Christians need to repent and be sure we are standing on God's side

 The shootings at the Covenant Church School in Nashville, Tennessee have rocked the Christian community hard.  Every one of us understands that the life of a Christian can be difficult because Christ himself predicted that we would be persecuted and killed for his sake.  That doesn't make it any easier.  Indeed, we are to bear these sufferings joyfully, which is even harder.  

I have mentioned it before, but Tucker Carlson often implies, but never says outright what is really going on with these violent acts, such as the Covenant School shootings in Nashville.  He came closest yesterday saying that the transgender movement was diametrically opposed to Christianity.  It is true, as far as it goes, but the obvious question is;  "Why?"  Carlson says that people who believe that they can change their genders believe they are God, whereas Christians know they are not God.  Again, true as far as it goes, but is there something deeper going on here?

Joy Pullman, at The Federalists has an article today entitled The Six Christians Martyred In Nashville Are A Call To Repentence For All Who Will Hear It that is quite explicit about what is going on.

If you weren’t aware that the West’s culture war is also a spiritual battle, let the martyrdom of Christ’s six precious saints in Nashville, Tennessee this week open your eyes. We “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

It should be no surprise that worshippers of demons rage against those bought and sealed with Christ’s holy blood, and identify Christians as their worst enemy. They hate us because of Christ. Our Savior, whose torture and triumph we honor next week with Holy Week and Easter, told us to expect their violent, unceasing hatred.

Putting Carlson's observations together with Pullman's essay, one realizes that this is indeed Satanic.  Lucifer was God's highest angel.  But he didn't want to just be an angel, one of God's creations.  He wanted to be God, to sit on His thrown.  It was this pride that caused him to be kicked out of Heaven by the Arcangel Michael.  It was this same pride with which he tempted the first humans and caused our fall.  We also wanted to be as God.

I don't discount that men can be evil on their own. For man is born sin, and sins all the days of his life. But what we are seeing today is a special kind of evil to attack society in this way. Normal people are protective of children. They are repulsed by grooming of children by drag queen story hours, convincing them thay are another gender, engaging in pedophilia. Even more, normal people don't shout their abortions. No, this kind of evil is demonic in origin. Christians can expect more of this demonic attack, so it is important to make sure you are on God's side.

Why We Carry Guns

 The repeal of the Jim Crow era law requiring citizens to obtain a permit to purchase a handgun was a big deal.  But Andrea Widburg's post at the American Thinker entitled The most dangerous guns are those in governmen's hands points to another big deal, to wit: that the governments' monopoly of force is a clear and present danger to its own citizens.

Tucker Carlson made a great point last night: There are about 70 million more guns in America than there are citizens, and gun owners have billions of rounds. If guns were inherently dangerous, America would be in a perpetual state of Armageddon-like warfare, but it’s not. That’s because most Americans are good people. But there is a group of people that should never be allowed sole possession of guns because when they go bad, they go very, very bad, and that’s government employees—and I’ve got the numbers to prove it.

With help from Rummel’s data and from other readily available (and uncontested) information on the internet, I was able to compile a short list showing what happens when just a few governments turn on their citizens—and all the numbers far exceed anything American citizens do to each other.

Turkey: In 1915, the Turkish government murdered an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

Soviet Union: In the 1920s through mid-1930s, Stalin went to war against the Kulaks, Ukraine’s independent farmers (the Holodomor). The government starved, executed, and deported the Kulaks, killing an estimated 7 million in less than a decade.

While that was a targeted mass murder, the Soviet Union generally attacked its own citizens, starving them, executing them, or sending them to gulags. Estimates range from 7 million to 20 million people dying from the Soviet government’s policies and purges.

China in the 1960s through 1970s: Mao made Stalin look like an amateur. We don’t know how many people died from executions, starvation, and slave labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but estimates range from 23 million to 46 million Chinese. Outlying estimates are that 50 million or more Chinese died for Mao’s statist vision.

Nazi Germany, from 1933-1945: Any disfavored civilians not already unarmed before the Nazis gained power were disarmed when the Nazis achieved power. The Nazis then executed 6 million Jews; 250,000 gypsies; 220,000 homosexuals, and, through slave labor, executions, and starvation, as many as 10 million Slavic people. The number of handicapped people killed is unknown. Another 19,000,000 European civilians were estimated to have died because they found themselves in the path of Hitler’s war.

Cambodia: Between 1975 and 1979, under Pol Pot, the government killed between 1.7 and 2.2 million of its own citizens, out of a population of around 8 million people. That’s a lot more than 10.2 murders per 100,000.

...snip...

We’ve already seen the current government and its media allies menacing those American citizens it views as a threat to its power (e.g., January 6, which increasingly looks like a Reichstag Fire event; the unending, unconstitutional pretrial internment of the J6 prisoners; Democrat leaders who encourage violence; the purging of the historic record about attacks on Republican politicians; the weaponization of the IRS; etc.). I don’t like to think what it could do if it felt there were no barriers to action.

One commenter feels that the United States hasn't had any cases of demicide. Apparently he hasn't connected the dots from mere harrassment to actual killings on an industrial scale. Like all criminals, they don't start out killing people. They start out small, and their crimes continue to get worse and worse unless stopped. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop these criminals before they can get worse. Most of these things mentioned are crimes being committed uncer color of law and should be punished. It remains to be seen whether our Republican representatives will punish them for any of this.

I would also point out that adding yet more gun laws to the books while failing to prosecute the ones we already have is pure lunacy. Indeed, if crimes are not to be prosecuted, then they shouldn't be on the books at all. But if we are on our own to defend ourselves, we must have the means to do so.  It is not the social contract we grew up with, but it seems it is the social contract into which we are being forced.

Another Jim Crow Era Law Falls, No Thanks to Governor Roy Cooper

 Let me say that the North Carolina Legislature has finally done it.  They have over ridden a veto by Governor Roy Cooper and the old Jim Crow era gun law that forced a person to get permission from the local sheriff before buying a hand gun is no more.

Now, some may complain that this makes it easier to purchase a weapon.  And it does in a way.  But stopping to buy a 5 dollar permit from the sheriff before going into a gun shop and going through an even more rigorous step of subjecting oneself to a National Instant Background check (NICS) was redundant.  In this day and age, the sheriff is unlikely to know you from Adam unless you have gotten in trouble, in which case you would be flagged in the NICS. As I say, the stop at the sheriff's office was redundant.  Sheriffs wanted the revenue, such as it was, and who knows, they might get some more information should you commit a crime.

Of course, the Jim Crow era law would still be staining North Carolina if it wasn't for the constant efforts of Grass Roots North Carolina and the leadership of Paul Valone. Valone wrote an article earlier that pointed out that sheriffs across the state typically do not revoke these permits once issued, even if the person to whom it is granted commits a felony. In Mechlanberg County, for example, 38% of gun permits were still in effect even though the grantee of the permit had committed a felony. In other words, the sheriffs' permits were not very effective at keeping guns out of the hands of people who would misuse them.

Valone and the Grass Roots North Carolina have been saying that for at least 20 years.  The Legislature finally listened, no thanks to Roy Cooper.

You can read more of Paul Valone's and the GRNC's exploits here and here.

Is This Why Americans Are So Fat??

 I may have mentioned to gentle readers on a number of occasions that cattle do not contribute any new carbon to the atmosphere.  They merely recycle carbon that is already in the carbon cycle.  Thus, even if we give the devil his due and say that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is causing global warming, (and it is not) cattle ranching is not part of it.

Recently, the government produced a new food pyramid supposedly to improve our "health."  You can see this pyramid at the Good Ranchers site in a blogpost entitled New Government Funded "Food-Pyramid" Says Lucky Charms Are Healthier Than Steak. And if you beliefe that, I have a bridge to sell you in New York City, but you will have to move it yourself.

Buckle up. This one is a doozy. You probably missed it, but in September 2022, the White House hosted a conference that focused on nutrition, health, and hunger in America. Dariush Mozaffarian, who was one of the main organizers of the event and is currently Dean of the Tufts School of Nutrition — presented a newly designed food pyramid that only cost 3 years of time and millions of taxpayer dollars. The new wisdom they found? Lucky Charms are healthier than steak.

...snip...

As you can see, Lucky Charms receives a 60 while ground beef is at a 26. Beef Steak ranked a little above 30 on the chart, which means both beef items received half the score of Lucky Charms. If we turn our attention to the green section, we see that chocolate covered almonds received a 78 and should “be encouraged” in someone’s diet. Chocolate covered nuts should be encouraged while beef and a majority of commonly consumed meats should be minimized.

