FBI Presecutes Pro-Life Catholics

 Eric Sammons at Crisis Magazine reports that the FBI Is Sending A Message To Pro-Life Catholics.

The swatting and arrest of a pro-life activist on Friday sent shockwaves throughout the pro-life community…which is exactly what the FBI intended by their gestapo tactics.

When a swarm of fully-armed FBI agents attack the rural home of a father of seven who runs a Catholic anti-pornography ministry over a charge that was already dropped in the local courts, it’s not a mistake—it’s a message. You will be silent, you will comply—or you will be next.

...snip...

The real story here is the overheated response of the federal government. This arrest is another step on the path to full-scale persecution of Catholics and pro-lifers. History shows that the persecution of a class of people doesn’t appear in a vacuum; it usually takes decades or even longer of priming the society to look down on a group of people or way of life. And what has the past few decades in America been if not a growing delegitimization of Catholicism and its teachings?

We see it all around us. Big families are ridiculed, priests are mocked, and traditional sexuality is reviled. Anyone who dares to resist this trend is progressively ostracized from society and the culture at large. It begins at the level of the major media and Hollywood until it seeps into dinner conversations and neighborhood picnics. Eventually it gets to the point that a family man can be arrested and many will just say, “Well, he probably deserved it—after all, look at the way he lives.”

The forces of evil know how to take advantage of this attitudinal shift. They push a little at a time, progressively ramping up their attacks to see what is acceptable and what is not (yet) acceptable. An arrest like this, then, serves a dual purpose: first, it sends a message to the pro-life community, and second, it checks the pulse of the culture to gauge the reaction. If this arrest is allowed to stand, then expect more in the future.

"The forces of evil indeed."  Is it too much to say that Catholics are being attacked demonically? I won't name the demon because to do so gives it power.  We invite these demons into our lives when we allow abortions and do other things that displease God.  If you want to see what I am talking about, look up the Tucker Carlson interview with an exorcist.  Hair raising stuff, that.

The chaos around us is yet more evidence of demons let loose on the world. Many gentle readers will of course say that this is all hogwash. But if Christ himself cast out demons, and taught the Apostles to do so, then demons exist.

The Church has been through persecutions before. But in a country that ostensibly has religious freedom as one of its founding principles, it is disappointing. Still...

The increasing insanity of the Left has one positive element: it reveals to a growing number of “normal” people that a world ruled by the Left isn’t one they want to live in. And so we will likely see more and more victories by the Right, which is really just more victories for sanity.

If you are Catholic, pray a rosary for Mr. Houk, and also for his persecutors. If not, pray anyway.  He needs our prayers and so do we.

We must insist that the demons stay in Hell where they belong

Today at Townhall.com Star Parker has an article noting that Religious Freedon Means Nothing if Religion Means Nothing. It seems that an LGBTQ etc. etc. (yawn)club had sued Yeshiva University to be included as an official club, and the Supreme Court had backed the club.

Yeshiva University, the nation's only orthodox Jewish university, has been sued by Yeshiva University gay students for refusing to sanction an LGBTQ club. A New York State court ruled in favor of the students, and now Yeshiva University has been dealt another setback by the Supreme Court.

The Supremes, to whom Yeshiva University appealed, refused to block the state court decision requiring that the university allow the LGBTQ club to operate.

First, this shows that the Supreme Court, being composed of fallen human beings, doesn't always deliver the right decision. Obviously, Yeshiva University is a religious Jewish school.  Their first amendment rights would be violated by being forced to officially recognize an LGBT etc. etc. club.  And the club could operate in any case, as it apparently did.  

Second, it also says that no matter what, we must stand up for what we believe. I noted a few posts ago, that during the pope's trip to Malta to speak with the migrants, he covered up the Cross. He should never have done that. We should never do that.

For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels.

 And Yeshiva University should not, under any circumstances accede to this ruling of the Supreme Court. If the State of New York can thumb their noses at the Supreme Court's Bruen ruling, so can Yeshiva University.

But, more importantly, Yeshiva University must follow God's law when God's law and civil law disagree. God's law uneqivically says that homosexual behavior is anathema to God. More to the point, God says He created man male and female. The first command He gave man was to be fruitful and multiply. Homosexual behaviour can not produce children. Neither can any other of the LBGTQ etc. etc. (yawn) click produce children as long as they behave according to their perverted leanings. This is nothing but the demonic being allowed once again into our midst. We must insist that the demons stay in Hell where they belong.

Saving Unborn Lives

 Over at the Federalist Joshua McCaig has a piece entitled Biden Administration Silently Erases Unborn Child in Legal Argument Pushin Abortion On Religious Medical Workers. The issue is surrounding the Emergency Medial Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) has taken center stage in the Biden administration’s push to force health care providers to perform abortions. Faith-based organizations have been forced to take action to protect their sincerely held religious beliefs, including the belief that human life begins at the moment of fertilization, from being violated by requirements that health care providers perform abortions.

...snip...

HHS then published a memorandum providing guidance on the obligations of health care professionals under EMTALA to patients who are pregnant, and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra sent a letter to health care professionals stating that “if a physician believes that a pregnant patient presenting at an emergency department, including certain labor and delivery departments, is experiencing an emergency medical condition as defined by the EMTALA, and that abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve that condition, the physician must provide the treatment.” This guidance effectively requires any physician, regardless of personal beliefs and conscience considerations, to perform an intentional abortion.

...snip...

Contrary to HHS’s position, EMTALA was created to ensure that not only a pregnant woman’s health is protected in an emergency situation, but also the health of the unborn child. Enacted in 1986, EMTALA addressed “patient dumping,” a term to describe a situation where a patient who is uninsured or unable to pay is prematurely discharged or sent to another facility before being evaluated and stabilized. Pregnant women in labor were specifically contemplated in this law, as women without insurance who presented to a hospital in labor were being inappropriately denied care or transferred to another facility leading, in certain circumstances, to injury or death of the mother or unborn child. The purpose of EMTALA was to protect both the mother and the unborn child, and the unambiguous language of the statute requires health care professionals to take into consideration the life and health of the unborn child. EMTALA defines “emergency medical condition” as “a medical condition manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including pain) such that the absence of immediate medical attention could reasonably be expected to result in — (i) placing the health of the individual (or, with respect to a pregnant woman, the health of the woman or her unborn child) in serious jeopardy … (B) with respect to a pregnant woman who is having contractions — (i) that there is inadequate time to effect a safe transfer to another hospital before delivery, or (ii) that transfer may pose a threat to the health or safety of the woman or the unborn child.”

I urge all gentle readers to read the entire article. What is happening to our country is an infinitely small version of what the real Hell would be like. Too many in our country have abandoned God, including our leaders, God in turn is abandoning us. We need to repent and return to placing God at the center of our lives.

We Should Be Grateful For Fossil Fuels. Instead, Some People Want To Destroy It All.

 I have two today from the American Thinker The first, I will let gentle readers read on their own, for it is, in essence prologue to the second. The first is by Alicia Colon entitled Are You Really That Smart If You Can't Recognize B.S.. Colon argues that facts are always in service to our interpretation of what we observe. But our highest act of reason is what is known as critical thinking. It is this critical thinking that our education system should aspire to, but has too often failed to deliver. She cites as one example the moronic theory climate cooling...er...warming...er...change.

The second article comes from Christopher Chantrill and is entitled Green Energy Transistion Hits the Wall. Chantrill in this article is necessarily vitriolic and sarcastic.

I wish it didn't have to be this way, but really, it's the only way to tell the climatatistas that their God is Dead. Facts and logic won't do it. Instead, the believers must experience decadence and nihilism and dead bodies floating down the Rhine and know, in their eternal recurrence, that their climate god isn't going to save them.

It's Not Funny, but the prospect of a cold winter without Russian gas in Europe seems to be the one thing that the Klausi babies and the Greta Thunbergs and the gubmint-funded scientists didn't think about in planning their glorious Great Leap Forward to the green energy transition.

Good point, young Mao, in the back row. If backyard steel plants were such a good idea, why don't we all cook up lithium batteries on the backyard barbie?

