The "Experts" mantra -- "Never in doubt, frequently wrong".
I'd put some of the headings differently -- 2005, Katrina was the PEAK year for "we can expect an ever increasing number of larger hurricanes" ... after which we have had basically NONE. Even large storms like Sandy had to be "uprated to hurricanes", and PREDICTIONS had to be more and more dire as in last falls "strongest hurricane EVER!"
The State is not able to create life, but it can end it, and seeks to expand it's powers to end at least innocent life in greater and greater numbers both at the start and end of life.
Without fanfare or announcement, Governor Brown’s proposed 2016 Budget recommends $2.3 million dollars to allow California to purchase lethal drugs for Medi-Cal patients who want their physician to help them commit suicide.
California would pay an estimated $5,400 per patient just for the drugs yet Medi-Cal patients still have no access to palliative care (designed to improve the quality of life for patients and their family facing serious illnesses.) Even more incredibly, a recent study has shown that Medi-Cal recipients have only a one in three chance of even getting cancer treatments under the system and often cannot obtain second opinions.
The State finds palliative care to be too expensive -- assisted suicide quietly being made a "better option". If you lack personal resources, the choice is given that you may either suffer on in pain, or end your life with state assistance.
At some point I will research the theology and think a bit more of my "bottom line" on this issue, but my general thought at this point in life is that Christians are under no requirement to use "heroic measures" to maintain their life. Christ certainly "gave up his life" on the Cross -- being both God and Man, he had the power to preserve it, but dying was required.
The sad situation we are now being faced with is:
The State raises the costs of medical care to extravagant levels through subsidy, regulation, removal of competition (cronyism) and requirements for vastly increased coverage (pre-existing conditions, mental illness, etc)
The numbers are arranged so that lower incomes get increasing subsidies, higher incomes pay ever larger premiums, co-pays, deductibles, percentage of coverage, lower limits on coverage, etc.
The system becomes increasingly wired to impoverish all but the very rich prior to death unless they die VERY quickly (ie INSTANTLY in accident, stroke, heart attack)
Thus the the percentage of us who will be wards of the state at the end of our lives continues to grow, and the "compassionate State" gives us the choice of either a quick death, or a lingering painful death without palliative care.
Thus, a horribly painful or immoral death is increasingly the wages of our secession of our lives and morals to the "care" of a faceless bureaucracy.
Abortion shouldn’t be seen as taboo and I can’t believe I even have to say in 2016 that women or doctors shouldn’t be ‘punished’ for carrying it out. If you’re having sex you’re always at risk of pregnancy. Some people are just unlucky.
Will somebody ask Governor Doofus what percentage of state travel is "non-essential"? It's like all the damned "non-essential" federal "workers".
I am SICK of paying for NON-ESSENTIAL ANYTHING for the government!
From some of the past federal shutdowns I gleaned this little gem:
Federal agencies have the power to designate their employees’ status in the event of a government shutdown. The last time Congress and President Obama stalemated, in 2011, the administration estimated that 800,000 of the 2.1 million employees in the federal workforce would be furloughed.
So only about 1/3 of the current federal bureaucracy is "essential" IN IT'S OWN MIND! So I bet in the real world it is EASILY more like 20% TOPS! You ever meet anyone who didn't think they were an "above average driver"? Guess what? I guarantee you that 1/2 of the population is of below average intelligence!
So when Gov Doofus talks about banning "non-essential travel" to a place where men use men's bathrooms and women use women's bathrooms, does it even DAWN on him how much taxpayers like paying for such travel ANYWHERE?
If the governorship was essential, Doofus would have been replaced LONG ago, so that is somebody that can CLEARLY stay home!
The decline covered in the linked article is old news to readers of this blog -- I found the following paragraph to be especially well put.
And now our civilization is likewise demonstrating its own shortness of breath, with Europe a few decades ahead of us on the downslope. Europe is utterly exhausted. It believes in nothing – its churches are empty and that hopelessness has translated into a demographic death spiral. Europe does nothing new and merely feeds off of the fading triumphs of the last century. Its politics are frozen in a cycle of failure even as the barbarians it unwisely invited into its midst establish their own internal kingdoms. The elite is no longer composed of citizen-soldier-politicians in the mode of the ancient Roman patricians, or even the modern Winston Churchill. Instead, it is all bland bureaucrats, terrified of losing power and using their regulatory cudgel to squelch the unrest by marginalizing the unsatisfied and outlawing the speech of the uncooperative.
