The Founders Second Amendment

 One of the commentors to this article said that if he didn't know better, he would think it was satire.  But then he noted that the author was on Kurt Schlichter.  But let's get into it shall we?  The article in question is Mandatory Assault Weapons Now! by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall.com.

Before we discuss the possible strenghths of the idea, let's discuss what the rights in the Second Amendment means. The Second Amendment states that "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Rights properly understood are liberties that one may take advantage of, but one must both assert the right and pay for any expense entailed. So, for example, while one has a right to freedom of the press, the government doesn't buy you a press, paper, and a staff of writers. Similarly, the Second Amendment acknowledges your right to own and carry a weapon, but you must purchase the weapon, ammunition, cleaning supplies, training and range time. Essentially, the rights provided in the Bill of Rights are negative rights.

The Left, however, has a different definition of rights. Under the Left's understanding, if someone has a right, it means that these rights must be provided to the person by society at large, meaning the government. Such rights are thought to be positive rights. The theory under which Obamacare was past would be an example of positive rights. Everyone has a right to health care, which is true enough. Under negative rights, you must pay for your own health care costs, whether that is health insurance, or health savings accounts, or pay as you go. Under the Left's positive rights, the government subsidizes part or all of the costs of your health care. (The fact that they don't actually do what they promised should concern everyone, but I digress.) Schlichter is here taking the Left's word quite literally, and applying it to a right the Left would like to erase.

There is an assault weapon problem in America – too few Americans are ready to do their duty to deter and defeat criminals and tyrants because they do not own the kind of weapons necessary for a free and secure people to remain free and secure. Right now, America has only 1.2 guns per person – this tragic shortage is nothing less than a crisis, considering that each citizen should have a battle rifle and a handgun in order to perform his or her duties.

A modest proposal: Make owning an assault rifle mandatory and have the government supply one to those who cannot afford one. I say we ensure an M16 in every pot.

This only makes sense. If a citizen has a gun, he is a citizen. If a citizen does not have a gun, he is not a citizen. He is a serf at the mercy of his feudal overlords. The right to keep and bear arms is not merely a right but a duty to keep and bear arms – everyone who is a law-abiding and healthy adult must have a real assault rifle and the ammunition to use it to protect himself, his family, his community and his Constitution.

This is a non-delegable duty. Like serving on a jury and paying taxes, you can’t slough this off on others. You have to step up personally. Relying on cops is a cop-out – we must all be first responders, and there’s no better response to criminals and aspiring tyrants than a bunch of Americas packing the same heavy-duty firepower that our soldiers do. We must make it mandatory, because some people are half-stepping, and we must supply those Americans without the means to buy the necessary guns and ammunition with a weapon and bullets so that they too can know the pride of participating fully in their own governance.

I like the idea. Indeed, I have floated it in the past. Every young man would train for two years in the military, and at the end of that time, would take home an M16, 100 rounds of ammunition and a side arm with ammunition. Each year, each man would be obligated to spend two weeks in military training, during which they would bring their weapons and ammunition, and ample range time to be available to refresh their weapons skills. At the same time, a program like this would obligate men to keep themselves fit enough to serve. I think this is what the Founders intended. They certainly never wanted us to have such a large professional army.

Personally, I think the Founders, if they were alive today, would find Schlichter's idea absolutely a good one.

No Forgiveness, and We Won't Forget

 John Daniel Davidson has an article at The Federalist entitled No Forgiveness For Pandemic Sins Until The Guilty Repent. Davidson tells us that to be forgiven, a necessary part of the process is for those who seek forgiveness to admit their guilt and ask for forgiveness. In addition, the guilty must repent, which means they agree not to do whatever they are seeking forgiveness again. None of these things have been done. The guilty have not asked for forgiveness, nor have they admitted their guilt. That means that they will do the same thing, given the chance.

Christianity Today published a curious piece by Paul Miller on Thursday calling for everyone to forgive each other for our supposed “pandemic sins.”

He doesn’t exactly say who sinned, just that “We got things wrong,” and “Some officials made mistakes in the early days.” Things happened. Mistakes were made. It’s time to move on. Miller’s argument is basically a warmed-over, lightly Christianized version of the essay Brown University economics professor Emily Oster wrote for The Atlantic last November, which argued for a “pandemic amnesty” on account of how “uncertain” and “complicated” things were in the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic like Covid. The ruling class did its best, OK?

