Trump Less Unpopular Than BO

How Unpopular Is Donald Trump? | Power Line:



Next to the heartbreak of psoriasis and diarreah, BO has always been pretty unpopular, so this is no surprise.



OTOH, everyone LOVES Trump ... if YOU have the Trump!



The linked shows us BO in August of 2011 with a -26 Stronly Approve / Disapprove. The same pollster currently shows Trump at -14. AND I might add, BO achieved his rather lackluster number with 24x7 media worship, and Trump achieves his number with 24x7 CRISIS! IMPEACHMENT! HORROR! ...



The bottom line here is never pay any attention to the MSM telling you about polls ... which fits with never pay any attention to the MSM rather well.





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Trump Genius! STAY DOWN!

The Daily 202: Trump’s triangulation shows what might have been - The Washington Post:

The biggest takeaway from the rather longish and confused linked column is "the beltway is confused". I thought the following was instructive ...

"The path of least resistance, the path of popularity for him, is to dismiss the demands of Congressional Republicans on virtually everything except abortion, judges, education, free speech, and regulations.”

I love the "free speech" one ... WaPo definitely recognizes that if there is any constituency at all for the 1st Amendment, it is the Republican party. It sure isn't "The Party" (TP-D) and it's captive media including the WaPo! Life as the US version of "Pravda" is MUCH simpler!

As far as Ryan and McConnell go, I'm not buying the "free speech" interest -- they are totally swamp creatures, and they failed Trump and his voters MASSIVELY on BOcare. BOcare has been the BIG kick in the balls to working people. It has allowed them to see in very vivid numbers how a small but significant increase in earned income can move them from "free" healthcare that is gold plated to unaffordable MANDATORY healthcare that they can't afford in either premiums or deductables.

The message from TP is STAY DOWN! We BEAT YOU! Just STAY DOWN! Are you people really so stupid that you can't just pop another cold one, flip on daytime TV and ride the gravy train? Have we not made it completely and totally clear that you are NOT GOING TO MAKE IT up any income ladder?

Certainly the WaPo, the beltway Republicans, the Adminstrative State and TP have been certain since the second term of BO that America was defeated and BOistan would move on in blessed totalitarianism (from their POV). Much like when Rocky came out in '76, TP and the Davos rulers are certain that "it's over".

And it certainly may be, but Trump is definitely the wild card! He clearly has the WaPo completely confused. They LOVE seeing him work with their gang Schumer and Pelosi, but of course they HATE TRUMP! Is it "brilliant triangulation", or is it another Trump head fake? They don't know, and neither do I.

I loved this ...

Trump is toxic to most Democrats because of his personal behavior and his reaction to events like Charlottesville. Not to mention rescinding DACA, instituting the travel ban, pardoning Joe Arpaio, firing James Comey, etc., etc.

"Toxic" to a DEMOCRAT? That is a lot like Charlie Manson suddenly lecturing on "personal behavior". You mean after Slick Willie, Harry Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, Hildebeast and that paragon of ball kicking, BO ... "if you like your healthcare you can keep it", the D's have "principles"? Dear God, what they have is chutzpah! (well, not really, they just really really know how to lie BIG)

It took a long time to corrupt America to BOistan, Chappaquiddick is my pick for a good place to start getting worried about "toxic behavior" in leadership.

I loved Paul Ryan getting caught with his pants way around his ankles today ...

A "bi-partisan moment" with two hurricans to deal with? Ya think? After congress screwed Trump and all his voters over royally on BOcare? Duh. The RINOs used the debt ceiling as a fake issue to make it seem like they might stand up to BO ... when they were itching to use it with Trump as well, they showed their true colors.

NPR was completely flumoxed today ... they HATE Trump. They "tolerate" Ryan and McConnell as long as they stay RINOs. Naturally they LOVE Schumer and Pelosi,  but wait!,  Chuckie and Nancy made a deal with TRUMP! So what to do? Let's see, the debt ceiling is raised, a bunch of money is going to Harvey victims,  and Chuck and Nancy are heroes --- but WAIT! It't CAN'T BE! That makes Trump look GOOD !!!!! ... and there stands weenie Ryan with his bi-partisan pants around his ankles.

