Anybody that has to use a gas can knows that government has wrecked it. What I liked was this:
Ask yourself this: If they can wreck such a normal and traditional item like this, and do it largely under the radar screen, what else have they mandatorily malfunctioned? How many other things in our daily lives have been distorted, deformed and destroyed by government regulations?
If some product annoys you in surprising ways, there’s a good chance that it is not the invisible hand at work, but rather the regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself
Over the weekend, Trump made good on his promise to restrict Muslim immigration and increase vetting. As with most of what he did in week one, this was following through on clearly made campaign promises. The nation has become so expectant in campaign promises being completely meaningless, or just out and out lies, following through on them is shocking! (eg BO, "I'll close Gitmo on day one!". "If you like your health insurance you can keep it!"). It's now a shock to the nation to see a successful candidate do what they said they would do.
There were demonstrators out in Rochester and accross the country, special call in shows on NPR, and the lefties on Facebook blew up in anger, sadness, fear, etc. Over?
So what do we need to know about this order?
Like anything in the first week or two of a new president's adminstration, it is largely based on things that BO either did or did not do during his administration. He did a similar ban on Iraqi refugees in 2011, he discriminated against Christians (Trump is mildly reversing that).
"On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when the United States let in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trump’s list — and all countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 — only after he was safely out of office."
What he is doing is in line with what he has done all through the campaign, written about in his books, and used during his business career -- staking out a position beyond what he expects to get and negotiating. Scott Adams covers that in detail here.
Most people are completely unaware that BO executed a similar order in 2011 because BO did it, so it HAD to be good!
I highly recommend to read the Adams link. While I am still not convinced that Trump is playing 3-dimensional chess while the rest of the world is stuck on Tic-Tac-Toe, it IS possible.
You start the negotiation by throwing a cherry bomb into the room -- because it puts everyone off guard and it makes them LOOK at you.
You take a position that 70-80% will think is "crazy", but 20-30% will think "did not go far enough" -- eg, why not Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries as well? The 20-30% will see the rest of the world going nuts over what they think is not enough and realize that Trump tried very hard to give them what they wanted, but it was a bridge too far.
Because everyone is looking at you and thinks you are crazy, things will come out that would not have otherwise; BO's Iraq order, the discrimination against Christians, the fact that BO had radically increased Muslim immigration on the books for this year, what our historic rates have been, etc.
I would like Trump to do a speech focused on the the 40K over the last decade and the over 100K planned for this year alone and say; "BO pulled the pin on an immigration bomb and left it in the Oval Office. I fell on it as soon as I found it and there is collateral damage. I can live with that, my mission is to protect the American Peoople."
Much like during the campaign, the most entertaining thing about Trump is to watch the fireworks. I've always enjoyed fireworks!
I understand the sentiment expressed in this column very well. It opens with:
There's a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It's an Alinksy tactic called, "Make them live up to their values." Now, living up to one's values isn't a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you'll sometimes fall short.
The left loves to exploit these shortcomings--every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.
What I tried to do at the end of my blog was indicate what was needed to "all get along" ... "shared values, Constituion, figuring out what we are "FOR" rather than just what we are against.
At that time, I would have never believed that Trump would be elected -- and now that he has been, the left is responding exactly has I would have predicted. We are definitely a tribal state and what tribes do is make war -- which is what Western civilization was created to rise above and did.
Everyone knows that Republicans are "Pro-Life". Everyone also knows that Democrats are "Pro-Black".
At least that is what "everyone knows".
If we look at the top most murderous cities in the US ... Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, DC, New Orleans, St Louis, etc, they are all Democrat fiefdoms of welfare, urban blight, failed public schools, drugs, crime and single parent households. Democrats like it that way -- being "pro-black" means encouraging blacks to live in a manner that keeps them voting over 90% Democrat. Why worry about anything else?
On the Republican side? Why alienate the "moderates" by giving the wacked out pro-lifers anything but flapping lips and broken pormises? What part of "politician" was it that the rubes failed to get anyway? There is always a "good excuse" for not REALLY nominating SCOTUS judges that will overturn Roe V Wade and return the infant slaughterhouse rules to the states. The Democrats won't let us get through the Senate, we will lose the woman vote, we will lose the "libertarians" (all 2-3% of which they lose anyway), etc.
We were assured by the MSM that Trump would not actually appoint a pro-life judge to the SCOTUS ... for the reasons above, and because "he doesn't care'. Of course we were assured there was no way he could win as well.
Perhaps being taken only flew for a little over 40 years!
