ex President George W Bush cut in line at the famous Fanklin's BBQ in Austin this past week, then in typical noblesse oblige silver spoon 1%er audacity, thought he would "make it all better" with his stolen from the rest of us bankroll!

National outrage was justifiably extensive at the bumbling plutocrat, and the local Austin eatery has banned the unpopular ex-president, responsible for 9-11, hurricane Katrina, the great recession, income inequality, political deadlock, unrest in the mideast as well as being completely incompetent and unable to achieve anything in office.

St Obama could not be reached for comment, he was golfing.

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TP (The Party) as Medieval Indulgence

Liberals: Exempt from Scrutiny | National Review Online:

 "We are told that the Kennedys, the Pelosis, the Kerrys, and others like them are noble because they vote against their class interests. But they really do not; they vote for them. Liberalism is now the domain of the elite, and antithetical to the aspirations of the upper middle class that lacks the capital and tastes of the 0.1 percent. The higher the taxes, the more numerous the regulations, the greater the redistribution, so all the more the elite liberal distances himself from those less cool who breathe down his neck, and the less guilty he feels about the growing divide between him and the poor he worries about, but never worries about enough to associate with.

Liberalism professes a leftwing ideology, but these days it has absolutely no effect on the lives of those who most vehemently embrace it. In other words, being liberal is professionally useful and psychologically better than Xanax, but we need not assume any more that it is a serious belief."

Good column that covers some of the specifics of Kerry, Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman and others -- as I've often said, you CAN'T really be a hypocrite when you don't truly claim to believe in anything!

Little long for the benefit, but generally worth it.

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BO vs Reagan on Job Growth

This Simple Graph Compares Reagan’s and Obama’s ‘Recoveries’:

Of course BO doesn't really believe that a job is something we need and a majority of the country agrees with him!


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The Breathless Human

The Rise of Secular Religion - The American Interest:

It only requires the most minimal of study and thought to realize that the non-spiritual human is exactly as rare as the non-breathing human. No matter how hard one may work to differentiate themselves from "the breathing class"  (say Indian meditation, holding of breath for very long times like free divers, etc), that more the actual focus is on breathing, modified though it may be.

So with the spiritual. Those that are absolutely most certain that they have completely "abandoned religion" and "have no faith" are often the greatest "Puritan zealots", even if their "purity" is pure evil as in the case of the Gang, the Prison Culture, the Nazis or the BO cabinet.

So we have "political correctness", gay rights, animal rights, veganism, coops, local foods, environmentalism ... the list is endless. As the linked article puts it:

We live in a spiritual age, in other words, when we believe ourselves surrounded by social beings of occult and mystic power. When we live with titanic cultural forces contending across the sky, and our moral sense of ourselves— of whether or not we are good people, of whether or not we are saved— takes its cues primarily from our relation to those forces. We live in a spiritual age when the political has been transformed into the soteriological. When how we vote is how our souls are saved.

"soteriological" - providing salvation.

One of the extreme advantages of religions that are thousands of years old is that when you are raised in one and embrace it, you know what you are doing. The analogy of the cute little boy that takes his toy apart becoming less cute when he dissects his puppy is apt. "Science" and "left wing paganism" has dissected Western Culture and Christianity with an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and decided "that was easy".  The kiddies may think that yoga, gardening and expanded gender identities" are a good replacement for what they believe they blew up, but the fascination with monsters, vampires, demons, body piercings and tattoos  might not be entirely metaphorical.

Perhaps there is more to this breathing thing than they thought?

How durable is post-Protestant culture? Missing from Bottum’s portraits of the “poster children” is any mention of the children they are—or aren’t—raising. Fertility rates among members of the secularized Mainline churches are so low (just as they are among “progressive” Jews) that one is tempted to regard post-Protestantism as a one-generation wonder. While the children of the Mainline occupy themselves with yoga, organic gardening and expanded gender identities (Facebook now offers more than fifty categories to choose from), popular culture becomes moribund. The 20th century’s variations of the social gospel seem genteel next to what populates America’s metaphysical realm today. Americans spend more time with supernatural monsters than ever did the Christians of the Middle Ages, from vampires to zombies to demons of every hue. In 2012, the horror genre supplied one out of eight American feature films; a decade ago it was roughly one out of twenty-five. Strip away divine immortality from American spirituality, and it embraces the undead variety.