Today is of those days that makes Trump seem to be a complete GENIUS ... or so lucky that having that much luck is BETTER than being a genius!

Can Trump make America exist again (MAEA)? Today made it look like it was possible!

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Can Christianity Save The West (Again)?

Only Christianity Can Save the West... Again | Intellectual Takeout:



A worthy read of the history of Western thought. A teaser ...

Today, we find ourselves in a postmodern world whose greatest prophet was Nietzsche. He warned people of the West that, in their return to a de-Christianized Hellenism, they had lost the metaphysical foundation for their big ideas (which were never really separable from the Christianity that had filtered Hellenism to modern man). They had junked the framework in which those ideas made sense. Apart from that framework, he foresaw that the intellectual thinness of those ideas would eventually be unmasked, and the ideologies that come to shape society will do so as the result of “the will to power.”

If Nietzsche is right, it’s not about ideas anymore in the modern, secular West. To paraphrase Stalin, it’s about how many divisions you have.

Or as I like to say ... POWER! Stalin is supposed to have once asked; "The Pope? How many divisions does he have?" 

As John Paul with Reagan's able aid might have answered "Enough to kick your commie ass Joey!"

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A Little Trump Truth From a Dog

I suspsect that besides risking advertisers and their balls, the other reason that shows like SNL tend to avoid making fun of liberals is that it is too damned easy!

Talk about "Truth to Power"!

Karl Popper, Tolerance

Popper’s Paradox And The Corruption Of ‘Tolerance’ - Tom Knighton:

The modern "liberal"  brand lives on fuzzy headed thinking. The linked article exposes a good bit of it relative to "tolerance" and "hate speech".

Tolerance simply means “to tolerate.” Nothing more, nothing less. 

However, leftists seem to believe that tolerance means something more akin to acceptance and celebration.

One need not CELEBRATE a gay "marriage" to toleratre it! Likewise with 58 genders and rising.

According to this columnist, the left then applies the same logic as they look at "Nazis", and consieer "tolerating" Nazis to be "acceptance and celebration" of Nazis, so they validly refuse.

The article points out that actual Nazis and KKK member sorts are exceedingly (and gladly) RARE. They serve largely has an all purpose demon with which to demonize anything that is remotely "right wing" (which of course is another left wing construction that in reality bears no resemblance to the construction) ... in reality, "left" is any form of increasingly totalitarian state control, and "far right" is anarchy. National Socialism ... or the KKK for that matter are very much about CONTROL. Identifying certain groups as "undesireables", removing their rights, and then removing them!

Certainly a free society wants to prevent any ideology that will destroy it -- Islam/Sharia Law, Socialism, Racism, Political Correctness, etc from becoming powerful enough that tolerance is ended. The main risk of that in the US is of the nation becoming a single party state where "The Party" (TP-D) achieves enough dominance that their opposition is demonized to the extent that they can be removed.

As the linked column puts it in closing ...

In other words, Popper had no interest in destroying the right of free speech. He had an interest in preserving a free society, which is precisely what progressives are trying to destroy today. 

So maybe it’s time for liberals to revise their idea of what makes up tolerance, and recognize that you can meet intolerance and combat it, giving it no comfortable place to take root, without becoming the very thing they claim they’re trying to prevent.

Photo ID's, Lying Eyes, Racism, Cognitive Dissonance

https://thinkprogress.org/new-study-confirms-that-voter-id-laws-are-very-racist-c338792c3f04/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-voter-id-laws-discriminate-study/517218/

I only included links to two articles assuring us that requiring IDs to vote is RACIST!, but there are hundreds more, plus I've had it explained to me like 100 times on NPR.

According to the dominant media in this country the racism of requiring IDs to vote is a FACT -- at least as proven as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW ... human caused).

So assuming that blacks are unable to acquire IDs in sufficient numbers for this to be an issue, then that MUST also mean that blacks are unfairly excluded from obtaining internet by an FCC rule. It isn't just the internet ... they can't ship UPS packages, get on planes, check into many hotels, use a credit card in many places, or a host of other things. It is enough to make one believe that there truly IS "white privilege" in this nation, and blacks are unable to get an ID, thus being excluded from a huge part of life in America!