And with the Arctic Circle sitting right between North America and an increasingly belligerent Russia, the Navy needs to be sure its subs and crews can handle the conditions.
Russia? BO assured us in 2012 that "the cold war has been over for 20 years".
Chicago is on track for 700 murders this year under BO crony Rahm Emanuel.
Chicago police stops have dropped 90 percent -- from more than 157,000 up to this point last year to roughly 21,000 so far this year. No coincidence that the city is experiencing its bloodiest start in nearly two decades. The latest data shows violence has not relented since January, with both shootings and murders sharply rising.
BO is pardoning criminals and police forces around the nation are battening down the hatches as they are hyper-scrutinized for even protecting their own lives from the rising tide of increasingly violent thugs.
"The Party" (TP-D) is pretty certain they have successfully wired the demographics this time by immigration and killing any form of voter ID, thus allowing massive vote fraud, that they will be able to prevent any rise in the "law and order voter".
Even discipline in school is now "racist", and on the mean streets, cops are far better served to just stay in their cars and let the thugs kill each other -- hoping that the collateral damage will be minimized and they can just move in after the fact and pick up the bodies.
Detroit is the model for the the "TP city" -- DC, Baltimore, St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans and Chicago are cities on the way to "The Detroit Model" -- here in Minnesota, our own N Minneapolis is a local version.
I'll take my chances in Emmetsburg Iowa, I don't need a front row seat like the liquor store owner in this little promo for the ObamaNation. (abomination)
Eventually, even a very slow nation will learn the difference between "justice" and "punishment".
The article covers the fact that Bernie Sanders (BS) is Jewish, but basically nobody knows it -- and he very much likes it that way. He is PROUD to be a Socialist -- he rarely admits that he is a Jew.
God creates, works in love and light and provides both free will and Grace. Lots of people like to question the existence of God, many of them consider the "proof" of his non-existence to be evil.
Virtually nobody questions the existence of evil -- which would indicate that those who question God because of evil find evil to be a completely natural element of the universe. Interestingly, they are often those who somehow, even after consigning God to non-existence due to the existence of evil, find the nature of man to be "good", (randomly I'm sure) with the mysterious origin of "natural evil" to be somehow due to "society, male privilege, religion, etc". How these "evil elements" arose from "good human nature" remains a mystery -- but one they are quite comfortable with as opposed to the idea of a good and loving God.
Those that work against God love to work in darkness.
Karl Marx was a Jew—and also an anti-Semite. He was steeped in the works of 19th-century French theorist François Fourier. Paul Johnson, in his magisterial History of the Jews, quotes Fourier’s contention that commerce was “the source of all evil” and that the Jews were “the incarnation of commerce.” Thus was the elimination of commerce inextricably tied to the elimination of the Jews. Ethnic eradication was part and parcel of socialism, in Marx’s eyes. Indeed, in Johnson’s view, “Marx’s theory of communism was the end-product of his theoretical anti-Semitism.”
"Honor your father and your mother" is the 5th Commandment, so it is unsurprising to see Satan providing us with another inversion. "Hate your father and your mother" -- and so of course, your own race and blood line! Marx found commerce to the source of evil, Jews to be the incarnation of commerce, so elimination of the Jews as been part of the Communist and Socialist (see NATIONAL Socialist) agenda throughout the 20th century. When consistency is COMPLETELY not an issue, theoretical elimination of YOURSELF is only one more inconsistency -- thus we have $100 million dollar woman Hillary inveighing against "the rich" and Bernie part of a tradition of eliminating the Jews.
What does any of that have to do with “Zionists”? The answer goes back to Marx: “The contradiction which exists between the effective political power of the Jew and his political rights, is the contradiction between politics and the power of money in general. Politics is in principle superior to the power of money, but in practice it has become its bondsman.”
In other words, money talks. And in Marx’s view and the view of his descendants, it speaks the language of the Jew, who represents power. If that power is going to be devolved back into the hands of the people, where it belongs, it must be wrested from the Jew.
