The Truth Lament Strolls On

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody-cares-the-president-is-lying.html?mc=aud_dev&mcid=fb-nytimes&mccr=FebPostElectionSubs&mcdt=2017-02&subid=FebPostElectionSubs&ad-keywords=AudDevGate&referer=http://m.facebook.com

I've been observing for a very long time that the concept of "truth" in the West has fallen on hard times. Knowledge of Philosophy and Theology are at all time lows. Very few can tell much about the relation between fact, dialectic and rhetoric, understanding of which would help the author of this column a good deal.

During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

So in a nation where many states have no voter id, what would qualify as "evidence". Here is some from a 2012 Pew Study:

• About 24 million voter registrations are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.
• More than 1.8 million dead people are listed as voters.
• Approximately 2.75 million people are registered in more than one state.

So that is an OPPORTUNITY of 27 million. If 10% of the opportunity voted, that would be 2.7 million. Up to now, nobody has really looked for voter fraud, nor do we still have a good mechanism. My son voted in Colorado, when I voted in MN, there was his name right above mine. MN requires no voter ID ... anyone that knows his name and the fact that he is registered could have walked in, voted as him, and be completely secure against prosecution and likely detection (they would have to do a cross-check between MN and CO). 

Of course, if one knows about fact, dialectic and rhetoric, they realize that is NOT the point. What Trump engages in, what the linked column engages in is rhetoric -- unidirectional convincing speech. If the author of the column and I engaged in a debate, that would be dialectic, and in both, we may or may not attempt to use "facts". I used a few (assuming you accept Pew as a source) in my response to his rhetorical response to Trump's rhetoric in which BOTH of them conclude that "the number will we what **I** say it is!" ... NY Times columnist asserts zero, Trump and minions assert "millions". 

NY Times columnist asserts that he is believable and Trump is not based on -- er, well, "bluster". A very common tool of rhetoricians.  

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Exactly, always has been, always will be. What difference did it make if W Bush was a great national guard fighter pilot or a mediocre one? None, but the idea of it was enough to take down Dan Rather. What difference did it make if someone "leaked" that Valeria Plame, who drove into CIA HQ everyday actually worked there? None ... but it occupied a lot of media pages for over a year anyway.

The point of rhetoric since Plato and Aristotle has been to convince humans at a level "beyond factual" ... because humans actually never do anything for purely rational and factual reasons, and they never have. As long as "your side" is winning, the standard human tendency is to never even observe the difference between factual basis and rhetoric.

When "your tribe" loses and you understand nothing about truth, philosophy, dialectics or rhetoric, you are suddenly adrift. Your "moorings" are slipped, and it is obvious to you that "the others" have somehow changed.

This may explain one of the more revealing moments from after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.

It turns out that everybody has always had their own way of interpreting wether a "fact" was true or not -- it's just that the column author recently notices that less people than he thought were navigating the shoals of truth and falsehood based on the rhetoric of the NY Times.

Oroville Versus Flint, $840 Billion

Oroville Spillway Situation: Fast facts and timeline - KRCR:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0131-highsmith-flint-water-crisis-20160131-story.html

It appears that loss of the Oroville dam in CA will be headed off. The 200K people that were evacuated have returned, we hope for good. Interestingly, the population of Flint Michigan was once 200K people as well.

Remember 2009 when BO assured us that he was going to "invest" $840 billion in "shovel ready" projects? We never really did hear a lot about what happened to that money "Cash for clunkers", $500 million lost on Soyndra, a few crony payoffs to ACORN and others. While the media is quick to find the shortest path between a government failure and a Republican in office, $840 billion can be thrown to the winds of political graft by a Democrat and nobody even expects that it will be linked up to fixing things like water systems in Flint or giant dams in California.

It isn't hard to find out a trail of what has happened at Oroville.