Assuming this is the case as we are assured it is, we can only assume that righting this wrong and helping this vast number of blacks to get an ID is no doubt one of the top priorities of many "progressive" organizations in the US. Could you name one?

I did some searches ... I came up with"Vote Riders", an organization ONLY focused on getting IDs for voters in states that require them. Otherwise it appears that nobody cares.

How can this be? If there are a large number of blacks without IDs, this is a national tragedy, and it can be easily remedied by getting them IDs. Perhaps a study on what strange cultural phenomenon it is that causes them to have such difficulty in obtaining basic documents allowing them to live their lives in the modern world is in order.

If we do not believe this, then we are being asked by the dominant media and political party to believe and repeat the lie that having an ID to vote is "racist". Blacks would therefore be capable of getting IDs, and in fact would HAVE IDs, and the voter ID issue would be a fabrication.

A quick look at Wikipedia shows us that Canada, Mexico, and a good deal of the world require ID to vote. I especially like the Swiss options ...

Switzerland
In Swiss cantons (i.e. the subnational political level in Switzerland) that still use the Landsgemeinde or cantonal assembly; Historically, or in Appenzell until the admission of women, the only proof of citizenship necessary for men to enter the voting area was to show their ceremonial sword or Swiss military sidearm (bayonet); this gave proof that you were a freeman allowed to bear arms and to vote. Women, and men who choose to do so, may show their voting card instead.[13]

So our dominant media and party is saying that all these other countries are racist, or are they simply lying to us?

I think we all know the answer -- for the left, consistency is NOT an issue! Political expediency and power is all that counts, and they are assured that the preponderance of voter fraud is on their side, therefore, they are neither going to try to reduce it, or do anything to figure out how large it is! IT IS IN THEIR FAVOR, and that is really all that counts!

Their position is completely non-factual, and the fact that they are effectively calling most of the other developed countries on the planet "racist" is beside the point. They are certain that they are gaining SOME percentage of fraudulent votes, and it MAY be large ... without IDs, it is pretty much impossible to determine, which is fine by them The result is IN THEIR FAVOR ... and that ultimately is all that matters to a Democrat.

Iconoclasim, Skynet, Satan

NR Statue Removal

Burke said it best:

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

Or, to understand it in more modern terms ... just destroy everything! (yesterday, August 29th was Skynet self-awareness day).

Or in God's Word 1 Peter 5:8

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

Creation vs Destruction -- The super free to view (but not to lose) fight of the ages. 

We all understand what is happening here, it has happened many times. Tear down the statues, burn the books, declare views that you disagree with to be "hate speech" / "subversive" / imperialist / capitalist ... in other words, "bad". The important thing is to DESTROY THEM!!!

The Creator or the Destroyer? The modern destroyers seek to deny any "creator" save randomness -- very very unlikely things "just happen". There is really no other explanation -- for there to be a creator would mean that some level of respect was owed to that creator. Or even classical civilization, Christianity, Founding Fathers, or, dare we say it ... parents / elders. 

But then how could each and every modern be "god" --- each with their own "sacred view" (well, at LEAST as "sacred" as the next guys, gals, ????) 

Raze the earth of it's past -- the PRESENT is so much better, and the future? Well, no doubt it will be better still in the "progressive" model -- it will have to be, it will be NEW ... for a bit, and then it will be gone ... ever replaced by the latest and greatest "more perfect" level of knowledge 

Thus saith the "progressives"! Materialist "knowledge" ( depending on a universe randomly ordered)  is god, wisdom is bunk. 

Matt 4:9 "All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me."

Haidting Trump, Pagan Taboos

Trump Breaks a Taboo—and Pays the Price - The Atlantic:

I've read quite a bit of Haidt (pronounced "height"). Happiness Hypothesis, and Righteous Mind being examples -- in general he is a very smart guy and I enjoy his perspective.