Oster’s piece elicited well-deserved scorn from many on the right, including our own Joy Pullmann, who noted that a genuine amnesty “requires an admission of guilt and a commitment to repairing the wrongs done.” The absence of such an admission and commitment to change, says Pullmann, is “an indication that you’re going to do it again,” and makes it impossible to rebuild trust.

Of course, the people responsible for shutting down the economy, closing schools and churches, destroying countless businesses, and condemning the elderly to die alone in their hospital rooms are not at all sorry about what they did. To this day, they don’t acknowledge any wrongdoing whatsoever. Certainly not Anthony Fauci, who in an April interview with The New York Times defiantly faulted ordinary Americans for failing to listen to him, the self-proclaimed embodiment of science.

The same people who needlessly imposed massive learning losses on schoolchildren, or barred families from burying their dead, then foisted an ineffective vaccine on the public and tried to shame or coerce everyone into taking it, regardless of their age or health status. Plenty of Americans, including those in the military and medical professions, were faced with the terrible choice of taking a shot they didn’t trust or losing their careers and livelihoods.

None of the people who did this are sorry about it. In fact, they’re proud of it — and they will absolutely do it again the next chance they get...

So, no. No forgiveness for pandemic sins, and we will not forget. 

Here in North Carolina, our Covid Czar was one Dr. Mandy Cohen, a woman who took great delight in telling North Carolinians what to do, where they could go and not go and other dictatorial edicts with zero scientific basis. She shut down church services, and many were cowed into staying away. She shut down sports events and made going to a restaurant a torturous event. I could never figure out why one had to wear a mask to walk to the table, but then one could take it off when one sat down. Clearly it had nothing to do with spreading the disease and everything to do with social control. Unfortunately, she is going to be the new CDC Director.

Kleptocrats Keep Doubling Down on Climate Change, Despite Facts That Say Otherwise

 Following on yesterday's post pointing out that the push to deprive you of meat in the name of climate change is really a power grab by the kleptocratic elites, comes a piece by Gabriella Hoffman at Townhall.com entitled Want to Save the Planet? Stick to Eating Meat.

Preservationists, including Bill Gates, will not like the following development: Lab-grown meat– seen as a “climate-friendly” alternative to animal agriculture– is, in fact, worse for the environment than red meat.

Last month, researchers at University of California at Davis (UCD) published an eye-opening paper finding lab-grown meat is more energy intensive and responsible for a higher carbon footprint than beef, for instance, reared by farmers and ranchers.

Animal cell-based meat, (ACBM), or lab-grown meat, they concluded, “is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilized for ACBM production.”

ACBM “meat” has a global warming potential that is “four to 25 times greater than the average for retail beef,” the study added.

Ouch. Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Yesterday, I spelled out that properly managed herds of ruminant animals is good for the ebvironment because these animals build up the soil and reverse desertification. I have observed before that many animals change the environment to suit them. You know that man does this, but I have observed that even bees promote the flowering plants that they depend upon. After we foolishly eliminated the giant herds of buffalo that kept the Great Plains healthy, we discover that we can use cattle to do the same thing. In addition to making and keeping our environment healthy, these herds provide nutrition for us, making us and them a vital part of the environment. This is exactly 180 degrees from the sick notions of our kleptocratic elites.

Eating wild game meat, another red meat, also has innumerable benefits–especially if you hunt it. The University of Wyoming says consuming deer, elk, and other wild game meat is recommended. Why? It’s rich in protein, B-vitamins, iron, and zinc and inherently boasts low levels of saturated fat.

Fake “plant-based” meats, in comparison, are far worse for your health. One Harvard University scientist warned, “Some of those products, even though they contain high amounts of plant-based protein, may also contain unhealthy ingredients, such as high amounts of sodium or unhealthy fats.”

The Dublin Declaration, a consortium of scientists who want objectively back in studies relating to animal agriculture, said divorcing livestock from the environment would have ruinous effects. Their declaration proclaimed livestock boost the environment by “recycling in various ways the large amounts of inedible biomass that are generated as by-products during the production of foods for the human diet.” Other inherent benefits include “carbon sequestration, improved soil health, biodiversity, watershed protection and the provision of important ecosystem services.”

As Hoffman writes, despite these facts, the kleptocrats are doubling down, claiming to know better than those that actually raise and depend on ruminants for a living, and insisting on their foolish desire to eliminate the cattle industry. They want to do this because they want to steal our substance, and make themselves rich by impoverishing us.