This new food pyramid is being touted as the most comprehensive and science-based nutrient profiling system to date, which honestly just isn’t a surprise anymore. This is happening in a country where congress declared pizza to be a vegetable, and if tomato paste can make pizza a vegetable then maybe luck can make the charms healthy.

Now, I don't want to tell anyone what to eat, but my own cardiologist said to me once that if I wanted to lose weight, the best way was to cut down on the carbs. And the worst carbohydrates one can eat, in terms of fattening a person up are any of the grains. Those would be wheat and wheat products, corn and corn products, oats, barely, rice etc. Sugar in all its forms is of course not good for you. Similarly, vegetable oils like corn oil and canola oil are not recommended.

So, what should you eat if you are keeping your weight down? Well, meat, eggs, fish, vegetables like broccoli and brussels sprouts, the occasional carrots and sweet potatoes. You can also eat moderate amounts of nuts and fruits in season (without sugar, of course.)  Counterintuitively, heathy fats should make up a substantal amount of your diet by calorie count.  These would be olive oil, cocoanut oil, pork fat (which is delicious, by the way.)  Whatever you do, don't eat highly processed foods like Lucky Charms.

Citizens Own Guns, Slaves and Serfs Do Not

 Our media are not very good at reporting what goes on in other countries, particularly our neighbor to the North.  Now, I don't know much about how the Canadian legal system works, but apparently Justin Trudeau has published an edict termed an Order in Council (OC) that tells legal gun owners in Canada that:

...(Canada) f roze the movement of handguns. Canadian citizens cannot now buy, sell, or transfer handguns within Canada, nor bring them into the country. Eventually guns in Canada will be extinct with this rule.

Hank Vanderbeek has the story at the American Thinker entitled Gun Control in Canada. You would think that gun laws in Canada would be similar to those here in the States, but no. Canadians have no guarantee of their rights to a gun, or to anything else for that matter. Note, that Canadians have the same rights as we do, indeed as every person born in the world does, but their rights are not acknowledged nor are guaranteed. Thus, Canadians' rights can be more easily trampled.

The United States truly is exceptional in that its founding documents for the first time in history stated that the purpose of governments is to protect its citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property. I look at America's founding as inspired by God, our Creator.

The reason Justin Trudeau gave Canadian citizens for the gun freeze were the same reasons leftist Americans give time and again. He said, “Canadians have the right to feel safe in their homes, in their schools and in their places of worship. With handgun violence increasing across Canada, it is our duty to take urgent action to remove these deadly weapons from our communities. Today, we're keeping more guns out of our communities and keeping our kids safe.”

Liken Trudeau’s statement to banning all safe drivers from the highways and allowing only drunk drivers to drive, because taking guns away from lawabiding citizens leaves the lawbreakers with guns.

It is unclear how a freeze on the movement of handguns is going to stem rising handgun violence. The Order of Council is reserved for emergencies and meant as a temporary measure. Restricting movement of handguns versus confiscating Canadians’ handguns is somehow going to end or reverse the “emergency” of rising handgun violence.

Trudeau offered no empirical evidence to support his new emergency public policy. I searched and found nothing to back up Trudeau’s connection between handgun ownership and rising handgun violence in Canada. There is a plethora of data showing that handgun ownership by law-abiding citizens is not the basis for the rising handgun violence in America. In fact, just the opposite.

You should read Vanderbeek's article. It is fundamentally a cautionary tale, as if Anerican gun owners didn't have enough cautionary tales from around the world. Australia, for example, or England, or New Zealand, or Germany, or...well...the rest of the world is pretty much a cautionary tale. Tyrants do not want their subjects to own guns, for what should be obvious reasons. Citizens have guns and know how to use them; subjects and serfs do not.

The Left has been on the march for a long time. Here at home, they keep trying to take away the guns, despite the acknowledgement in the Second Amendment that the government shall not infringe the right. They keep throwing things against the wall...anything that might stick. Banning semiautomatic rifles, banning hand guns, banning pistol braces, taxing ammunition out of existence, have all been tried and no doubt they will try other sick ideas. The Bruen decision was important, but the only Supreme Court ruling the Left respects are those they agree with. So, we always must be vigilant.

The Second Amendment is the difference between freedom from tyrannical freeze laws, infringement, and the right of ownership.

Don't Take the Bait

Once again, gentle readers, I am presenting more information about the Left's efforts to subvert the United States. Anyone who is paying attention can see that they are very far along the road to doing exactly that. John Klenoff has an article at the American Thinker entitled The Worst Prison Is The One You Don't Know You're In:

What if I told you that a very powerful man has, in his own words, been "infiltrating governments" around the world to implement a surveillance state, strip you of your property rights, and remove your freedom of speech?

And what if this same man was pushing policies that benefited big corporations (too big to fail) while bankrupting millions of small businesses (too small to save)? More and more of the struggles that individuals and small businesses face point back to Klaus Schwab and the prison he is erecting, a prison few of us have ever even heard of. Its name? Technocracy!

The man Klenoff is writing about is Klaus Schwab, an engineer, and economist, and a Communist who seems to be the personification of the typical evil genius who wants to take over the world. He even looks like an evil genius, though his lack of a sense of humor seems to preclude having an evil genius laugh, bawahahahaha.

Klaus Schwab is a German economist and engineer who is the founder and executive chairman of WEF.

Schwab is concerned about elected officials who are "too often caught in traditional, linear (and non-disruptive) thinking or too absorbed by immediate concerns to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation”. Instead of trusting the open marketplace and the established rules and customs of the Western liberal democratic system, Schwab wants a planned economy based on what is called "public-private partnerships".

In practice, these public-private partnerships resemble fascism, which its initiator, Benito Mussolini, described as the merger between the corporation and the state.

In this spirit of authoritarianism, Schwab works closely with China and has praised China as an optimal model. In fact, he keeps a bust of Lenin, who imposed communism onto the Soviet Union, in his personal study.

While the Left likes to scream "Nazi" whenever they can't think up a relevant arguement, as you can see, the distance between a Communist and a Fascist is pretty small. Both Mussolini and Hitler were Communists, but each realized that if they left the means of production in the hands of the owners, they could influence those owners to do the will of the state. That of course, is what is happening here in America. For example, the push to change from gasoline powered to electrical powered vehicles is driven by the government in with the "cooperation" of big business.

One wonders why there were no widespread inventions, other than those that improved state functions before the modern era. In fact, many of the technologies that were developed in modern times were first developed in ancient times as well. But because nobody could claim ownership and make money from their invention. This caused them to keep their inventions secret, which died when the inventor died. What changed was the modern idea of intellectual property. This intellectual property was recognized with a patent, that gave the owner of that property rights to receive compensation for its use. As a result, technologies of all sorts exploded starting in the 18th century. As the population increased, the unit costs of production came down, making a greater variety of things as well as more sophisticated things available at affordable prices.

No one elected evil genius Schwab and his fellow self appointed "elites."  These people believe they are the ones who can best tell everyone else how to live their lives. And they think they can control everyone throughout the world with the new technologies such as high speed super computers, algorithms and AI. Of course they want you driving electric vehicles because then you won't be able to travel as far. Limited range is a feature not a bug. But here's the thing: not everyone has the same priorities in life as the Davos swells.

Schwab and the Davos swells intend to centrally control the economy of the whole world. Now these people, including Bill Gates have never come up with something new in their lives. I am sure he thinks that it is the best way, but the truth is that central planning has never worked well for the average person. It may work well for Schwab because he will be able to have whatever he wants. The rest of us, not so much. In fact, under Schwab's plan, we return to a Hobbsian world wherein life for us is nasty, brutish and short.

I don't think in the end that Schwab and his cronies can pull off their totalitarian scheme though.  I think Scwab has bitten off more than he can chew.  He has been seduced by the technologies.  Yes, it may be inconvenient to avoid these technologies, but if we do, we can still be free.  Schwab intends to encluse us in a tech prison.  Don't take the bait.

The Climate Castrophists Are Anti-Life

Ron Ross has a post at the American Thinker today entitled Good news sucks for climate cultists in whichs he points to a number of good news items that the climate alarmists either ignore or attempt to spin as bad news.

There’s a war against happiness. Climate alarmists bury good news and exaggerate bad news. They have made up their minds to be miserable and they’re determined to take the rest of us down with them.

For example, have you heard that over the past 30 years there has been a 14 percent increase in the Earth’s green vegetation? Deserts are getting smaller and forests are getting lusher. That gain even has a name: “Earth Greening.” Not surprisingly, 70 percent of it stems from the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere! Zaichun Zhu, one of the scientists who measured the greening, says it’s equivalent to adding a new continent of green vegetation twice the size of the mainland United States.