It is a bit funny how in "Righteous", Jonathan points out that liberals claim to be virtually immune to "sanctity/degradation" relative to sexual mores because they have been so indoctrinated that no matter how "yucky" some sex act is, as long as it "doesn't harm anyone" (temporally, they don't believe in eternity), "it's OK". Of course, when asked about things like a guy taking a chicken home from the grocery store, warming it up a bit and having sex with it, a PET scan showed that the old tired morality centers of their brains were screaming "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!" as God intended -- they had just been socialized to lie about it, so they claimed it didn't bother them.

Who says indoctrination doesn't work? (at least if one can't peek at the wetware (brain))

Haidt seems to have the hypothesis that while lefties have managed to get vast swaths of humans to deny and lie about their sense of sexual sanctity/degradation wired in by either many 10's of thousands of years of evolution or divine design.  OTOH, somehow within the last "30 years or so" (being charitable -- BO and Hilly were against gay "marriage" in '08), sanctity/degradation about the KKK, created by Democrats in 1865 and being recruited for by Robert Byrd up to the 1950's is going to be absolutely the end of Republicans!

In that moment, Trump committed the gravest act of sacrilege of his presidency. In that moment, the president rendered himself untouchable by all who share the belief that Nazis and the KKK are not just bad—they are taboo.

"NAZI" of course stands for "National Socialist", and the party of socialism isn't the Republican party. KKK is a creation of DEMOCRATS, who were the party of slavery and Jim Crow for well over 100 years.  Isn't it amazing how "sacrilege" fails to stick to Democrats?  Yes, yes, I understand that the idea that "right" is "nazi" has been more marketed than lite beer, but I'm just not the lite beer sort. I'm guessing that Haidt has bought into it -- no matter how smart you are, marketing tends to work unless you are the sort of iconoclast that is WAY more disbelieving in human wisdom than someone tearing down monuments

This is why, for many Americans, things feel so unsettled this week. Extraordinary sacrilege has occurred, but divine retribution has not yet come down from the heavens, and we have no priest and no scripture to guide us. The world is out of balance, and America can’t just go on as before.

Yes, but can BOistan? America would have had to have a Constitutional Amendment to kill 60 million babies in their mothers wombs, it would have impeached AND removed from office any cad who would stain the oval office (literally) (Slick Willie), and it CERTAINLY would have had a Constitutional Amendment before there was such a wacko thing as gay "marriage".

I understand that Haidt can't go there, but doesn't his PET scanner give him a little insight to what ACTUAL sanctity/sacrilege/degradation looks like when something as basic to the species and every human religion in history as gender is supposedly beyond figuring out?

What is "sacred" in BOistan? I'm not so certain that divine retribution isn't raining down constantly ... people are dying in droves from suicide, substance abuse and just plain old hopelessness. Compared to what I grew up in, and certainly the '80's and the '90s, this is HELL -- hundreds of young black men die in just Chicago at each other's hands every year now ... thousands across the nation in other Democrat controlled cities. MUST the wrath of God be mass plague, nuclear war, dogs and cats living together?

I DO understand the marketing -- we are all supposed to decide that some tiny rump remnant of old National Socialists or Robert Byrd recruited KKK is "a big threat", while an Administrative State with it's roughly 14 million workers when fully accounted for is "nothing to worry about".  Haidt would like it if our very paganized state of BOistan deeply felt "sacrilege" --- but how are we to do so when we have been indoctrinated to believe that the ultimate good is "equality and tolerance"? If you remove all distinctions and claim anything goes, how well does the "except THIS!" really work? (we believe the science except for that X and Y chromosome thing) 

The truly strange thing is that if the universally left wing reviled Trump tweet ... "We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!" was said by a previous president (not that many of them could actually state something that succinctly), it would sound dangerously like a boring platitude. It is the horror of TRUMP that creates the hysteria.

I understand that to the ruling elite and media, "Trump and reviled" are synonyms, however does that REALLY sound any different from what you would have heard from every president in your lifetime? Certainly our betters have TOLD us that BLM, Antifa, and even "Islamic Terrorists" are not violent (and in the case of self labeled Islamic, they aren't even Islamic), but DOES ANYONE SANE BELIEVE THEM if you PET scanned their brain? 

