Pray that God Steels The Supreme Court's Spine This Time

 I am still busy, but thought I would get in a post now and again. 

Joy Pullman at The Federalist has an article today entitled Supreme Court's Cowardice Allows Colorado To Keep Persecuting Christians. Pullman is referring to Jack Phillips, the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding because to do so violated his Christian beliefs. Mr. Phillips would sell anything in his store to anybody. But of course, that wasn't good enough. They insisted he must bake a custom designed wedding cake.

The U.S. Constitution unmistakably protects not only the freedom of speech but also the freedom of Christian worship. The First Amendment, which the Supreme Court holds is now extended beyond Congress to state governments, is extremely clear: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.”

U.S. governments may not prohibit the free exercise of religion, nor the freedom of speech. On both these counts, Phillips’ rights are clear and ought to be secured by courts.

Instead, however, his natural human rights have been ceaselessly mutilated by not only the entire machinery of Colorado courts but also the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Phillips’ favor, yet in such a narrow ruling as to allow a venomous transgender activist to immediately haul him back into court after speciously demanding that Phillips bake a transgender celebration cake.

The whole world seems to have been taken over by Satan, and he won't let any corner of it rest, it seems.  Misery and death follow in the wake wherever he strikes next.  One hopes that God will send us holy shepards to lead us, and give the Supreme Court some steel in their collective spine to finally say that this is simply not allowed.

Keep in mind that the claims of any of the LBTQ++etc. people that they were "born that way" have never been proven. There is no evidence for a gene that makes people gay or transgender. Thus the whole notion that LGBTQ++etc. rights is the same as the other civil rights causes fails. A person may be born of a different race, or be born in a different country, or be born with disabilities. But people choose an LBTQ++etc. lifestyle. That is on them.

The Greenie Left Starts Another Power Grab

 I know, I know.  I haven't been posting lately.  I have been busy lately.  I will likely be busy again next week, but I couldn't let this piece by Monica Showalter at the American Thinker entitled The greenie left is coming for your coffee now go to waste. I like my coffee, and I make 1 to 2 double espressos every day. As Ms. Showalter says, this is just another attempt to put us peasants in our place, while the elites get to enjoy a cup or two of coffee every day. Oh, and as a plus, they get to starve poor doffee farmers, who might not be able to grow much else on their properties.

What they want, of course, is to take away more stuff from us, the better to control us. It wasn't enough to target our gas-powered cars and tell us to take the bus. It wasn't enough to take away our electricity and natural gas in the name of 'going green' and tell consumers to freeze in winter. It wasn't enough to howl for an end to jet travel while greenie leftists bought carbon indulgences and continued to jet about with their private planes. It wasn't enough to take away our plastic bags, to ensure that we only use unsanitary bacteria-filled cloth recycle bags. It wasn't enough to take away our meat and tell us to eat bugs.

All these are things they are -- no, really -- trying to take away. In some cases, they have succeeded at such schemes, too, all for a phony and chimerical quest to stop global warming, which somehow never happens. Oftentimes, they have trashed economies of third-world countries that rely on production of raw materials and agricultural production, but not a problem for them. You can bet this coffee nonsense is going to worm its way into leftist discourse the same way every other bad idea has among the greenie-dictator set. They just can't stop grabbing for power.

Now coffee is to become a luxury item in their narrative, to be consumed only by the elites. As for the rest of us, have a cup of instant ... just like they do in prisons.

If the study cited by the New York Post has any actual scientific basis, it is not cited in the article. I suspect that as usual they have cherry picked the data to present the worst possible case. And of course, they have left out the health benefits of coffee.

The idea that we should reduce our "carbon footprint" rests on a couple of assumptions. One is that we can actually drive the global temperature up or down by our behavior. Another is that the current global temperature is the ideal. Neither assumption is true.  The fact is that world's temperature has been much warmer and much much colder and people were not even living on the planet at that time. In fact, the global temperature has been both warmer and colder in historic times, and humans have adapted to them.

The fact is that the global temperature is out of our control. In fact, it is the Sun controls our temperature. Showalter actually makes a good point that the "researchers" never ventured a guess as to how much giving up coffee would actually make in the total scheme of things. One suspects it would be like spitting in the ocean hoping to make it rise.

What Women Expect Is To Be Protected. And Have Gas Stoves to Cook With.

 Christopher Chantrill over at the American Thinker today makes an interesting point in his article entitled Women Expect: To Have Gas Stoves. The point he is making is that asking what women want is the wrong question. What we should be asking is what do women expect. And what the expect is to be protected, and to be protected by men. Once conservatives realize this (we men are simple creatures after all) then we can fashion scare stories that move the needle in our direction. voil`a.  Women expect to be protected, and have gas stoves.

One of the most important things I know is a fundamental mistake of Sigmund Freud. Siggie asked: "What do women want?"