Oh, and that is in the current, supposedly nominalist, scientific, "modern" world.  Many of our current youth might well compare tattoos and body piercings with even an African tribesman of the year "800" and not detect any irony.

It is the season of Lent as I write this. God came down and took human form to die on a cross to save humanity from ETERNAL spiritual "non-breathing" (spiritual death) 2000 years ago. Of course each generation would DEARLY love to make that "eternal" word part a MYTH, in the sense that "myths" may be in "detail and particulars" not "data factual", but are far MORE "human factual" than "data reality".

The Mona Lisa is a better "likeness" for humans than a terapixel photo of the subject. On this failure of understanding falls much of the sadness of our declining culture and community.

While "Avengers" was an eminently forgettable film, the scene where Loki declares to Hulk that "I am  a God" might give  a tiny insight into how the underlying spiritual reality of the universe ultimately deals with humans that are certain of their deity ... or that try to hide what they are really thinking behind the idea that "there is no god" (translation in reality, they have decided that THEY are god!).

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Outrunning Glaciers on Acid

Remember The Acid Rain 'Scare'? Global Warming Hysteria Is Pouring Down - Forbes:

Back in the late '70s when I was in college, we needed to go fast on I-94 to get to Madison for other reasons, but we all thought that it would be funny to tell any officer that pulled us over that we were "outrunning the glaciers". Those were the days of Global COOLING ... which I know as now gotten the left all riled up to be reminded of, so they have went to work trying to rewrite that part of history.

No, it WASN'T "the same" then,  since not EVERYTHING had been fully politicized yet! One of the outcomes of that was that "research" tended to end up in a lot of different places, and maybe more importantly started from a lot of different premises. Today, you can set out to "continue to prove" GW, or you can get no money, get no degree, lose your professorship, etc. Tough choice if you are an academic that wants an advanced degree and needs to eat.

In the "old days", we all watched, read, or listened to the same message on NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, NYT, WaPO, etc and if you were a complete low brow reactionary, you MAY have gotten some wild right wing thinking from the EDITORIAL page of the WSJ, although their news pages were (and still are) just as left as the rest of the media. Oh yes, there was Buckley and National Review -- which I had never heard of until I got bummed out because Jimmuh assured me that the era of fun in America was OVER!

"Many" scientists thought the data showed we were cooling. It was NOT a "religious issue"! The idea of using "science" as a political cudgel to pound down the apostates had not been even remotely associated with "science" in those days (we still had religion for for the fixed outlook).  "Acid Rain", "Coming Ice Age", "Ozone Hole", "DDT", "we are going to turn Japanese", "Detente --- the obvious reasonableness of surrender to the USSR", "the world is OUT of petroleum" .... those were the "smart topics" of the day.

The list of topics aren't an accident, They were ALL considered to be "common sense", and if had Fox news in those days, you could likely have done a poll showing that people "didn't know the answers to the issues of the day" ... as in, "all the forests will die from acid rain" (probably before the glaciers ran over them, but they were not clear on that), all us country kids will be dead of skin cancer long before now, and the penguins would ALL be gone due to the "ozone hole".

DDT, well, it turned out to kill 50 million plus 3rd worlders by NOT being around, but we are back to using it now with no problem to birds (if a couple beers are OK, a keg isn't necessarily better), we not only didn't turn Japanese, they started their eternal  government managed recession in '90 and are still in it.

We didn't ever try the surrender to the USSR route -- but given BO, maybe there is still time. Oh, and world oil reserves were at "400ish Billion Barrels BB) in '80 and they are N of 1.6 TB today with a lot of countries using less ... + a lot of the Baaken isn't even online! The US could push Venezuala and the Saudis for the the top of the list!  We talk about that as about as much as GW folks talk about GW during a record cold March.

Don't get the impression that EVERYONE was just stupid back then, and we have obviously gotten smarter. SOME predictions DID happen! Reagan DID consign the USSR to the ash heap of history for example (until BO resuscitated it like a long dead Chicago voter).

So the linked article brings back memories:

And lobby they did. Between 1994 and 1996 the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million to the Nature Conservancy, and together with the Pew Center and the Heinz Foundation they engaged in an energetic and successful global warming fear campaign which included attacks on scientific dissenters. Incidentally, the Heinz Foundation, headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry, generously provided a $250,000 award to Al Gore’s star congressional hearing witness, NASA’s James Hansen, who subsequently went on public record supporting her new husband John Kerry’s failed presidential bid.