We need to remember the smarter old Bill ... or William S

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep."
Why so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?”

Are there any pockets remaining in the US that don't know what they are SUPPOSED to think? My sense is that is precisely why there is Trump. I'm actually not the only one that quit buying "The Party" (TP-D) mass marketing sometime around when Slick shook his finger at me and said that I better quit making a spectacle of "his privates".

This is BOistan, not "America" ... that was a nice place with God, churches, intact families, common decency, respect for the Constitution, freedom of speech, hard work, individual responsibility ... you know, that kind of tired old crap that our modern schools and TP detest!

Taboo? Is that a science guy thing?

Yes, the name of "progressivism" is to create constant new realities at each instant, and given the wonders of modern marketing, to make sure everyone at least claims to buy these new realities.

But how does the more ancient brain behave? Haidt would seem to know -- he has seen that even with full modern indoctrination, the underlying wetware still signals the actual OLD taboo, the question is just if you can condition the subject to lie as long as you watch them. But what if you are not watching -- or your "subject" doesn't actually give a rats ass for your conditioning?

Certainly Haidt is indoctrinated enough to believe (at least for publication) that National Socialists and the KKK have been "rebranded" to fit the current narrative, but DOES IT WORK? Are we truly as "the flies of summer", or is there a wee bit more in the human core -- perhaps, dare I say it, even a SOUL?

I keep wondering if deep down Jonathan has not studied a bit too much too deeply and might end up having a dark night of the soul. I pray that he does. I believe that our time frame is a LOT longer than the past 50ish years of heavy duty progressive indoctrination -- as in eternal. 


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Arpaio, Political End To Political Persecution

Trump pardons Joe Arpaio | Power Line:

Our Constitution grants the president the power to pardon without any oversight -- wrong or right, that is what it provides. BO broke the record for pardons -- media interest? Ho hum. Slick Willie did get some notice from the MSM when he pardoned Mark Rich in return for millions of dollars, but the Constitution doesn't even directly say that the president can't sell pardons on the open market.

News at 11, Washington is totally corrupt, and has been for a long time, however, all that has NOTHING to do with this case!

Power Line does it's usual good job of reporting the Sheriff Joe pardon shortly and sweetly.

Obviously the left hated Sheriff Joe, a conservative who believed in protecting the border. (and somewhat of a crank as well, but aren't "crank" and "conservative" synonyms today?)

BO managed to inflate the idea of a sheriff thinking you were more likely to be an illegal alien if you were Mexican than if you were Swedish into "profiling" (a left wing sin comensurate to making money other than through graft of theft).

So they wanted to put an 85 year old man in jail to teach him ... and of course anyone else who might disagree with them, a "lesson". All the way back to Stalin, Hitler and Mao, the left LOVES "lessons" ... it is a VERY important part of their "education" and more importantly RE-education of the recalcitrant free thinking sorts!

Remember, LEFT is the party of DEATH!! -- if you have no ,mercy for babies in their mother's wombs, you certainly have no mercy for an 85 year old guy that pissed you off by trying to enforce immigration law!

Oh, and crocodile tears over presidential pardons? Please spare me!



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What Is A "Democrat"?

Democrats, Then and Now | Power Line:

Founded by slave owner and indian fighter Andrew Jackson in 1828, the Democratic party is the party of Slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. One might say that Democrats have never met a form of slavery they don't like, as today they are quite commonly Socialists, and would have elected one Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, as their presidential standard bearer if the Clinton Crime Family had not rigged their own primary.

At the moment, the Democrat party seems intent on tearing down the statues of their own Civil War heroes, the bulk of which were erected by Democrats in the Jim Crow south, or it's border states. The current Democrat Minority Leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi's father erected some nice ones in Baltimore that the linked article points out as now being part of Democrat history that they would like to erase.

Barack (BO) Obama was president from '09-'16 (the mourning goes on) and from '07-'10, Ms Pelosi was Speaker of the House -- somehow, neither Nancy or BO ever managed to mention that any sort of Civil War statue was worthy of any concern ... let alone being removed.