When we were visiting Denver in December of '14 and took in the Light Parade, we got to witness a "Black Lives Matter" protest walk through carrying signs and chanting -- we were rather shocked to see "Free Palestine" posters as part of the group. We should not have been -- the movements are linked, antisemitism is part and parcel of the "movements of the people", here we have Jeremiah Wright (YES, BO's old pastor) inveighing against Israel.
Citing what he called the “three-headed demon” of “racism, militarism and capitalism,” Wright implored the gathering to “stand beside our Palestinian brothers and sisters, who have been done one of the most egregious injustices in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Ah what a fetid stew the left boils in their Satanic caldron of hatred and death. Hate the whites, hate the Jews, hate those that create wealth, hate those that protect and keep order (police and military) -- hatred for law, Christians, civilization even for their parents and their own blood. When they finally come to power, they always have some "inner power group", the KGB in the USSR or the SS in Nazi Germany that even rules over the military and normal police with terror.
Remember, our current sitting disaster of a president sat in Rev Wright's church for 20 years, and of course BO himself in his own autobiography talked of trying to "filter his mothers white blood" and finally found his true self as a "proud Luo Tribesman" and picked up the mantle of his father and grandfather to "destroy the colonial powers" (America, England ...)
There seems to be universal political agreement that even if Roe-V-Wade was overturned and states were allowed to protect the unborn, killing them should be a "victimless crime".
I'm CLEARLY not a politician -- so that probably is the only "reasonable / non-crazy / winnable / etc" POLITICAL position. I'm surprised, but I'm surprised a LOT these days.
Morally though, it seems to me that taking the life of an unborn baby is either wrong or it isn't. If it is not wrong, then why would it ever be made illegal? If it IS made illegal, how did we get to the position that it is "politically insane" for there to be a penalty for breaking the law?
Let's say that Jamar Clark's (black man killed in scuffle for policeman gun in November up in Minneapolis) girlfriend decided that after probably being beaten many times, maybe with huge emotion, soul searching, reticence, etc that she was going to take matters in her own hands and kill the bastard.
Now depending on circumstance -- was he in the act of beating her, did she "fear for her life", etc, she may well get off with self-defense (and I'd be fine with that) ... however, if after a certain beating she just decide when she got up early to eviscerate him with a butcher knife, there would be a trial and a penalty. "Soul searching, thinking she had no options, etc notwithstanding.
I know I'm WAY out on a limb here -- even the WSJ asserts that "nobody holds the penalty position".
My question then is whether the battle for the unborn is not already lost then. Jamar Clark had a nasty criminal record, had beaten his girlfriend bad enough for EMTs to be called and was interfering with them forcing them to call police. This information was considered (as it should be) immaterial relative to his life being lost in a scuffle with police. He was "innocent until proven guilty". Had the officers been found to not have acted properly they would have been charged with some level of "manslaughter" -- or possibly even murder.
If a baby in it's mothers womb is NOT human life, then why regulate abortion at all? It can't be "killed" any more than your appendix can -- which is why pro-choice people hold the position that they do (at least the ones that care about morals). No "tissue rights".
Is it possible for the pro-life position to have any moral standing but not deal with the question of there being a penalty for killing the unborn baby?
I can't see how.
I don't say that the penalty for "first offence, especially underage, extenuating circumstance" has to be large, but we definitely live in a society where if an underage male is accused of ANY form of "sexual harassment", there is no compunction whatsoever for the system to identify them as a "sex offender" with a trail that may follow them for life.
I think Trump handled the question badly for sure, but I had never realized that the official position of the pro-life movement was that there could be no penalty for women getting an abortion if Roe V Wade was ever overturned.
Given that moral position, I can't imagine how it ever will be.
I continue to subject myself to an hour or two of MPR a week, and since November, a liberal might say that I've been "the victim" of WAY more coverage of Jamar Clark than a rational person should be subjected to.
During the hours that I listen -- typically in snippets from 9:30 AM to 1:00PM, the coverage of this has been INCESSANT, and the CONSTANT is "Jamar Clark, unarmed black man victim of police shooting in Minneapolis". MANY times we also covered the "witnesses say he was handcuffed and on the ground at the time he was shot" -- sometimes they even said "executed".
When you have your hand on an officers gun you are NOT "unarmed", and when you are shot, you are a "suspect" or now "perpetrator". Let's try this out -- "Jamar Clark, a violent domestic violence perpetrator was shot and killed in a struggle for a police officers gun"!