After all, it is not as if we have been told numerous times by those who should know that the climate has been changing since God created the Earth, and well before man first walked on the planet. To presume that man has anything to do with the current climate, or can do anything to change it is the height of hubris. It recalls the Tower of Babel. Chantrill, of course, takes his swipes at St. Greta of Thunberg and others, but then he gets down to business.

See, geniuses, there is this little concept called “time preference.” It says that humans discount possible events in the future. That's because it is more important to put gas in the car right now -- or plug your climate-friendly EV into the free recharging station at the supermarket -- than to worry about what gubmint- and billionaire-funded scientists say about the climate in 80 years. And it is really not a good idea to wreck the economy with green energy subsidies and pay-to-play research grants, just because you can.

And another thing, the gubmint scientists may be wrong. Ask Trofim Lysenko, Stalin's pet scientist, about that.

fearlessly predict that by the end of the 21st century the Big Thing will be the grandsons of Elon Musk fighting over their SpaceX inheritance to see who gets to make the next trillion by sending people to Mars on the Starship Premium Frequent Flyer Program.

People under thrity may not know who Lysenko was (or Stalin for that matter) but you should look him up. He was the one who attempted to conform science to Communist dogma. You may guess how that worked out, but at least Lysenko kept his head.

Chantrill concludes with this:

All the flap about green energy has helped me appreciate what an amazing boon to humanity gasoline is: with a hundred pounds of gas in the tank you can drive the kids all day across the fruited plain to grandma's house. But it takes 6,000 pounds of battery to get your EV halfway to grandma's: assuming that the charging stations have electricity, California.

Because of abundant fossil fuels, we no longer are dependent of human muscle power, which has woeful limits, nor on horse power, which also has woeful limits. This has enabled us to build, to travel, clean our homes and cook our food and live longer, healthier lives. We should be grateful and respectful. Instead, certain people want to destroy it all. Why?

Depopulation?

Marian Tupy has an article at Townhall.com asking Does The World Face an Underpopulation Problem? Tupy argues that contrary to what is deemed "common sense", the world, and human flourishing, has grown as the population has grown. But common sense in this instance is wrong because neo-maltusians look at resources as being used up. But all the resources that have ever been here are still here. What happens is that as population growns, we get more and more creative in how to use these resources more amd more efficiently.

Tupy notes that the price of strategic resources continue to go down in terms of the number of hours someone needs to work to purchase these materials.

The problem with real prices is that they ignore changes in incomes. Typically, though not always, individual incomes increase faster than inflation. That’s because people tend to grow more productive over their lifetimes and across time. Contrast the productivity of workers equipped with shovels and those driving giant excavators. While real prices are measured in dollars and cents, time prices are measured in hours and minutes. To calculate a time price, all you need to do is to divide the nominal price of a good or service by the nominal hourly income. That tells you how long you must work to afford something.

Consider U.S. manufacturing workers. Between 1900 and 2018, the time prices of pork, rice, cocoa, wheat, corn, coffee, lamb and beef fell by 98.4%, 97.6%, 97.1%, 96.7%, 96.1%, 93.8%, 78.6% and 75.5% respectively. That means that the same length of time that bought 1 pound of each commodity, now buys 62.6, 41.1, 34.8, 30.5, 25.6, 16.2, 4.7 and 4 pounds. While people cannot eat rubber, aluminum, potash or cotton, the prices of these commodities are valuable inputs in the production processes that impact the prices of goods and services, and hence the overall standard of living. Their time prices fell by 99.4%, 98.9%, 98.2% and 95.8% respectively. All the while, the population of the United States rose from 23 million to 328 million.

What happened to global time prices of resources? They fell by 84 percent between 1960 and 2018. The personal resource abundance of the average inhabitant of the globe rose from 1 to 6.27 or 527 percent. Put differently, for the same time of work that he or she could buy one item in the basket of resources we looked at, he or she can now get more than six. Over that 58-year period, the world’s population increased from 3 billion to 7.6 billion.

When looked at in those terms, it is pretty clear that far from being over populated, more people have brought greater human flourishing. The malthusians have always been wrong. The neo-malthusians are just as wrong. The China one child policy has been wrong. I suspect that as the world's population decreases, the cost of everything will rise because there are fewer people to spread the cost over.

Dobbs was worth it

Yesterday, David Harsanyi had an article at Townhall.com entitled Absolutely, Dobbs Was Worth It. Now, Harsanyi cites reasons of constitutionality and the political prospects of Republicans in the upcoming midterms as reasons for believing that the Dobbs decision was needed. I can not argue with Harsanyi on any of the points he made. Indeed I am glad he made them. For too long we have wandered away from our constitutional roots by following stare decisis. So one bad decision yields another worse decision based on the bad decision. Then the next, based on the worse decision becomes still more worse than the last. What the Supreme Court has done is gone back to and ruled on the Constitution itself, to find that there is nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing a "right" to kill your unborn children. So they have turned it back to the states to decide, each state for itself. It's about time. Why does everything have to be decided nationally for all? But of course you know the answer. It concentrates power in the hands of Washington elites.

What concerns me more, however, is the sheer immorality. Now, one can feel sorry for women who have to carry an unwanted child to term, and believe me I do. And men do not get off easy here, for there has only been one immaculate conception in the history of mankind. But the baby is the only innocent party here. Each person, mother and father, made a choice. The moral thing to do is bring the child to term and either raise it yourself, or put it up for adoption. Many families are looking for children to adopt, and frankly the government often makes adoption more difficult. But there is doing the right thing, and doing the convenient thing.

Whatever way you look at it though, Dobbs was worth it.

Ohio Advances the Second Amendment

At Townhall.com today, Sarah Arnold tells us that Ohio Teachers Are Now Allowed To Have Guns In Their Classrooms

As many Democrat states call to get rid of guns, Republicans are fighting to keep the Second Amendment alive and protected.

This week a new law went into effect in Ohio allowing teachers, principals and school staff to carry firearms while in the classroom.

House bill 99 will require only 24 hours of training, down from the previous 700 hours, followed by 8 annual hours of re-qualification training. School staff will also be required to undergo yearly criminal background checks.

Another win for the Second Amendment.

As individuals, in obedience to Him, we can save our nation to be a blessing to the whole world

 I would like to feature today a speech given by Josh Hawley, a Senator for Missouri, to the National Conservative Conference on September 12, and provided to us by The Federalist. I have commented before that the Constitution of the United States was an inspired document, meaning inspired by God. Hawley makes this much more explicit, noting that Biblical history was one long continuing speech by the Almighty against the cultural elites of the ancient world and instead in favor of the individual.

Hawley, of course, as a politician is making a political point, and a valid one. But God doesn't just pick individuals out of the rabble, but he picks individuals who love Him and do their best to obey Him. Still, I will not quibble with Hawley's basic argument, because without the freedom as individuals to do His will, we are not free at all.  And what the Left proposes is the same thing as the ancients proposed:  that the few should rule over the deplorable serfs and peasants, and these deplorables should obey, or else...

You will find Hawley's speech at The Left's War On History Is Really A War On The God Of The Bible. I would urge gentle readers to get yourselfs a cup of coffee or tea, as you may be inclined, sit down in your most comfortable chair, and read all of Hawley's remarks.

I would like to point to something that is often used to say that we Chritians should meekly obey whatever the state tries to ram down our throats. This particularly is a problem at this time here in America, as Hawley points out. We are asked to say that men can get pregnant. We are asked to believe that aborting our children is good and right. The Left wants to separate children from their parents and turn boys into girls and vice versa.  The state intends to force us to repudiate our God, our faith in Christ, or else...Is that what Paul meant when in Romans 13 he says to obey civil authroities? At the Be Transfigured Ministries the poster threads the needle this way

Christians of every generation face the same dilemma. Should we submit to God or the State? In 20th Century Soviet Russia, thousands were martyred because the State attempted to crush the Church, but the people stood up to the State and practiced their faith anyway. Were they disobedient to Saint Paul? When the time came for Saint Paul to choose State or Christ, of course he chose Christ and paid the price for it. In being arrested and put on trial, he submitted to authorities.