A bunch of people hardly remember Enron ... going from the most admired business in America in the late '90s with a myriad of connections to both parties, to an early example of "W's fault ... he met with Ken Lay" (the CEO of Enron). As WSJs "Best of the Web" likes to point out, Paul Krugman was an Enron advisor and proponent and proud of it in the late '90s. Ah, how easy the memory hole works for one side of the political spectrum.

Historically, mankind inherently understood the relation between age and "wisdom", because it was ASSUMED, and UNDERSTOOD by at least the educated that to a very significant extent "education + experience = wisdom". Put that was before the cult of "progressivism", which assumes that the data/information/knowledge that they pick up today is INHERENTLY superior to the past (mostly because they have no clue about what happened in the past)

So, most no longer learn from the past ... even just a few short years in the past. It matters not that every time a set of policies has been applied in history, they have failed. If the "smart guys" think that printing bags of money + taxing it away from the economic winners so that the economic losers get "another chance" (typically to lose bigger amounts faster), it doesn't really matter how many times it doesn't work until you end up in Greece or Japan and you are just STUCK --- no capital to go forward, no successful folks left, and a bunch of unsuccessful ones that have even lost the will to fail after pissing away multiples of borrowed / subsidized fortunes.

I have to admit that as much as I'm looking forward to warmer temperatures, a nice big continental glacier forming would be VERY cool. Sure, the "30-40 tops" years I have remaining would only allow for a few100 feet of snow and ice AT BEST, puny by the 5000+ full monty behemoth, but the warmist tap dances would be a thing of beauty ... and there is always tracks for the Ranger!

Oh, never mind ... they will claim it is "due to human caused climate change" ... or it will just go down the memory hole like Krugman/Enron, "out of oil", "ozone", etc.

It is the age of OZ, and even when Toto pulls the curtain, the lefty witches will conjure SOME way to hide the humbug!

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Pedo-Earth Religion

When Did Global Warming Begin? | Power Line:

Many Christians are "Young Earth Creationists". They believe that the earth is 6K years old because that is what they believe they have extrapolated from the Bible. For them, it often becomes a "faith test" for someone to deny glaciation, light from galaxies billions of years old, the huge number of craters on the moon, etc. If you don't believe the earth is less than some date old (say "10K years max"), then you are not a Christian.

My personal view, (as it is in many things) is that an all powerful, all knowing and eternal God can create the universe any way he sees fit. If he did it in the last 10 min, it would likely have "the appearance of age" to an "unbiased observer", not because he is trying to "fool anyone", but because babies for example are not going to be able to live on their own, so doing creation with no ready made adults would be very counterproductive.

As an old boot path computer guy, I'm typing on a good analogy for this. When this iMac booted, there were a series of "bootstraps" (as in pulling up from bootstraps model) that were loaded in memory to set up the environment for the "boot load", that at the moment it began execution at some fixed address had memory tables, open file handles, a series of processes, etc that to someone looking at memory that was NOT from the boot path team would look like a whole bunch of things had happened that actually had not ... certain files being "opened", certain memory spaces being "allocated", certain processes being "initiated", etc.

A perusal of the state of the system would have certain "appearance of age" that would be "fake", not to "fool anyone", but just because it is OFTEN that "initial conditions" are different from the standard state.

It happens that I know WAY less about creating a universe than I do about booting a computer, and humans in general were not on the "universe boot team".  In the "it all just happened by accident" model, we only showed up after the thing had been running for like 14ish BILLION years.

I tend to be very magnanimous about allowing omniscient, omnipotent and eternal beings pretty much complete freedom in how they do their creation (call me libertine). I'm  interested in "how creation looks to me" and as in the case of the early stages of the running iMac, I doubt if the Apple boot load team would sentence me to any punishment for looking at a little memory and trying to understand what they did. My guess is that God is even more unsurprised by our curiosity about creation. So relative to a lot of young earth creationists, I'm a very liberal sort!

**NOTE** there is a principle here! The more "out there" the position, the more radical and combative it's adherents. True "Flat Earthers" are very zealous compared to "Sphereists". Watch this tendency in yourself and others, and you will have a powerful ally in wisdom. ** END NOTE **

What I find utterly amazing though are the "Young to Pedo-Earth Warmists", and the fact that their faith requires absolute fealty to their dogma or you receive all sorts of attacks relative to your intelligence and unwillingness to believe.