Everybody knows that Siggie was asking the wrong question. It is not what women want, it is what they "expect." And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

Once you read this, learn it, and inwardly digest it, life looks a lot different.

The limit case on women and protection is described in A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. Yes, what does a woman do in Berlin in May 1945 when it's been invaded by the Red Army and she's already been raped a few times? Bueller? Anyone?

So, what are some of the things that can be exploited to our advantage instead of the left's? Well, take all electric vehicles and amp up the negatives. We know that these vehicles are vulnerable to running out of energy at the worst possible moments. But they are also vulnerable to catching on fire. Oh, and the batteries use materials that demand huge amounts of energy to produce and pollute when they are disposed.

But women should be terrified by "EVs." Suppose a nice liberal lady goes to the Seattle Symphony in her "EV" and it's a really cold night and she has to stop at a charging station on the way home in a supermarket parking lot at 11:00 p.m. and there are drug dealers about? Of course, there are three charging stations in the basement of Symphony Hall, but good luck getting ahead of the Gold Membership patrons -- or matrons, as the case may be.

But, ladies, what happens in ten years when there are 50 charging stations in the basement of Symphony Hall and one of the "EVs" has a battery fire -- in a basement parking garage full of EVs with nice explodable lithium batteries?

You get the idea. Does it seem like playing dirty? Well, maybe, but the idea is to fight fire with fire. Meet the enemy where he is on the battlefield and show women that they do indeed need men and of course men need women. We used to know such things.  Then Betty Friedan said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.  Maybe somewhat true of the woman in question is rich, otherwise...

Now, the conceit of our lefty friends is that They Care about women, their rights, their welfare and their safety. But I say it's all a lie. Women's rights meant nothing in Berlin in May 1945, or in any blue city in America in 2023. Women's welfare adds up to nothing if she doesn't have a husband. Women are fundamentally unsafe -- especially in the Age of Depolicing -- without a man with a gun.

It's our job, each of us racist-sexist-homophobes, to teach our beloved women these practical facts of life.

Because women expect to be protected. And have gas stoves to cook with.

The Madness Continues Apace

 The madness continues apace.  The "woke" want to keep the normals on their heels to prevent us from figuring out that the whole "woke" agenda is a scam designed to enrich the "woke" at the expense of everyone else.  A couple of cases in point:

The Biden administration now wants to ban gas stoves according to an article at American Action News entitled Biden's Gas Stove Ban Is A Bigger Deal Than Democrats Think: This Business Owner Could Lose His Business. The owner in question is restaurantuer Stratis Morfogen who claimed on Tucker Carlson Tonight last night that switching to electric would reduce production by 40% and increase prices by 60%. The claim by the US Product Safety Commission that gas stoves are a health hazard is pure hogwash. Gas stoves have been in use in the United States since the early 20th century and they are just now claiming unhealthy air quality from these stoves? Please.

Then there is the hairbrained scheme to capture carbon dioxide, liquify it, and store it underground. At the American Thinker today, John M. Contino tells us about it in an article entitled Carbon Capture Is A Woke Fantasy.

Let's say you're brainstorming with some friends, trying to figure out how to cash in on the woke green wave. It would probably not occur to the less boldly imaginative among us to propose 1) capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from agricultural areas covering five Midwestern states (see map from a corporate website here), 2) dehydrating and compressing it into liquid form at various capture locations, 3) transporting it via brand new pipelines, and 4) sequestering it into its permanent rocky tomb a mile beneath the surface, safe from climate change, nuclear war, and all but the most severe cosmic catastrophes. As a bonus, liquid CO2 that survives burial has commercial industrial applications, like dry ice for food preservation or creating cloudy or foggy effects for Hollywood productions. It's also used in fire extinguishers and to carbonate soft drinks, and it is even an important cooling agent for cryogenic freezing, as was done, for example, to Ted Williams and his son John Henry.

If you're wondering where the money comes from for these enterprises, the Department of Energy has announced many tens of millions of dollars in funding for research and implementation of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects. Additionally, carbon credits for industry are shaping up to be a powerful incentive for generating private and public investor capital.

Where to start...

First of all, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been much higher than today, and contrary to St. Greta of Thunburg, the planet did not burn to a crisp, and life went on. A Forbes article, no conservative site, points to levels as high as 4,000 ppm in the past, compared to 400 ppm today. Then there are volcanos, which emit more carbon dioxide than human activity.

Second are the benefits of CO2 to plants. First plants grow bigger and faster with higher CO2, which is why green house growers pump it in to their green houses. Plants also need less water when living under higher CO2 levels. So more CO2 helps to overcome desertification. Shouldn't that please environmental wackos?  After all, they blame deserts on us too.  Levels as high as 600 to 800 ppm would not be harmful to us.