COUNTLESS representatives from "Black Lives Matter", "Justice for Jamar", NAACP, the University of MN, black political leaders and various community members and activists were given a HUGE amount of time to talk, and to summarize their points:
The Minneapolis Police Department is racist, "their narrative" should not be covered AT ALL.
The entire idea of "police" is "White Privilege", the entire idea of "law" as it exists today is "White Privilege". MPR is racist, continues to dispense the "racist police propaganda".
The idea of "truth" as a "racist construct". The ONLY truth that counts here is the TRUTH of the Black Community -- Jamar Clark was handcuffed, on the ground, and executed.
Here we have a short summary by the local head of the NAACP from the article.
"Your entire narrative today was to push the propaganda of the Minneapolis Police Department," said Raeisha Williams, communications director for the Minneapolis NAACP and a candidate for the Minneapolis City Council. "You, Mr. Freeman, did not give a fair and accurate portrayal … and let me tell you: If the city burns, it's on your hands.""
We FINALLY heard the police side yesterday -- not very much in the article above.
Jamar Clark beats up his girlfriend at a party bad enough that EMTs are called.
EMTs arrive, they get the girlfriend in the ambulance, clark is fighting with EMTs trying to get at girlfriend again, EMTs call police.
Police are less than two blocks away, they arrive, tell Clark to get hands out of pockets, he refuses.
Officer Ringgenberg takes Clark to ground and Clark continues to resist, he gets his hand on Ringgenberg 's gun, which Clark has moved toward Ringgenberg 's back. Clark has hand on gun, Ringgenberg is fighting for control and tells partner -- "He's got my gun!"
Partner Schwarze puts gun in Clark's face and says "Let go of the gun or I'm going to shoot you!"
Clark says "I'm ready to die" ... Schwarze feels that in order to save the lives of his partner and possibly himself and others around, he has no option and shoots him.
Clark's DNA is found on the gun and Riggenberg's belt, No DNA from Clark is found on the inside of the handcuffs, there are no marks on Clark's wrists from handcuffs.
The "20ish" witnesses variously say "he was handcuffed in front", "he was handcuffed in back", "he had one handcuff on", "he was not handcuffed".
The BLM narrative usually consists of merely "he was handcuffed, on the ground and executed" -- I've never see them asked to extend this any as to what we have to believe to believe their story. It would have to be something as follows:
Two racist police officers get a call, they show up and find a black man scuffling with EMTs.
They grab him, handcuff him, throw him to the ground, and within 60 seconds of their arrival they decide that with two EMTs standing there plus about 20 witnesses, it is a good idea to execute him in cold blood, so they do.
Could that happen? I suppose, but if this is what police forces in the US are like, especially in heavily Democrat states and cities like Minneapolis, one would expect at LEAST 100's if not thousands of young black men executed by police each year in this country. Our news media and for certain MPR would not have the hours to do the coverage! They would need 10-20 stations in the Twin Cities alone just to cover the police killings of "unarmed black men".
Since Fergusson MO it has been clear that "The Party" (TP-D) and it's media arm wants to whip up racial tensions to increase turnout for the 2016 elections, so EVERY opportunity is fanned to fit the story line of "white police murder unarmed black man".
Left wing narratives are so ubiquitous that we often don't see how selective they are. When the violence is Islamic, we MUST NOT generalize -- there are no "root causes" except possibly "W invading Iraq". The incident is the incident -- nothing more general can or should be discovered.
When there is a mass shooting in the US, we MUST generalize about the "problem of gun ownership". What may appear to be the proximate cause -- the perpetrator is a raving lunatic who ought to have been locked up long ago, such complicating factors are "avoiding the REAL issue of guns in America". The blood is "really on the hands of the NRA and every gun owner in America".
When a black man is shot by police, we completely ignore proximate causes and purely generalize to "racism" in police forces and the general public. In the Clark case, it is interesting that nobody cares about the girlfriend and the relationship of domestic violence and substance abuse to the incident.
In 2011, the most recent year for which such data is available, black females were murdered by males at a rate of 2.61 per 100,000 in single victim/single offender incidents. For white women, the rate was 0.99 per 100,000.