In 2005, DWR applied for a renewal of its operating license for the Oroville hydroelectric generating facilities. During the relicensing process, Friends of the River, Sierra Club, and the South Yuba River Citizen's League filed a motion to intervene in the relicensing. These groups alleged that the emergency spillway in Oroville should be classified as an "operational/auxiliary" spillway and should be armored with concrete, citing the potential for erosion and downstream runoff impacts. During the proceeding, FERC confirmed that the emergency spillway was properly designated and that it met all FERC engineering guidelines.

We all know the government of California is 100% lefty ... yes, yes, they elected Schwarzenegger, however he ran and governed as a Democrat with an R next to his name, and since the legislature was all Democrat, he really had very little choice. Unsurprisingly, Oroville is a near disaster that seems devoid of political recrimination.  The other underlying reason that we hear little about it is because the "extended drought in CA due to global warming" has been in the news for years, and they haven't figured out how to spin the end of it yet. The Oroville situation shows that the drought is over, which if one was rational and consistent would be a statement on global warming. It is of course not to be taken as such -- drought proves global warming, heavy rain proves global warming.

How is it though that when organizations like the Sierra Club are filing suit in 2005, such a project never gets funded as $850 billion is getting sprayed around? Nobody cares -- "BO was a great president, Trump is a disaster", thus saith the NY Times.

Michigan government is more varied than I would have assumed -- a pretty decent mixture of D and R.  They voted D for president from '92 on up to Trump. So since '92 they have been considered mostly a blue state. However, after the really heavy D cities -- like Detroit and Flint, went into bankruptcy (how does THAT happen?), they ended up electing an R (Snyder) to clean up the disaster as governor. Part of that cleanup involved putting managers in to try to fix the city finances, which resulted in moving to Flint river water in 2014 that ended up leaching lead out of old pipes -- which nobody expected.

Naturally, since a Republican was in the governors office, perfect knowledge of potential problems is supposed to be assured, and when something bad happens it is nearly assuredly due to "racism" -- NPR liked to run shows with crying black mothers talking of how the Republicans purposely poisoned her children. What would one expect?

The moral of the story? Government screws up a lot -- and often in BIG ways. It's a bi-partisan problem -- but don't expect anyone to connect at least half the dots for you.

Prediction though -- if Trump does any sort of a "public works / stimulus, etc", it will be a DISASTER according to the news!

When R's screw up, the media lets us know -- it is because they are nasty, racist, incompent, etc.

When D's screw up it isn't really a "screw up" --- it is like an "act of God", except D's generally don't believe in him, so it is "bad luck". Nothing to see here folks, move aloing.

A cynic like me looks at this and says "elect Republicans" ... at least they will get a TON of oversight from the media, and there is a "chance" they might improve because of it. They will still be working with a unionized beauracracy with no competiiton, protected jobs, etc, but at least THEIR jobs will not be guaranteed, so they might yell lounder at the union folks that they can't fire!

It isn't much, but at least it is SOMETHING!
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Goldberg, Confidence, Memory, Meaning

Donald Trump’s 4D Chess, Political Master Myth | National Review:

Here is what I consider to be Golberg's central pontification of the linked column:

But I’d like to inter a different common retort: that Trump is playing ten moves ahead; that he’s playing 4D chess; that he’s brilliantly distracting the media by creating this or that controversy. I’m willing to concede that there are times when he’s deftly sent the media chasing their tails. But the idea that Trump’s brilliant master plan is unfolding just as he intended is frick’n bonkers.

First, let it be said that I admire Jonah Goldberg and am even significantly jealous of him -- multiple books, respected journalist at the magazine founded by Buckley, who I nearly idolized.

I realize that in order to operate in life in the position he is in, he needs to:

1. Take firm interesting positions 
2. Always be confident no matter what  

To some degree, that is what it takes for "good mental health", even a "good Christian life". Living boldly in the present, forgetting  / forgiving ones past errors, enjoying and continuing to live boldly in the future present moments with no concern for the morrow. 