Democrats, which I call "The Party" (TP-D) since much like the old Communist Party in the USSR, they dominate the vast Administrative / Deep State where the real government power is at today, academia, the proffessions, finance, the wealthy, corporate CEOs, and of course the media --  both the admitted fake Hollywood entertainment sort, and the "stealth Fake" supposed left wing "news". Since they are so dominate, their whim of the moment is always made to sound like brilliant wisdom falling from heaven -- or more likely in their case, an official howl from Satan himself, since Democrats are not very oriented to anything about God and Heaven!

"Memory", or "consistency" are terms which Democrats simply don't consider of any use --- OK, so they supported slavery, created and presided over Jim Crow, founded the the KKK, put up all the statues honoring confederates in the first place, and up until very recently, they could care less about any of it. So? They suddenly decided it was politically expedient to tear them down. You didn't really expect them to honor any sort of historical memory or consistency did you? What part of "we make the rules and you just kneel" is it that you have failed to understand?

Making a "deal" with a Democrat is somewhat the same as making a deal with the Devil -- in fact, I suspect Satan is a tad more reliable. At least you ALWAYS know he is going the evil route -- in the case of Democrats, they will do ANYTHING to gain power -- even the occasional "good deed":

The idea that they have suddenly decided that their own statues are "bad" is a great example of how the Democrat mind works -- POWER, POWER, POWER!

It really is that simple!

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Anger, And the Cure

The epidemic and its cure – Catholic Philly:



Another excellent column from Archbishop Chaput. I thought this paragraph was especially good:

When an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a mainstream religious liberty advocate like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) as a “hate group” it’s simply betraying its own bitter contempt for the people and convictions the ADF defends. So yes, hate has a home here alright: not just among white nationalists, immigrant-haters and neo-Nazis, as loathsome as their ideas are, but also among the “progressive” and educated elites who have the power to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own delusions and bigotries.

I've covered the Southern Poverty Hate Group here ... for them, Chrisitanity is a "hate group", because the Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman.



Vast swaths of the media and the left are so insanely angry that pulling a sports announcer of Chinese descent from announcing a football game because his name is "Robert Lee" seems "reasonable. Certainly there is anger amoung Trump voters as well, however they are not the ones tearing down statues.



Anyone that qotes Seneca gets some favorable bias from me.

Anger “is greedy for punishment” and a kind of “brief insanity” as Seneca says elsewhere. It first deforms and then destroys the person and the culture that cultivate it. If that’s true – and it clearly is – America 2017 is urgently in need of a healing. We’re a culture addicted to anger. And we’re relentlessly reinforced in it by mass media that compulsively feed our emotions and starve our reason.

The cure is Christ in my view, or maybe, if one believes David Brooks, it is possible to "step back" and become a "moderate" ... MAYBE!



The biggest problem is that the left is in anger overdrive, and like most angry people, they feel 100% "righteous" in their anger!



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John Brown Clubs

Articles: The Left Arms Up: John Brown Clubs:



If they didn't exist, they would have to be invented. The left has not had a new idea since Ho Chi Minh ... so they look at what they want to think the "Right" is about, then try to emulate it in leftist terms.



The video embedded in the linked is pretty much a Rangemasters nightmare ... the table loaded wiht guns, people on both sides of it, and folks loading magazines is an invitation to lethal AD.



As the article concludes ...

Eventually, they will show up with their fancy weapons that they don’t understand. Eventually, somebody is going to pull that trigger, as happened at Kent State in 1970. Then the Brownies will learn what guns are all about.
They will also learn what it is to be cannon fodder.

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Cruz / Trump January 2015 Wayback

Ted Cruz & Donald Trump: GOP Establishment Prefers Trump | National Review:

In these days of zero memory, it is so laughable to go WAY back to January 2015 before the primaries had got going. French goes through a bunch of mental gymnastics  as to why the "establishment" like Trump better than Ctuz, but I think the reason is obvious. They thought Cruz might beat Hillary and they were CERTAIN that Trump would not. "The estabishment" in both parties preferred Hillary over either Cruz or Trump, and they were starting to see how weak the other R candidates were.

