I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Kill You

David Hardy of the blog Of Arms and the Law has a new book coming out entitle I'm From the Government, and I'm Here to Kill You, about horrible disasters visited on the American people by an often indifferent and incompetent government with no legal consequences whatsoever. You can pre-order the book at Amazon.

More on Charlottesville

Yesterday I was watching an HLN news babe excoriating President Trump for saying both sides were in the wrong, and then extolling the supposed Antifa "heroes."  I really had a hard time, as I saw the dust up as being a replay of the Nazis vs the Communists in 1930s Germany.  Neither side is in the right, and neither side is on the Right.  I yelled at my TV, but that really does no good, does it.

Derek Hunter has a post today at Townhall.com entitled  The Gathering Mob which makes the same point, and several others as well. Really, you should read the whole thing. My first thought was that if I took the most salient points and quoted them here, I would have to quote the entire article. None the less, let me quote just one piece, the then let you read the rest at Town Hall:

The term “alt-right” is used by those idiots to give themselves something to cling to and to seem larger than they are, and for the media to paint their political opponents as part of these monsters’ circle. It has no basis in logic.

The proper place for these creatures is on the far-left. They, like their kindred spirits who call themselves “Antifa,” seek complete government power to impose their will. Just as with the Bolshevik vs. Menshevik, totalitarians always will break into factions and fight each other for power. That’s what Charlottesville was.

Left-wing “journalists” have been tweeting a meme comparing Allied troops in World War II to the antifa in Charlottesville in an attempt to misdirect the public, to make them think people responsible for violence across the country are somehow heroes. An appropriate comparison would be to compare them to the Soviet troops. Show up to an antifa rally with an Israeli flag and see how that goes over.

Out of it, radical leftists, as always, were emboldened and took to the streets across the country, and violence and anti-police words and actions soon followed.

Indeed. Charlottesville was a false flag operation from beginning to end. The media had to move on from the "Russia, Russia, Russia" meme, and Charlottesville was its next thing. Did whoever funded it expect someone to drive a car into a crowd and kill someone? No, I don't think so. But at the same time, they knew if they could get these two groups together, surely something newsworthy would happen.  The media has been pushing this notion that Trump was somehow responsible, then running polls and reporting on the polls.  Its an old technique for creating news.  You can't believe what you hear or see anymore.

Keep your powder dry.

Charlottesville and the Bearing of False Witness

I was torn whether to say something about the firing by Google of Mr. Damore, or cover instead the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Google's firing of James Damore, a software engineer, and form all accounts, a brilliant analyst, is to be condemned.  If Google were any ordinary company, they could be as Leftist, Progressive, Communist, and Marxist as they please, with no consequence to anyone else.  But Google as a large monopoly, with access to everybody's search engine history.  Indeed. Google attempts to control what you find with its search algorithms, which try to "nudge" you toward their preferred outcome.  This is dangerous, as it suppresses free inquiry and free speech. I suspect that as Kurt Schlichter suggested here, Google should probably be broken up as a monopoly enterprise for the good of society. Go read Schlichter's article. Enuff said.

The other item, however, is more disturbing, as people were injured and one killed.  It is disturbing because conservatives and classical liberals are being wrapped up in the same group as the KKK, white supremacists, white nationalists, and the so-called alt right, The first time I even had heard of the alt right was during a Hillary Clinton speech. I had to look it up. I consider myself a classical liberal, who believes the Founders were inspired, and who works to return the governance of this nation to its Constitutional roots. As such I abhor both the white supremacists and Antifa equally. Indeed, I abhor identity politics in general, as it is a cheap attempt to gain votes for illegitimate causes that can not stand up to scrutiny. So, upon reading John Hawkins' article at Townhall.com entitled How the Liberal Media Created Charlottesville, I found the correct place to lay the blame. Of course, the immediate blame lies with both the White Nationalists (who at least were protesting with a permit), and with the Antifa movement, but they would not have felt emboldened to show their hatred and evil ideologies in public had it not been for the mainstream media.

Hawkins writes:

To begin with, the liberal media is almost entirely responsible for growing the Alt-Right merger of hate groups and internet trolls. Most people are well aware of the stifling political correctness that reached an apex under Barack Obama. People are sick and tired of being attacked and scolded by the humorless left-wing thought police every time they stray from the latest liberal doctrine. That created a large group of people who enjoyed tweaking social justice warriors and some of them realized the easiest way to do that was with racial slurs. Every time some doofus leaves a noose on a college campus or says the N-word, it’s treated like a national crisis. If you’re an anonymous troll who enjoys getting people to react to everything you say, that’s a FEATURE, not a bug. All you have to do is say something racially offensive and all these people who studiously try to ignore you will go out of their minds.