My position on Trump definitely "evolved" -- I thought he had no chance, I was aghast when it became obvious that he did, etc. I essentially went through the stages of grief. (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) as we ALL do sometimes many times in a day over matters great and small in our lives. I could go back and link some of my blog entries together and likely chart the progression (with some regressions) relative to Trump. 

Here is Goldberg in an NR column "Operation Destroy The GOP" in October of last year.

I feel like Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty on the beach. You people blew it all up. You embraced a man who has no serious allegiance to the ideals you got rich peddling and who had a vanishingly small chance of winning in the first place — even if he had been the disciplined candidate he deceitfully vowed he would be. Trump is now an albatross on the party and he will leave a Cheeto-colored stain on both the GOP and the conservative movement for years to come. 

Goldberg was one of the founders of the #nevertrump movement on the right. He was CERTAIN that not only was Trump going to lose, but that his loss (and the very likely loss of the Senate with it) was "the end of the GOP" for at least the foreseeable future. Based largely on my reading of Scott Adams and the fact that I had COMPLETELY underestimated Trump relative to the nomination, I was "mildly hopeful" on election day, but far from certain that he would win.

When he started to look like he might win the nomination last spring, I started looking for "other information". It was a tiny example of the same logic that led me to find National Review in the late '70s when I realized that I wasn't ready to turn off my Christmas lights, put on a sweater and accept that the best days of America were behind us.

When I realize that I'm wrong, I like to do a reset and look for "other information". Apparently that is even odder than I realize.

I've been wrong too many times to believe that I KNOW that Trump is not playing "4D Chess" -- or to think that he is a bumbling corrupt idiot savant that happened to luck into the White House (maybe with Russian help). I firmly believe that it is possible that he is a genius with a master plan that STILL makes mistakes and can lose "battles" while still winning the war. Back in August, I was getting more convinced he had to be a "plant". Hell, maybe he WAS a plant, and in trying to throw the election he accidentally won because Hillary is such a putz. We have been living in insane times for certain at least since Slick Willie was able to skate with BJs from an employee in the oval office (or was that "oral office"?).

Goldberg is a smart person, WAY smarter than me. Does he realize that even his supposedly educated conservative readers have such short attention spans that they have forgotten what he wrote last fall? or is it simply true that nobody cares about such tired concepts as "truth", "consistency", etc? If that is true however, what is the objection to Trump? Or anything really -- if BOTH sides (all sides?) have abandoned consistency, truth, "history" (of even the less than 6 months sort), then what exactly do words mean?

Perhaps I missed the memo and everyone else but me decided that it IS actually true that we each defined our own meanings of all words -- including "IS" ... so we have passed through the looking glass, and everything operates with each of us playing Humpty Dumpty ...

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." 

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."

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One With $1 Million or a Million with $1?

http://www.businessinsider.com/check-cashing-stores-good-deal-upenn-professor-2017-2

"Banks want one customer with a million dollars. Check cashers like us want a million customers with one dollar," Coleman, the RiteCheck president, said in Servon's book.

Good article, a little longer than it needs to be. For those of us who can afford to park $10-20K in a bank in order to get "free" checking and a bunch of "free" services, as well as being able to accept the fact that the money from checks we cash isn't "available" until the check clears, the bank is a "no brainer", and people that use check cashing services seem "stupid".

Sort of like "Trump voters". If you are doing pretty well in BOistan, the big banks and institutions seem "safe, sane and secure". Increasingly, unless you are in the "upper 50% or so", that isn't your world.

Pretty much the same phenomenon explains why the elites were wrong on Brexit and on Trump ... the "smart money", the "big bets" were against -- the greater number of tiny bets were FOR. How many more people turned out in the well off counties of the nation (or at least appeared to turn out) really doesn't matter. It's like winning the football game time of possession by a full 15 min quarter, but losing by 1 point. You lose.