Third, there is the cow flatulence nonsense. Cows, and other livestock, including you and me, fart. Cows fart a lot because they eat a lot of low nutrion feed like pasture grass. But they do not add to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere because they are just part of the carbon cycle. The grass breaths in CO2. It then strips off the oxygen, breathing that out so we can breath. The grass meanwhile uses the carbon as building blocks to form the celluose that is the backbone of blades of grass. The cow eats the grass, and releases the CO2 back to the atmosphere, so it can be utilized by more grass. Nature thus recycles the same CO2 in a great circle of life.

So what happened to the 4,000 ppm of CO2 that existed during the Precambrian period 500 million years ago? Most of that is sequestered in the vast layers of limestone around the earth. It was layed up by trillions of shell forming creatures in the ocean that died, and left behind thick layers of limestone. Indeed, these little creatures turn out to be a more productive way to sequester CO2 that the multibillion dollar Navigator project mentioned above.

Sequestering CO2 by liquifying it, and storing it underground is just a waste of money that serves no purpose except to enrich already rich people more at your a my expense.

The United States Should Mind Its Own Business

John Green, at the American Thinker today has an article entitled The World May Have To Do Without America For A Bit, in which he claims that America is so divided, so distrustful of other Americans, that we can not effectively provide the "Pax Americana" that we have imposed since the end of World War II. Indeed, Green thinks we are heading towards a national breakup, as citizens flee blue states for red ones.

In a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, 39 percent of Americans consider other Americans to be America’s greatest threat. That’s more people than consider China our greatest threat (25 percent). It’s almost twice as many as those that consider Russia our greatest threat (20 percent).

Of those polled, 22 percent say Democrats are our greatest threat. That would include people like myself, who believe the Dems have become the American communists -- determined to destroy everything that makes us exceptional -- as a necessary measure to marshal in a socialist utopia.

Another 17 percent say that Republicans are the greatest threat. Those would be our fellow citizens who have bought Biden’s semi-fascist baloney and Merrick Garland’s “white supremacist” propaganda. So much for returning comity and normalcy to the American conversation.

Meanwhile, the world is full of threats. Russia wants to reconstitute the Soviet empire, and is chipping away at eastern Europe to do it.

Islamic fundamentalists want to create a caliphate, and seem to think that enough murder and mayhem will convince the world’s population to join the “religion of peace.” Or maybe they just want to kill the nonbelievers for the fun of it. It’s hard to tell.

China just wants everything. But they aren’t resorting (yet) to the grotesque methods of Russia or the Islamic fundamentalists. They’re simply trying to buy it all with their Belt and Road initiative. They seem to think that world domination is a simple real estate deal. Hopefully they’re wrong -- but who knows?

...snip...

The American contest of ideas has devolved to: personal freedom advocated by the Right vs statism advocated by the Left. Open dialog advocated by the Right, vs no dialog commanded by the Left. There will be no quick compromise or resolution.

It’s no exaggeration to point out that unless there’s a sudden outbreak of sanity and reason, we are approaching a national breakup. Americans are already beginning to sort themselves between red and blue states on the basis of ideology. If this trend continues, there will eventually be a winner and a loser, and the breakup will not be pretty. Hopefully we’ll find a peaceful resolution, but achieving ideological alignment will take years.

I will leave quotes from Green's article here. In terms of imposing a "Pax Americana" on the World, I suspect that our current disunity will be good for the rest of the World. Certainly, other countries should pay their own way for defense of their own borders. Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) are long obsolete and we should pull out of them. Instead we need to concentrate on internal matters, with the exception of reinvoking the Monroe doctrine, which states that the Western Hemisphere is our sphere of influence. Communists need to get out.

Then there are the wars in which there seems to be no American interests involved whatsoever.  We have spent huge amounts of money and lost the lives of young men and women for what?  Many of these foreign inbroglios have been the result if treaties that we never should have gotten into in the first place.  No less than George Washington warned us against becoming entangled in such treaties.  Now is a good time to dientangle ourselves.  

Kurt Schlichter keeps pointing out that the United States military has not won a single war since WWII. Perhpas if we concentrate on internal matters and in this hemisphere, we can return it to its roots as a strong defense force, not unlike Switzerland, where a rifle is behind every blade of grass. Oh, and get rid of the woke officers. We need more Chesty Pullers and George Pattons, not to mention Grants and Shermans.  

Will Courts Pin Back the Ears Of Anti-Gun Legislators?

Jacob Sullum has a piece out today at Townhall.com entitled The 3rd Circuit Considers Whether Nonviolent Crimes Justify The Loss Of Second Amendment Rights. The plaintiff in the case is Randy Range who pleaded guilty of fraudulently obtaining $2,458 in food stamps by misrepresenting his income. He was given a sentence of 3 years probation, fined $100, and paid $288 in court costs.

Obviously, Randy Range is not your violent criminal type. He made a mistake, and paid the price. What has bothered me all along is how an anti-gun government can create prohibited persons by simply creating felonies. All they have to do seemingly is make the penalty for every crime one year or more in prison. They don't have to impose that penalty, just that it is on the books.