Climate Change Is A Cover for Our Kleptocrat Elite To Steal Us Blind

I have noted before that the notion that ruminant animals, such as cattle, are harming the environment by emitting so called greenhouse gases is total nonsense. Cows do not fart and burp out new carbon dioxide. Rather, they are part of the continuing recycling of existing carbon dioxide. Furthermore, by pooping out the remains of their diet and stomping this into the soil, they store a great amount of carbon and other minerals into the soil. Indeed, by properly managing herds of ruminants one can slowly bring back deserts to life. Cows then, are not the problem but rather the solution to the climate catastrophes predicted by the Left. In addition, in a world where malnutrition stalks the population everywhere, perhaps it is time that we get on board with a proper human diet and having more cows (and sheep and goats) available to provide it is just what the world needs.

But it seems the Left, in search of every more power and money wants to restrict us to eating manufactured foods, which of course puts money in the pockets of Big Food, Big Pharma, and of course Bill Gates. Ultimatley, this is not about bringing about an earthly Utopia. No, that is just the come on to get you to agree. The real goal is to enrich the kleptocartic global "elites" who are in reality the global kleptocracy.

So it is that I read today at PJ Media that the Irish Goverment Wants To Spend 600 million euros to Sacrifice 65,ooo Cows for Climate Change by Ben Bartee.

The “climate change” ideology increasingly takes on pseudo-religious aspects, demanding sacrifices from its adherents at its altar. God is dead in the West, after all, but He must be replaced with something as humans are inherently inclined to seek transcendence and meaning.

...snip...

As I’ll delve into shortly, that the world’s politicians are on board is an understatement. Destroying the livestock industry is one of the main objectives of the global technocrats that, as Klaus Schwab openly brags, have “penetrated the cabinets” of nearly every major government worldwide.

...snip...

This is a worldwide phenomenon, coming to a blue state near you. I have previously written about the Dutch Farmer Citizen Movement, which won a historic victory in the Parliament earlier this year running essentially on the single issue of rolling back the technocrats’ plans to shut down their food production and ultimately replace them with a corporatized farming system raising bugs at scale, as the World Economic Forum has encouraged.

Of course, go read the entire article, and if you have time, watch the Ted Talk by Allen Savory. I want to take a few moments to explain where vegetarians and vegans go wrong, however.

Many in the vegan and vegetarian community do so in the belief that they are being more virtuous by not killing any creatures. But in fact, every farmer of plants must kill countless creatures in order to have a crop to sell. First, they destroy an entire habitat which supports birds, insects, deer, bears, indeed all sorts of living creatures, Then they dig up the stumps and plow the ground, which destroys worms, bacteria, fungi, and turns the ground nearly sterile. They apply artificial fertilizers to make the plants grow better, but the plants still depletes the soil of minerals. Worse still, these minerals and vitamins in the plants aren't very bioavailable to the people who eat them.

But there is an ongoing war in which insects, larger beasts such as deer, and other creatures that must be killed in an ongoing effort to have a crop left to sell. Birds devour sprouting bean seeds, as do rabbits. Birds eat fruit crops such as apples, while insects deposit their eggs on fruits in an effort to give their babies a good start in life. Caterpillars eat the leaves of broccoli and brussels sprouts, cabbages and lettuce. Corn borers ruin corn, while the infamous bole weavil eats...well...cotton. All these have to be killed or driven off with various pesticides. Of course, you don't realize it because the stuff that makes it to market doesn't have any such damage. Why? Pesticides!

Now, let's look at cows. First of all, around 75% of the arable land is not suited to row crops. It is either too rocky, too hilly, or it doesn't get enough rain at the right time of year for crops to grow. But this same land can support herds of cattle and sheep. If you keep large enough herds of ruminant animals moving from pasture to pasture through out the year, one can actually build up the soil while providing a proper human diet.

But, of course that is not what our kleptocrat garbage "elite" want. No, what they want is to reduce everyone to such utter poverty that we are too busy keeping body and soul together for another day, so that we don't pay attention to the fact that they are stealing our substance for themselves.

Biden Leading Us To The Rubicon

I urge gentle readers to go to Matthew G. Andersson's analysis of the Biden administrations efforts toward war at the American Thinker entitled Why The White House Wants War and read it carefully. It is one of those pieces that are so dense, one can not take a lot of quotes, because the entire piece is quote worthy. Let me just quote the end:

An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy. It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law. The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order. Biden was installed not just as an Obama proxy, but as a signal of weakness. To appreciate the risk, imagine Israel’s security interests headed by such a figure, rather than a Netanyahu.