To get all nuts about current climate, you have to:

1). Completely ignore 100's of thousands of years of very good data about climate as in the linked column.

2). Focus ONLY on 130 years of data on "global temps", that is actually limited to something like "30ish" years of GOOD data, meaning data from orbiting platforms that can actually have a good bead on something approaching "planetary scale", as opposed to a bunch of anything but random local measurements extrapolated together.  Where thermometers and reporting stations were located in 1800 to say "1950" was NOT "random" in any sense ... cities, airports, universities, etc being the locations.

Even the most casual of skeptical people can see the difficulty of "global temperature".  The heat island of the Twin Cities to the N of me tends to run 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding temps. The area along Lake Superior is often TWENTY or more degrees cooler than just a few miles away during the summer. Mark Twain once commented on "the coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco" ... a phenomenon I first experienced on my honeymoon, where **I** (who am almost always warm compared to everyone around me) FROZE in the damp fog in late June after sweltering up a Yosemite in 100+ degree blast furnace heat. The list of local climate variation difficulties on scales of 10 miles or less is gargantuan, and must be accounted for in "global temperature".

Naturally those of the Warmist Faith assure us "it's all been worked out" ... at least as long as we pay no attention to their secret e-mails.

Even with satellites and computers, the amount of data required to compute an accurate "global temp" is very daunting, and requires A LOT of really unbiased and detailed analysis to be "accurate" by some measure. Ideally, the globe would be split up into say "10 mile cubes" and the temps at all levels ... ocean surface and depths, air column and land surface (and possibly depths in areas like tundra) would be gathered on a "few times a day" basis, say sunrise, noon, dusk, middle of night".

That sort of a measurement over a few thousand years would give an excellent basis for understanding climate. Once we had such a record for say "500K years", we would have a number of samples of how climate fluctuates relative to continental glacial advance and retreat, etc. Once we had that, then it would be much easier to try to figure out what the causes of the global climate changes are.

It is a testament to man's capacity for inconsistency that on one hand, science can wax poetic about "billions and billions of years", and on the other, base supposedly "settled conclusions" costing billions of dollars and affecting billions of people on AT BEST 130 years of data, which is so minimal as to provide only the most minimal of backing for even a "fad", let alone the proposed religion that Global / Warming cum Climate Change have become for many. Sadly, the Warmist Faith has become a state religion, breaking the Constitutional separation of Church and State.

I have a hard time with people that have faith in a religion that hasn't been around at least a thousand years! Even Scientology is "tried and true" relative to Pedo-Warmism!

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SALON Explains Food Stamps to Paul Ryan

What I learned from a week on food stamps: Paul Ryan couldn’t be any more wrong - Salon.com:

The entire "SNAP / Food Stamp" discussion is a great example of differing world views and people talking past each other. The MSM is of course extremely clear on the Republican view; "heartless, cruel, war on the POOR, blaming the poor, etc, etc ...." It often reminds me of the evil Tim Pawlenty being accused by Mike Hatch, and effectively by MPR commentators of wanting to "release the worst psychopathic sex offenders to save money".

That particular quote showed up on MPR a number of times, and each time it was uttered, one wondered what the person uttering it had between their ears. Really? Had there been a policy meeting in the Pawlenty office that went something like:

(Staffie A) "Hey, we have to save some money, let's release some sex offenders!"

(Sr Staff) "Great thought, but it seems a little weak as a news item ..."

(Staffie B)"Oh, wait, how about THE WORST sex offenders?"

(Sr Staff) "SUPER, I think you are REALLY on to something here, but let's hone it some more ..."

Eventually, the Pawlenty team apparently arrives at the ultimate idea, "Let's release the WORST psychopathic sex offenders to save money!!!"

So how does such an astute group of folks like those at MPR just repeat that back verbatim as being official policy from the Pawlenty administration without at least SOME little bell going off in their heads?

We ARE our biases!!! Unless we work VERY hard to THINK!

The current Republicans, SNAP and the media view are quite similar. Obviously Democrats including BO have signed off on everything to do with SNAP cuts -- BO has the vaunted veto pen, and the Senate is in the hands of Harry Reid, both willing to shut the government down rather than NEGOTIATE on  delaying BOcare at all ... and we now KNOW what a WINNER BOcare is!