We all tend to assume that those that disagree with us are "stupid" -- they very rarely are. The actual difference in "raw general ability" between an 80 IQ and 160 IQ isn't worth much on the street. SURE, it is worth a TON inside the DC beltway, universities, law, mass media, corporate boardrooms or the operating room. Most 160 IQ PHDs are smart enough to realize they don't want to take on a street-wise 80 IQ thug in his element. Their 160 IQ general smarts are enough to avoid the encounter and that is all that is required.

Typically, the 160 IQ person has leveraged their advantage to know "everything about nothing" in their specific domain. They know how to do brain surgery really well, but they have no clue to do anything but call AAA if their car won't start. The 80 IQ guy is forced to do the reverse, he knows "nothing about everything" that matters in HIS domain.

We tend to be amazed at tricks a trained animal can do. Even the very smartest apes barely make 40 relative to a human IQ, and that is only in very limited and highly trained/specialized domains. The 40 IQ ape is more like the 160 IQ PHD. The ape is out of his domain and struggling to compete on a scale that he is not genetically predisposed to compete on. So too the 160 PHD -- humans were designed or evolved to be "hunter gatherers" -- the street is much more like the jungle than a courtroom, executive office or medical operating room. The 160 IQ PHD would lose to the ape in the apes environment as well without weapons -- so probably would the 80 street smart guy, but he would have a better chance.

"Genius" is often like being a virtuoso violinist -- take away the violin and your skill is worth very little. The Davos assumption is that we need just a few more 160 IQ virtuosos -- and to hell with the 80-100 IQ "proles".

Where are you placing your bets?

The Chisago Resistance On Hold

Chisago County special election has DFLers hoping for rebound - StarTribune.com:

MPR was rather giddy about this prospect on Monday as well --

“People sense a real opportunity to start showing Republicans that Democrats are frustrated and they are going to stand up and resist Donald Trump,” he said, “and this is a perfect opportunity to do that.” 

Ah, a "pause" in the resistance!




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Fascism, You Keep Using That Word

| National Review:

Fascism is one of those terms that fits in with "Hitler" on the hit list of left wing name calling that is constantly used by people that don't understand what it means -- they may as well just say "bad", or "evil" to anyone that knows history at all.

While we are at it, let's make sure everyone is on the same meme page. The reference is from "The Princess Bride", the link gives a little background.

I've covered this umpteen times, using "Fascism" and "Hitler" to refer to the political RIGHT is like walking up to me and calling me "Miss" ... for those that don't know me, 6'4", 300ish, bald and bearded. I covered left vs right in detail here all the way back to the French Revolution.

The linked Sowell article has the following:

Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run. They were for “industrial policy,” long before liberals coined that phrase in the United States. Indeed, the whole Fascist economic agenda bears a remarkable resemblance to what liberals would later advocate.

The article also references the excellent work "Liberal Fascism" which I have reviewed.

The bottom line here is that in a post-truth tribal nation, the best myths win, so there is NO WAY the leftist tribe will be giving up the left-right inversion, Fascism, Hitler, etc mythology. They are not about to own "National Socialism", let alone Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, North Korea, etc ...

I'm not sure if Trump will be able to establish any really good mythology that works, but he certainly keeps throwing stuff at the wall. The best myths have very tiny pieces of truth and give those that believe in them a "slam dunk" -- "truth" at a general level is antithetical to myth making, since the truth is very rarely anything even close to a "slam dunk" on anything more complex than 2+2=4.

"97% of Scientists" is a great example.

If you want to explore, where you are on a slightly more sensible scale than MERELY left and right, this is an interesting site -- CERTAINLY far from any sort of "perfection", however I think an INDICATOR worth considering.  Here is my result.

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Tim Scott, Black Republican Senator on Tolerance

There is nothing very surprising about the video -- I prefer text, but very little reporting has been done on this from any source, left or right. What I learned from it was this:

1. Scott has the ONLY black chief of staff in the US Senate. 
2. Scott is one of three black Senators in the current US Senate (I looked this up) , here is one of the others ... I'll let you make you make your own determination on her "level of blackness"
   
   
   
3. He was nice enough to not read the ones that had the "N word" in them
4. The media is a lot more concerned about what happens to Faux Native American left wing women Senators than they are about Republican Black male Senators. 