The establishment’s anti-Cruz faction sees the real-estate mogul as more capable of bringing disaffected Democrats to the GOP, and thus potentially more capable of defeating Hillary Clinton. They’ve developed a grudging respect for his success, and a hope for what it augurs, since one does not remain a going concern at such stratospheric levels without an ability to adapt and compromise. Though they still think he’d lose to Clinton, they’ve stopped waiting for his campaign to fall apart, and they’re noticing that he represents a classic constituency — Jacksonian America — that is in many ways perceived as less radical than Cruz’s grassroots army.

The failure of the GOP to repeal BOcare has convinced me that they had decided to sit this one out, let Hillary and the Davos crowd keep driving the bus, while the sitting GOP Congressmen and Senators kept riding the gravy train. The election of Trump was and is as painful for guys like Ryan, McConnel, McCain, etc as it is for D's ... maybe more so, since the R's have been exposed as the feckless liars that they are. Promising since '10 to "REPEAL BOcare!" ... and then not doing it when they have control!



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"Moderates" In Brooks Clothing

What Moderates Believe - NYTimes.com:

David Brooks is not a man whose voice I would follow into a coffee shop without a good deal of skepticism -- however, I find this column generally worth reading. My view is that "moderation" is impossible without a transcendent view -- the best of which I find to be Christianity.

Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

I totally agree that politics is not only "limited", it ought to be WELL down the list of personal priorities ... God, Family, Friends, Community, Vocation, Study, ... maybe a couple more, and THEN "politics".

I strongly disagree that "government can create economic and physical security".  It CERTAINLY can't create anything economic at all -- it is an EXPENSE! It can aid in physical security, but absent a  moral and religious people, it is totally unable to protect individual physical security. Those are responsibilities of free men and women, and Brooks error in believing in the impossible shows how far from reality we live.

Beware the danger of a single identity. Before they brutalize politics, warriors brutalize themselves. Instead of living out several identities — Latina/lesbian/gun-owning/Christian — that pull in different directions, they turn themselves into monads. They prioritize one identity, one narrative and one comforting distortion.

Making "Christian" just another "identity" means there can be no "moderation". In order to put all our "hats" into perspective, we humans need somewhere to stand that is transcendent. Without a point to stand that is beyond temporal earthly concerns, we attempt to make earthy things into heavenly things, and thus we end up precisely where Brooks laments. Any "Christian" that puts their race, sexual persuasion, material owning, etc AHEAD of their Christianity is certainly NOT a Christian in any form at all. To be a Christian is to seek FIRST the kingdom of God!

I PERSONALLY don't understand how one can truly transcend humanity without Christ and the Holy Spirit presenting inhuman goals to me like "love your enemies", however I withhold judgement -- perhaps a very strongly held philosophical position could suffice to provide the transcendent grounds to reach that even-handed non-emotional appraisal of politics as Brooks seems to have begun to wish for as he watches the forces which he would normally support tear down even our own history.

His paen to "humility" would be better said as "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom" ... for without that fear, his objective is for naught.

Humility is the fundamental virtue. Humility is a radical self-awareness from a position outside yourself — a form of radical honesty. The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.

Brooks echoes Proverbs 9:10 here, so this is not exactly new thought. It is just RARE thought in these days of the "latest being the greatist" ("progressivism") -- a cause for which Brooks regularly shills, however at least he has his moments where he realizes that Pandora is well out of her box and the ability to limit her violence without naked force appears ever more unlikely.

All in all, a worthy read -- Brooks is at least apprehending our peril, although I find his appraisal of it inadequate and wishful.


'via Blog this'

Eclipsed 2017

If you would like to see where we watched it, follow this link. In the sandhills S of Alliance NE -- we avoided the crowds. We were going to watch it from York NE, the clouds looked bad, so we abandoned our friends and just headed west ... for a spell just outside of Ogallala NE, it appeard that we would be punished for our sin ... it actually got a bit worse than this picture!

We found our spot, and we sat and watched the slow occlusion in bright sun, then we got some high clouds just before totality ... they broke for totality, and then it clouded right up. Whew!!