In this time of mass media and the internet, human life is one of constantly being persuaded/manipulated/marketed than it ever has been. Marketing streams at us pretty much every waking moment, the media has an agenda, the political parties have an agenda, and certainly Trump has an agenda -- he is preseident because he is a better persuader than either party or the mass media.
I'm not at all certain HOW he manages all he manages. Sure, some of it is obvious -- the fact that Trump is able to have the media chasing around like a cat after a laser pointer by tweeting. His tweets have the same effect on the media and much of the hard left as seeing a squirrel does on Doug the talking dog in this clip.
The linked article points out a classic media manipulation technique. Numbers are important when THEY say they are! Pro-Life rallys for over 40 years? Numbers completely unimportant. Obama's inauguration, VERY important! Trump rallys conmparted to Hillary rallys? TOTALLY unimportant. Number of women at women's march? Hugely important!
We could just keep quoting -- number of Chicago murders vs a single black killed by police, gun deaths vs heroin deaths ... the use of selective numbers is a constant form of the manipulation we deal with. Likely voters or straight poll of "Americans"? Deficit in raw numbers or as a percentage of GDP? All these and more are used to attempt to get people to think what the manipulator of the moment wants to have us think -- and the biggest manipulator was always the MSM prior to Trump.
The use of polls or not using polls is another. I wasn't even aware that controls on abortion had a strong plurality over abortion on demand -- not one of those messages the media is interested in making clear.
Not much of this is new, but what is new is TRUMP. Does his incessant apparent obsession with the crowd size at the inauguration have an actual purpose, or is he just "insane / stupid" as the MSM tells us? Could he really be purposely holding the media on the "numbers thing" to force them to pay attention for the March for Life?, or if he can't get them to do so, reduce the media credibility even farther? Does it actually work for him to "stupidly focus on the numbers" so that even the most media addled see at least subconsciously that "it takes two to play the stupid numbers game"? I mean, if it is "ridiculous to focus on crowd size", then why is the MSM interested in it sometimes and not others?
Up until Trump was elected, the MSM story was that "he doesn't really care about abortion" -- I suppose similarly to them saying that "BO isn't really against gay "marriage" in 2008 -- he just SAID he was'. What I find interesting is that even though Republicans were supposed to be "the party of life" for the entire time since Roe, Pence will be the FIRST VP to talk to the March for Life rally! Taking a base that you feel you own for granted has been one of the tried and true methods of both political parties for a long time.
The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”
Satan is a huge fan of reason -- when he shows up in the Bible, he pretty much sounds like a lawyer. We now know through science that we can't make decisions without emotion. As Jonathan Haidt showed us in "The Righteous Mind", even "liberals" who will TELL you that disgusting things don't disgust them are lying. Put a PET scan on their brain and the moral modules light up just like they do in the person that admits that they have morals! Denying your natural moral nature is very costly.
I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you put a PET scanner on even the most supposedly pro-abortion woman out there, the scanner will show that she inherently knows it is murder as she watches one. That is going to be hard to prove, but if you take the little time required to watch this video, at least YOU will know that it is murder -- this woman, Gianna Jessen, is a survivor of that attempted murder.
Why did Christ have to come and die on the Cross? For the cosmic version of the reason that Gianna had to survive an abortion. So you could FEEL the TRUTH of Gods Love and Grace! Because thinking about things never actually allowed anyone to make a decision. We don't decide on reason!
Satan wants to give you a long list of "logical reasons" to not believe in Grace, Love, Redemption, Truth, God, Spirit, Eternity, etc. At the head of the list is "If you don't believe in those things you can be "god", or at least your own version of the idea -- and you can be smug". For a season -- really just an "instant" on the cosmic scale. Pride. You can be proud!
And then you die -- alone. More alone than is possible to imagine from this earthly coil. Satan knows you will be alone. Take the class or the gathering or the trip where you felt the most alone in your life and multiply it by a few billion, and then possibly you can imagine a mere wisp of how alone Hell is. God is surrounding you here -- generously gifting you your breath and your pulse, holding you in this mortal coil and begging you to acknowledge that Grace already won and available explicitly for YOU!
Have you ever noticed how critical it is for Satan to have "more numbers"? Since the election we definitely know that BOistan is ruled by Satan -- both Trump and the left are ALL about "numbers". "We won the popular vote"! "No you didn't, there was fraud!". "The inauguration was sparsely attended"! "No it wasn't"! "We had a MILLION marchers!" ... and so it goes. There are MORE PEOPLE on MY side!