So they have been willing to negotiate on SNAP, which means that it must not be nearly as good as BOcare for starters (or at least not be projected to buy votes as well). Yet, we see column after column assuming (apparently correctly) that the American public believes something to the effect that Republicans have some sort of a Hitleran Concentration Camp fetish, or USSR Starving Gulag wish relative to "the poor".

For starters there is the small (and hard to find) matter of CUTTING THE RATE of GROWTH, vs CUTS! http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/congress/item/15241-joint-bills-introduced-to-cut-skyrocketing-snap-food-stamp-costs only in the whacked out place called Washington, can a program like food stamps DOUBLE in size, and be projected to GROW at 20% a year for TEN YEARS, and someone that comes in an talks about "cutting" (reducing the rate of growth) on a program that would cost $760B, so it "only" might cost $730B!).

But after YEARS of trying to explain to lefties the difference between "cutting the rate of growth" and a CUT,  I DO understand that when the choice is between "human beings" and "numbers", lefties simply care not for numbers ... so I'll focus on the "human interest".  If I expect a 10% raise next year and only got a 5% raise, my salary was CUT! It is just too hard for the left to see it any other way!

Here are some revelations that crept up on the intrepid Salon reporter as he tried to live on SNAP:

1. Some people look down on taking them as "welfare". Ah yes, for some of the young, life's little embarrassments are rather harsh. Wait until after age 50 when you can go through hours on the porcelain throne preparing to have many FEET of tube inserted in through the out door in the interest of not dying of cancer. Yes, even death is less than optimum, but so far, not even the supposedly godlike BO has proposed a law against it -- no doubt one which would also be blocked by evil Republicans!
   
2. Food Stamps don't cover lattes or even take out. Oh, the horror!
   
   "At first, $41 seemed like a lot of money for a week’s worth of food, but this was $41, full stop — not $41 (unless I’m running late for work and need to stop by a coffee shop for a muffin) and not $41 (and then ordering from Seamless because the temperature has dropped and I wanted to cozy up with some hot soup). This was $41 to pay for three meals a day for seven days. This was going to require some planning."
   
3. Oh, the "planning", and the work of prep! Having to reduce meat and cut out "organic" ...
   
   "Trying to stretch my meager food budget, I found that while some healthy items were expensive — anything organic or gluten free jumped in price, and meat prices are very high — fruits, veggies and oatmeal were far less expensive than frozen meals or cereal. The most difficult part was preparing and portioning out my meals."
   
4.  "Time was an unexpected source of frustration. I was late to class because I mistimed how long it would take to cook and clean up after a stir-fried lunch. When running behind schedule on a Thursday night, I resorted to a meal of cold, leftover brown rice and carrot sticks. Hardly nutritional, or filling."
   
    Dear me ... it takes time to cook! Perhaps the only human activity for which this is the case. No doubt it takes no time to GROW the food too -- if one was forced to think "holistically" !

We were once a nation founded by hardy souls that got on SMALL boats and migrated to a new land, taking MONTHS to arrive, with NO HOPE of assistance should they run into difficulty. Many of them were even aware they could not just "pick up a muffin", or "order Seamless" in the new land.

Even just 100 years ago, there were plenty of people in rural areas that had no power, no running water, no even "relatively instant" communications, and not only no "food stamps", but they also had to put up with the minor inconvenience of GROWING and preserving their food rather than just finding the time to cook it and clean up after! 

We are no longer that nation, and clearly a whole bunch of us believe that our sustenance ought to be delivered like mothers milk, with no effort at all on our part -- although no doubt even in mothers milk, this generation would demand more flavors and the assurance of "100% organic"! 

The very idea that someone might have to shop, prepare, plan, cook and manage storage and such ON THEIR OWN! Is beyond the ken of people like this author. 

So how DO we communicate with each other? Are the Chinese going to be willing to cover the tab so many of us don't have to bother to shop, cook, clean, plan, etc? One wonders how this poor reporter imagines that the foodstuffs show up at his local market or "Seamless"? He must view the sorts of people that deal with the much greater difficulties of working the ground, planting, tending, reaping, processing, etc as some sort of an alien race. (no doubt a race of aliens he is far superior to) 

Can we possibly be a self-governing people when some write columns like this and think they are conveying useful information, and some farm thousands of acres raising the food so that someone that has extreme difficulty in just cutting it up and preparing it can complain that it's too hard / complicated / time consuming / etc? How DO we talk to each other?