In any case, Range attempted to buy a hunting rifle and was turned down. Thinking this was a mistake, he asked his wife to buy it for him. He did not realize that his conviction for a relatively minor nonviolent crime meant he had given up his Second Amendment rights.  I am sure that such was never explained to him either by the court or by his, no doubt, court appointed lawyer.  

Range's initial confusion about his status is not surprising, since the rule he inadvertently violated does not make much sense. Although it is ostensibly aimed at protecting public safety, it does not require any evidence of violent tendencies. In a Nov. 16 decision that was vacated last week, a 3rd Circuit panel said that policy nevertheless is "consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation" -- the constitutional test that the Supreme Court says gun laws must pass. Surveying the history of status-based gun prohibitions from 17th-century England through ratification of the Second Amendment, the panel perceived a pattern of disarming people "who did not respect the law," whether or not they posed a violent threat.

A brief that the Firearms Policy Coalition submitted on Range's behalf reaches a strikingly different conclusion. "Historically, firearm prohibitions applied to dangerous persons," the brief says. "There is no tradition in American history of banning peaceable citizens from owning firearms."

That take jibes with a 2019 dissent that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. "Legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns," she said. "But that power extends only to people who are (SET ITAL) dangerous.(END ITAL) "

Hopefully, the courts will pin back the ears of these anti-gun legislators, who are entirely too numerous.

Two Tiered Justice System Strikes Again

The story is brewing that President Biden stored classified documents among unclassified papers in a think tank closet in Washinton, DC. Oh the horrors! Why has the FBI not raided his home? On the case today, at The Federalist is Margo Cleveland in an article entitled There's A Difference Between Biden's and Trump's Classified Documents Snafus. But It's Not What You Think. As she is at pains to point out, the National Archives and Records Administration cooperated with the Obama/Biden administration. Trump, not so much.

But the similarities between the situations remain striking, with the classified documents both at Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden think tank, comingled with unclassified documents, reportedly including “top secret” documents, and stored in a closet.

At least, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was private and protected by the Secret Service, while the Penn Biden Center was located at a busy D.C. office building that spanned some 10 stories and included numerous public areas, including a reception area on the roof that hosted weddings and other private events.

...snip...

So if the NARA had legitimate concerns about Trump’s possession of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, the NARA “would have worked to arrange for the documents to be preserved under the auspices of NARA control in a location chosen by Trump, as it had done with Obama.”

But the NARA didn’t work with Trump, with the records instead suggesting that “a backbench bureaucrat’s partisan grievance spurred the FBI’s nakedly political raid on Trump.” And that is where the real double standard is seen.

Who knows, too, what classified documents the FBI might have discovered had it raided all the Biden and Obama properties mere months after they left office, as agents did to Trump?

We’ll never know that answer, though, because the NARA properly partnered with the former Obama-Biden administration. And that is the appropriate comparator to consider, not how the NARA or the DOJ responded to the recent discovery of Biden’s secreted classified documents. Of course, given their very public mistreatment of Trump, the NARA had to refer the case to the DOJ, and Attorney General Merrick Garland had to assign a U.S. attorney to investigate the matter.

Once again, we see the difference in how the justice system works for Democrats and against Republicans.

"Paul Ehrlich Is An Idiot..."

Jack Helmer at the American Thinker today has a post entitled Another year, another round of global warming doonsday predictions that never come to pass, In this case he notes that while California had predicted a dry winter, low and behold they are getting hit with massive amounts of rain and snow. A Christian might say "Thank You Lord." He goes on to note Paul Ehrlich's 50 years of wrong headed predictions. and concludes that:

Erlich is an idiot. And anyone who keeps citing him as an 'expert' is a bigger one.

Indeed.

DeSantis Setting an Example to Other Governors

 Speaking of institutions we pay for that are at war with us, today at Townhall.com Kurt Schlichter has an article entitled Red States Need to Stop Letting Academia Flip Us Off. Just as the intelligence agencies are using our money against us, our state colleges and universities are using our tax dollars to turn our children against us, and to overturn our culture.

The beauty of federalism is that, in some states, we patriots are nominally in charge. Places like California, New York, and Massachusetts are communist hellholes, and they remain communist hellholes because the communists in charge of those hellholes demand policies that ensure the perpetuation of their communist hellholedom. But good gravy, why are so many red states where we conservatives have the governor’s mansion and the legislature, and therefore the car keys to floor it on conservative policy, so damn spineless that we refuse to carve out the tumors of communist hellholedom that threaten to metastasize throughout our red paradises?