That racial element gave the Nazis, white supremacists and KKK mouth-breathers a way to connect with the more socially adept trolls making the Pepe the Frog memes. Of course, the media liberals fueled them as well with their hypocrisy. They painted EVERY white supporter of Donald Trump or the Republican Party as a racist even as they ignored and defended the vicious anti-white rhetoric that has become commonplace on the Left. Just to give you a quick example of that, there was a hashtag that trended on Twitter after the attack called #ThisIsNotUS. It started out as a way for white liberals to virtue signal, but it quickly turned into an all too typical attack on white people, America and Trump voters...

The mainstream media has used the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a source for the grouping of all these disparate groups as members of the alt right. That is like using your crazy uncle, who never had anything to do with them, as a source for your conspiracy theories about the Bilderbergers and the Tri Lateral Commission. The fact is that the White Nationalists and the Antifa movement are both leftists groups. After all, NAZI stands for National Socialist and the full name of the group was the National Socialist German Workers Party. They have nothing to do with conservatism or classical liberalism, as John Hawkins makes clear:

On the other hand, white supremacists are nothing on the Right. David Duke is a joke. Richard Spencer? Let me tell you a little story about Richard Spencer. I was walking around CPAC and noticed an enormous gaggle of media surrounding someone I didn’t recognize, who didn’t seem to be drawing a crowd of regular attendees. As it turns out, the massive group of media people weren’t following a big name. They were following Richard Spencer, who was later kicked out of the conference, presumably because the organizers never wanted him there in the first place.

Yet Richard Spencer, like David Duke before him, is treated like some kind of rock star by the media liberals even though he’s a nobody in the conservative movement. Why? Because they don’t care about conservative opinion. They don’t care about conservative views. They care about creating propaganda that paints the Right as a bunch of hood-wearing, Nazi-saluting scumbags. So, they treat Richard Spencer like a rock star.

This creates a sort of Kim Kardashian effect. Ninety five percent of any influence Spencer has comes from the fact that anything he does is a big deal to the media. Why were Spencer and Duke able to gather even 500 Tiki torch-waving idiots in Charlottesville? Because the media would cover everything they did with bated breath. It gave them a chance to feel important, to feel like they were making an impact. In fact, white supremacists have started to believe their own BS because they keep hearing it from the media. After fighting with Richard Spencer on Twitter, I still remember one of his fans claiming that white supremacists were an essential part of Trump getting elected. My response was….

“Yeah, you guys made a bunch of Holocaust memes & called people cucks and then you're all....’I'm helping.’”

But of course, they weren't helping at all. Many people, not knowing any better, probably viewed the endorsements of Trump by various white supremacists groups as reason to vote instead for Hillary. Trump's victory might have been a landslide except for the outsized media presence these groups have. Indeed, the whole media presence, and the emphasis on the alt right during the election may have been a false flag operation designed to drive votes toward Hillary, as I have noted already the fact that these groups are also Leftist. Trump may have been as surprised and appalled by these groups endorsement as everyone else was.

On the Left, perhaps, lying about people is considered acceptable behavior as long as it achieves your ends, but among conservatives it is called Bearing False Witness, and is a violation of God's commandments.  In a court room, it would be called perjury, and it must stop.

The Madness of Transgenderism

Because I live in a place Rush Limbaugh calls "Realville," I refuse to go along with transgendered individuals by calling them by their preferred pronoun.  A man wearing dress and calling himself a "she" will find me resolutely calling him "he."  Even if one undergoes hormone treatment, and surgery to remove his male parts, no one can change his DNA.  Psychologically, he will always be a man dressed in drag.  And the revers is true of women as well.

The American Thinker today has an article entitled Portraits of Madness: Don Quixote and the Transgender SJW, by William Sullivan. Sullivan illustrates in his piece the suffering and hardship that delusional people impose on those around them. They often brow beat the people closest to them, the people who love them and want them to remain in their lives into going along with their fantasies, pretending that they, like the emperors subjects, can see his new clothes. But, as the little boy points out, the emperor has no clothes. Don Quixote is not a fearsome knight but a sad old man in ill fitting armor.  The wind mill is not a giant monster.  There is no such thing as "transgendered." No one "assigns" your gender at birth, as if they were ordering a customizable feature on a car. We are what we are, and it is all pretty obvious to any observer. Its either a boy or a girl. Boys have that little appendage down there, girls do not.