Here is my one 360 degree video -- I hesitate to include it because like so much of our modern world, it is FAKE -- the real experience is what is awesome, our reading, videos, movies, documentaries, "first person accounts", etc have more and more given many the idea that real experience isn't all that important. I'm starting to feel more and more like there actually isn't anything except real personal experience, with others, when at all possible.

The video underplays the darkness with the 360 degree "sunrise/sunset" effect. You can see that you are in a special spot of totality. It gives you a LITTLE of the feel that "things are not what they have always seemed". Go look at the best movies of the corona that you can find -- it is ALIVE, and the naket eye shows it in all it's majesty during a total eclipse. I had always assumed that the beautiful corona pictures were from special high resolution telescopes -- Nope! There it is in all it's mysterious glory. The mystery is that the surface of the sun is at about 6K degrees, but the the temperature increases very steeply to a few million degrees in the corona, in the region 500 kilometers above the surface,and we don't know why.

The other amazing thing is how light it is right up to that last "flash" as the sun totally disappears -- it looks like a super cloudy day, with a "weird filter", but not enough to really make you look up if you did not know what was going on..

As I write in my blog of "Spaceman",

"Experience vs Knowledge". Mike is orbiting at the Hubble spacewalking, looks around and EXPERIENCES the billiant light of the stationary sun as the earth rotates out of darkness ushering in a new 90 min Hubble "day". Mike EXPERIENCED the fact that the sun is stationary (relative to earth) and the day and night are caused by the rotation of the earth. Of course he "knew" that, but experience is much more. Telling someone about being a grandparent is not the same as being a grandparent.

You "know" what is going to happen, yet when it happens there is an emotional effect -- it "feels odd", how can this be? Even when you have been a space nut your whole life and watched men walk on the moon in rapt attention, there is something about the experience  of the moon blocking the sun that you sense is rare, and it is an honor from a greater source to be able to experience it.

As a believer in divine creation, an eclipse is especially poignient, as it feels like a direct message from God ... "As you grow in knowledge of my creation, you are able to discern my joy in creating the moon 400 times smaller than the sun, yet having the sun 400 times farther away so that at special times because of the eliptical orbit of of the moon, and the tilt of the earth, you may see my hand of creation as the sun is blocked perfectly. I give you these signs so that you may know that I am God".

Alas, for many today it is but one more random phenomenon in a cold and random universe that is so far beyond exceedingly unlikley that the fact of an eclipse would add a few exponents to the number of required universes were the God deniers to consider the ramifications of not only there being a universe that can sustain life at all, but one in which intelligent life arises -- nay, even CONSCIOUS intelligent life that can survey it's place in the universe AND, just happens to live on a planet that experiences perfect total eclipses ... where the sun is EXACTLY blocked, making it's corona visible!

One "explanation" is what Elon Musk believes ... we are in a "simulation" a sort of "Grand Matrix movie".  This explanation is really no "explanation", since it just makes "god" to be whomever programmed the simulation. According to modern physics, there ISN'T any explanation -- it's pure randomness all the way down, so there "must be" something like 10 to the 400th UNIVERSES in order for the extreme unlikelyness of our existence to happen.

To accept 10 to the 400th universes or "being a simulation" is considered intelligent and rational in these times -- God is however something that only the most backward and out of touch with reality believe in.

I pray that others may feel a little "sense of small" as I did in their observations of the eclipse. Our greatest shared loss, and with it, our ability to see our fellow man as similarly tiny short lived entities in a vast and timeless cosmos, is our sense of small. It isn't just our elites that have lost it or at least heavily distracted ourselves from it. Nobody with any sense of their smallness in the universe would waste their time tearing down statues of any sort if they were part of a very small and temporal humankind. Even all of human history is such a tiny blip in time that we barely have any history at all ... let alone any to tear down.

As it has been since Adam and Eve, the human sin that exceeds all others is PRIDE. for me, the eclipse was a visceral experience in being very small and very finite in the face of God and eternity.

Thanks be to God for allowing me to witness this example of his greatness.