The Certainty Refuge

Elizabeth Warren ‘Silenced’ -- Liberal Media Show Their Arrogance Again | National Review:

As I drove up and back from visiting my 90 year old dad this past Thursday I followed my usual varied diet of listening across the radio spectrum -- lots of NPR, some in MN, some in WI (they carry quite a bit of different stuff). AM talk radio -- little Beck, little Rush, little Hannity, little scratchy stuff I couldn't identify.

What struck me most was how everyone had views that were close to 180 degrees off from each other, yet all were totally and completely certain of their absolute correctness. We seem to have entered the "age of certainty". A rather amazing development considering that at least the elite prognostications have been not tracking all that well the last couple years.

Some of the "certain" positions on the radio that day depending on where one turned.

•  Trump's "Muslim ban" was the most dangerous unconstitutional power grab in the history of the nation, guaranteed to incite vast amounts of global terrorism.
• Trump's temporary hold on travel from 7 states identified as sponsors of terrorism that have little or no documentation on their populace by the Obama administration is in line with rulings from every previous modern president, including Obama -- and restricting this already vetted presidential power on the standing of university students getting back to class is a travesty.
• Trump's tweet questioning the ruling is a gigantic violation of the separation of powers and should be enough to impeach him.
• Too even compare Trump's tweet with Obama dressing down the SCOTUS sitting right in front of him during the 2010 STOTU address shows this nation has lost all perspective and ability to govern itself -- it has the attention span of a 12 year old male with ADHD. 

I could go on ... the linked article covers the Fauxcahontas timeout certainty/uncertainty. There is a quote that I guess I had been misattributing and misquoting for years, but thanks to Google, here it is. "What is certainty but the refuge of those whose faith is not strong enough to entertain doubt." I thought it was "Certainty is a poor substitute for knowledge" ... which I like much better, so I think I'll declare that to be true and attribute it to Scalia. We live in a post truth age anyway.

It is DEFINITELY true that the one constant now is TRUMP!  Obama was somewhat close to this much coverage in 2009, 90% of it radically positive -- 11 days after he was inaugurated, he had already affected the world positively enough to be nominated for a Nobel peace prize, which he would actually receive on October 9 of that year. I'm thinking that it is "certain" that Trump won't be getting any global awards this year -- but then  that would be in opposition to the linked article and my beef with "certainly".

Here is what I thought was the best of the article:

Let me make a confession. I have no idea who the Democratic nominee will be in 2020. Nor am I completely sure, since we are being honest, who the Republican nominee will be. (Trump, I guess?) McConnell’s decision to cut off Warren may have been a disaster of epic proportions for the GOP. Or it could have been a brilliant strategic move, elevating an unlikable Massachusetts liberal to the top of her party. McConnell himself is probably ambivalent. 

I do suspect, however, that if Harry Reid had cut off Ted Cruz’s microphone in 2013, the Nevada Democrat would have been hailed as a hero and genius. Even so: The shoe-on-the-other-foot argument may not count for much anymore. Nothing may count for much anymore. If the last year and a half has taught us anything, it is that what we think is supposed to happen does not. Brexit was not supposed to happen. Trump was not supposed to happen. The Patriots’ comeback was not supposed to happen. 

Yet here we are. And no one seems to be drawing lessons from any of this. I open Twitter and see the very people who were convinced Trump wouldn’t win the Republican nomination, who were convinced he’d lose the general election, immediately embrace the most negative interpretation of anything Trump says or does, of any event that might impact him in the slightest. They may well be right. But they just as easily may be wrong, as they have been, consistently, for some time. A modicum of humility and skepticism would go a long way. I understand that these qualities are not especially useful in a city of careerists and poseurs and pseuds. But why not give them a whirl nonetheless.