Unlike what has been repeatedly stated by the harridan mob...er...feminist press, boys and girls really do have differences in their psychological makeup that seem to track very closely with the differences in their DNA and so up pretty soon after birth.  As has been documented time and again, girls are generally better listeners, and better communicators, and are more nurturing.  Boys have naturally better visual skills, hand-eye coordination, and so forth.  Both the male dominated and the female dominated skills occur in both sexes to greater or lesser degrees, and some women may be better that most men at male dominated skills, and vice versa.  but none of that changes the truth that there are indeed significant differences.

I was happy to see that Mr. Trump indicated that "transgendered" individuals would not be allowed in the military.  I was disappointed with the predicatable reaction by the Left.  The idea that the transgendered do not cost any more than others is quite untrue.  The first "cost" is that these people identify themselves first and foremost not as potential soldiers, but as "special."  Because of the "special" identification, these people demand acknowledgement and even celebration of their status, which can only have deleterious effects on morale and unit cohesion so necessary to an organization whose mission is to fight wars.   Then there is the extra cost of continued treatment to allow them to maintain their delusions, which also have to be maintained even in a war zone.  Trump is right, the cost is too high, and frankly, the payoff for the nation is zero.

Sullivan concludes his article with this:

The delusions of transgender individuals will undoubtedly persist. But there is nothing noble, and there is plenty that is detrimental, in our continued cultural enablement of the madness promoted by transgender ideology.

Just so.

Can Anyone Answer Patricia McCarthy's Question?

On another note today, Patricia McCarthy asks Why Are Republicans in Congress So Spineless? Why indeed.

I suspect Ms. McCarthy also has the answer.  They didn't expect to be in a position where they would actually have to make good on those promises.

Cadwaladr: Impersonators of God

In the article Impersonators of God, E. M. Cadwaladr explores the seemingly incredible belief that Leftists have in the power of words. I have noted this tendency over time with respect to the gun debates. Leftists seemingly believe that if they can find the right magical incantation, somehow they can solve the "gun problem." So, for instance, they seek to restrict concealed carrying of firearms in various places. But of course the criminals, the ones they should be controlling, don't care about their rules, and will carry guns wherever they please.   This also shows the limitation on the power of words.  Since Leftists do not define the problem correctly in the first place, (as in guns instead of criminals) they do not come up with the right solutions. Cadwaladr writes about this tendency to see the problems of the world as one of messaging and narrative rather than as actual real problems to be solved by men taking real actions:

Since at least the beginning of the Obama administration, both politicians and what pass for journalists have been using the word “narrative” more commonly -- and with less reservation. “We have to get the narrative right” or “terrorism is a problem of competing narratives.” Similarly, progressives seem to have acquired an unshakeable faith in sending diplomats to simply talk to our enemies -- like Iran or North Korea -- as though they could be persuaded by pure eloquence to give up on their national agendas. Obama himself began his presidency with the odd notion that he could control the world with a series of speeches -- not speeches announcing particular policies, but speeches constructed entirely of grand dreams and virtue-signaling tropes. Not to be ignored is the left’s confidence in flinging the word “racist” like a voodoo curse. To be fair, the tactic of shaming their opponents has worked well for them for decades -- withering weak Republicans in place like Christ’s fig tree. We drown in the perennial mantras of “diversity,” “social justice,” and “white privilege” -- vague ideas that are moldable enough to suit whatever magic incantation the circumstance requires. All of it nonsense. All of it just so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Progressives love their words. Educated elocution is the public emblem of their self-declared superiority. They sneered at Bush with his Texas drawl, and they despise Donald Trump who -- let me tell ya people -- is never going to speak like JFK. But at some point, the left’s longstanding literary fixation became something more than a badge of identity. It quietly crossed over the line from affectation into the territory of full-blown delusion. The progressive mind has come to believe that reality itself is merely the invention of words. Leftist academics have long been fond of saying -- (fill-in-the-blank) “is a social construct.” What is a “social construct” other than an edifice of words? The left believes that words have direct, causal powers of their own. In a sense they are right -- and we agree. Consider the words of the apostle John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Language is a powerful tool, and of all the species on earth, humans alone have this powerful tool.  But like all things, it has limitations too.  It only describes a thing, it is not the thing itself.  Just as an architects drawing shows you what the building will be like, but is not the building itself, so language can be used to paint virtual pictures in our minds, but these are only virtual.  They are not reality.  They only work to create reality if enough people believe those words and acts upon them.