So the policies of BO have created the worst economic recovery since the Depression, and the ONLY idea of the Statists is to double down on more of the same policies, including INCREASING the minimum wage, which will reduce the number of available low paying jobs, and to INCREASE the ease of the safety net, rather than putting SOME limit on how fast it grows!! 

It is HEARTLESS to look at numbers, realize the difference between slowing rate of growth and "cuts", and it is HEARTLESS even if Democrats sign off on it! They bear no responsibility for that, because they ought not have to "negotiate" at all. There IS NO REALITY ... reality and Republicans should just shut up and die!

'via Blog this'

Gender Neutral Bathrooms, Flies of Summer

Gender-neutral bathrooms: All bathrooms should be open to all users.:

I've been wondering what the next frontier after "gay marriage" would be. We know there has to be one, since there can't be a "progressive" movement unless "progress" is being made.

One of my picks has always been just the further sorting out of "bi-sexual marriage" as in exactly how DOES one deal with "transgender / gender free / androgynous  / queer".  BTW, Slate uses the term "queer" in the first sentence, so if that is decided to be a terrible slur in 30 years and I'm a famous food network personality, it really WAS an approved word when I used it here!

Of course, so was the "N-word" when Paula Deen last used it, but little details like that make no difference to the PC police. The only choice if you want to be "safe" is to ALWAYS agree with the "progressives" or remain COMPLETELY silent ... and with the current level of surveillance, I'd say you better just "get your mind right".

The logic in this article gives a good insight into the minds of "progressives'.

A minority that "feels uncomfortable" is identified. It is verified that they have no current cultural norms or any transcendent religious thought basis for their group identification. As a group they are identified purely by a physical or behavioral choice. Science may or may not be able to identify if there is actually a physical (eg genetic) origin of their identification, but as in the case of proving there are not space aliens,  (or pretty much ANY negative), "it can't be ruled out"!

If you are a "progressive", since people feel strongly about this and it "can't be ruled out", ergo it must exist!  Therefore it is a FACT that "these people were MADE THIS WAY" ... apparently by randomness, since there is no God. "Randomness is good, randomness is great, we honor it's "logic". Consider how "foolish" believing in an actual multiple millennium old religion is compared to this "logic".

Certainly pedophiles could be chosen as well (and might be next). The test is, "Can anyone say anything of this group that could NOT be said of gays"?  So, the big comeback: "Do you REALLY think that ANYONE would CHOOSE to  have sex with children given the legal and cultural taboos? You would have to be CRAZY to believe that!! They MUST have an inherent "desire/drive" that they CAN'T change (or even control)!!!!" (we don't really want to follow the way this logic works, retching could ensue ... animals? rape? cannibalism? "That cannibal had to know people would be offended, he MUST have been "made that way"!"

Note, this is NOT like being black. It is obvious that you don't "choose to be black", nature has already exposed the genetic links quite clearly. Note also the difference with alcoholism. There seems to be very clear genetic markers, but nobody is saying that we need to recognize the alcoholic lifestyle as being "equal or superior to the sober lifestyle".

Human kind as all sorts of innate drives and desires that are at least extremely difficult to control. So for 10's of thousands of years religions and cultures developed to encourage the drives deemed to be adaptive, and inhibit the ones which are not. Monogamy makes for a nice time tested way of both procreating and socializing the young. Gay, not so much. Moderate drinking or abstaining, pretty adaptive, alcoholic, not so much.

Of course, there is a lot of diversity. Winston Churchill was at least borderline alcoholic as have been many great authors and other artists. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of examples of other unusual appetites in great leaders, artists, entertainers and such. If you are of superior intellect, stamina, fortitude, musical ability, or some other positive, you MAY be able to do quite well going against the grain of society and be extremely successful. The list is WAY too long to even start when you talk drugs, alcohol, sexuality, etc, but everyone knows it to be true. FOR EXCEPTIONAL CASES ... which may, BTW be also related to them being exceptional -- where there are great abilities, there are great deficits.