I guess maybe that is the answer. We don’t stop believing in Christ. We don’t stop worshipping Him. We don’t stop living as Orthodox Christians. We maintain all our Orthodox way of life and submit to authorities at the same time. That might mean losing a business license if the State no longer endorses our way of life. That might mean being expected to quit a job if our employer no longer tolerates our Orthodox Christian way of life. Submitting to authorities doesn’t only mean obeying them. It means being willing to endure the penalties when following our Faith is no longer acceptable to the authorities. It is why we commemorate as many martyrs as we do. They submitted to torture, exile, and death, never giving up faith in Christ.

So it is that we as Christians must constantly tell the Truth, as required by our Christian faith, but we must also pay the price. Every time the state, or its propaganda arm tell us something untrue, we must speak out with the Truth.

In truth, their vision is bleak and their ideology is brittle. They do not understand the deep strength of the American people, because they do not understand the deep goodness of their character. They see only deplorables who must be re-educated.

They do not understand our history and our ideals because they do not appreciate the truths on which this nation is based. They do not realize these truths have made us good and made us strong. And truth is their problem. The woke ideology, this warmed-over cultural Marxism, is not true.

Race and class do not define all that we are. Society is not an unending struggle for power and domination. And America is not structurally defective. America is the best and freest nation in the history of the world. And it is so largely because of the biblical revolution that made us what we are.

As Hawley points out, as individuals, in obdience to Him, we can still save our nation to be a blessing to the whole world.

Wise as serpents and innocent as doves

Mark Lewis, over at Townhall.com has an article that at first glance claims that Germany To Put Pictures of Hitler on the Deutschmark!. Great click bait, right?

As it turns out, it is not happening, and nobody, but nobody wants to do it. Why? Well, because Hitler led a regime that killed some 6 million Jews. If Germany were to propose it, everyone would immediately distance themselves from Germany. The German government would be diplomatically isolated.

But can you imagine the world-wide outcry if Germany did put Hitler’s face on the Deutschmark? First, the world would be in total shock. Then, immediately, there would be a non-stop cacophony of denunciation, recrimination, abuse, condemnation, and, no doubt, sanctions--and perhaps even threats of war--against the German government. Germany would be out of the European Union and NATO (perhaps the best arguments for Hitler on the Deutschmark). Such an action would be headline news every night until Germany rescinded the insane proposition. And rightly so. To exalt a criminal ogre like Hitler would be an offense of the highest magnitude, an insult to the entire world, a hideous, despicable action by crazed, degenerate human waste.

But we all know that the German government, thankfully, has no intention of ever doing such a thing.

But as it turns out, Hitler was a piker, and number 3 on the top ten list of mass murderers. Number 2 on that list of mass murderers was Joseph Stalin. But coming in at number 1 is none other than China's Mao. Yet whose face is on every bill? You guessed it: Mao Zedong. Yet no outcry. Why? Why isn't China treated as Germany would be in Lewis's mental experiment?

As I have noted elsewhere on TownhalI, I lived in the People’s Republic of China for almost ten years of my life, having only recently escaped that prison. The common people there, the slaves (for that’s what they are), like most such people in the world, are decent folk, just trying to survive and live a happy, prosperous life. They're masters, the Chinese Communist Party, are thugs. Human garbage. Power-hungry, murdering, oppressive thieves, liars, cheats, monsters, and a few other things I would like to call them that Townhall probably wouldn’t permit. You have heard this, of course, from other conservative pundits in America. They tell the truth. I’ve lived it.

...snip...

A government that puts a picture of the greatest mass murderer in human history on all their money. What does that tell you about that government? And a world that says nothing about it. What does that tell you about our world? That so many people on this planet suck up to that country, buying its slave-labor produced products with hardly a whimper of protest, and slobbering over a regime that has killed more innocent people than any in human history is at the top of the most nauseating, revolting, and inexcusable facts imaginable. Yes, I’m talking to YOU, Joe Biden!

But, the Left controls the world narrative now--from China, to the Wuhan virus, to sexual immorality, to climate change and other pseudo-scientific theories. And the Left is wrong about 99.9% of what it believes (though I couldn’t tell you what the .1% is they are right about). That narrative-control isn’t going to change soon. And it takes a wise person with courage to see through it and stand up against it.

Yes, it does take a wise person. "Wise as serpents and innocent as doves." This what we must all be.

Update: Meanwhile at the Congressional Post we find that the New York Times is extolling the fashion sense of Xi Jinping. As it turns out, the author is a former propaganda writer for the Chinese Communist Party.

The National Pulse revealed that many prominent news organizations, including the New York Times, CNN, and Reuters, took part in what is described as a “Marxism journalism school.” This was reportedly done in collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party.

It also came to light last year that China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid for trips to the country by several U.S. journalists — on the surface as a way to better understand the country. Is there any doubt they were financed to gain favorable coverage?

Nevermind the well-chronicled cultural and some believe physical genocide ongoing in the country’s west. And overlook the iron-fisted reaction to dissent and even questioning authority in the mildest manner. What’s important is a sense of fashion, and that’s what Xi Jinping portrays.

I am embarrassed for faithful Catholics

I am not Roman Catholic, yet I am embarrassed for faithful Catholics when Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi express support for, indeed a "right" to abortion; that is a right to kill another human being, using their Catholic faith as the reason. The Roman church has been very very clear that they view abortion as anathema. Indeed, our congregatation views it the same way. So, it is interesting that in Florida, two Rabbis filed a complaint against the State of Florida citing its ban on abortion after 15 weeks. The Rev. Jim Harden has the story at the American Thinker entitled Is abortion a faith based expression?.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the pro-abortion side of America hastily grope to patch the gaping torpedo hole in their destroyer, and along with the pro-life community, realized that a new theater of battle is opening. No longer is abortion legal by default in all 50 states, as many already moved to regulate or nearly outlaw the practice completely. Like a cornered animal, the abortion industry is baring its four fangs, protecting its precious prey, and one of these fangs is surprisingly religious. We’ve seen the Biden administration dictate that religious people can still be religious while supporting abortion, and now, this kind of equivocation is being attempted.

On August 1 of this year, three rabbis in Florida filed a legal complaint against the state regarding the 15-week abortion ban. The rabbis argue that in Judaism, counseling women for abortion is an integral part of their religious expression. In their complaint, the rabbis point to the Old Testament, calling it the “….primary source of Jewish law and theology” and claim, “the sanctity of all human life is the core tenet of Judaism.”

It is odd that Rabbis filed the complaint considering that when Abraham went to sacrifice his only son, as did the followers of Moloch, God sent an angel to stop him just in the nick of time and then supplied a ram to sacrifice instead. Christians, as they spread throughout the world, eventally made the practice illegal throughout the Christian world. 

So it comes as no surprise that I am embarrassed for truly faithful Catholics, and of course other Christians as well, that two "leaders" who claim Catholicism openly support not only abortion as a "right" but also the governments efforts to pass a law making Roe the once again the law of the land again. Meanwhile Elizabeth Warren wants to put a stop to pro-life pregancy centers. I have no idea what faith, if any Elizabeth Warren holds, but the embedded article speculates that her faith may be in the dollar.  Perhaps that is the faith of the two "leaders" menitioned earlier?

The Green New Deal is Fantasy

David Harsanyi says Welcome To The Green New Deal, California. <sarcasm>And Californians, you're going to love, love, love it.  Yeah! You're going to have electric cars, but you won't be able to charge them because there won't be any electricity. Isn't that great?</sarcasm>

Now, we know that Californians seemingly vote for the most ridiculous things, like prosecutors who vow not to enforce the law. Why? If you don't want the law enforced, just get rid of the prosecutor entirely and save the money for other things, like drugs for addicts. Yeah, that's the idea. But note that nobody voted for this electric car mandate. Therefore, it was not done with the consent of the governed.  So Califonia is running an illegitimate terrorist state.  Pray for those stuck in that state.