The benefits of the increased vegetation are widespread: “It means more food for insects and deer, for elephants and mice, for fish and whales. It means higher yields for farmers; the effect has probably added about $3 trillion to farm incomes over the past 30 years, so less land is needed to feed the human population and more can be spared for wildlife instead.” We’ve given a raise to all commercial farmers around the world. Increased supply eventually results in reduced prices.

The connection between increased carbon dioxide and increased plant growth is a perfect example of “negative feedback” in that the added vegetation from Earth Greening takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. A physicist friend of mine reminds his students, “We live in a negative-feedback world. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

Unfortunately for climate alarmists, the entire theory is based on positive feedbacks creating runaway catastrophes. Thus they can predict silly things like global warming will somehow produce global cooling and we will end with snowball earth and of course we will all die! If you happen to be a young person with little experience of life, you might react to the global climate change cult with over the top fear just like St. Greta of Thunberg at the U.N.

Matt Ridley, at Human Progress points out that:

This greening is good news. It means more food for insects and deer, for elephants and mice, for fish and whales. It means higher yields for farmers; indeed, the effect has probably added about $3 trillion to farm incomes over the last 30 years. So less land is needed to feed the human population and more can be spared for wildlife instead.

Yet this never gets mentioned. In their desperation to keep the fearmongering on track the activists who make a living off the climate change scare do their best to ignore this inconvenient truth. When they cannot avoid the subject, they say that greening is a temporary phenomenon that will reverse in the latter part of this century. The evidence for this claim comes from a few models fed with extreme assumptions, so it cannot be trusted.

This biological phenomenon can also help to explain the coming and going of ice ages. It has always been a puzzle that ice ages grow gradually colder for tens of thousands of years, then suddenly warmer again in the space of a few thousand years, at which point the huge ice caps of Eurasia and North America collapse and the world enters a warmer interlude, such as the one we have been enjoying for 10,000 years.

Attempts to explain this cyclical pattern have mostly failed so far. Carbon dioxide levels track the change, but these rise after the world starts to warm and fall after the world starts to cool, so they are not the cause. Changes in the shape of the earth’s orbit play a role, with ice sheets collapsing when the northern summers are especially warm, but only some of these so-called “great summers” result in deglaciation.

Recent ice cores from the Antarctic appear to have fingered the culprit at last: it’s all about plants. During ice ages, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere steadily drops, because colder oceans absorb more of the gas. Eventually it reaches such a low level – about 0.018% at the peak of the last ice age – that plants struggle to grow at all, especially in dry areas or at high altitudes. As a result gigantic dust storms blanket the entire planet, reaching even Antarctica, where the amount of dust in the ice spikes dramatically upward. These dust storms blacken the northern ice sheets in particular, making them highly vulnerable to rapid melting when the next great summer arrives. The ice age was a horrible time to be alive even in the tropics: cold, dry, dusty and far less plant life than today.

The good news for humanity is that CO2 has been increasing, partly becasue of man's use of fossil fuels, but more generally because of the warming itself. If we want a greener planet, we meed to keep pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. the current level of CO2 is just over 4 parts per million (4 ppm), but 6 ppm is not too much, and it would help all life.

Clearly, climate alarmists are anti-life.

The Greatest Threat To The United States

 So, gentle readers are no doubt familiar with Godwin's Law.   Godwin's law is actually more nuanced than it is typically portrayed, but as it is typically protrayed, "the first one to mention Nazis loses the argument."  But when someone does something that actually resembles the tactics of the Fascist govenments of the 20th Century, it seems to me that it is fair to mention that fact.  That is what Steve McCann does at the American Thinker in a piece entitled Eight Startling and Uncomfortable Ways the Democrat Party Emulates the Nazi Party.

I first became aware of these similarities a number of years ago when I read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. As much as I think Goldberg is an excellent writer and analyst, the truth is that he is also what I call a soft conservative. Such people are not willing to call the Left out for what it is, and instead conflate the Left with liberals. They are afraid of offending people on the other side.  But there is a qualitative difference between liberals and people on the Left, and once you see it, it is easy to tell the difference.  Such conservatives look at the Left as just being misguided. But in fact, the Left knows exactly what it is doing and why.

McCann sets the table by giving a brief history of the Democrat party going back to President Andrew Jackson:

The Democrat Party has been a stain on the nation since its founding in 1828 by a virulently racist president, Andrew Jackson. It was the party of slavery and the Confederacy, it initiated racial segregation by legislating and brutally enforcing Jim Crow laws. It unabashedly aligned with and supported the Ku Klux Klan for over nine decades, thus promoting antisemitism, religious persecution and xenophobia. Over the past sixty-years the Party has embraced and promulgated cultural Marxism which espouses the transformation of traditional American culture and society. The Party has succeeded in undermining the family structure and religious freedom as well as mainstreaming abortions up to the point of birth and what was once considered deviancy.

The Democrat party’s two most exalted figureheads are the fervently racist Woodrow Wilson who set the Party on the path of undermining the Constitution in order to remold the United States into a “modern administrative state” (i.e., socialist) and Franklin Roosevelt who was enamored with and utilized Fascist principles in his “New Deal” thus permanently embedding them in the Party’s psyche.

An unemotional examination of the underlying philosophies and the tactics the Nazi Party used to gain and maintain power reveals not just the common impulse to weaponize the judiciary to eradicate one’s political opponents (e.g., Donald Trump) but numerous other similarities between the Nazis and the Democrat party that cannot be ignored. Here are eight uncomfortable dimensions of that resemblance.

If one reads all of the embedded hyperlinks in those first three paragraphs, that is a lot of information. But McCann goes on to show eight ways that the Democrat party uses the Nazi party tactics in ways that are eerie.  In fact, it is difficult to believe that things like the J6 incident, or the George Floyd riots arise organically. There almost has to be a guiding intelligence to so thoroughly always keep moving our nation to the Left. Considering the horrible and anti-human things the Democrats embrace, I think that intelligence is Lucifer.

McCann finishes with this, which seems fitting

Eighth, Hitler, after serving in World War I was an avowed Communist who eventually joined the National Socialist Party, later renamed the National Socialist Workers (NAZI) Party. He did so because it was larger and also espoused Marxism/socialism. Influenced by Mussolini and his Fascist Party, in the 1920’s the National Socialist Party adopted extreme nationalism and government-controlled capitalism as a part of their foundational Marxist/socialist underpinning.

While flirting with it for a number of decades, in the latter half of the Twentieth Century the Democrat Party began to fully embrace an American version of the Marxism/socialism that underpinned the NAZI Party. Mark Levin in his seminal work American Marxism, lays out in detail this metamorphosis. For all intents and purposes, the Democrat party could easily be renamed: The National Marxist/Socialist Party.

The greatest threat to the survival of United States as founded is not offshore but within its borders: the Democrat party.

We Will Not Comply

 Col. Allen West has excellent article at Townhall.com entitled Executive Orders and Federal Agency Rules Are Not Law. In their enthusiasm to disarm Americans, most of the press seems content to pretend that Biden's executive orders have effect outside the Federal government. However, the Constitution places the law making power solely in the hands of Congress. Neither the Supreme Court, nor the Exective Branch has the power to create laws, though both seem to be trying to do so. If Biden wants to create law, he should have stayed in the Senate.

Just last week, Biden erroneously embarked upon an unconstitutional venture by issuing an executive order that his White House said will utilize federal agencies to promote red flag laws (which are unconstitutional violations of the Second Amendment and due process), expand background checks, and collect more information on federally licensed firearms dealers. Biden asserts that the order is geared to protect the safety of children and is calling for Congress to pass universal background checks (failing to explain what that means) and pass a ban on assault weapons.

...snip...

“Universal background checks” is just a cute-sounding euphemism to enable gun registration. Imagine leftists criminalizing a responsible parent, such as myself, giving their child a firearm. I did so for both of my daughters for their protection. Or the fact that I gifted my pastor with a Henry Repeating Rifle .44 Mag Big Boy. He cried when I presented it to him. Yes, both my daughters and pastor later went and filled out a 4473 form, as that is what law-abiding citizens do. We do not need Joe Biden or anyone giving orders or making rules, as we are not the criminals.

There can be no debate: the left in America wants the citizenry disarmed. They want subjects who can be subjugated, not citizens who can stand and defend themselves. That has always been the mantra of totalitarianism, and history has proven such. However, these antics by Biden and his cronies are just solidifying the strong opposition.

...snip...

Joe, the words of the Second Amendment are indisputable, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Your executive order infringes upon our Constitutional right, We the People, the well-regulated militia, shall not comply. Now, have a great day, and go take a nap.