But guess what. There aren't a lot of Churchills, Hemmingways, or even Elton Johns. The structures of morality and culture are for the MASSES ... the average, and especially the below average, which naturally doesn't sit well with the "we are all the same" folks. Yup, you and Jeffery Dahmer can be "the same" all you want. As for me, Viva La Difference!

"Progressives" can't stand this, because they want absolute equality, and if human nature itself is flawed and not infinitely malleable, then their whole project is doomed. Things like making "gay good" and then making it "equal or better with heterosexual" are projects that they MUST be able to carry out. They have to crank up the sanctions to a level where essentially nobody dare open their mouth to say anything other than what their progrom demands. If it causes the need for repression of the folks that aren't "getting their mind right", that is just a price to be paid. They KNOW that what they are doing is RIGHT, so people that don't agree have to be "handled".

"Progressivism" is wonderful because "progress" NEVER stops! You may be thinking to yourself that gender neutral bathrooms will never become law". Well, in CA schools,  they already have ! http://calwatchdog.com/2013/08/13/gov-brown-signs-gender-bathroom-bill/

As they say, as CA goes, so goes the nation. I didn't even know the meaning of "gay" until I was out of HS, and then I pretty much couldn't believe it. Of course by the late '70s, it was running wild in CA, and then they were dying like flies from AIDs. One would have STILL thought -- "OK, this was a short term blip, and while it may continue on in whacked out CA, the rest of the country has seen where this easily leads". That was just "gay", I would have never imagined anything like gay "marriage".

I dropped my subscription to Time in the early '90s when they had a sympathetic report on the plight of a poor teacher that was a member of NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) and it was likely going to cost him his job. Hey, it's not like he declared himself a Christian or quoted the Bible or anything! THAT would be a legitimate cause for dismissal!

The basis of human culture and development is the idea of social norms that are largely passed on to the next generation so we feel that we are part of a meaningful chain of creation with a purpose. Keep changing up the culture so that one generation can no longer hardly identify if the next is even human, and man becomes as Burke said, "Like the flies of summer".

Only it is worse than that! We are NOT flies! Flies need no meaning, they procreate with a vengeance as long as there is food. Not so man. As we see in Europe and the European origin population of the US, man ceases to continue the species when there is no longer any vision of the next generation following a religious and cultural order. We need more than to just pass on our genes. We seek to propagate the hopes, dreams, morals and soul of our civilization!

When that is destroyed, then we perish. Why even have a higher brain that engenders a religion for the hope of eternal life and a culture that is more than a continuation of mere gene pool?

The point is, there is no reason to do so. There is GOOD reason that he Chinese are still thinking expansion, and we are focused on transfer of wealth to the elderly as we pass into the ash heap of history.

'via Blog this'

JD 2320 Tractor, Patio Project

2320 and Patio Project

I was out working with the 2320 today and decided that I ought to shoot a couple of pics of it since it happened to be in a rare "loaded" state with the bucket, belly mower and tiller all attached. The bucket is on for obvious reasons, the evident digging for the extension  / completion of our house back perimeter rocking plus the addition of a small patio and a couple levels of steps to enable people to get to the patio, firepit, deck around the side of the house without stumbling in the dark. There will also be a berm and some rocks to separate it from the lawn and provide some privacy from the street

The other two items are on because I didn't like where I had the tiller at, so I wanted to move it and decided to just leave it on for weight while I dug, and when I was digging today I noticed that the lawn was really long, so I put that on and mowed. 

I've got all of 13 hrs on the unit so far, but WOW, it has done A LOT!! Lots of brush moving both at the edge of the yard and off from our drain-field, plus all the digging and mowing. Mowing is quite a breeze with the 62" deck! 

I'm always amazed at how poorly the measure "horsepower" captures working power. My previous 10 year+ mower was a JD 425 with allegedly 24 gas HP. This is a Yanmar 3cyl diesel, also with 24hp. The 425 had like zero torque ... load it and it died. This plays with the 62" deck, showing no signs of lugging even at 2/3 throttle. When I do lug it pushing brush or digging into a dirt pile with the bucket, it has a good deal of "snort" before it thinks of killing. 

It has been a JOY to use! Doing tasks that I've wanted to do for YEARS in an hour or two of enjoyable time is a superb treat. Somewhat like the opportunity to "be retired" for a couple weeks being of nearly infinite worth, the blessing of being able to complete tasks while using such a nice machine as been a real high point of the summer.