To make matters worse, other states have adopted California regulations, again without te consent of the governed in their states either. Thus states like the Commonwealth of Virginia blindly follow the California Air Resources Board (CARB) without recognizing that the geography of California and Virginia are very different, and Virginians deserve to have teir own elected representatives determine such things.

Thus the Green New Deal is being illegitimately imposed by fiat. Harsanyi proves the point with empirical evidence:

If there was any real big organic demand for EVs, the federal government wouldn't have to keep massively subsidizing -- bribing -- the industry into manufacturing them, and California wouldn't have to mandate you to buy them. Less than 1% of cars, SUVs and light trucks on the road in the United States are electric. Right now, electric cars are for wealthy people more concerned about pricey virtue-signaling than functionality. A recent University of California at Berkeley study, for example, found that 90% of tax credits for electric cars go to people in the top income quintile.

That's fine. Knock yourself out. But Democrats are rigging the market to force you to buy a car that has a 200-mile reach and uses erratic and expensive energy when you already have increasingly efficient models in your driveway and tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of offshore fossil fuels here at home -- and much more around the world. We have centuries' worth of the stuff waiting in the ground. Which gives us enough time to come up with some better ideas. Because, sorry, transitioning away from modernity and into windmills, choo-choo trains, folding fans and candles isn't progress; it's regression. And California is leading the way.

We need to boot these fantasist out.

Booting Leftists Out of Our Lives, Both Foreign and Domestic

What is the difference between a real government and a criminal gang?

The answer may not be as much as you think, but the difference is important. First and foremost, a legitimate government is one that governs at the (informed) consent of the people. That means that the people actually voted for that government with fully informed consent, and without any shenanigans or rigging. A legitimate government provides equal justice under its laws. No special favors for the rulers, or special interests. A legitimate government recognizes basic human rights such as our Bill of Rights, and scrupulously protects those rights.

I realize that I have thus condemned our own government, for it has fallen far short of the ideals prescribed by our Constitution. When people lie about themselves and their intention to get elected, they can not assert that they were fairly elected. In lying, they denied voters due informed consent. Of course, people lie, particulary Marxists, because if the told you the truth, that they wanted power and riches and they would steal it from you, turn your children against you, and kill you the moment you were of no use to them, you wouldn't vote for them, would you? I would hope not.

So it is that while we are in the struggle internally to boot out the Communists, Fascists, Progressives, and assorted other Marxists from our midst, domestic enemies all, Civis Americanus points to a foreign enemy at the American Thinker in Chinese Communists are Communist Bandits or Gognfei. In this article he makes clear that the Chinese Communist Party, the ChiComs, are the enemy of every civilized country. But at the same time, he draws a distinction between the Chinese people, who suffer under this gangster government, and the ChiComs, who were never elected in any meaningful sense. I have been as guilty of lingusitically conflating the two as anybody. But they are not the same.

It is important during wartime to have a name for the enemy that does not include ordinary people who have the misfortune to live under that enemy's rule. Colonel Paul Linebarger's Psychological Warfare said explicitly that it is unwise to define the enemy too widely. When General George Patton gave his famous speech, for example, he proclaimed "the Nazis are the enemy" rather than "the German people are the enemy." Most German people lived in terror of the Nazis, and it is in fact alleged credibly that Hitler was willing to sacrifice Germany itself to achieve his personal ambitions. It is a historical fact that he sent hundreds of thousands of Germans to their deaths on the Eastern Front and would not allow them to retreat from untenable positions like Stalingrad. The ChiComs, who similarly view their own people's lives as expendable as anybody else's, threw human waves at South Korean and American positions during the Korean War in the hope that we would run out of bullets before they ran out of soldiers.

It is similarly important to avoid saying "the Chinese are the enemy" because there is more than enough anti-Asian bias in this country as there is, with "enough" being exactly zero. Chinese-Americans left their outhouse country as ruled by the Chinese communists (a.k.a., ChiComs) or previously by autocrats, the same way our own ancestors left equally undesirable homelands. Unless we're Native Americans, we or our ancestors didn't come here because the Old World was a great place for us to live. If, for example, you were a Pole or a Jew under tsarist rule, you probably viewed Russia as an outhouse country that was a very good place to be from. "May God bless and keep the tsar… far away from us!" The ordinary Russian was not usually the biggest problem, but the tsar and his government were. Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese, and the billion or so mainland Chinese who still have the misfortune to live under communist rule are not the problem either. General Secretary Xi Jinping and his fellow Gongfei (communist bandits) are the problem.

The ChiComs are a ganster government, a terrorist organization, or Communist bandits. But it is not just the Chinese people that the ChiComs are threatening. They also are threatening Japan, Australia, Taiwan and with their Belt and Road program, many African nations and South American nations. The ChiComs even are in control of the Panama Canal, which shows the utter stupidity of Jimmy Carter, arguably the worst President ever.

Well, besides getting the Left out of power at ALL levels of American society, what else can we do to stop the ChiComs? As it turns out, the Chinese economy is not good. Big surprise, right? Their economy is suffering from the same problems our own is, the idiocy of the Left. The best thing we can do is refuse to buy anything made in China.

The ChiCom Gongfei are powerful only because short-sighted American business "leaders," the kind whose eye is never on the job but always on the dollar, offshored American manufacturing jobs in exchange for cheap labor. They got what they paid for in shoddy and often counterfeit active pharmaceutical intermediates, contaminated heparin, counterfeit semiconductor devices, and counterfeit N-95 respirators that put their users at risk during the COVID-19 epidemic. The only difference between the organized criminals who sold bootleg alcohol during the Roaring Twenties and the Gongfei seems to be, in fact, that Al Capone and those like him tried to assure the quality of their products so their customers would keep coming back, while the Gongfei do not care if they kill their customers with shoddy products.

The problem is that the American consumer has been conditioned by advertisers and marketers to pay made-in-America prices for ChiCom-made trash. Consumers need to be educated that placement of a famous athlete's name or picture on a ChiCom-made shirt you could get from a big box store for ten dollars does not make it worth eighty or ninety dollars. Placement of a famous brand name on ChiCom-made clothing you can buy for twenty dollars from a big box store does not make them worth the two hundred dollars on up that some upscale stores charge for them. If the overpriced product says only "Imported," you can be pretty sure the seller is ashamed to say where it is imported from. There is nothing the Chinese Communists make that we cannot make in the United States, and we need to get the Gongfei out of our lives as quickly as possible.

The Dirty Secret of Wind Energy

 Daniel Greefield has a stinging article at Sultan Knish entitled Wind Turbines Are Destroying The Planet. Greenfield points out that while wind turbins don't provide the engery advertised, they destroy the environment in innumerable ways. First, wind turbines require huge amounts of rare earths metals that have sickened entire villages. But just as bad, the manfacturing of wind turbines is denuding the Amazon rainforest for Balsa wood. Didn't environmentalists used to say that the Amazon was the lungs of the World? What do they say now?

Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors. A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals. Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment. One story described radioactive lakes, high cancer rates and villagers whose "teeth began to fall out" and "hair turned white at unusually young ages". "Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed."

A recent Associated Press story about rare earth mining operations in Burma told of a world where "birds no longer sing, and the herbs no longer grow. The fish no longer swim in rivers that have turned a murky brown."

One wonders where the Sierra Club is in all this. If this happend in the United States, they would be screaming about it from the roof tops, and every news cast would show graphic pictures of the destruction. But it is okay if it is in China, while we reap the supposed "benefit" of these peoples lives? Understand that someone in the United States is profiting...handsomely...from the deaths of these Chinese and Burmese people.

Meanwhile, the Chinese manufacturers of wind turbines use huges amounts of Balsa wood for turbine blades, which requres cutting down te Amazon rainforest.

Balsa wood is light, airy and popular for everything from model airplanes to planes. The obsession with green energy has created a massive demand for balsa wood to use in wind turbines. While a story from 2020 about how 14 million trees had been cut down in Scotland to make way for wind farms recently went viral, far more trees are cut down to make turbines.

Billions of trees.

One wind turbine blade can require as much as 5,300 cubic feet of balsa wood.