We in the United States have been fortunate to have our right to arms protected by our founding document. The Left has been trying everything in their power to end that little thing known as the Second Amendment. And why, you may ask? Because the United States stands as a rebuke to the Left.  Its prescriptions have never worked for the people, though it has make a few people incredibly rich.  Look, the Left has been trying to destroy the United States for over 100 years. They probably would have already succeeded had it not been for the Second Amendment. Just as ciminals must reckon on the fact that someone in their proposed killing zone may be armed, so Leftist politicians must reckon on how far they might push the American people at any time.

As West says: We will not comply.

It may already be too late

J. B. Shurk has an article today at the American Thinker entitled Government Tyrants Play With Fire on the impending arrest and prosecution of fomer President Trump. Supposedly he is being charged with paying "hush money" to Stormy Daniels, all very purient and thus intriguing. But, and this is coming from a non-lawyer, I haven't even stayed at an express hotel lately, shouldn't Miss Daniels be charged with blackmail? After all, it isn't illegal, as far as I know, to pay blackmail, but it is illegal to commit extortion. Help me please! In any case, paying blackmail seems kind of petty stacked up againsts what others have done while in office, as Shurk points out.

The communist thugs controlling America's legal system have chosen to cross the Rubicon, it seems. President Trump says he will be arrested Tuesday now that New York City's corrupt, Soros-funded district attorney has cooked up some cockamamie criminal indictment against him involving Stormy Daniels — the same political pawn who was already ordered to pay the president 300,000 dollars in legal fees as restitution in a prior case.

If anyone needed further evidence that we reside under a post-constitutional Uniparty regime with utter disdain for the rule of law, add this to the long list of government crimes and usurpations committed against the American people.

...snip...

If Bill and Hillary Clinton had ever been properly charged for their decades-long crime spree involving perjury, rape, investment swindling, real estate scams, stolen White House furniture, Chinese bribery, campaign finance violations, family foundation fraud, mishandling of classified secrets, conspiracy to defraud the United States with the Russia hoax, Epstein-linked prostitution and child-trafficking, or their uncanny proclivity for leaving a trail of dead associates in their wake, their rap sheets would stretch from here to the moon. Had Barack Obama ever had to properly answer for illicitly using the IRS, EPA, DOJ, FBI, and Intelligence Community to target, harass, and persecute his political opponents or account for his stunning success in using his political office to transition from one of America's poorest presidents to one of its wealthiest, he and his wife would not so absurdly yet flippantly claim that his presidency was aboveboard and "scandal-free." If there were not a two-tier "justice" system that exists only to protect Deep State friends and demolish Uniparty enemies, Joe Biden's notorious reputation over the last half-century as a bought-and-paid-for stooge of foreign governments and domestic crime syndicates — with a family of drug users and reprobates who profit solely from his politically-protected name — would have at least kept him far from the White House, if not serving time in prison.

Only Donald Trump — the man who donated his salary for serving the American people and who has lost a fortune parrying endless and spurious criminal, civil, and regulatory attacks — finds himself in legal jeopardy, with his life, liberty, and property all on the line.

Taking bribes from Chinese communists? No problem. Laundering money through Ukraine? No big deal. Fabricating an international conspiracy framing Donald Trump as a Russian spy? What's the harm? Selling America out to her enemies in Iran, China, and anywhere else politicians and their corporate patrons can make a buck? By all means! But sacrifice your security, reputation, and good fortune in order to run for office against the Uniparty's collective will and make America great again? Well, that, my friends, must be punished to the hilt, lest the American people learn to govern themselves without first consulting D.C.'s occupying forces for approval!

If you get the impression from the above that Shurk is a bit upset, well, he has a right to be upset. Think about it. President Trump was elected by a majority of Americans to do a job that he did indeed try to do. But rather than bow down to We the People's wishes, Trump was defied at every turn, and the bureaucrats and politicians not only in the opposition party but in his own party as well opposed him. But in opposing him, they were really opposing We the People. Then they rigged the 2020 election to keep Trump from a second term and put Biden in his place.

So, essentially, the deep state and politicians want things like the failure of SVB to happen. They want a war in Ukraine. They may even want WWIII. They want to destroy America, mutilate our children with puberty blockers and transgender surgery. They want us feeding our children to Moloch through abortions. They want drag queen story hours, critical race theory, and a no energy "green agenda." They want us to invest using ESG rather than profit as a guiding principle, which lets them choose winners and losers rather than the market. In short, they want us poor and barefoot, able to move no farther than one day's walk, while they enjoy lording over us peasants and moving about freely.

Andrea Widburg posted yesterday that she had thought the WEF was trying to bring back the middle ages. But on further consideration, she realized the middle ages were Christian, so were less brutal. What they really want is to take us back to the Roman era, a truly brutal era of Hobbesian proportions. Life was cheap and hard, such that for the average guy at the time, 30 years was probably an average life.

The founding documents of the American Republic for the first time put into practice the idea that the so called "elites," the "nobility," the "aristocrats" and so forth had no more rights than any other member of society. The government had to govern with the consent of the people over which it governed. The fact that the government is acting in direct contravention to the will of the people is what has Shurk so mad. And it has been happening more amd more, until under Biden it has become blatant. Biden does things he knows are not legal, and defies the people to sue. Of course, by the time a case gets to the Supreme Court, he has achieved his purpose. But by then he has put out another flurry of illegal executive orders. At some point he will have to be stopped or we will lose our Republic.  It may already be too late.

Tucker Carlson: A truly humble man

 If you are a young whippersnapper, as almost everyone else is when you get to be my age, you may still be pretty proud of yourself.  You may think you are pretty smart, skilled, able and so forth.  You don't need anybody.  Even Tucker Carlson, at 54, seems a young whippersnapper to me.  But I remember being about his age and suddenly realizing that the world works nothing like I had previously thought.  It is a humbling experience, and the humbling experiences just keep coming.

Today, at the American Thinker, Thomas Lifson has embedded a podcast with Tucker Carlson at Tucker Carlson Lets It All Hang Out. He sounds so much like me in this roughly hour and a half interview. I haven't been to as many places as Carlson, but I have learned the same lesson as he has, that people everywhere are pretty much the same. In my case I learned that lesson in Panama.  That world leaders are all bad. Trump may be a bad guy, but he none the less told the truth about China and Russia, but no one listened. Mostly he is ashamed of having been a part of the apparatus that tries to control us, and didn't even realize it. How humbling! He also realizes that men and women are different. Men need to be men, and part of that is realizing women are different and amazing for being different.  But women can't be women unless men are men.

I try to watch Tucker Carlson Tonight whenever I can. But I have really enjoyed the Tucker Carlson Today interviews because he lets guests tell their stories with minimal interference from him. Oh, and there never is a gotcha question. These people are truly interesting, sometimes odd, always insightful, even if I don't agree with them.

Carlson is at the top of his game, and this insight into him shows him to be a humble family man who knows his own weaknesses are many and great, yet he has the courage to soldier on. Gentle readers should take an hour and a half and watch the podcast.  Also, you should add him to your prayer list, because his kind never last long enough, and they are too few.  

God Help Us.

 Victor Davis Hanson has an article today at Townhall.com that compares the United States of today with the end of the Byzantine empire. Gentle readers will recongize many of the things Anson mentions in the article entited Are We The Byzantines? One of the things that Hanson continulusly states as that Americans seem to be as oblivious as were the Byzantines. But as Tucker Carlson pointed out the other day, the majority of Americans are aware of the fact that our leaders are marching os unto World War III and do not want to go there. We just have no choice. Everything Biden's administration does seems to damage Akericans, while enriching the so called "elite" who are doing Biden's bidding. And while Republicans seem to be taking a good game, they are not doing anything to counter Biden's plans.

Gentle readers can read the article for themselves. The fact is that there is a lot of history packed into a short article.  The truth is that the comparisons are eerily similar.  The other fact is that a lot of Americans feel like we are being held as hostages in a bus that is traveling to hell.  We think the 2020 elections were rigged, and we have the evidence.  The courts have refused to see it.  We see the same thing happening in Arizona and again the courts refuese to grant relief. 

We have seen that the Uniparty has distorted justice, such that they are keeping political prisoners for the crime of wandering around in the Peoples' House.  Democrats can violate all the laws, including taking campaign contributions from over seas and nothing is done.  But Republicans who are not part of the club had better watch their step.  Even the President has called MAGA Republicans "terrorists."  Really?  Making America Great Again is now a terrorist enterprise?  Please, we need more such terrorists who go to work every day making the world a better place.  