If Clark had not been beating up his girlfriend there would have been no call and no death. He also had a blood alcohol level over the legal limit as well as evidence of other drugs in his system. Perhaps if he had not been high he would not have been neither abusing his girlfriend or resisting arrest? But substance abuse is a "victimless crime".
One more case where the vast majority of the public are simply sheep bleating to the narrative that TP and it's media arm choose to apply to fit whatever story they seek to use to increase their political power and control of the masses. "Follow the money" is indeed a worthy maxim, but "be aware of the narrative" is possibly even more critical as TP consolidates it's power over a largely blind public.
Another paper, published in 2011 by the Williams Institute, used survey data to attempt to count the transgender population. It estimated that 0.3 percent of the population, or 700,000 adults, identified that way.
So let's be VERY generous here and conclude that transgender is a "real problem". I assume that even the most jaded among us would consider being a paraplegic a "real problem" and conclude that a very few of them are "faking it".
So WHY are we AT ALL CONCERNED about people with "gender issues" having to use the bathroom that fits with their biology?
Do we think it is HARDER to be dealt this unfortunate blow of feeling like you are not comfortable with your gender than it is to have to deal with not being able to move your legs?
We have sports teams, states and cities talking about boycotting NC because they officially state that men should use mens bathrooms and women should use women's bathrooms.
Not a lot of solid information on the incidence of pedophilia ... Wikipedia lists it as "less than 5% in males" as an incidence -- COMMON compared to trans at .3 or less! Does access to a women's bathroom give better access to pedophiles that want to prey on young girls?
The insanity in this is so great that it defies comprehension:
We are paying COMPLETELY INORDINATE attention to one very odd group of people many of which are quite likely are most simply "disturbed", while other groups of similar size who are CLEARLY disabled and forced to deal with MUCH more difficult circumstance (paraplegics, blind, etc) are of very little concern to the elite.
The exposure of children and vulnerable adults in the 99% of the population so that the <1% "don't feel embarrassed" is utterly insane. We are in the process of GLORIFICATION of "trans" people -- see Caitlyn Jenner. "Trans pride" will vie for "gay pride" in the elite quarters. Why would they hide?
The bottom line here is again the attack on all of created order -- destroy the Church, destroy the Family and now destroy Gender -- this is important PURELY to destroy the natural order. That is the complete and total reason for this happening!
The linked article is OF COURSE about Trump -- only it really isn't. Is it REALLY so hard for people to figure out why Trump is popular and actually could win? Is the media and everyone REALLY this dense?
Duality and obsession, his enemies’ and his own, fill Batman's stories. His enemies reflect and distort facets of himself. What psychopathologies lurk in the minds of supervillains like the Joker, the Riddler, Two-Face, and Catwoman? Are they really rogues and villains, or simply misunderstood victims of a heartless society? Do Batman and his foes depend on each other?
Figuring out Trump is easy, but is Hillary the Joker or the Penguin? She seems quite a bit more off her rocker than Heath Ledger's Joker, but she looks a lot more like the Penguin. Oh, and people like villains too -- LOTS of people liked Ledger's (and Nicholson's) Joker! If people didn't like villains, Hildebeast (nor Satan) would stand a chance!
Of the eight Batman films, four of them broke the opening weekend record. One of them came in third. One critically-dismissed (and eventually rejected) installment snagged the seventh biggest debut of all time while the current item has the eighth biggest debut on record as of today. Heck, at this moment, the 8th, 9th, and 10th biggest debut weekends are the last three Batman movies.
What is all this malarky about "Evangelical Christians would repudiate everything they believe in to vote for Trump"?
The media called them hypocrites for voting for Reagan as well -- first divorced president, not a regular church attender, product of evil Hollywood, bad father, hated the poor, warmonger. This is supposed to be new? Clearly, from the POV of the MSM, ANYONE that votes for ANY Republican is stupid, immoral, greedy, evil, Nazi ... oh, you get the point.
So they should vote for Hillary??? She has DECLARED that she is all for abortion, at least Trump CLAIMS that he has "repented". Evangelicals actually believe in repentance -- but it isn't like any of the past Republicans including Reagan have got rid of abortion either!