Let all that sink in. This makes sense out of the confusing actions of the Biden administration. When Julius Caesar decided that the Roman Republic and Senate was not doing its job as he saw it, he took the fateful step of crossing the Rubicon River with his army, an act that was both illegal and unprecedented. Would he be allowed to get away with it or would there be civil war? We know how that turned out. According to Andersson, Biden is leading us toward a figurative Rubicon, daring us at every turn to stop him. Stop him we must.

Refined Carbs Might Be Making You Dumb

 I found this article, at The Federalist interesting. The meat is bad and grains and vegetables are virtuous ideas have permeated our media and our medical research since the early 1960s. Rarely does an article come out that suggests that carbohydrates and sugar are bad for you. Oh, you find books like Nina Teicholz book Big Fat Surprise, where literally half the book is footnotes, that proves that the dietary fat leads to heart attacks hypothesis is a flat out lie. The lie was created and propped up by intimidation, silencing of critical voices, by Big Pharma abd Big Food dollars to support Big Pharma and Big Food profits. In any case, the article in question is Refind Carbs Might Be Making You Dumb.

I have been on a ketogenic diet for some time. When I get off it, though, I find that I have some brain fog. But staying in ketosis is not easy, and surprising things cause your insulin to rise, kick you out. Recently, taking up Dr. Ken Berry's challenge to go full carnivore and eat nothing but beef, butter, bacon and eggs (called the BBB and E diet) for a month, I have found more energy and clarity than I have felt in a long time. I also find I am less anxious in general. I am about two weeks in, but I find I don't need to eat as often, nor as much.

According to the article, by Tristan Justice:

A new study out of France this month linked consumption of refined carbohydrates with lower cognitive function.

In their paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, French researchers studied the relationship between carb consumption and cognitive performance in 95 healthy young adults between 20 and 30. Of the 95 participants, 48 were women, and 47 were men.

The French team of scientists found negative impacts on cognition across both genders. The consumption of foods with a high glycemic index, mainly refined carbohydrates such as white bread and many ultra-processed foods, “is associated to a decrease of cognitive performance.” Individuals’ cognitive performances were measured by the Wechsler’s digit symbol substitution test.

Of course, looking at the study, one finds that it includes a limited data set, only 95 people. Such studies are easily dismissed, but Nina Teicholz intensive research points to a number of things that might be associated with eating a higher saturated fat diet. Weight loss if you are plagued with the typical "wheat belly" for starters, but also lowering diabetes symptoms, building stronger bones, more musculature, a bigger brain, and elimination or lessening of a number of the "diseases of civilation." Dr. Berry describes the elimination of exzema and dandruff among other complaints when he started the carnivore diet.

Now, while Berry and others talk about eating nothing but BBB and E, the real culprits are both refined carbohydrates, specifically grains and sugars, and polyunsaturated vegetable/seed oils. They point out that our brain size began to grow about the time we adopted the hunter/gatherer lifestyle and began mostly living off animals and animal fats. We spcifically went after the fattest parts of the animal including the brains, livers, and bone marrow.  Moving around with the herds of animals, we didn't grow grain crops. Furthermore, in the wilds there are very few edible plants. Anthropological studies show that our ancient ancestors became super preditors, and were large, well muscled, and had very few modern illnesses such as dental cavities. Heart attacks were unheared of.  About 10,000 years ago we began cultivating grains. Our brains shrank in size, and we began to enounter the diseases of civilization including obesity, diabetes, dental cavities and cancer. Our lifespan shortened as a result.

I am not a doctor, nor an anthropologist, so don't take my word for any of this. But as someone who has had a problem with weight gain since I was 10 years old, I have studied various diets and books about dieting for a long time. The first diet I was put on was around the age of 12, when my mother tried to put me on what was called the "Mayo Clinic Diet."  It consisted of spinach, dry toast, and hard boiled eggs. Yuck.  It was, as you might suspect a low calorie, low fat diet, and thus not very sustainable.  If one was confined to a hospital and unable to find other food, it might have worked.  

I remember reading with alacrity Dr. Atkin's Diet Revolution in the 1970s, and Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades Protein Power. Even then Eades tells us that his diet was really about eating more fat, but that it wouldn't have been published if it was called Saturated Fat Power. Since then I have learned that eating a diet high in saturated fats and eggs was known to physisans to induce weight loss  since...well...ever. William Banting wrote a book detailing how, using this approach, he was able to reduce the weight of his portly body, and is probably the first dieting book. It was wildly popular, as more sugar and refined grains entered the English diet in the 19th century.