There are many such infested institutions, but let us focus on one of the most visible and most deadly to society because it infects and poisons the young people who will take leadership roles in society down the road (that they primarily come from colleges yet another problem). The fact is, even in red states that should damn well know better, state colleges and universities not only indoctrinate students in CRT garbage but actually build DIE infrastructures that perpetuate wokedom and crush the students who yearn to breathe and learn freely. We could stop it with a snap of our collective fingers, yet for some reason, Republicans seem terrified at the thought of offending the ragged collection of man-bunned TAs, tweed-jacketed dorks, craven, cat-fancying administrators, and daddy issue-smitten purple-haired co-eds who seem to run our colleges.

Our colleges. Ours. We, taxpayers, built them. We, taxpayers, pay for them. We, taxpayers, should dictate how they function. Why won’t we?

Why don't we indeed. But all this is to talk about Ron DeSantis's latest crusade.

First of all, “we” does not include Ron DeSantis. The guy on the cutting edge of crushing CRT just gave all the public colleges in Florida a short fuse to report on their woke web of organizations and activities. The university eunuchs freaked, of course, claiming that this was just a first step toward wiping the slate clean on the government-funded woke fascism plaguing Sunshine State academia. Why diversity consultants may be fired, conformity enforcement teams curtailed, and kangaroo courts adjourned!

DeSantis hasn't said if he will run for president, but he is making moves that are exciting to conservatives. If not, he is certainly setting an example in Florida for other Governors to follow. I frankly an tired of the Left using our money to try at topple our Republic in the name of course of "Our Democracy" which is neither a republic or a democracy, but an authoritarian oligarchy.

Any Chair in a Bar Fight

 Joy Pullman, at The Federalist has a good article up entitled What Spygate Tells Us About The Google, Facebook, and the Twitter Files. And what it tells us is that the various intelligence agencies have been using Big Tech to effect regime change here, just like they do in other countries.  In other words, our own taxpayer paid for intelligence agencies have declared war on the Republic that is paying them.  Why are we allowing this?ss-referencing new information from “The Twitter Files” and a state attorneys general lawsuit against Big Tech with what we know about Spygate from years of investigations reinforces and enlarges shocking conclusions about the corruption of American government. Those two illuminate further how the U.S. bureaucracy interferes in elections, in these cases by pushing communications monopolies to shut down discourse that undermines the administrative state.

...snip...

There will be plenty of points of crossover between these developing investigations and the Crossfire Hurricane operation that began in 2015 among U.S. intelligence agencies to deny voters the fruits of electing Donald Trump. One immediately apparent is that the attorneys general Big Tech lawsuit and “Twitter Files” evidence are showing Democrats used the same process against Trump in 2020 that they falsely claimed he used to win in 2016.

Even before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and other Democrat operatives planted the media narrative that Trump was “colluding with Russia to steal the election.” When Trump upset everyone’s expectations by winning, the losers turned to the planted Russia narrative to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. They falsely claimed Trump was a traitor, a Manchurian candidate: that he had betrayed his country to get Russian help to win the U.S. presidency.

All the so-called evidence for this lie, laundered through U.S. intelligence agencies and media entities we now know function as intelligence agency propaganda megaphones, was completely fabricated. It was fake. The whole Russian collusion charge was a frame, a setup, a big lie.

If you are feeling like elections no longer matter, that they will always reflect the extablishment and Democrat priorities, you now have the evidence to support that feeling. Initially in the 2020 elections, I looked at polls, at the relative enthusism of the Republicans as opposed to the Democrats. That Trump lost was a total shock. That the Congress didn't even want to take a look at it was more shocking. When Time even bragged about how they did it, and nobidy but a few people in the conservative media even noticed, I had the sense that the Republic was lost.

One of the pieces of falsified evidence for that big lie was the Jan. 6, 2017 “intelligence community assessment” signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms. That report claimed the Russian government ran content farms on social media that disproportionately favored Trump’s candidacy over Clinton.

This assessment came out a mere two weeks before Trump’s inauguration and was an initial part of the coordinated campaign between the minority party and the permanent unelected class of bureaucrats to undermine Trump’s presidency.

Pretending this conclusion was shocking was a total setup against Republicans. Democrats with intelligence clearances on, for example, congressional committees had been for years getting info about foreign governments doing exactly this. They knew basically every country, including the United States, does what they pinned on Russia — use sock puppet accounts to inject their preferred narratives into global public discourse. This is basic Internet Age information warfare.

If this is war, then any chair in a bar fight.

Gun Safety Ghouls and Gun Free Zones

 D, Parker at the American Thinker today has a post stating that Gun free zones are antithetical to 'common sense' gun laws. Indeed, as Masaad Ayoob explains with steely eyed seriousness, gun free zones are the exact opposite of what anyone with any serious intent would impose to prevent mass murders. Gun free zones have been called many things. I have called them target rich killing zones. Ayoob calls them "hunting preserves for psychopaths. Think of it like this: If you were at war, would you advertise to the enemy where they could go to find a bunch of your soldiers unarmed and defenseless? If not, why not?  But this is what our legislatures do to innocent citizens daily.  That is what so called gun free zones do. But go watch Masad Ayoob's video on the Wilson Combat channel.