The price of balsa wood shot up, driven by demand from Communist China. While the Chinese have tried to grow their own balsa with limited success, they have turned to deforesting the Amazon. The Amazon, the world’s largest carbon sink, is being destroyed to reduce carbon.

Again, where is the outrage. Were is the pearl clutching on the Left. These are poor, brown people by the Left's own definition being exploited for the profit of white straight males. Why is nobody chaining themselves to balsa wood trees to save the Amazon.

Green eco-business and its allied leftist politicians remain obsessed with carbon, but the Amazon rainforests have been described as the “lungs” of the planet. And environmentalists themselves argue that the Amazon is a "carbon storage sink". Destroying the Amazon to build wind turbines to reduce carbon would wreck the planetary ecosystem leading to the natural disasters that green energy proponents claim that they want to stop.

If astroturf environmental activists really wanted to save the planet, they would start chaining themselves to wind turbines, instead of vandalizing classical museum paintings.

I hope gentle readers will read the whole article, and use what Greenfield provides as a way to begin to counter the push for "greem energy," and windmills in particular.

We Must Stand together, Or We Will Surely Hang Apart

 Rachel Bovard has an important article at The Federalist today, analysing Biden's speech of last Thursday at Indepence Hall. She paints a dark picture in which Biden's "MAGA Republican" Screed Gives Gatekeepers The Green Light To Purge Political Foes.

But there is another, more practical matter: How does Biden expect this to end? Does he really think that using the office of the president to re-christen an entire group of Americans as extremists whose existence “threatens the very foundations of our republic” will somehow compel them to see the light, as it were? To step out of their red-colored haze, and vote Democrat? To suddenly reconsider the Senate run of failed presidential candidate Evan McMullin or to pour one out for future MSNBC contributor Liz Cheney? Or by summoning the same language used to justify suppressing the speech rights of Americans in World War I, is he laying the predicate for something much darker?

In one sense, Bovard suggests that this is a matter of old fashioned class warfare. The Ivy League enducated bankers, big tech CEOs, Corporate CEOs, and so-called "elite" politicians aginst the smelly Walmart crowd. And certainly, the speech was a dog whistle to this group to do whatever they can to suppress, deplatform, and disenfrachise Republicans. And this suppression of free speech fits right in with the Great Reset crowd who think we need to "recalibrate" free speech rights and other civil rights around the world. And if you want to see this as a class struggle, what who better than the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, with swells such as Bill Gates and John Kerry.

Make no mistake that Biden is playing with fire here. Demonizing swaths of the population is what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Hutus did to the Tutsis, indeed it is what every dictator has done throughout history. Dictators need an "enemy," preferably one that is defenseless. Sooner or later, with enough pushing, prodding, and demonization, some begin to believe that killing these demons is justified.  Such demonization has preceded every genocide in history.  And it sure looks like Biden is winning.

Except for one thing.

MAGA Republicans are not as being painted and everyone who isn't a hardcore Leftists can see that. They don't want to destroy America; that's what Antifa, BLM and the Democrats want. MAGA refers to Make American Great Again, to a return to a federal government confined in the box the Constitution puts it in. MAGA Republicans want equal justice under the law. They want secure borders, to put parents in charge of their childrens' education, to properly vet those who enter the country, energy independence. They want to repartiate manufacturing and be able to feed our own people.  In short, MAGA Republicans want to make American great again.

Notice that none of the goals of MAGA Republicans seem to be racists, or sexist, or any of the other "ism" windmills Democrats are constnatly tilting at.  We really don't care who you are, what your religious beliefs are, what race you happen to be, or where you originated, as long as you believe in making America great again for all of us, not just for the few at the top.

Here's something else to think about.  It is not just Republicans who believe in MAGA.  There are a lot of Democrat voters who would like to see America be that country again.  You know, the one that runs to the rescue of every other country when that country has a disaster like floods and earthquakes.  They would like to have their stores fully stocked, especially with baby formula and toilet paper.  A lot of Democrat voters would like to have good jobs that allow them to afford homes, cars, to take their families on vacation each year, and buy Christmas presents for the kids.  In short, MAGA is not a strictly Republican idea.  Is our scavenger class willing to sacrifice these voters too?  

For all the clownish supervillain feel of Biden’s staging outside of Independence Hall, his message was very real: Hate your neighbor because he’s a danger to the country. Biden’s speech gave official permission to his fellow ideological and political travelers to fully demonize their political opponents in every arena in which they find them — a public message soon to be enforced by very private means, from the heights of social, political, and corporate power.

We can not become tbis people. We can not succumb to hating our neighbor. Remebers Christs first commandment was to love God, and his second was to love your neighbor. We must stand together, or we will surely hang apart.

Vote as if your life depended on it. It just might.

 If gentle readers have noticed allusions to Fascist systems such as the Nazi Party govenment and the Italian Fascist government, it is because the Democrats are using tactics well known from the 1920s and 1930s.  But to make this more explicit, Vince Coyner has an article at the American Thinker telling us that Democrats Dangerously Copy The Tactics Of Famous Fascists. Coyner first goes over the well worn history of the Nazi party begining in the 1920s. He illustrates that by taking incremental baby steps, the Nazis eventually gained control of the German govermnent. Once in power, they swiftly moved to silence, jail, or execute opponents. Eventually, they went after the Jews with what they termed the "final solution."

We can be almost sure that, if we asked any German in 1932 whether it would be okay to enslave and murder Jews, he would most certainly have said no. But within two years, Jews would officially be defined as an inferior race and have their political and economic freedoms curtailed. Within a decade, millions would be murdered.

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came,” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public.

So it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would want you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade. For just over two years, we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold as it’s never held sway before..

. ...snip...

The Biden administration’s threatening, intimidating, and jailing of its opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech on September 1, when he stated, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” This was not a campaign speech; this was the President officially addressing American citizens…and calling 70 million of them terrorists.

You can laugh all you want, and it does seem that Uncle Joe would never do anything like the Nazis did, that this was just a campaign speech to rile up the base. Indeed, that is what most people are taking it as being. If it is what most people think, it is deeply embarrassing.

 But what if it is not?

These are not just idle words: It’s Joe Biden, the head of the American government, with all the resources at its disposal, telling 70+ million Americans they are a threat to the nation. And in case anyone missed the point, after having just passed a law to hire 87,000 armed IRS agents, the administration hired Nikole Flax, who worked with Lois Lerner at the IRS when it was targeting conservatives during the Obama administration, to run the new division. Joe Biden and the Democrats have just created the largest armed police force in the nation and set as its leader someone associated with the targeting of their political opponents.

Joe Biden’s words are not just words…they’re threats. The leader of the government paints his political opponents as extremists and then exhorts his supporters to “confront” them. “We’re all called by duty and conscience to confront extremists who put their own pursuit of power above all else.”

Campaign speeches to rile up the base ahead of the November election or threat to round up MAGA supporters and dispose of them? I have no crystal balls, and I am not a prophet. Still, it pays to take such actions as you feel you need to protect yourself and your family. The one bit of advice I can give is to vote as if your life depends on it. It just might.

I the Pope Catholic?

Today's post discusses things Catholic.  Gentle readers who are Protestant, or who are atheist or agnostic may wish to turn away, but I urge you to read it anyway.  The Roman Catholic church affects all of Western civilization, or what is left of it, and whether we like it or not, is our only hope of resurrecting a powerful, strong Western civilization, and our Contitutional Republic.

First up today is an article at Crisis Magazine entitled A Different Kind of Catholic by Jennifer Hartline. She describes how her eyes have been opened to the what has been called the "gay mafia" in the church, and is disgusted that Pope Francis appointed a well known member of such to the Cardinalate.  As a Cardinal, he will have voting power over Francis's successor. You should read the entire article, which will bring tears to your eyes as you read it. But it shows that we should never, ever trust in men, in church or politics. Even the most sainted man or woman has flaws and is deeply in need of God's saving Grace, myself most of all.