I encourage you to obtain and read Nina Teicholz book, Big Fat Surprise to discover just how much various special interests have manipulated our politics for their own gain. The food industries selling your children sugar for breakfast, selling vegetable oils and trans fats, shortening and margerine, and highly processed snacks is appalling. Big Pharma selling statins, which arguably were worse for your health than the colesterol is eqully cynical. But they have made a killing on statins and other products, many of which we did not need. And in the process, sound, evidence based medicine has been sacrificed to passing out pills and surgery. It is shocking, but a necessary wake up call. As Teicholz makes abundantly clear, no one in the vast enterprise was looking out for you and me. They could care less if they ultimately killed the patient, as long as they made their billions.

We find ourselves being manipulated by these same bad actors yet again. At first it was a nudge, then a push, and soon the velvet glove will come off and we will be forced to accept yet more devastating dietary skullduggery. We will be forced to eat an even higher carb diet, soy based pseudomeats. while real food is slowly made more and more expensive until only the very rich can afford it. We will be made to eat ze bugs and like it. We will be made sick and stupid, and this is by design. This helps no one except a few billionaires at the top, and of course, Big Pharma, who will have pills for what ails us. This is all being done under the great climate scam, of course, just as it was done before under the great heart attack epidemic. Do not fall for it, guys.

This Memorial Day, Let Us Remember that Christ Won 2000 Years Ago

Some gentle readers may be dismayed that I have spent so much time of late writing about the spiritual nature of the culture war.  Some may be atheist or agnostic.  I get it.  In the Gospels, Jesus is often descibed as driving the demons out of a person.  I was told when I was young that what really happened was that Jesus healed a epileptic or someone with a mental disease.  And I believed this for a long time.  You may too.  But I have learned that demons are as real as the Three Persons of the Godhead are: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Satan is real, and does real damage here on earth.

But I am not the only one, and increasingly, Christians are coming to the realization that we all need to turn to God, to call upon His name, because what is happening is not man made evil, but rather is of the devil himself. Thus, I welcome yet another writer, at the American Thinker, Trevor Thomas, who penned an article yesterday entitled Transgenderism and its War On Truth. Thomas makes the writes that debating what is a man and what is a woman is pointless. We have known these things since Adam and Eve. The Left has muddied the water with made up words like "cisgendered," and indeed the concept of gender as a separate thing from sex. They write so called "scholarly" papers that andvance these silly concepts, and the gullible media breathlessly report this garbage.  The sex of a child "is" at the moment of conception, and not "assigned" at birth as the Left claims.

In all the conversation that is prevalent throughout the Earth today, there is almost nothing further from the truth than the absurd and evil notion that men can become women, and that women can become men, or similarly, the idea that sex (or “gender”) is not binary and rather “a spectrum.” These ideas are so absurd and so far from the truth (in line with 2 + 2 = 5) that many modern liberals refuse—or perhaps more accurately, have yet—to embrace them.

We shouldn’t be surprised that we are now having to debate what is a male and what is a female, or that sex is binary. Transgenderism, and all its fallacies, is simply what results when one abandons the notion of absolute truth. The idea that some things are settled for all time is not a tenet of modern liberalism.

...snip...

The truth about truth flies in the face of those who wish to rule their own world and write their own moral code. So you see, transgenderism—like the marriage debate—is just another battle in the war on truth. Granted, it is a battle against one of the oldest truths—even older than the truth of what is marriage—in the history of humanity. Few things have been known longer than what is a male, and what is a female, yet the left’s war on this old and foundational truth rages on.

It rages on because if doubt can be cast on the truth of sex (males/females), then doubt (and subsequent lies) can creep into virtually ANY realm of truth. This is why the enemy of all humanity; the enemy of all truth—Satan—is so hard at work here. Yes, this is indeed a spiritual war, and The Father of Lies is winning many battles.

Satan does indeed appear to be winning many battles. And those aligned with Satan are quick to tell us so. For example, the daughter of Turkish president Erdogan tells us that Islam will break the cross, meaning that Islam will win the culture war.  Paul writes in Ephesians that:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

But we Christians know that Christ won the war 2000 years ago. Sorry Muslims, but either you stand with Him, or you lose. There is time yet to repent. In the book of Revelation we read that God will, for a time, release the devil to wreak havoc on humanity. It certainly feels like that prophesy may be coming true, though I do not know. God has not included me in His plans:-) But on this Memorial Day, it certainly doesn't hurt to include our nation in our prayers. Pray that God sweeps all of Satan's demons from our shores, and turns everyone to face God, to repent and do His will in our lives. And pray in Jesus name.