And while helping Americans who need our help such as the town of East Palistine is of no interest to our President, he keeps sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, where Zelinsky is shutting down Christian churches.  But then, our so called "elites" tried to do that here too.

 In short, we have no power to change the Uniparty's goals, and the Uniparty's goals appear to be to take us to war, and to destroy the United States as founded.  I don't think such things are in God's plan, but I think he will allow it for the sake of His plans.  God help us, because no one else will.

Do not mistake Leftists for Liberals. They are anything but "liberal"

I have commented before that too many conservative commentators accept the language of the Left when writing their columns, as if the Left was telling the truth.  But first and foremost, the Left lies about itself.  It describes itself as being "liberal."  But there is nothing liberal about it, and it needs to be called out at every turn.  Conservatives who accept Leftist language inadvertantly end up telling the same lies.

Eleanor Barton has an article today at The Federalist today calling out the Leftists entitled They Are Intolerant, Divisive and Anti Liberty - Call Them Leftists, Not Liberals The title says it all, but just in case you need more, there is an article below that explains in greater detail.

Democrats have moved so far to the left in recent years that they should no longer be called “liberals,” unless the true liberals among them start to stand up to the leftists who have taken over. The term is misleading, giving the impression that Democrats support individual freedoms and accept people of different viewpoints, when increasingly they do not. The word “liberal” gives yet more power to those who seek to take more of our liberties.

...snip...

As the Times notes, the left is “increasingly” intolerant. Part of why “liberal” no longer works to describe Democrats is the party has moved leftward, as many have noted, including The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, comedian and commentator Bill Maher, and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in her State of the Union response.

Since at least 2020, Noonan wrote, Democrats “have aligned with or allowed themselves to be associated with … the identity politics-wokeness regime. (It’s amazing we still don’t have an agreed upon word or phrase that fully captures this program.)” That regime consists of transgenderism, climate alarmism, and so-called anti-racism. “The Democrats are the party of the left. Progressive pathologies morph into Democratic ideologies, tagging the party as radical. Why do the Democrats allow this to continue? Why don’t they push back, hard — as a party?”

Maher makes a similar observation: “There is that faction of the left, that we will call woke, who’s gone off the deep end,” as he described it. As Maher told CNN’s Jake Tapper last week, the woke “want to shut down debate,” and that’s how they differ from his idea of a liberal. The woke “love diversity except of ideas.” Asked to define wokeism, Maher said, “I think it’s this collection of ideas that are not building on liberalism, but very often undoing it.”

Now, you know that Bill Mahr is not a conservative, but he at least is not a Leftist either. People have different tolerances for just how much Leftism they are willing to accept. Zell Miller famously left the Democrat party years ago claiming that he had not changed, but the party had left him. More recently, Tulsi Gabbard has left the Democrat party. Again, neither of these people can be describe as conservative, but they each have finally been driven from the party because of the insanity being pushed in their name. If there are any truly liberals left, they need to be more vocal that they do not like the current thrust of their party.

Termite Larvae Taste Better Cooked on Natural Gas!

 So, after yesterday's post, you know the government lies, seemingly about everything.  Jenny Beth Martin, at Townhall.com has the latest lies from the Biden administration entitled Keep Government Out Of Our Kitchens; The Gas Stove Ban Is Heating Up. You may remember that Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumpka, Jr. (yes, the son of THAT Richard Trumpka) first said the Consumer Product Safety Commission would ban gas stoves, then backpedalled and said it was just some talk. But now the CPSC has put out a Request for Information in the Federal Register, a first step in rule making.

The RFI “seeks comment on all significant aspects of this issue,” including information “related to the scope and scale of potential chronic chemical hazards, exposures, and risks associated with gas range use,” “data sources and approaches CPSC should consider when completing an evaluation of chronic chemical hazards, exposures, and risks related to gas range use,” and “proposed solutions related to any chronic chemical hazards, exposures, and risks associated with gas range use.”

Said CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka, Jr. about the announcement of the RFI, “The trust between CPSC and the American consumer exists because actions like the one we take today make clear that we only act in service to consumer safety … This Request for Information furthers our commitment to American consumers because step one in confronting a potential hazard is understanding its scope and the options for addressing it.”

Those two sentences contain multiple lies.

First, the CPSC, most certainly in this case, is not acting “in service to consumer safety.” Instead, it serves a green energy agenda that says fossil fuels must be banned. The agenda begins at the endpoint – banning fossil fuels – and then works backward to figure out a way to ban fossil fuels. That’s where the alleged “chronic chemical hazards associated with using gas ranges” come in. Claiming that there’s a “chronic chemical hazard” (read: health risk) attached to using natural gas stoves – which is very much in dispute – is just a convenient cover for the coercive arm of government power.

Second, Trumka doesn’t believe natural gas stoves present a “potential” hazard; he thinks they pose a definite risk. He uses the word “potential” to make himself sound reasonable as if he has an open mind on this matter rather than being what he is – an ideologue determined to promote the green energy agenda to which he is committed, no matter what it takes. He shouldn’t be using the word “potential” as an adjective to describe “hazard” because he is using that word deliberately to create the (false) impression that he could conclude, in the end, that natural gas stoves pose no hazard at all. And that’s wrong. He’s not open to that conclusion. On this matter, his mind is most definitely made up.

In seeking to discover the "hazards" of gas stoves, the CPSC is inviting disgrntled crackpots to submit false claims. Gas has been used for over 100 years as a cooking fuel. It is used exclusively in restaurants because of its superior heating ability and control. I have also used gas at home, and much prefer it to electricity. But there are no gas lines out in the country side where the Beautiful PolyKahr Estates are located. There are no health hazards associated with gas. Rather, destroying the fossil fuel industry is at the heart of this ideological war on gas stoves. But, of course, it will not end there. Eventually it will be gas furnaces and everything else that runs on gas tin this war on fossil fuels. You must nip this one in the bud.  <sarcasm>After all, termite larvae taste better cooked on natural gas!</sarcasm>

The Lying Liars Who Lie

 I have considered myself fairly intelligent...no genius of course, but smarter than the average bear.  But I have constantly questioned what is going on in Washington, D.C.  Why do those we hire to represent us seem to work for someone else?  For that matter, why do our local newpapers seem so intent on angering half of their potential readership?  But, now that I have read J. B. Shurk's article at the American Thinker entitled Liberating Ourselves from Dystopia, I can see that I have been pretty stupid. Shurk explains exactly what is going on, indeed has been going on for a long time, at least since the late 1890s. And his explanation fits all the facts.

More Americans grasp how the U.S. government actually works. Large corporate interests pay off politicians and bureaucrats to advance their financial interests. In return, those politicians and bureaucrats are responsible for creating new problems for the American people that can be exploited to justify spending huge sums of money — the bulk of which falls into the laps of the large corporate interests.

The pharmaceutical industry, for instance, would love for lawmakers to mandate that Americans purchase and use their products in perpetuity. Big Pharma then pays hospitals, research scientists, and medical doctors to push its products. It privately funds public health agencies, while rewarding ostensibly objective bureaucrats with research grants and promises of future lucrative employment. Through its lobbying arms, Big Pharma fills the campaign coffers and family foundations of elected officials and works hand in glove with lawmakers to craft legislation that simultaneously expands Big Pharma's profits and lawmakers' personal stock portfolios. Lawmakers who refuse to play this corrupt game end up becoming the electoral targets of all those extra dollars in industry profits, and the stick-or-carrot system effectively works to eliminate ethical politicians, while elevating criminals. It's plain old bribery and extortion, and it is how Washington, D.C. operates.

So, politicians dream up crisis after crisis to keep the public scared out of their wits which keeps them voting, while they actually take campaign cash from major donors and corporations. And those oare the people they actually work for. Our republic thus becomes a lie. The politicians lie. The corporations lie. The donors lie. And we pay for it.

What is to be done, I am at a loss.  But one must first recognize the problem, before one can develop a solution.  Right now, corporations and government are too intertwined.  The twitter files show this in dramatic detail.  And the revolving door between government and the private sector is old news.  One thing is clear though: the cost of todays campaigns are astranomical.  The donors who pay for these campaigns surely want something for their money.  They don't give out of the goodness of their hearts.  So, somehow, we need to get the money out of politics.  Also, Congress, both the House and Senate should not be able to take campaign money from outside their respective districts.   That would limit the power of pacs, unions, corporations, and even political parties.  But it would increase voters power, putting it back where it belongs.  