We all know that the road to Hell is wide and easy -- with busloads of marchers. If you know Truth, it matters not at all if others agree. God and one is an extreme majority.
The linked article is well worth reading. It makes the case in one section that abortion is a sign of extreme sickness in our society. If you were a naturalist who came upon an area where all the creatures were harming themselves, maybe eating some poisonous plants to abort their young, you would not say "this is wonderful, I should help them"! You would realize that something had gone horribly wrong and look for the cause of this clear abomination of nature!
If you were a Star Trek sort of space traveler who saw such a planet where sentient life was killing their young in the womb, I can pretty much guarantee you that you would also find mass killings, rampant and rising, drug abuse, families falling apart and an extreme lack of love and caring for others "outside their tribe". All of these things are endemic to loss of meaning, respect for life, and hope. Welcome to planet BOistan.
I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”
Much like the animal, the woman who chooses to murder her child lives with the gnawing that she did. Unlike the animal, unless she allows redemption to wash her clean, her wound will fester for eternity.
I close with this.
The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?
I've written about the phenomenon that our emotions are required for decision making more than once in the blog -- I've certainly read about it more than once. Here is a version of it from this linked article.
A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.
At some point, I hope to do a thorough review and tie this factoid together. I actually think all of us are pretty intuitive about this. Our "guts" or "right brains" give us the answer, and then our left brains, the logical part make up a story was to why it was "rational". Thus my oft used quote "we are rationalIZING not rational!".
For those of us in the Christian Right, we have known this since at least 2008, if not 1999 when we failed to impeach Clinton for perjury and the crime of sexual harassment that would have gotten any kids having sex at McDonalds fired. We could even go back to 1973 and say that when a nation embarks on a holocaust that quickly surpassed that of Germany, any person who still has a moral compass knows that war will eventually result.
There are those on both the left and the right who call for American “unity.” But these calls are either naïve or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the Right and liberals, but not between the Right and the Left.
How does one make "peace" with those who will kill 60 million innocents as has happened with abortion? By winning.
Liberalism – which was anti-Left, pro-American, and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America, regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement, and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism – is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.
I think Praeger is a bit of a Pollyanna as he looks at "liberals of old". Certainly there WERE many such liberals, but even at the time of Buckley writing "God and Man at Yale", it was clear that belief in God was becoming unacceptable at "liberal institutions", and Marxism was considered the winning hand over Capitalism. He is certainly correct however that the modern US and European Left is against every one of those values in the paragraph above at this point.
As long as conservatism was losing, the war was covert -- but with the Trump win, we see it heating up. Can conservatism win without firing a shot as Reagan did against the USSR? I doubt it, but we can always hope. Apparently Praeger doesn't agree with me that the elected government of BOistan has become a SERVANT of the Administrative State and the courts. We shall see.
The article is not that long, highly recommend reading it all. This is how he closes.
With the defeat of the Left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the Left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives, and the Right have to defeat the American Left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.
If Trump was a Democrat, this would be VERY exicting news! As it is, it is awfully muted. As US News says though:
But the achievement wasn't tough to see coming, considering stocks have boomed in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's electoral victory. The Dow has climbed more than 1,600 points since Election Day – up more than 9 percent over the course of a little less than two months.
It is good to remember that one of the reasons for NOT voting for Trump was "econmic disaster". Over at the NY Times on election night when market futures went down, former Enron advisor and Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman was certain they were going down and never coming up.
It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?
Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
The Times advertises all the time as "Truth" -- in this age of "fake news", one wants hard hitting accurate reporting from experts like Krugman!
He isn't the only one ... poor muti-billionaire George Soros managed to lose one of his billions betting against Trump markets, and a lot of millions supporting Hillary and other left wingers.
Ah yes, things that make you go "boo hoo".
Does this mean that presidents make markets? Certainly not before they are elected, no ... we are talking "sentiment" here. In the long run? Well, that is why we have the sentiment -- while Hillary was the darling of Wall Street and the wealthy, Trump has promised to bring back some economy for the little folks.
If he can follow through on that remains to be seen, but people are voting again with their money and driving the markets up at this point, while the elite wealthy like Soros are unhappy and grumpy.
More pardons than the last 12 presidents combined. BO wanted MORE gun control ... yet he pardoned many that used guns to commit felonies. "Law" is an oxymoron to the left -- POWER, that is their coin.
Worthy of a read. I have no understanding of gayness, but assume it is looking at a man like I look at a woman in "desire mode". There tends to not be lot of deep thought related to that ... looking at a tall cold glass of beer on a hot day comes to mind as a similar sort of non-intellectual endeavor. If the species needed very much intellect for feeding, fighting, fleeing and, er "procreating", we would likely either be a lot smarter or "not" (as in not existing).