Realize, though, that the unraveling of the Catholic church began in the 1960s with Vatican Counsil II. Archbishop Vigano ascribes the treachery that took place at Vatican II as under the influence of Free Masonry. Reading his book, it sounds more like Leftists to me. But each of these at heart is Satan working through greedy, corruptible men. You can see it continually unfolding with the gay mafia infiltrating the church, and with the Society of Jesus, the principle teachers at Catholic Universities being wholly taken over by this mafia.

Hartline writes:

I admit I was ignorant for a long time. I know the Church is both “Spirit and mud,” as Deacon Keith Fournier explains it. But I did not know the mud was so deep, so toxic. I trusted that the men in priestly collars—and especially those in miters—were genuine in their faith, pure in their love for God, sincere in their desire to serve. I trusted that they were, indeed, shepherds. I never thought they could be wolves in disguise.

It sounds ridiculous now. If you want to chide me for being a colossal idiot, get in line behind me. But there you have it. I trusted. I believed the best.

No more. I am not that Catholic any longer. And I am glad. Though painful, I hope this shattering of ignorance and foolishness is also purifying, so there is nothing at all to cling to except Jesus.

...snip...

And now, Robert McElroy, a bishop who protected a sexual-predator-Satanist-priest received his shiny red cap and changed his name to Cardinal. A man who saw fit to provide cover and safety for the literal devil is elevated to be a prince of the Church, joining the ranks of those who will elect the next pope.

There is no way Pope Francis does not know the details of his candidate for promotion. The pope is giving the faithful a cardinal who chose Satan over the body and soul of a young woman who was diabolically raped by a wicked priest, to say nothing of choosing the devil over Christ.

All of that is necessary background for you to understand why Christopher Skeet at the American Thinker says that The Next Pope Should At Least Be Catholic. To understand what is going on, one must realize that Catholicism is based on a combination of written Scripture and Tradition. Mariology is a good example. From ancient times, people believed that Mary the mother of Jesus remained a virgin and was assumed into Heaven. The belief is based on Jewish customs then existent. Once you find out these things, saying the "Hail Mary" prayer makes sense. Similarly, the elements making up the Mass, which is the central worship of our God, the Holy Trinity goes back over 2000 years. Neither the Bible nor Tradition have changed, but Vatican II changed the Mass. Many have not accepted it yet. Francis calls these people essentially heretics.

Pope Francis doesn’t like America. Pope Francis doesn’t like capitalism. It is unclear whether Pope Francis even likes Catholicism. Whatever the case may be, he seems to be doing everything he can to dissuade Catholics from remaining in the Church, and to keep prospective Catholics from joining.

When certain Christian leaders, such as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, or the Southern Baptist Convention president, J.D. Greear, speak, nobody listens. Why? Because they sacrificed Christendom, and the glorious civilization it produced, upon the altar of wokeness a long time ago. When the pope speaks, people still listen. But that’s rapidly changing, and for the same reason.

Some of the most egrigious pronouncements of this Pope can be read in the article. The most appalling to me, however is this:

Or when Pope Francis visited Malta to address Muslim illegal immigrants and had the cross removed from the stage in order to avoid offending the audience.

Really? Whatever happened to that hymn that expresses triumphantly Lift High the Cross, the love of Christ proclaim? Do we now bow down before Islam? I don't think so. This is like Obama bowing to the Saudi King.

But the time will come for the College of Cardinals to pick his successor. They can admit Francis was an unintentional fluke, rebuild from his wreckage, and reassert Christianity into the world as an active, assertive, and positive force. Or they can mistake him for an ideological trailblazer, whose destruction they intend to continue by sacrificing the most valuable tenets of Scripture and tradition for whatever is trending on Twitter. But they cannot then feign befuddlement when Catholic churches keep emptying at rates comparable to those of other Christian denominations, whose leaders worship Quinnipiac polls rather than God.

We live in a world where Christians are regularly persecuted, facing not only murder and imprisonment in remote dictatorships but increasingly here at home with open attacks on both religious liberties and the nuclear family. But listening to Pope Francis and other Christian leaders, one would think that legions of SUV-driving Klansmen are changing the weather and casting sickness upon the peasantry better than the Salem witches ever could.

To the Pakistani and Chaldean Christians whose worshippers are slaughtered en masse, do Francis’ priorities seem logical or asinine? To the Chinese Christians praying in secret, lest they end up in labor camps with their Uighur Muslim brethren, is Francis’ kowtowing to their blood-drenched government a cause for attraction or repulsion? To the African Christians, whose countries’ transitions to capitalism are opening up unimaginable universes of technology, health care, opportunity, standards of living, and freedom, does Francis’ description of capitalism as “terrorism against all of humanity” sound like wisdom or idiocy?

Like Martin Luther, I think the Catholic church as mucked things up with nonscriptural ideas such as "Days of Obligation" and Saint this and that. But even Martin Luther believed that Mary was ever virgin. If you pray the Rosary, then pray a Rosary for the whole Christian Church, especially the Roman Catholic Church, and pray for Pope Francis. We need the Mighty hand of God to save us. In Jesus Name.

Schlichter: Pray the AR-15 vs. F-15 Stays Hypothetical

 In his speech in Pennsylvania, Biden hinted at the notion that if brave Americans wanted to go up against his regime, they had better bring F-15s to the fight, and not AR-15s.  Now, here is a strawman if ever there was one.  Nobody I am aware of has seriously talked about our side going to war with the administration.  Indeed, I, as do most, pray never to have to draw my weapons in self defense.  To be forced to kill another human being, made in the image of God as I was, would be devastating.  Clearly, Biden doesn't know much about guns or warfare.  He doesn't realize the devastation and suffering that such use of the military on his own people would bring. 

Or does he?  Maybe he hates average hardworking Americans that much.

In any case, Kurt Schlichter, who has some experience with these things, discusses who he thinks would ultimately "win" such a fight in his article at Townhall.com entitled F-15 vs. AR-15? Bet on the Guys With the Guns. As is usual, and gentle readers will know I like his style. Schlichter sprinkles his commentary with creative insults of the kind you might find in a court room drama.

Okay, fine. Let’s go over this again for the knuckleheads who think that they prevail if they step outside the “use your words” paradigm they grew up with in their sissy private schools. You lose if you idiots provoke a real civil conflict – not the kind of low-intensity urban conflict of the Seventies where you cheered on the Weathermen and Cinque’s SLA, and not the kind where a bunch of mutants riot under the protection of leftist municipal governments in leftist municipalities, but a real one. One where the people you want to crush under your Birkenstocks fight back. With AR-15s.

I discuss this in great detail in my new non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America, and not from the perspective of half-wit daughter-showering goofs but from the real down and dirty of how this terrible course of events would actually unspool. And it would go poorly for a largely unarmed, untrained, urban-centered population of smug geebos whose primary weapon system is a snarky tweet.

The doddering moron shared his tactical insights with his audience at a rally in Pennsylvania for Heart Attack Shrek. He said, thinking he was super-clever, “For those brave right-wing Americans... if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something little more than a gun.”

Schlichter then goes on to compare guns in the hands of soldiers to what fighter-bomber jets do.

Well, a gun gives an individual soldier – and that’s what civilian freedom fighters would be – the ability to dominate the space on the ground around them out to a couple hundred meters of open territory (let’s not argue about maximum effective ranges, or the fact that civilians have a lot of weapons that outrange the 5.56mm weapons systems currently used by the military – a weapon system whose bullets Mr. 10% Off The Top thinks fly “five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun”). In other words, a gun controls space on the ground. Coincidentally, the ground happens to be where people live.<

A jet fighter dominates air space and keeps other planes away. Few people actually live in the air. Now, a jet fighter bomber like the F-15 can drop bombs on the enemy – which is, according to Crusty, us freedom-loving American citizens. Of course, this kind of tactical employment works to support guys on the ground dominating terrain with guns. Planes don’t hold territory; they help soldiers hold territory. So, it’s an apples and oranges thing at the threshold, which is appropriate since the whole discussion Slow Joe began is pretty much Fruit Loops.