Cain Killed Abel With a Rock

 Tom Knighton at the website Bearing Arms has a story of a tragedy out of Hamburg, Germany entitled Latest On the Hamburg Shooting. Knighton reports that:

That peace was shattered on Thursday, however, when a shooter killed a number of people at a Jehovah’s Witnesses church in the city.

Eight people were killed in a shooting at a Jehovah’s Witness place of worship in the German city of Hamburg and the gunman was among the dead, police said on Friday.

Police received a call soon after 9 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Thursday and officers arrived at the scene to find several people seriously injured and some dead. “Then they heard a shot from above, they went upstairs and found one further person,” said a police spokesperson.

…

“We heard shots,” one unidentified witness told reporters. “There were 12 continuous shots,” he said. “Then we saw how people were taken away in black bags.”

The gunman was believed to be a former member of the Jehovah’s Witness community, Spiegel magazine reported. The man was aged between 30 and 40 and was not known to authorities as an extremist, the report said, citing unnamed sources.

So, why bring this up? You and I are unlikely to know anyone of the killed and injured. Nor are we likely to live close to where this happened. The point is that like most of Europe, Germany has pretty strict gun control laws. So, one of the questions is where did the shooter get a gun? And note too that this sort of thing is not unheard of in either Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, a shooter in Norway killed 77 people, 69 by shooting. Mass killings, even shootings, are not a uniquely American problem. And the fact that Europe suffers from mass shootings despite strict gun control shows us again that the problem can not be solved with gun control.

David Codrea, of the War on Guns has a saying that "If a man (or woman for that matter) can not be trusted with a gun, he also can not be trusted without a custodian." It points us to the true cause of mass shootings, or indeed any murders no matter the weapon used. It is the people. Why people are like this is a story for another day.  But if society can not trust a person with a weapon, they should be in jail until they can demonstrate they can be trusted. That may mean putting them in jail for life. It would help too if the government would stop making everything illegal. Then they might concentrate on truly serious crime.

Remember that Cain killed Abel with a rock. Rocks are everywhere.

The Green Agenda Is Not Green At All

 Before you go out and purchase an electric vehicle, you should read where the stuff to make your new car's battery comes from. You can find out at at Townhall.com in an article by H. Sterling Burnett entitled Dirty Mining, Slavery, and Child Labor are at the Core of Elites' Green Energy Obsession.

The mining, refining, manufacturing, and transportation of the huge amounts of rare earth elements and critical minerals is a dirty business. Yet, they are vital to the magnets used in wind turbines, the cables, and stations used to transform the electricity produced by turbines and solar panels, and transmit it to its final destination, and the battery back-up needed to maintain electric power supply and reliability from those intermittent sources.

The International Energy Agency reports that offshore wind requires more scarce minerals, rare earth elements, and other critical metals per kilowatt hour of energy produced than any other source of electric power generation, renewable and non-renewable alike. Onshore wind and solar are the next most critical-mineral-intensive sources.

The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad, and almost all the refining of them is done by China alone.

A single on-shore wind turbine requires up to three metric tons of copper and magnets. Much larger offshore wind turbines require even more copper and magnets composed of rare earth elements. Thousands of pounds of ore must be mined to produce a single pound of rare earths, much less the combination of rare earths required for the magnets used in wind turbines. In addition, between 200,000 and 1.5 million pounds of earth must be mined and moved to produce the lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and other metals and trace elements necessary to produce a battery pack for a single electric vehicle. Thus, billions of tons will have to be mined and refined to produce the thousands of batteries that will compose the large-scale battery facilities providing backup power when wind and solar facilities are offline.

So from that, you get a sense of the sheer amount of materials needed to make single wind turbine.  Yet typical wind farms involve many wind turbines.  Then there are the batteries to back up the wind turbines and solar farms when these intermittent sources are not generating.  But even worse is that these rare earths are mined and refined by child and slave labor in appalling conditions.

The conditions under which many of these minerals are produced are appalling. For example, cobalt is a necessary component of the green energy technologies President Biden is pushing on an expedited timeframe. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the largest producer of the cobalt in the world, by far. A large percentage of the cobalt is produced from small mines, where child labor is the norm, not the exception.

What’s more, China is the largest single provider of most of the critical minerals and rare earths used around the globe, and is almost the only refiner of such products. This means minerals and rare earth elements mined elsewhere, often with Chinese funding, are shipped to China for processing into usable materials. Much of the mining and refining of materials in China is produced by forced or slave labor, often of persecuted religious minorities, like Falun Gong followers and Uighurs.

To be clear, those pushing Net Zero goals, like Democrats in Congress, green energy elites profiting from government support in the form of mandates and subsidies, and the Biden administration, know child- and slave-labor are used to produce the minerals their green technologies depend upon. They claim to care about human rights, but their actions belie their words.

You may not have know before. But now you do. The green agenda is not "green" as it tears up huge amounts of the earth, and it certainly is not humane. What are we doing?

The Censorship Complex

 Yesterday, the Republicans new majority in the House of Representatives fired up their House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to hear from Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger about the "twitter files" and what they have discovered about government censorship. Remember that the government should not be in the business of deciding what is true and not true, let alone censoring what it deems as untrue. But neither should it be using private companies to censor speech either, because that is still government censorship. The government can not escape the charge of censorship by leaning on private companies to do its dirty work. But as we shall see, the government did more than lean on social media platforms, it actually directed their behaviors.

Today, at The Federalist Margot Cleveland has a report on the hearings, and it is quite damning. In this case, it was the Democrats who were doing the censoring, but I am quite sure the Republicans would do the same. What we need to concentrate on is the fact that all of this activity is Unconstitutional, and that the platforms themselves need to be forced to fairly allow all sides, including the crazy guys to speak. The ONLY thing that should be disallowed are things that are illegal, such as doxxing political opponents including judges, and calling for the murder of opponents and so forth. You can read the whole thing at The Censorship Complex Isn’t A ‘Tinfoil Hat’ Conspiracy, And The ‘Twitter Files’ Just Dropped More Proof.

But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.

In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.

“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”

Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”

Gentle readers can read the boring details of the events at yesterday's hearing for themselves. Back in the 1980s, a political group called the Moral Majority sprang up attempting to counter the now out in the open Leftists taking over the Democrat party. But many evangelical Christians believed that politics was too dirty a business for them to get involved in it. In truth, if the government was working as intended, they shouldn't have had to do more than vote for the person that best represented their interests. Unfortunately, the power and size of governments at all levels forces everyone to care about what government is doing.

One factor in the growth of government is the fact that few people know or understand the Constitution. The Courts have encouraged this by making the Constitution seem too esoteric for the average person to understand. But the truth is that the Constutition was written straight forwardly so that the average person can indeed understand it. The fact that all three branches of the Federal government routinely violate the Constitution with little pushback indicates we need to redouble our Civics enducation. Students need to understand what the government can and can not do, and jealously keep the government in its box.

In truth what we need to do is reduce the size and reach of government.  The Federal government for example has no business dealing with education, much less K-12 education.  These belong to the states and localities.  The Federal government has no business determining police forces at the local and state level.  So called "crime bills" are outside of the Federal government's powers.  The recent overturning of Roe returned one issue to the states, but there is so much more that governments have muscled themselves into.  We must muscle them back out.

Maitaining Your Integrity

 D. Parker has a must read article at the American Thinker today entitled Lies, Damn Lies, and Democrats. He makes several points. One is that, if it hasn't occured to you yet, the unhinged hate and vitriol of the reaction to Carlson's reporting, both by politicians and the mainstream press, shows everyone that he is over the target. Or, as Parker puts it:

If we didn't know any better, all of this rage from the "ruling class" would bring forth the quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." But considering all the issues surrounding this soil enhancement storm of the lowest caliber reveals far more about our ruling aristocrats in Washington than we ever wanted to know.

These people were exposed as liars, and yet rather than apologize, they doubled down. And that yields the second point, that Tucker Carlson's reporting exposed: that the two parties are in fact on the same side, and against We the People. I am not sure I believed fully in the idea of a Uniparty. But I was listening to Glenn Beck's interview with Tucker Carlson yesterday where Carlson discussed the fact of the Majority and Minority leaders acting in concert to attack Carlson. He also mentioned McConnell's getting wealthy off of Chinese money, which explains a lot. It truly is, as Angelo Codevilla wrote in The ruling Class, the Ruling Class against the Country Party.

The third point Parker makes is one I have made continuously, that by forcing you to call things that you know are untrue "the truth," they effectively demoralize you. If they can get you to tell lies that you know to be lies, they can make you do anything.

It hearkens back to a key moment in what to our horror has become the instruction manual for the fascist far left these days, George Orwell's 1984, where the protagonist is being tortured ("re-educated") in the Ministry of Love, and he has to accept that two plus two equals five. That's not like what we've been battered to accept these days, such as that men can get pregnant or there are 57 genders, but that was the start.