One thing we know for certain, this IS NOT the age of humility!
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Why Three Political Branches?

Ninth Circuit’s Donald Trump Travel Ban Ruling Is Dangerous | National Review:



Why does BOistan need 3 political government branches?



The old United States had a judicial branch that interpreted written law that was either:



A. Based on the Constitution



B. Created by legislature and possibly being tested for Constitutionality.



It was above politics.



The 9th circuit is certainly a pure political play, and the SCOTUS is very much the same -- "Scalia seat", 4 liberal, 4 conservative judges, etc.



I got to spend some time listening to NPR today and it was very clear that "they won" and "Trump lost" -- hooray, hooray.



Constitution? Law? Who cares. THEY WON!



No doubt if Trump manages to stock the federal court system with "conservatives", and the next president is left wing, they will ignore court rulings like BO did with losing the court case on spending funds on BOcare even though not appropriated by congress.



Apparently even Trump lacks enough of a lawless streak to willfully ignore even just a court -- let alone the clear statement of the Constitution ( CONGRESS shall appropriate) AND court rulings!





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Fauxcahontas Gets a Timeout

‘Nevertheless, She Persisted’: How Senate’s Silencing of Warren Became a Meme - The New York Times:

Somebody eventually needs to let the left know that rules are not created to protect the strong. Yes, yes, Fauxcahontas and all sorts of women's rights folks are very proud of their ability to ignore rules, propriety, tradition, etc. Jezebel in 2 Kings thought taking on the strong without any rules was a great idea -- she ended up being eaten by dogs.

Even the common turncoat McCain had the following to say:

“You don’t insult — whether it be from a letter, or from a message from God, or on golden tablets,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “That’s the rules of the Senate.”

"The Party" (TP-D) seems in a mood to put pussy hats and vagina outfits up against big guys with assault rifles wearing cammo, while proudly screaming "NO RULES"!

Whatever blows their skirts up I guess.

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Heartwarming Trump, WaPo No Less

Patriots owner on Trump: ‘In the toughest time in my life, he was there for me’ - The Washington Post:

I have to give the WaPo credit for printing this ... although they did make the point that there are "few stories like this" at the end. Are there ANY stories like this about Hillary, Billy C or BO? If there were, given the way the MSM works to promote their own, I'd suspect we would all be able to quote the most tear jerking from heart.

During the campaign, I noted that there was a heartwarming story about a boxer that Trump employed and treated well. I did a little looking around to see if it had been debunked, but found nothing, so apparently it is true. The media is wisely not drawing any attention to it by trying to discredit it, so fewer people know about it.

The level anger on the left against Trump seems to exceed even that against Reagan or W Bush -- he is of course "Hitler" and every other bad thing that can be hurled at him. Welcome to being in disagrement with the left!

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Let the Truth Rot

Intelligentsia Elegy | City Journal:

An excellent column on why it is that our "elite" (and pretty much everyone elses "elites") can't manage to get along with "the common man". The "let the truth rot" comment is from here in the column.

In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the intelligentsia had yielded to the temptation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor—may the truth rot, if people are the happier for it.

It's a worthy, but a bit pretensious read. Most of BOistans "intelligencia" manage to be either very narrow (know everything about nothing), or extremely shallow, knowing less than nothing (being wrong) about a set of "everything" that is quite narrow. It tends to not include much of history, philosophy, theology or classic literature -- eg. "Closing Of The American Mind".

I found this part the most enjoyable. I disagree that BO would have survived at NIU in DeKalb. He would have wagged his finger one too many times and someone would have kicked his sorry ass in a local bar bad enough he would have run home to Michelle and likely written himself another biography about how tough it is to convince everyone of your brilliance.

The election of Barack Obama was the singular triumph of this class. His election was celebrated for the milestone in race relations that it represented. But among the intelligentsia, this ecstasy was heightened considerably because he was One Of Us. His imminent canonization as a secular saint is best understood in the context of the arrival of the intelligentsia at the apex of American political power. 