Speaking of Massad Ayoob:

He refers to these leftist insanity zones as a “hunting preserve for psychopathic murderers”, we use something similar in calling them massacre zones, but they certainly aren’t “gun-free” zones. The statistics show these are the places of choice for mass shootings.

Massacre zones attract mass murderers like flies to honey, after which the nation’s socialist media will swing into action. If the suspect meets the proper criteria to fit a certain agenda, media parrots then insist on publicizing every detail they possibly can about the alleged killer, for the sole reason that innocent people were murdered.

The media rewards mass murder with notoriety, then the same socialist media will be ‘surprised’ when this happens again within 13 days, by people who are often described as a “loner” or a societal “reject.”

I do not know whether the gun free zone idea was conceived out of naivete, or malice, but we have enough experience now to know that nowhere should be a gun free zone. There are some common sense places where guns should only be carried by law enforcement such as court buildings and jails. Even hospitals should not be gun free because the gang bangers and others sometimes admitted to emergency rooms will surely not obey such signs. See Make Your Own Gun Free Zone. Parker calls the people advocating for the various gun control schemes "gun safety ghouls." A good term for them, as these people routinely dancing in the blood of innocent victims, rush to the microphones to denounce guns as the cause of murders instead of the obvious persons who actually did the killing.

Please go read D. Parker's post and be sure to watch Masaad Ayoob's video.

When Did We Vote to Have Our World Turned Upside Down

If you are as old as I am, or older, you probably don't recognize your country any more. When I was a youngster, a postage stamp cost 4 cents and had Abraham Lincoln on it. We wrote letters to people, because it was cheaper than making a long distance call. Boys all carried a pocket knife to school, and nobody cared. Of course, boys did not go around stabbing each other either. Hard work paid off, slackers became gas station attendents. You get the idea. Many of us are asking what happened?

Some clues are contained in a book I am reading from Paul Kengor and Mary Nicholas entitled The Devil and Bella Dodd that indicates that the Left has been working to establish a different culture from the one defined by the Constitution since the early 1800s by people you never heard of. And while we went about living our lives, the Left contantly sought to undermine our churches, our industrial power, our economic power, our military power, indeed, they sought to turn us into a nation of serfs.

As Victor Davis Hanson at Townhall.com notes in his article The Coup We Never Knew that we never had a debate on these issues, or were given a chance to vote on them. They just suddenly were.

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did President Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent of dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America's wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, and which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas - furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices' homes, with placards declaring "Off with their d--s"?

Hanson goes on and on with pointing to things being done to our culture or our laws that we didn't have a say in, indeed were not even asked if we wanted these things. He concluding with this:

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare of a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup, we never knew.

Of course there are more things that can be added. When did we decide to groom our children with drag queen story hours or drag queen fashion shows? Indeed, when did we decide that Genesis is wrong and that there are actually 72 or whatever number of genders? But enough. The point is when did the majority of us agree to have our world turned upside down?

Another Author Praises Pope Benedict

 At the The Federalist Thomas Griffin has an article honoring Pope Benedict XVI entitled We Can Celbrate Pope Benedict By Keeping 'Encounter' and 'Truth' At The Center of Chritianity.

When our first son was born in 2020, my wife and I named him Benedict, in part after the witness of the tremendous Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died Saturday morning in Rome at age 95. Benedict will forever be remembered for his deep faith and capacity to transmit church teachings with cogency and depth, but what stands out perhaps more than anything else from his writings, speeches, and life is the stress he placed on two realities concerned with being a Christian: encounter and truth.

In his encyclical (formal letter written by a pope) called Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love,” in English), Benedict noted, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” As a learned theologian and a man of intense prayer, Benedict knew that people needed to hear this message: Being Christian is about a relationship with a person who actually lived and is alive today.

So many confuse the church’s mission and reason for existence. The church does not exist to bore its worshippers on Sundays, take their money, and give them orders on how to live their lives. The church exists as the concrete reality by which people today can experience Jesus as God and as having risen from the dead. Encounter-focused faith was a major mark of the pope’s ministry because without this being conveyed, Christianity, and the rest of the world, would disintegrate.

Pope Benedict's gentle, straight forward approach apparently brought many back to the faith. He will be missed, even by those of us who are Lutheran.

What Works and What Does Not

 John R. Lott today has an interesting piece at Townhall.com entitled Will Phobias About the AR-15 Keep Schools From Adopting This Innovative Product? The product in question is a bulletproof backpack with a collapsable AR-15 inside that can be carried by school resource officers throughout the day. The product manufacturer is Byrna, a company that makes a variety of innovative self defense tools.  As Lott explains:

Time is of the essence in mass public shootings. Civilians and police stop a lot of mass murders by carrying handguns, but sometimes you need a larger round than is available in a traditional handgun. It often simply isn’t practical to carry around a rifle. And school staff might not have time to run to a locker to retrieve the needed gun.