Liking beer, scotch, tobacco, chocolate -- or not, never seemed to be hugely intellectual to me either. There is the "addiction factor" of course -- I used to really enjoy smoking a pipe, but I gave that up and it wasn't too hard. I still enjoy the occasional cigar, but it doesn't average out to "weekly", so not much addiction factor. Eating too much for emotional reasons? BIG addiction factor -- really hard to give up eating though -- and it tends to not end well. Sometimes we have to totally fight STRONG urges to even survive, let alone be "moral". Just ask a "recovered" addict.
I can imagine that the "secrecy factor" can be significant -- the long term religious person doubting their faith, marital infidelity, being a victim of abuse, and likely an abuser, lots of addictions, etc. It would be interesting to note the percentage of the population that has "no secrets" vs "significant secrets" vs "secrets that are thought to be at an acceptable level"(whatever that means!). It's difficult to even put categories on such things. Having had some personal experience plus experience in talking to others, I'd guess that the totals for "having done or been the victim of something that has or occasionally causes moderate or greater guilt" is well over 50% of the population, possibly close to 90%? Who knows? They are called "secrets" after all! "Redemption" is an idea that doesn't apply if there is no sin -- and it doesn't apply politically. As Hillary reminded us, Trump voters are not merely "deplorable", but "irredeemable".
As the guy in the column says:
Worse than Mr. Trump’s inconsistencies, however, are those of his detractors. They cite his lack of inclusiveness yet discount that tens of millions of Americans voted for him, and he won 30 states. I am as afraid about acknowledging that I voted for Mr. Trump today as I was about being gay yesterday. There seems to be as little understanding of my political views as there was about my sexual orientation.
I suppose there is really no irony there at all, but it feels that way to me. If we take the old "10% gay" number that is thought to be VERY high (1-2% being closer to reality), 30 million out of our 300 million population would be gay. Therefore, that a significant percentage of 60 million Trump voters now feel reticent to "come out" would be considered to be "progress" by the Hillary voters. People feeling uncomfortable because they have desires that go against nature and human mores for thousands of years is "unacceptable" we must love the sin AND love the sinner. (actually, it often seems that the Christian ideal of loving the sinner is not really understood at all by non-Christians -- it is the sin that must really be loved)
However if 2x+ even the inflated the old number of gays have thoughts counter to recently expounded "progressive" positions, then they OUGHT to feel uncomfortable and be "closeted"!!! From the "progressive" POV, all that is required is to increase sanctions against them until they TRUELY "get their minds right" -- the idea that people would CONSIDER a position different from "progressive" orthodoxy is bad enough -- that they would find the gall go "come out" and admit it is totally beyond the "progressive pale"! It is as if the very worst of any sanctions formerly used against gays have suddenly become nearly mandatory from the left if used against Trump voters!
Certainly Trump supporters know that they are a "minority" in any way that counts, the much vaunted Hillary "3 million" more popular vote being the most meaningless part. As I lament to boredom, at this point, Trump support is DEFINITELY counter-cultural. You can lose your job, friends, social standing, etc -- and as "progressives" would say, that is only the beginning -- as evidenced this last weekend, they may want to attack you physically or even attack your kids. Proper thought must be maintained! My guess is that their big worry is that it might actually become acceptable to think differently from them! (the horror!!, I assume this is what they mean by "normalizing")
Is being a "minority" really bad? Women are in fact a MAJORITY, yet a million of them marched yesterday because they don't feel enough like a majority after the inauguration. The Davos crowd is in somewhat of a funk because Brexit and the US election didn't come out as they wanted. Eight of them have as much wealth as the bottom half of the planet, and if we counted the whole 3K attendees, it would likely be 2/3's or even 3/4s, yet they don't quite feel "powerful enough" since not everything is going their way.
My Packers are getting killed while I write this -- yet when Rodgers claimed they could "run the table", I thought he was crazy. They did WAY better than I would have expected getting to this point --- but since they didn't win it all, I feel the pangs of disappointment.
My current section of study in DBT -- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (a class I'm teaching) is "Distress Tolerance". Life is painful, sometimes very painful (like your spouse or child dying), sometimes ridiculously smallish painful (like your team losing). Even when you are part of an elite that has over half the wealth on the planet and fly around in beautiful private jets, life comes with "distress". The higher our expectations, the greater our distress. For the elite, the election of Trump is like someone dying ... even when discussed on a private jet flying to Davos.