The problem for today’s Progressives is that only God is God. Politicians, pundits, and opinion makers are not. Lies are not the Logos. The elastic and malleable narratives of the left are only powerful enough to fool the minds of human beings -- they lack the power to make falsehoods into facts or work miracles on matter. Detroit is still a ghetto transitioning slowly into scrub forest -- no matter what narrative one invents to describe it. Subtitling the Koran “the religion of peace” does nothing to alter the violent conquest ideology outlined on its pages. Gender is not determined by one’s choice of pronouns. Conservatives know these things; postmodern relativists apparently do not. A generation of Americans has lost the capacity to know anything. When truth is invented and reinvented on-the-fly, the very notion of truth is destroyed. Language not only loses what power it does have -- it becomes psychotic gibberish. Perhaps eloquent psychotic gibberish. A predictable discourse of group howls.

Perhaps here is the real lesson of the Tower of Babel. God created man unique among all the creatures. Through language, art and music, man has the ability to conceive the power and wonders of the Creator, but man is not the Creator. When man tries to become like the Creator, he destroys himself, as at the Tower of Babel, or as in the Garden of Eden.  God does'nt destroy man, but rather his actions against God's creation destroys him.  These stories are meant as cautionary tales, not how to manuals. Or, you might listen to a more modern source, Rudyard Kipling's The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

A Skeptic's Prayer

I was inspired to read the story of Rhonda Chervin by another story at National Review entitled When Women Pray. the book, When Women Pray is a compilation of many women's stories of the power of prayer in their lives. Rhonda Chervin's story is one of them, and she describes a stage along the journey to conversion where she prayed the skeptics prayer "God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul."  It is a surprisingly powerful prayer, for once someone can admit to the possibility that there might be a God, and that we as people might have souls, that is enough to set in motion the great healing power of God's saving Grace through Jesus Christ.

I have been a skeptic myself, having been indoctrinated in the sciences as part of my engineering training.  Of course, back then I was too busy learning this stuff to ask too many hard questions.  But, in the last 20 years or so, I have begun asking the really BIG questions.  Science can tell us how we came to be here, but not why.  Science can not tell us the meaning of life.  Mathematics tells us that the probability of life forming on any planet spontaneously is so astronomically small as to make it virtually impossible.  Like the infinite monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriter, the fact that they will eventually type the sonnets of Shakespeare does not mean that one should expect if within 5 billion years, or for that matter, within 15 billion.  Thus, belief in a Divine origin is not illogical.  Science can trace the beginning of our universe back to within nanoseconds of the big bang, but can not say what or who initiated the big bang, or why.

I came to the conclusion that there was indeed a God, that the Bible was not myth but in fact very real, and I began attending church in my childhood faith.  But, I didn't have faith.  What I had was belief built out of reasoned conclusions.  I didn't pray, because after all, even if there was a God, did he really listen to prayers?  My mother became a member of the St. Luke Society, and met weekly to pray for hundreds of people she didn't know.  I could not believe that these prayers did a thing for anyone except perhaps for the person doing the praying.

However, having come to the conclusion that there is indeed a God, the creator of all there is, and having come to believe the Bible, I could reason that things like abortion would be wrong in this God's eyes.  It would be murder, and murder most foul at that.  Indeed, reason took me far, but not far enough.  From whence had come the absolute faith that that led Saint Paul, for instance, to keep shouting to the world that fact of Jesus saving Grace, and accept execution with such equanimity.  This was true power, and I did not have it.

Without boring you, gentle reader, with my story, for mine is a boringly ubiquitous one, let me say that my alcoholism had become a matter of discussion in our household.  At my lowest point, and I could have gone lower, believe me, God reached out to me, brought me into Alcoholics Anonymous, and they in turn led me to a faith in God.  The journey of a foot, from the head to the heart, is the hardest and longest we make in life.

Along the way, I have learned that the only way I can do God's will is if I stay sober.  The only way I stay sober is if I maintain my spiritual condition.  The only way I maintain my spiritual condition is if I pray daily, seek out his will in all things.   The recovering alcoholic's life is, of necessity, a spiritual life.  Religions are ultimately the outer manifestation of our inner spiritual beings.  I have also learned that we are spiritual beings living in a physical world, not the other way around.

Go read Dr, Rhonda Chervin's story.  I am sure you will find it, as I did, inspiring. I hope if you are having difficulty with God, you sincerely get on your knees and pray the skeptics prayer.