Obama was only the second professional intellectual to be elected president, the first being Woodrow Wilson. It is probably not a coincidence that these two presidents have been temperamentally our least democratic. Unlike Wilson, who taught Greek and Roman history and wrote a highly influential tome on the Constitution that excoriated the Founding, Obama was an obscure, part-time University of Chicago Law School lecturer who had produced no original scholarly work. I studied law at Chicago while Obama taught there, yet it never occurred to me to take a class with him. He did manage to write two books about himself and was undeniably talented at stimulating the intelligentsia’s erogenous zones, prompting Garrison Keillor to swoon on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion about how wonderful it was that at last we had our first president who was a “real writer.” (Abraham Lincoln could not be reached for comment.) 

Not to take anything away from Obama—he would have made a perfectly adequate assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, if he had developed the self-discipline for academic work. But the reaction to him of the intelligentsia—the public intelligentsia, the sub-intelligentsia, the pseudo-intelligentsia, and the lumpen-intelligentsia—was embarrassingly self-parodic.

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Hating Hypocrisy

The Real Problem With Hypocrisy - The New York Times:

Modern psychology continues to attempt to catch up with Jesus. He knew that people hate to be called hypocrites, thus he says in Matt 23

27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

That is just one of my favorites, it is a litany of "you hypocrites", with the "whitewashed tombs" being a metaphor that stings me hard enough to be more memorable -- I'm a tomb lacking even decent whitewash. 

Strangely though, while the amoral poltical left, who proudly proclaim that they are not hypocrites since they have no values, love to talk of "Christian hypocrisy", no true practicing Christain can be a hypocrite. Why? 

Because if we really believe what we say before at least some of our communion rituals, we don't ever claim any form of sinlessness -- we proclaim our SINFULNESS and beg for redemption. 

I confess to God Almighty, before the whole company of heaven and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned in thought, word, and deed by my fault, by my own fault, by my own most grievous fault; wherefore I pray God Almighty to have mercy on me, forgive me all my sins, and bring me to everlasting life. Amen.

 The article talks a lot about why hypocrites are hated, (it's all about falsely signallying morality), then goes on to recommend that we say things like "I think it is morally wrong to waste energy, but sometimes I do it anyway". This would seem to be tautalogically true, since if wasting energy is morally wrong, all the energy wasted by the computers involved in typing the artitcle in and spraying it over the internet would clearly be "immoral".

"Morality" used to be something special -- murder, lying, infidelity, etc. Improper use of a resourse was once about efficency,  engineering trade-offs and such rather than "morality".

So given this latest NYT view, is hypocrisy possible without talking? When Al Gore flys to a warm climate on a private jet to discuss global warming, is is action "moral hypocrisy", since he clearly did not use the most energy efficient conveyance possible?

And some thought that medieval theologians were wasting time as they discussed how many angels could fit on the head of a pin! 

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Trump The Warmonger

Yemen Raid: Questions Swirl About Trump's First Military Operation : Parallels : NPR:

Executive orders are now a TERRIBLE thing ... when they were WONDERFUL just a few months ago. What changed?

Protests are now hugely to be applauded. Remember when the rather mild Tea Party gatherings in '09 were "chiling and racist"?

Oh, miliary casualties? Back on the front page. More soldiers died in Afghanistan under BO than under W, but one would be hard pressed to know that from reporting. What happened to the anti-war movement that was only operating under "conscience"? Crickets ... perhaps it was more politics than conscience?

The first serviceman died under Trump a couple weeks ago  -- big news on NPR, they even had the heartwarming story of family and friends from his hometown. Totally predictable. This is the way i think it ought to always be -- service lives lost with a Democrat in power are every bit as precious as those lost with a Republican in the Whitehouse. If your son or daughter dies under a Democrat president, that sacrifice is every bit as worthy and heart rending as if an awful Republican orders them to their death.