Andrew Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter, Meadow, died in the 2018 Parkland school mass murder that left 17 people dead, is fighting to give school districts the tools they need. Byrna, a company that makes innovative self-defense tools, has donated eight backpacks containing collapsible AR-15s to Pollack’s “Meadows Movement” nonprofit. These guns fire .223 caliber rifle rounds and are more powerful than traditional handguns.

On January 4th, Pollack will give the backpacks to the Bradford County Sheriff’s Office for use by school resource officers (SROs) and Will Hartley, superintendent of Bradford County Schools.

“The folding rifle is easy to carry throughout the day for a school resource officer inside the bulletproof backpack,” Pollack said. “The seconds to get minutes lost retrieving a rifle from a locker vs. pulling the bulletproof backpack into a vest and having the rifle on hand equates to the number of lives that could have been saved.”

The school superintendent echoes his comments. “I wish more people could have it,” Hartley notes. “Because if someone comes on your campus and they have a long gun, we need to be able to meet their force with the same kind of force.”

Florida is one of the states that now allow staff to carry concealed handguns on school property with of course proper training. Note that Andrew Pollack drew entirely different conclusions from the events and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School from those of David Hogg. Hogg believes that if we disarm ourselves and make ourselves weak, that somehow that will inspire the thugs and psychopaths among us to play nice. Pollack takes the more reasonable approach of hardening our schools to be better prepared for an attack.  The old Roman axiom, to have peace, prepare for war is appropriate.

My study of human nature over the last 70 years tells me that Pollack's approach works, Hogg's does not.

Even Ray Epps Can't Keep Quiet

First up today is an article at the Daily Wire by Daniel Chaitin entitled Ray Epps Told Nephew He 'Orchestrated' Jan 6. You may remember videos of Ray Epps encouraging people to go to the Capitol. At the time, some people filming him thought he was an agent provacatuer. However, he gave a story to the J6 committee about using the wrong word and got off scot free.

Hmmm...Personally, I think his story stinks. I have no proof of course, unless someone can find a smoking memo naming him an asset of the Fed, but I suspect he was exactly that. I suspect J6 was an inside job. Heaven knows the FBI, the CIA, the NIH and who knows who else was out to get Trump and instead installed a compliant figurehead. It reminds of the way Roman Emperors were often chosen, doesn't it? the Praetorian Guard would assasinate the guy making too much trouble and install one more compliant.  In any case, whoever the "they" are behind the figurehead, "they" do not care even on whit for our opinions.

Back When "Is The Pope Catholic?" Was A Joke

 Jack Cashill has the story at the American Thinker entitled The Euro Media Welcomed Benedict XVI The Way Ours Welcomed Trump, To give context to the election of Benedict XVI to be the new Pope after Saint John Paul II death, Cashill spends quite a bit of ink. You can read this for yourself. I will start here:

Having a day to kill before the conference on April 20, I wandered around Paris jet-lagged and found my way to Notre Dame—back when the famed cathedral still had a roof. Two things surprised me when I entered. One was that there were large TV screens set up in several places, which struck me as a tad blasphemous. Even more surprising was that the pews "reserved for the faithful," were actually filled with the faithful watching the TV screens.

I was in the cathedral no more than 30 seconds when the image on the screen switched from a French talking head to the balcony of the Vatican. There it was announced that a new Pope had been selected, and it was German Cardinal Josef Ratzinger.

Upon hearing the news, the faithful stood as one and cheered, and I shouted out impulsively, "I know that guy!" In fact, in 1998 I had interviewed Cardinal Ratzinger for a documentary we had done on the revival of the traditional movement within the Catholic Church, a revival that Cardinal Ratzinger had encouraged and that inspired me to return to Catholicism.

Not everyone was pleased with the choice. An American woman standing next to me blurted out, "This is a terrible day for women!" As I learned, the media were not too pleased either. By the time I left the church they had descended on the square in front of Notre Dame. They even interviewed me. In my half-assed French, I explained why I thought Ratzinger was a "bon choix," a good choice. The reporter rolled his eyes when finished, I thought, because of the quality of my French.

It should be pointed out, in case it is not fairly clear, that the Christian faith has not changed since Christ died and rose again on that Easter Sunday 2023 years ago. That was when God completed his plan for our salvation.  So the comment that Benedict XVI would not be good for women displays a misunderstanding of that faith. The faith does not change, ever. People change, but God never does. In this sense, Pope Benedict XVI was "conservative." During his time in office, the old joke "Is the Pope Catholic" was just that: a joke. Today, it has become a serious question.