As we have known since Genesis, our nature is to believe that each of us has a right to "be like God" -- or at least like what we assume God is like. When others are not what we want -- they vote for Trump, they cheer for another team, they don't worship as we do, they practice something (typically sexual) that makes our skin crawl, they don't "look like us" (they are way too fat, way too beautiful. the wrong color, smelly, etc), we feel various levels of "discomfort, disgust, hatred, anger, etc".
DBT would tell us that "our feelings are valid" -- they ARE the feelings we have. Claiming that we "shouldn't" have them is counterproductive. Nobody as ever used reason to create love or remove disgust. Most all of us have tried to overcome feelings with logic and reason, and we can often do a darned good job of "faking it" -- or at least we think we can. Usually, everyone pretty much "knows" at some level so we are really ALL just thinking we are faking everyone else out while everyone else actually knows about the faking. We live in an age where "The Emporers New Clothes" is no longer cautionary, but rather "kill the little kid being honest! He is a deploreable!"
In DBT, the idea is to "breath deeply", allow time to pass, "allow the solution to find us". This somewhat mumbo jumbo is called "wise mind" ... we all know what they are reaching for. (2:50 is the admonition from Obi Wan if you are in a hurry).
Christ went over all this 2K years ago and offered to change us so that our "still small voice" was aligned with good rather than evil. So aligned in fact, that it was just barely possible to see the potential to ACTUALLY love our enemies!
Search your heart -- what do you "know to be true" about the "million woman march" or the protests at the inauguration? Do you feel the love and understanding for the vast majority of those 60 million Trump voters by the marchers/protesters, and a strong encouragement for them to "come out" so they could practice "radical acceptance" of their views of religious freedom, the need to maintain a culture that can somehow be identified as "American", the value of hard work, thrift, as much self determination and responsibility as possible? How about the radical concept of local and even individual control of who uses a bathroom or even associational freedom as to if you need to bake a cake for a wedding that is against your religious sentiments vs selling a dress to Melania Trump that is against your political sensibilities?
What is "progress"? Having 60 million in the closet vs 30 million? Who decides that is "progress"? Davos Man? The New York Times? Harvard? George Soros? How many people you can get to march or break windows and burn cars? It looks like the left no longer even wants to honor elections? How are things decided when elections are no longer honored?
Will there ever be diversity of thought and love for even our enemies on a broad spectrum, or is "war" either via politics or direct means the lot in life of the failed state of BOistan forever? Reason will never get us out of our pit -- yet Christ created a way.
Rev 3:20 Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
The NY Times is all "just the facts you decide" on a physical attack of a Trump supporter during an interview. They usually aren't much for that sort of angle -- rather preferring to tell their readers exactly what to think. We can be pretty sure that they are just not QUITE ready to say directly "violence against Trump and his supporters is A - OK".
Their headline proudly proclaims that Richard Spencer is a Nazi -- he might be nationalist, not clear at all he is socialist.
Will it escalate? It is hard to see what "The Party" (TP-D) position on this really is. Ever since the election there has been a sense that riots, looting, violence, etc are at least "understandable".
The rather tepid "Tea Party" opposition that arose around tax day in '09 was quickly labeled strongly as "racist, unhinged, un-American, etc. BO was just too good to oppose!
The left is still on the "no opposition will be allowed" path. How much farther will they push it?
MN has two left handed Senators that we so richly deserve -- this is a state that needs to spend a decade or so to try to earn it's way back to being worthy of having a voice!
Franken digs the hole deeper here -- he thinks having a tobacco stock in a mutal fund is a sin ... and then finds out that HE has a tobacco stock in the mutual fund.
Naturally, Senator Clowns situttion is DIFFERENT ... he is a left handed clown, so his tobacco stock is just fine!
Male or female, we have all experienced the noxious skidmark on the skivies. Our national skidmark ends tomorrow, saints be praised!
We didn't end up eating roasted rat as I suspected we would -- Gods mercy is indeed beyond measure. BOistan is a failed state wholly undeserving of that mercy -- yet as evidenced by Christ, Gods mercy flows to the totally undeserving. Praise be to God!
We know that the stench of BO will linger -- but it's power has received a major freshening blast. Can the noxious stench ever be removed? Through God all things are possible!
Will Trump be an improvement? I really have no idea -- he will be DIFFERENT, and that is to be praised at this low point!
In the old military saw, the good news is that everyone is getting a change of underware. The bad news is that you change with the person on your left.
At worst we just pick up a new skidmark. Given the past 8 yars, that is wonderfully positive news!