That isn't what it is about though. Obama spent more on war than Bush did according the the liberal Atlantic:

Over the course of his presidency, though, the U.S. military will have allocated more money to war-related initiatives than it did under Bush: $866 billion under Obama compared with $811 billion under Bush.

Again, this is not a story that the left wants published, so it only shows up in the middle of obsture articles. The cost of the "Bush wars" is often listed in the trillions ... naturally BO bears no responsibility for what happened on his watch.

The adversarial press is definitely back. It is a shame they don't realize that the reason they are supposed to exist is to counterbalance BOTH SIDES! Partisan opposition is just partisan opposition, not fullfilling what was once supposed to be the reason for having an "independent" press!

If you want to go into more depth on how special forces raids are planned and carried out, this is a good article. If you don't believe that this would have happened just as it did if Hillary had been taking over and that the news in the press would have been "muted to none", well then you are not a reality based person.

'via Blog this'

Daily Bible Reading On Immigration

I'm in the book of the Bible about the shortest man "Knee High Miah".

Neh 13:3 So it came about when they heard the law, they excluded all foreigners from Israel.

I've noted that all sorts of left wing denominations have suddenly discovered selective Biblical texts relative to immigration in light of Trump's temporary restrictions on travel to the US from 7 majority Islamic countries specially identified by the BO administration as sponsors of terror. It is quite refreshing to hear the ELCA quoting from Leviticus.

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. – Leviticus 19:34

I await their quote and declaration of importance for our lives of other Leviticus scripture.

20:13 "If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

The media calls it "Trump's Muslim ban" ... usually presented as permanent (wink, wink, nod, nod). I've heard that the media even in Christ's day tended to use "Trumped up charges" to crucify people.

We could talk for hours about "who is your neighbor", and the difference between "Caesar" (the government), vs you as an individual. If "Caesar" decides a nation needs borders. and they need to be controlled, does that make Christians immoral for being citizens? Acts 22:25 -- As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, “Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?”

That sounds strangely like Christians that happened to be Roman citizens were not treated equally to non-citizens, and that was fine. 

The bottom line is pretty much that:

1. VERY few of the admonishments to New Testament Christians (none?) are about taking on the government. You pay your taxes, you fight as a soldier if you are drafted, you act as a "good citizen". If the government asks you to directly deny Christ or similar, you stand up, refuse,  and take your punishment.
   
2. Outsourcing to the government isn't a "good work". YOU are to be neighborly, provide charity, etc. Voting for for someone that promises to take other people's money and give it to "the poor" is not "helping the poor"in a Christian sense. Forcing the other guy to help non-citizens isn't a "good work" either.
   
3. "Caesar" defines the borders of the country, the enforcement of those borders, etc.
   
4. YOU, help "the poor" as YOU  find them in your community ... and yes, you are admonished to love them if they are Islamic, atheist, gay, democrat, Vikings fans, etc  Your task is to help,  not to preach others about how THEY ought to love them and the form that love should take. Not judging means you don't get to judge ANYONE as bad, nor even good ... that is above your pay grade. Your mission  (which you pray to the Holy Spirit to aid you in accepting) is about LOVE.

I've come to appreciate the Old Testament more as life has gone on. To me, the Old Testament is clear on "God's ways are not our ways", and God is SOVEREIGN ... "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom". It aids in making human pronouncements "less certain".

For OT attacking tribes / nations, the word can also be taken as "clear": I Sam 15:3

"Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"

That would be a hard one for my wife, she really likes donkeys! I find "the least of these" in the US to be the 60 million murdered in their mothers wombs. I believe that once our nation and churches are right with God on that, our ability to understand God's love will radically improve.

That is however only what **I** believe ... I'm not a bishop or anything, it is just what is in my soul. If we as Christians can search the scriptures on that issue alone and have general agreement, I believe the strength of our voice on other policies will increase tremendously.