Update: Gentle readers should also read John Daniel Davidson's piece at The Federalist entitled Amid the Ruin of Modernity, Pope Benedict XVI Championed a Restoration of Reason and Faith. The article is excellent. In fact, faith and reason are not at odds, but support each other. What many call "science" is nothing of the kind, but rather calls to authorities that are of dubious scientific value. But even science has its limitation, and where science leaves off are the place where faith and reason take over. The one bone I would pick with Davidson's article is the description of the current problems as "modernism." What plagues our modern world is actually as old as the serpent in the Gardern of Eden. Marxism, Socialism, Facsism, Progressivism, or the older Fabianism are not new ideas. In fact they are as old as the original sin. Like everything else, we should call things by their true names. It is just men pretending to be God.

When Seconds Count...

 Selwyn Duke has a post at the American Thinker entitled Remebering when gun control was at least remotely rational. Yes, I remember those days and they weren't truly rational even then. But the fact that they can not sustain the irrationality and emotionalism to get the desired results has led to censorship as well. You will find that story here at Bearing Arms. But back to Selwyn Duke: the current obsession with banning so called "assault weapons" is totally irrational. These rifles, that are semiautomatic and thus operate like any other semiautomatic rifle are used in fewer murders than fists and feet.

In contrast, handguns are used in 62 percent of murders committed with firearms. There was a time when this guided gun-control activists’ thinking, too.

Back in the ’80s and into the ’90s, our rancorous firearms debates centered around banning handguns. I disagreed with such a course, but at least the gun-control set’s arguments contained a smidgen of logic.

These weapons are used to commit a robust plurality of our nation’s murders, they said.

They’re concealable and thus are criminals’ firearm of choice, they said. So if anyone believed in gun control as remedy, the focus on handguns at least made sense: Banning firearms would reduce crime, the thesis went, so it was rational to focus on the guns most used, by far, in crimes. It was today’s SJW’s grandfather’s gun control.

But those days now almost seem quaint. Emotion, which always figured prominently in gun-control appeals, has now completely taken over. No longer is there focus on handguns, not even a peep. Instead, it’s all Assault Weapons™ all the time.

Duke analyses what he thinks the reasons for this change is strategy might be. Among those reasons, he believes is the rise of school shootings and other mass murders. These are rare events, despite the news medias concentration on them. But media's scaring moms into believing that these things are happening everywhere is a strong motivator. What I think is that the gun grabbers want to score a "win" anywhere they can. Despite the popularity of AR-15 variant rifles, they still represent a small enough target that gun grabbers think they can score a victory with them. In any case, both reasons may be driving the assault weapon ban agenda.

Lastly, those who’d criminalize firearms generally believe the weapons are at best superfluous because they trust the government to protect them. That’s certainly a quaint idea. Remember the L.A. riots in 1992, when the government, constrained by political correctness, refused to quell the unrest and allowed miscreants to run amok? Hapless truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten to within an inch of his life, and some of the only people we saw who could defend themselves were Korean store owners wielding firearms. There also was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, during which many police abandoned their posts and armed gangs were roaming about. Then, of course, there were 2020’s 600-plus BLM/Antifa riots, which also were allowed to proceed unfettered and destroyed billions in property and claimed at least two dozen lives.

But, hey, we’re sure that the next time the boogeymen come, the gubmint will be there for you, right?

Like most gun owners, I pray to never actually have to use my gun outside of a shooting range for training. If one has to use one's weapon, no one can predeict the outcome. But when one is forced to defend oneself, one wants the most effective weapon available. And even if the government does want to protect you, when seconds count, they are minutes away.

Go After ESG Collusion With Antitrust

John Dale Dunn has a post today at the American Thinker that espouses a principle that I have wondered about in these pages. What I have wondered is if BlackRock and other companies could be sued under anti-trust laws. Dunn's post can be found at Does Woke Corporate Policy Violate America's Antitrust Laws?

Chris Talgo at The Heartland Institute asserts that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics have become the bully boy project of the the big Wall Street investment firms and Fortune 500 companies, using trillions of dollars in assets under their control, that are just pension funds and retirement accounts for everyday Americans. Under the law, they have no right to use their fiduciary relationship with investors and savers to push a political agenda — so what gives?

As Mr. Talgo asserts, there is a good legal argument that ESG violates antitrust laws, an argument gaining momentum at the state and federal levels. On December 6, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) announced that the Committee on the Judiciary will investigate this very matter when the 118th U.S. Congress convenes next month.

The trend for taking care of older Americans after their working years are over has become pensions backed by the various finacial markets whether the stock market, the bond market, or the commodities market. People place a portion of their earnings each month into financial instruments such as 401K accounts with firms like BlackRock and Vanguard. These firms in turn invest with various companies and are supposed to exercise a fiduciary responsibilty in these investments to maximize the return on investors money. 

What has been happening, however, is that they have used the power of the many individual investors to reshape the companies in which they invest using ESG. ESG investing does not, by design, give individual investors the highest return on their investments. QED, it violates the fiduciary responsibility of the investment firms entrusted with persioners' dollars.