Of course, the whole discussion becomes complicated because just as patriots have weapons and can use them, Biden has forces too. How many? There are always those that can be counted upon to follow illegal orders and kill their fellow citizen. Certainly, the ground work of demonizing certain Americans will sway some. That is how the military convinces soldiers to kill human beings.  It is not natural, and they have to be convinced that the enemy is evil. That the senior staff of officers has been purged will mean they will give the orders, legal or not. But the fact is that the more Biden uses his military to try to punish us into submission, the more people will turn against him and his regime. The fact is that any fight against the civilians in the United States would be a guerilla war, with people hiding in plain site. Those following Biden's orders would never know from where the next attack might come. He may win the battles but lose the war.

But the problem for them is quantity. There are tens of millions of American patriots with guns, AR-15s being only one color in the rainbow of freedom-defending firearms. Real diversity is 5.56mm alongside 7.62mm and .30-06 and 12 gauge and .45 and others, all firing together for a brighter tomorrow. So, there better be a lot of airplanes to balance out millions of patriots.

Um, how many fighter-bombers do we have anyway?

...snip...

This means President Gumby has 1500 planes and 300 drones to suppress those millions of dissenters. Hey, that’s 36 aircraft a state!

That’s still a lot of platforms and they can still do a lot of damage – assuming there are enough bombs stored in our bunkers (The Hellfire missile stocks would vanish quickly and aren’t those made in Florida? Awkward!). Can that fleet of aircraft do enough damage to deter and defeat a few million red rebels? How does one say “I am unconvinced” in Pashto?

After going through a table top analysis of how a hot civil war might play out, Schlichter comes to the conclusion that it would be better if the Left, and Biden in particular, stopped attempting to provoke that which they can not win. And so we find ourselves as we started, praying to God that we never have to actually use our weapons to defend ourselves:

The enemy always gets a vote – and Biden just announced that his enemy is tens of millions of us patriotic citizens. So, in the great AR-15 vs. F-15 hypothetical – and pray it stays hypothetical despite the stupidity of our ruling caste – the smart money is on the numbers. But the truly smart course of action is to not to even go down this road, to re-embrace our Constitution and to stop trying to be butch in order to get some Twitter love from the pinkos. Maybe this ridiculous stooge masquerading as our president should stop running his fool mouth threatening to slaughter other Americans.

Who Is the Party Supressing the Vote Again?

 Democrats are constantly accusing Republicans of trying to suppress the votes of of black and brown people.  Here in North Carolina, Democrats have once again struck down voter ID, which the NAACP ridiculously claims will impact Blacks in particular..  The NC Supreme Court ruled on party line vote that voter ID is again "unconstitutional." based upon the flimsiest of excuses. So it comes as no surprise that Democrats are at it again, this time disenfranchising the Green Party. The story comes from The Federalist by Victoria Marshall at Demcrats Are The Real Threat To Democracy - Just Ask The Green Party. And of course, Marc Elias figures into the story, as he does in so many other stories of Democrat underhandedness.

After the Green Party submitted thousands of signatures for its candidate to appear on the ballot in North Carolina, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) — represented by Russia Hoax lawyer Marc Elias’s law firm — began contacting the people who signed the petition for ballot access and asked them to remove their signatures.

Even the Green Party’s candidate himself, Matthew Hoh, received text messages from the DSCC asking him to remove his signature from the petition and saying “the Green Party takes votes away from Democrats, which helps Republicans win.”

...snip...

In June, the state Board of Elections’ Democratic majority voted not to certify the Green Party, citing allegations that many of their 22,521 signatures submitted were fraudulent. Republican board member Tommy Tucker raised questions about the board’s 3-2 party-line vote, saying that while Republican calls for aggressive oversight into signature matching have been disregarded, “we’re making a whole-hearted effort on the Green Party.”

Luckily, a federal judge overturned the state Board of Elections’ ruling, and the Green Party candidate Matthew Hoh will appear on the ballot in November.

I hope gentle readers will read the whole article, which is peppered with juicy facts turned up by Marshall. Note that I do not subscribe to the Green Party, though I do feel that the environmental movement has done a lot for our environment. They have also been destructive with their fanatasism, and their leftward temdencies. Human fluorishing, which demands good stewardship of our natural resources should be the goal. Too many see human beings as a disease to be eliminated.  Too often, too, the environmentalists do not acknowledge that the achievements for which they should rightly take a bow, have come because of our capitalist system, and could not have been achieved under a Marxist system.

What is good for the goose, is good for the gander

 I covered this before in Sue baby sue, but now Eric Utter chimes in at the American Thinker in a post tiled New York pols ask credit card companies to track firearm purchases. Utter raises the idea that if guns can be specifically tracked, well then what else might be tracked? And what might these 50 politicians purchase that might be of interest to us...hmmm?

The letter drafted to Mastercard and American Express “suggested” that gun retailers be assigned their own merchant category code instead of sharing it with other non-firearm-related vendors. This change would allow credit card companies – and, consequently, government – to closely track firearm and ammunition purchases.

Democratic state Senator Zellnor Myrie stated that he believes the public would agree with the lawmakers' request.

Let’s hope not.

What other purchases will be tracked…and to what end? If one purchases a copy of Guns and Ammo magazine, will it soon be tracked? (If not, why not, if the purchase of actual guns and ammo are?) What if you buy a sharp knife? A stout fork? Mace? A baseball bat?

Utter expands on this list of "other item" the credit card companies could track for a snoopy government. For example, how much meat did you purchase? Did you purchase enough tofu? Did you purchase too many sugary snacks?

And why shouldn’t we be flagged—and warned—if we buy too much meat or sugary foods? I mean, the government’s just looking out for us, right? Moreover, we deserve what we get, whatever that may be, if we buy a MAGA hat or a “Let’s Go Brandon” bumper sticker, no? And what if we don’t purchase enough tofu-- or LGBTQ-friendly merchandise? That’s utterly indefensible, as any sane person would admit.

...snip...

What might we, the people, find if we were able to track all the purchases of the 50 or so New York lawmakers who sent the letter to Mastercard and American Express?

The one thing about the Left is that their shiboleths are constantly evolving and changing. Who knows what things will offend their sensibilities tomorrow. You never know what you might find if one did some snooping of one's own. What is good for the goose, after all, is good for the gander.

We are in the light business

 Biden's speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia has lit up the conservative media.  Most express outrage, at being called extremeist, terrorists and Facsist, by the President who had exhibited Fascist tendencies, including turning the FBI into his own Gestapo or KGB.  He and his party excused actual terrorists and extremists.

The use of private companies to do the Government's bidding fits exactly the very definition of Fascism, as we are discovering top Biden officials have actually done time and again.  I will not linger on this aspect of the speech except to say that Facsism is the exact opposite of what the MAGA agenda stands for. For more on this topic, see The Biden Regime Collapses the 'Public'-'Private' Distinction at Townhall.com

I think Tucker Carlson had it right, that this shows the weakness of this illegitamate President and his evil party.  Biden has natural tendencies toward authoritarianism.  He knows that 80% of the public believe that the 2020 election was rigged.  His natural tendency is to cover that by being even more authoritarian.

I remain hopeful that conservatives will turn out in overwhelming numbers to vote the rascals out, despite Republicans apparent desire to lose (witness the Safer Communites Act.)  Locally, for example, Donnie Harrison is running again for Sheriff.  The current Sheriff, Democrat Baker has been a disaster, mean, vindictive, but most importantly flouts the laws.  Harrison, by contrast may not be the heroic Sheriff that others have been, but at least he enforces the laws as written.  Everyone can not be a hero.  Sometimes doing the actual job you voted for them to do is enough.

Which brings us to today's post.  I want to write to gentle readers about When Must a Good Citizen Become a Dissident by J. B. Shurk at the American Thinker. I have written about the need to speak the Truth, especially when the truth is being denied by everyone around you. If those who promote lies can get you to speak the lies they tell, they have you. You have been literally de-moralized. But you can not, for your very soul, flag from the Truth.