Humans are NOT rational, we are RATIONALIZING! Love is blind said the beautiful woman as she kissed the Moose (well, cow, but same thing). Trump says that he will "Make America Great Again" -- and most of his supporters hang whatever their view is of "Great Again" on that promise just like all the BO supporters hung their view of "Hope and Change". The difference for the media though is that they were so thrilled with BO, it never occurred to them that they were being driven by emotion.
CERTAINLY humans are motivated by their "hearts and loves" rather than by "their heads and logic". Damn, NEWS AT 11! Have these people missed Madison Avenue 101? Have they ever watched a beer commercial? A car commercial? ANY commercial?
The article is VERY right that Evangelicals are "in love with the world", their services have become too much like TV shows, their preachers often look pretty much like Trump, etc, etc, but that is nearly as true about Rubio as it is about Trump. At least some of us Lutherans have traditional liturgy for just that reason -- but we still have trouble with "loving the world". MAYBE the Amish do "better", but I doubt it (whose buggy is nicest, whose horse is more expensive, whose crops are better ... ) .... AGAIN, "It was for this reason that Christ came into the world!" ... we are saved by GRACE, NOT WORKS -- which of course the media (and apparently evangelical preachers see as "foolishness".
For a media that is COMPLETELY disgusted that anyone could EVER fail to vouch for the Christianity of BO, their judgement of Trump and evangelicals might contain just a tiny bit of hypocrisy!
Who is the most interesting candidate in the race? Is that REALLY a "hard question"? Movies, commercials, songs, novels, women's clothes (like a bikini, enough material to cover the subject, but not so much to lose interest!).
Add on top of this the fact that I've pointed out a number of times that after Slick Willie, four hour erection commercials, constant profanity, etc, etc, THE STANDARDS HAVE DECLINED!!!
BO proved that you didn't have to have ANY experience running ANYTHING to be president -- Hell, Trump is a model of preparedness in comparison.
Slick Wille proved you could have morals that made tomcats look like saints and be president.
I'm willing to grant that BO's birth certificate was OK, but the media / Democrats / intelligencia could have cared less if BO was a citizen or not -- just like they don't care about Benghazi, e-mails, etc.
There are NO MORAL STANDARDS remaining for president of the US! (Bill Clinton)
There are NO STANDARDS OF EXPERIENCE remaining for president of the US! (BO)
The elite powers that be have been JUST FINE with establishing this as precedent, so why the hell not just elect somebody "interesting"?
LOGIC? After the last eight years somebody wants to talk about LOGIC???
Oh, never mind ... animal rights protesters disrupted EASTER services at St Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, using bullhorns and screaming about people eating tasty animals!
My standard points:
This is the most subtle and effective of media manipulation techniques. The media doesn't care about Christians and it is generally fine with PETA types. Ho hum, hardly hear about it. You can't react to what you never hear.
HOWEVER, if some Trump supporters really did interrupt a Muslim worship, ALL HELL would break loose! The media plays us like marionettes!!!
This was St Patrick's on EASTER! EASTER is **THE** holiday for Christians, it DEFINES Christianity! If our media had .00001% as much interest in "religious tolerance" for Christians as they do for Muslims, this would be a BIG STORY!
I'm not paying much attention to BO and TP as they whine about the SCOTUS nomination. But Sowell had a very good conclusion to this column on the obvious. If the SCOTUS interpreted the Constitution rather than making laws as they are sworn to do, SCOTUS nominations would probably sail right through.
Chief Justice Roberts himself practically repealed the 10th Amendment's limitation on federal power when he wrote the decision that the government could order us all to buy ObamaCare insurance policies. When judges act like whores, they can hardly expect to be treated like nuns.
Politicians, journalists and judges should all spare us pious hypocrisy.
The "religion of peace" aided the Christian celebration of Easter by killing 69 and wounding over 300 others, mostly women and children at a park in Lahore Pakistan.
Because of the innocent setting, an unusually high number of those injured were women and children. But the attack, claimed by a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, intentionally targeted Christians, the perpetrators say.
It would be a real shame if anyone would "falsely characaterize" such an attack as having ANYTHING to do with Islam!
The religious group [Christians] makes up only 2% of the population, and tensions are high between them and a hardline Muslim core which wants to see a strict interpretation of Islamic law take precedence in Pakistan's legal system.
I'm sure that "Islamic Law" really has nothing to do with Islam -- perhaps BO will wag his finger at us soon and enlighten us!