In accepting that lie, he was able to make "progress" in his "treatment":

He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions — 'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' — and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

Just as Winston Smith had to train himself to accept the lies without question, we're being put through the same process en masse. You could almost imagine Orwell toying with the proposition that men can get pregnant and then rejecting it outright as too absurd.

But we've trained ourselves not to notice the absurdities unless they are staring at us right in the face. That leads us to the truly disturbing revelation of what the ruling aristocrats think of the rest of us.

Why not let the people decide?

To remain free, you must not play this game. If you allow yourself to be demoralized, if you give up your integrity, you weaken yourself, Like the "honey traps" spys must watch out for, you become blackmailable. If you have given up your integrity, then you must confess and then stop it. It won't be pleasant for you, as Tucker Carlson is experiencing, and as Glenn Beck experienced. But such is what our Lord Jesus Christ said would happen.

Tucker Carlson Begins Exposing the Lies of Jan 6

 Are you watching Tucker Carlson?  You should, especially this week.  In case you didn't see it last night, I have found a copy at dailymotion right here. Carlson will be reporting on the 41,000 hours of tape that was recorded on January 6, 2021, but has never been released to the public. What Carlson has uncovered is that the carefully selected pieces of the video, coupled with the Democrat talking points make clear that the January 6th narrative of a violent armed insurrection was spectacularly wrong. The Dems lied. The mainstream press lied. The DOJ not only lied, but in some cases prosecuted defendants that they knew were innocent. In other words, they too lied.

That is the fundamental message of the first of Tucker Carlson's exposes. They all lied, both Democrats and Republicans lied. They lied for political reasons. They lied to cover up the fact of the rigged 2020 election and to preserve the Uniparty. Carlson points out, by way of time stamped video that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknik was alive and well (and wearing a helmet) and walking around the Capitol building after he had supposedly been beaten to death by "Captiol rioters." In fact, Sicknik died of natural causes, and was actually a Trump supporter. Yet Democrats lied about Sicknik's death, and used his body as a prop in their narrative. It is doubtful Sicknik would have approved.  Carlson asks "Who does that?"

We all deserve to see these videos, which show us what actually happened that day. Carlson is doing a great services to the public, and new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy deserves credit for releasing them to him.

Update: Several updates from The Federalists here, here, and here. The last is especially egregious because the FBI is supposed to be nonpartisan, enforcing the laws equally on everyone without consideration of politics or status:

The FBI’s D.C. field office directed the Boston office to open investigations into more than 100 Americans who had attended the Jan. 6 rally despite having no evidence those individuals had committed any crime, according to whistleblower testimony reviewed by The Federalist. This represents the second attempt by the D.C. field office to sic the FBI on innocent Americans — in this case, people who were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

The D.C. field office pressured Boston’s FBI office to open criminal investigations into some 140 people who took buses from Massachusetts to D.C. on Jan. 6, according to testimony from George Hill, a whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, reviewed by The Federalist. The D.C. field office applied this pressure, Hill said, even though it had no evidence that any of those travelers had entered restricted areas of the Capitol.

Bank of America Does Not Support Your Second Amendment Rights

 Is anyone doing business with Bank of America?  You should know that Bank of America volunteered records of gun buyers to the feds. The story is at The Federalist by Margot Cleveland.  Note that nobody asked for this information.  BofA simply gave it out of the evil of their hearts.

Bank of America is clearly not your friend. You will have to decide whether to do business with these people, but know that the BofA does not support your Second Amendment rights.

Three Today, While I Go To the Range

 I have several posts, which should keep gentle readers busy while I go to the range today.  It has been a while, as I have been busy with other things.  But as they say, shooting is a perishable skill.  I should not neglect it.

First up is a piece at Townhall.com by Rachel Alexander entitled Why Judges Won't Rule There Was Voter Disenfranchisement When It Happens To Republicans. I have wondered why judges who are appointed for life are so cowardly. Of course, witnessing the firestorm unleashed by the Left over the ruling overturning Roe gives one pause. After all, the Court merely turned the abortion question back to the states, they didn't outlaw it.  No state has yet completely outlawed it, though some have placed heavy restrictions on when it is permissable.  We should not be doing it at all, but for our hard hearts.

As Arizona experiences a repeat of the 2020 election, where MAGA candidates allegedly lost to poor Democratic candidates like Katie Hobbs who refused to debate, some are turning on the MAGA candidates and blaming them instead of election fraud. The candidates’ lawsuits are predictably going nowhere, as judges throw them out for supposed “lack of evidence” or narrow technical reasons such as “lack of standing.” The judges pretend that witness testimony and affidavits don’t constitute evidence, but every first year law school student learns that of the 11 sections of the traditional Rules of Evidence in law, an entire section, section 6, is devoted to witness testimony. Witness testimony throughout history has been the smoking gun in many cases; defendants have gone to the death penalty based on witness testimony alone.

...snip...

But judges cannot rule in favor of election integrity when it helps Republicans because they are terrified of what the left will do to them and their careers. The type of person who becomes a judge is someone who isn’t looking for the spotlight; most judges go their entire careers with very few headlines about them. If you look their names up on the internet, you can rarely find anything about them. They have relatively quiet, peaceful lives outside the public eye, and they live well with generous salaries. Arizona Supreme Court justices make $159,685. U.S. Supreme Court justices make $268,300 ($280,500 for Chief Justice John Roberts). Many judges got their positions due to the establishment, and in order to keep those positions, they are beholden to the establishment. While the U.S. Supreme Court justices are mostly immune from this, there are other reasons that deter them. If they rule for Republicans on voter disenfranchisement, that is all they will be known for the rest of their lives; “election deniers” and “conspiracy theorists.” Their speaking engagements and book deals will dry up. A search for their names on the internet — thanks to left-wing Google and big tech’s biases — will turn up nothing but hateful MSM articles about them.

Alexander makes the point that Kari Lake's brief is probably the best of any of the recent cases about voter fraud. But it isn't enough. This situation clearly can not stand. It used to be that Republicans were attacked as not making their case to the people. Kari Lake made her case, and the people demonstrated they wanted what she was selling. Hobbs, on the other hand, like Biden and Fetterman, hid in the basement, refused to debate, and got (s)elected anyway. Lake claims to have been recently bribed by "powerful people" to get out of politics. Frankly, I believe she is probably right, and that is disturbing.

The Left clearly hates America, despises the founding of our country and its founding philosophy and dociments. When I say "the Left," I am not talking about specific parties. Surely the Democrat party has succumbed to the Left and seeks to destroy the United States as founded. But many Republicans do as well. One wonders, with all their wealth, why they don't just leave? If China is their current model of governance, why not go there? For that matter, Canada has become quite fascist as well, and at least they speak the same language. Such are the musings of D. Parker, at the American Thinker today in an article entitled If Leftist Hates America So Much, Why Don't They Leave? It's a good question, one that is seldom asked and never answered. Let me try though.

The Left knows that it is lying to the people. Oh, some are true believers, what Lennin called useful idiots. But those who are directing the work of the Left know full well that the what they tell everyone else is nothing but lies. Whether it is the LGBTQIA++ agenda, or the Critical Race Theory agenda, or Global Warming, er Cooling, er Climate Change agenda, or the renewable energy schtick, or the coddleing the criminals notion, it is all lies. Even the idea of redistributing the wealth and the notion of a guaranteed livable income whether one works or not...lies. But here's the thing, if they don't tear down the United States, the United States will continue to stand as a beacon to the rest of the world. While the U.S. stands, it does so as a rebuke to the Left. That is why they don't leave, why they instead do everything in their considerable power to tear it down.

So far we have been talking about "the Left." But what is the Left? The Left at its core is a religion, different from and in complete opposition to Christianity. That is the subject of Allen West's piece at Townhall.com today entitled The Disturbing Religion of the Left.

In case you have not noticed, something perverse and bizarre is happening in the United States of America right now. Last week's hearing and exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Attorney General Merrick Garland was telling. The progressive socialist left, as embodied in the Biden administration, and across the country, is purposefully and intentionally targeting those who profess, believe, and advocate on issues based upon their Judeo-Christian faith.

No doubt you thought the Left were all about politics. Yet they have been slowly targeting Christians for decades. The Devil and Bella Dodd by Mary Nichols and Paul Kengor details the struggles Bella Dodd went through to free herself from Communism and return to the Church  She was seduced by Communists and for years was a devout Communist in the early 20th century. She awoke to the lies of the Left, like Whittacker Chambers.  A Duck Duck Go search of "the war on christmas book" turns up a number of recent books about the Left targeting Christians and Christian holidays. But now, and against the Constitution, it has become government policy to target Christians and to drive us from the public square.