After my condemnation of our "banana republic" in a previous essay, a clever commenter remarked pithily, "Last patriot turn out the lights." I laughed. But the truth is that the light is not dimming; it is getting brighter. We, all of us together, are in the sunshine business. And the more sunshine we bring, the more difficult it becomes for the darkness not to light up!

Case in point: After Facebook's Zuckerberg recently confessed to censoring the New York Post's explosive Hunter Biden "laptop from Hell" story (evidencing a compromised and most likely criminally culpable Biden family) before the 2020 election in response to FBI pressure that the social media giant treat real news as "Russian disinformation" (thereby corroborating that the national security Deep State helped rig the presidential election), the FBI superciliously responded with the equivalent of a teenaged shoulder shrug and a haughty "so what?" According to the FBI, our domestic spy agency regularly encourages censorship and secretive control over the free flow of information. No big deal!

Except it is a very big deal. Recent polling shows that nearly 80% of Americans believe that President Trump would have won re-election had voters "known the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop." In other words, the Deep State stole an election. This isn't a huge revelation for most readers here, but it is a huge revelation for those who have stubbornly refused to admit how corrupt and rotten the 2020 election was. Little by little, truth overpowers deceit. Let there be light!

In the sunshine business, our mission is to speak truth to power over and over again, much like a resolute punisher bringing down the lash against those who wound us with their lies. None of us alone must harbor the strength to complete the task at hand, for as long as another rises to give timely support and respite to any one weary arm, the lashings of truth will continue. That is truth's power and purpose: it cannot be bargained away or buried in the darkness for long. It lives whether its tormentors like it or not, and all we must do is recognize it, protect it, and sing its blessings from one shadow to the next, with courage and conviction, until the brightness it brings becomes glaring.

How do you collapse a corrupt system? By flooding it with oceans of luminous truth.

I urge gentle readers to consider Shurk's article, and to put it into practice in your own life. No, I do not expect that everyone will immediately become a "voice crying in the wilderness." But I also hope you will not let lies go by uncorrected. These are the times God has given us, We must not let our Light remain under a bushel.

Suspicion of the Government is Justified

AtThe Federalist Max McGuire tells us that Joe Biden's Ghost Gun 'Ban' Lasted Less Than A Minute. That's because selling an 80% frame plus the bits and parts to make it into a full frame was suddenly deemed illegally selling a firearm. So, they now sell the frame in separate packaging from the other items. Voila, problem solved. But, what is lost here is why the regulation was propsed in the first place. It was supposed to keep unserialized guns out of the hands of criminals. So how's that working out?

The Biden administration and its allies are celebrating that President Joe Biden has now “banned ghost guns” by executive order. A “ghost gun,” as the gun control movement calls it, is a homemade firearm that does not have a serial number and is not known by the federal government to exist. Since the moment our country was founded, it has always been legal at the federal level to build a firearm for personal use, as long as the firearm manufactured is otherwise legal to own. As of August 24, 2022, a new federal regulation prohibits kits with all of the parts needed to build a gun from being sold to the public without a background check.

As the gun control movement describes it, America’s streets are now safe from the scourge of homemade firearms because companies cannot sell the kits to make these guns without the purchaser receiving them through a licensed gun store and undergoing a background check.

Gentle readers can read the the intracacies of when is a block of metal a firearm. Lawyers will no doubt find it iteresting. Most will not. What should interest you and every American is the following:

This regulation has only succeeded in making the gun-building process more complicated and expensive. It has not stopped a single criminal from acquiring parts to illegally build a gun. Considering there is a step-by-step guide on the internet showing how to turn a rusty shovel into an AK-47, it is safe to say that anyone looking to illegally build a gun will continue to be able to do so. Criminals in our society already break countless laws on a daily basis; why would anyone think a regulation like this would finally stop them?

This regulation was never aimed at the criminal class, though. Like all gun control, it targets the law-abiding. Politicians and bureaucrats fear homemade firearms because they exist outside of regulated firearm commerce. There is no serial number or background check, so the federal government does not know who owns them. In a dystopian future where government agents could be dispatched to seize Americans’ known or registered firearms, the homemade guns would remain. Just as the colonial blacksmiths secretly repaired and built guns for the revolutionary war effort, the ability to manufacture arms today ensures that free Americans will never truly be deprived of the ability to defend themselves.

While Biden appears to know about as much about guns as can be learned at your local movie theatre, I suspect the people writing the the Executive Order knew what they were doing. They never intended to target criminals, indeed they intended to target law abiding gun owners. Which brings me to what I have always said, the government that doesn't trust its citizens is not to be trusted by those citizens.

Sue baby sue

At The Truth About Guns Larry Keane has an article about a disturbing situation entitled Privatized Gun Control: The Civilian Disarmament Industry Wants to Know...What's In Your Wallet?

Giffords, the gun control group founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), and GunsDownAmerica, an activist gun control group with links to far-left Washington, D.C., think tanks, are supporting an effort to have credit card companies create special purchasing codes for firearms and ammunition. The idea is that credit card companies would monitor individual purchases by law-abiding citizens and if they seem to out of the norm, those purchases would be reported to law enforcement for investigation.

GunsDownAmerica wants credit card companies to stop categorizing firearm and ammunition purchases as “sporting goods” and create a new code.

Of course, private groups are free to request other private groups to do anything that is legal for them to do. And those private groups, banks credit card companies for example, are free to accept or reject these requests. So, that is not what Keane is talking about here. The issue is rather when government gets involved. Government getting cozy with private parties and forming so called "Public-Private Partnerships" is one problem. In this case, the City of New York wants the credit card companies to make this change, and then hand the list to the City so that they can know which of their citizens is buying what firearm from whom. And frankly, if Giffords succeeds, the ATF will no doubt wnat a copy of that list too. That is illegal, of course, but as we have seen time and time again, the law is no impediment when the ATF wants to do something. Increasingly, it seems the law is no impediment to anyone in the federal government.

We learn recently that Moderna has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Phizer and BioNTech over mRNA Covid- 19 vaccines. Again, nothing wrong here. Moderna claims to have a right to mRNA technology and wants Phizer to pay a royalty to use it. The problem? The government also has patent rights to Moderna's mRNA technology. Yet the government will also decide this case. Thus the government has an automatic conflict of interest.

And there it is. The government, which is supposed to be the neutral arbiter between two sides in private disputes is not neutral. Our Constitution establishes three functions, each equal to the other two: The Executive, the Legistlative, and the Courts. the Courts are supposed to be the neutral arbiters of which side is right in a case, applying the laws written by the Legislative branch and the Constitution, the highest law in the land. But when the government engages in so-called "Pubic-Private Partnerships," the government puts its thumb on the scale of justice. It has a built in conflict of interest.

We have, for some time now, had state and local governments establish so called "sanctuary" states and cities against the law.  Again government actors are putting their thumbs on the scale against the law.  If you or I openly diobeyed the law, what would happen?  Would our disobedience be ignored by those whose duty is to enforce the law?  Why do I not think so? 

The Department of Justice, along with agencies like the FBI and ATF have not followed the law, but have instead followed their personal beliefs about what the law should be.  Mostly, those beliefs seem to be Leftist.  But that is not the job they signed up for.  At all levels, public servants, whether appointed or elected, should obey the law.  Elected officials may change the law, to some extent, but even they are not supposed to outright break it.  In the process of all this flouting of the law, our governments, at all levels, are turning what should be domestic tranquility into absolute chaos.

May I suggest to gentle readers that the problems can not be solved by defunding the FBI, or the IRS, the AFT, or any other governmental organization.  Rather, there need to be serious consequences for breaking the law.  That includes elected officials who break the law by deliberately not enforcing the law.

Clearly this is a complicated problem.  How do you force a prosecutor to enforce laws with which he or she disagrees, though that is the job he or she signed up for?  We need to allow citizens to sue in court to force compliance with the law.  In the case of sanctuary cities, civilians in the city could sue to force a return to lawful behavior.  The penalties, in this case would be actual jail time, and they could not use tax dollars to defend themselves.

I realize that this, like everything, can be abused, and knowing Leftist, probably will be.  And it down't begin to solve the school indoctrination issue.  However, what do gentle readers think?