Why is this happening? West attempts to answer that question. It is because what we call the Left is a religion itself, an ancient religion that goes by many names with many 'gods,' such as Baal amd Moloch. It is Satanic, Luciferian. It is Evil itself. It lies and it murders. It always has, and its followers do the same.

Go read all three articles. Discuss among yourselves. I am going to the range.

"Sorry, but my guns were lost in a tragic boating accident"

 I can't tell you when I first read the by now old joke that if they come for my guns, I lost them all in a tragic boating accident.  It has been a popular joke on internet forums for at least 20 years.  So it was hilarious to read at the American Thinker today that a Texas State legislator has taken the joke one step further in Too funny: resolution would inform the federals that the people have lost all their guns in a boating accident by D. Parker.

Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton recently submitted a very unique resolution — H.C.R. No, 54 — for consideration before his lawmaking colleagues. The proposal would inform the federal government that his constituents have lost all their guns and ammunition in an unfortunate and regrettable “series of alleged boating accidents”.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of fighting back against the fascist far-left arises from the fact that they are unable to laugh at themselves or others, lest they “offend” someone.

Sure, they’re always up to attack certain groups they consider to be the “enemy” — in other words, normal people. But besides that, they have no sense of humor; that’s where we can have fun with them, hitting them in their incessant crisis mode.

This means that their anti-freedom authoritarian ways are always open to mockery, especially when it comes to a running joke in the pro-freedom community. Slaton’s submission of H.C.R. No. 54, is a stand against the march towards exhaustive federal databases which inevitably lead to confiscation —...

The joke, which as I say is a staple on gun forums where people discuss not just their favorite guns, brands, and calibers but also gun politics has even been immortalized in the Babylon Bee.

But in all seriousness, we all know the history of weapon confiscation. The ancient Samarai class, for example, prevented the peasants from having swords. So it has always been. But our wannabe overlords have a huge problem. They have not conquered us. Indeed, the "federals" were delegated certain limited powers by us. Among those was NOT specifically the power to confiscate our guns. We the People are the boss here, and what boss allows his servant to disarm him? This could be why the "federales" are so intent on making the Constitution a dead letter. But until they do, we'll keep our guns, thankyou. "We might need them for squirrels and sech."

Naming the Balrog

Yesterday I was listening to the Glenn Beck program while driving out to Elizabeth City, NC. Glenn and company reviewed a litany of the troubles and chaos currently plaguing the United States. He almost called out the name of he who is causing the chaos. I yelled at the for radio Glenn, name him, but he did not. Later, I was speaking with a member of the team, a woman and a Baptist (bless her heart) who thinks Glenn doesn't know. She could name him, of course. So could I. And I think Glenn knows too, for any recovering alcoholic has come up against him, if not seen him face to face. It is only by surrendering to God's mercy each day that an alcoholic can hope to remain sober.

It was with this backdrop that I read Deana Chadwell's piece at the American Thinker yesterday evening entitled Beating the Balrog. The Balrog for those who are not familiar with the "Lord of the Rings" by C. S. Lewis, is the beast fought by Gandolf in the mines of Moria. In the novel, Gandolf died fighting the Balrog, just so you know.

Time was when we could look at our political differences and see those differences as just a wrinkle in the cloth of society. We could look at our religious variances as mere quirks -- most people recognized God in one way or another. No more. Something really dreadful is happening. We are not experiencing ordinary variations in opinion; we’re experiencing war in every area of our society. We can no longer “agree to disagree” and expect our society to be there when we wake up in the morning. We’ve slid into a Tolkeinesque nightmare deep in the mines of Moria. There is a way out, but we’re going to have to fight the Balrog to get there.

One of the first principles of warfare is “know your enemy.” Who (not what) is this Balrog? The Democrat party? -- key Democrats, those with the loudest, most influential voices, have largely succumbed to the temptations of power and unrestrained sex, to the easiness of dreaming up their own set of values -- ones they can easily excel at -- tolerance, inclusiveness, and diversity. The leadership of that party completely believe that the end justifies the means – any means at all, including the killing of babies, the undoing of the family, the wrecking of businesses, the destruction of an economy, the demolition of a child’s education, to say nothing of cheating to win elections.

I recall the introduction C.S. Lewis wrote for his novel The Screwtape Letters. In that essay he discusses the concept of Satan, the Father of Lies. He addresses a misconception that has plagued humanity from the get-go -- that Satan is God’s arch-nemesis, God’s equal antagonist, but Lewis points out something about the archangel-gone-bad -- that Satan, for all his ill-gotten power, for all his beauty (Yes, Satan is beautiful.), for all his brilliance, is still just a creature. God, on the other hand, created all the heavens and the earth, as well as all the angels. No other entity is the equal of the three members of the Trinity. We must remember that so as not to become despondent.

 And there it is.  Deana Chadwell has named the actual enemy, Satan, or Lucifer or the other names by which he is known including Baal and Moloch. Even more, though, and Christians should know this, God has already won. The Devil can only do what God allows, and he allows it, if he does, to improve us, to make us so that we can be with Him. We need to surrender to God's mercy every day. Too often, we think that because we are relatively wealthy, we can take care of ourselves. But we only live because of God's good graces.

My point is this: God is perfection, Satan is a mere creature who has run amuck. His arrogance has blinded him to the impossibility of his rebellion succeeding, and we’re caught right in the middle of his final, last-ditch offensive.

What we are seeing is evil so strong that it’s almost bubbling up out of the ground. The pivotal evidence is the way we are treating children. The Left likes to talk about “systemic racism,” but I argue that what we’re truly seeing is systemic, Satanic, child abuse. If we don’t rip children limb-from-limb from the womb (and sell their body parts), we raise many of them in households where they are ill-fed, ignored by parents too busy to really pay attention, and too secular to take them to church. We send them off to government schools that have failed horridly (A third of our children cannot read at grade level, then we lock them out of their schools, where they at least had friends. Then we have stuck them with an overload of questionable vaccines, and now we have allowed sexualization at an alarming pace culminating in the schools getting involved in grooming young children for sex with adults and, even worse, sexual mutilation without parental consent. This is not just human evil. We’ve gone back to the time of Baal and Moloch, idols that demanded human -- i.e. child -- sacrifice.

Interestingly, God can operate in the physical world, indeed he has. When Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God walked through the garden looking for Adam. He came to Abraham to announce Abraham would have a son in his old age. The second person of the Holy Trinity came and lived among us, suffered with us, was tempted as we are and died like we do. You could say this is God's world, and we only live in it.  By contrast, Satan can only operate in this world by influencing people to do his will.

Yes, I think we’re face-to-face, as was Gandalf, with the terrifying Balrog. He’s taken the appearance of power-hungry government officials, of liberal schoolteachers, of money-hungry doctors and pharmaceutical companies. He looks like militant Islamic fanatics, like pimps and child rapists. He looks like the drug-infested, the slovenly, the lazy. It is interesting that there doesn’t seem to be one particular group organizing all this Satanic nastiness -- though it is also fascinating that the Democrat agenda lines up well with the demonic. How many pro-life Satanists are there? How many against euthanasia? How many anti-gay, anti-molesters are also in the Satanist camp? I would venture there are none. There are communists (a Satanic system if there ever was one), anarchists, racists, college professors, media people, medical folk, corporate giants, and those indulging a variety of perversions -- and they’ve all sold their souls simultaneously creating a perfect storm.

A society can only stand so much chaos, so much evil. We can’t really help the rest of the world, but we should have the ability as American citizens to correct our itinerary and do away with this many-headed monster that is about to eat us alive. Because this is such a multifaceted problem it has to have many concurrent solutions. We -- millions of us -- have to start locally and small. We can invite friends over to see documentaries like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules. We can show up for school board meetings -- over and over and over again, as necessary. We can file lawsuits, write letters to the editor, go to church -- one that will actually teach something true. We can join or form conservative groups, start a school or homeschool our children. We can learn our history, start a prayer group, talk to people and stand up for what we know is right. We will have to expect to offend some people, but it’s either that or we, our children, our grandchildren will live (if they live) in abject misery. Look at the misery that is already overwhelming our kids -- a recent study of teenage girls found that 30% had contemplated suicide.

As Ms. Chadwell points out, we can win this if we are on God's side. In this season of Lent, it is good to remember that God has already won on Easter Sunday 2000 years ago. We just have to keep fighting the good fight until the last day.