Don't Be a Vegan. Embrace The Inner Predator

 I still work a regular job, despite being retired from my former career as a civil and structural engineer.  One of my colleagues, who suffers from diabetes, recently stopped taking Metformin, a drug that the FDA no longer recommends, and started Ozempic.  I was vaguely aware of this new drug because of commercials with a portly woman dancing around and singing the praises of Ozempic.  Now, my friend eats a tremendous amount of junk food, no doubt because of his diabetes and the fact that he needs to eat every two hours or more to function.  But that same junk food is why he has diabetes in the first place, and why he continues with the disease.

I was reminded of all this when I read a story today, at the American Thinker entitled 'Miracle' weight loss drug manufacturers hauled into court by Ben Bartee. The issue is that in addition to diabetes, Ozempic and other "miracle" drugs do supposedly also cause some weight loss.  But that weight loss comes at a price that many would rather not pay.

I get a veritable avalanche of breathless complaints from (probably obese) individuals when I write about semaglutide (marketed as Wegovy and Ozempic in the United States). Their objections tend to go along the lines of: "but muh pharma. How else am I supposed to lose weight?"

The obeses call me a fascist – exercise and eating right now being apparently "right-wing." They say I'm unempathetic and don't understand their plight for even suggesting they don't turn to expensive pharmaceutical products as their first-resort solution to their problems.

I sympathize with the people who write in asking "how else am I supposed to lose weight." They have been lied to.  Now, I am no doctor, so I am only repeating here what I learned from someone who is a doctor, and from personal experience, which is admittedly a N = 1 situation. What I learned was that exercise, while good for you, has nothing to do with weight loss. You tend to eat as many calories as you burn, and our bodies are so efficient that you really don't burn all that much, unless you are a marathoner.  Meanwhile eating less and essentially starving yourself only works for so long. Eventually, you will become so starved you will overeat and gain the weight back plus more. You need change your diet. And by change, I do mean radically change it.

The issue is something called insulin resistance. All the grains you eat (think bread, cereals, pasta, bagels, donuts, muffins, and many junk snacks) and many vegetables like potatoes are turned into sugar in your system.  In addition, we eat pure sugar to boot in the form of soft drinks, syrup on pancakes and waffles, which are themselves just more sugar.  Honeybees are designed to eat this way; we are not.  The intake of sugar spikes your insulin levels. Over time, your body becomes resistant to insulin, which makes you hungrier, so you eat more, which spikes your insulin levels and...it becomes a vicious cycle. You get fat. Keep that up, and you will also get Type II diabetes because your poor pancreas just wears out.  Then there is research that suggests cancer may well be fed by sugars.

So, what is the solution? Carbohydrates, those things that turn into sugar in your digestive track, spike your insulin big time. And, as it turns out, you don't need carbohydrates at all. The Inuit live on a diet of fats and proteins (think fish, seals, whales) their entire lives, never eat vegetables, and are just fine, thank you. Other cultures have lived on mostly meat and saturated fats (not vegetable oils) with few of the diseases of civilization such as diabetes, heart attacks, being overweight and similar diseases.

I now eat a diet that is pretty much meat, especially beef with 50% being fats. I don't trim any fat off, and I like it well marbled. I eat other meats as well such as lamb, pork, and some poultry. I cook in lard and butter with the occasional tallow. I eat eggs cooked in butter. Eggs after all are complete kits to build a chick including all the vitamins and minerals necessary for that operation. What could be more perfect? Red meat, by the way, has all the vitamins and minerals you need in bioavailable form, unlike many supplements.

Being fat since I was 12, I have studied the weight loss field going way back. My first real breakthrough was reading Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution. But I have also studied the highly researched book by Nina Teicholz entitled Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Heathy Diet. Teicholz is a journalist but is also a featured speaker at professional meetings of diet doctors. Then there is Professor Tim Noakes, a sports medicine specialist and marathoner, who discovered that you can (and should) run marathons while eating a diet consisting of meat and fats. He wrote a book that updated the 19th century book The Banting Diet.  Professor Noakes does not recommend the old idea of carbohydrate loading, which was all the rage when I was a runner.

One book that is very informative is by Dr. Ken Berry entitled Lies My Doctor Told Me that explained where a lot of the myths about diet and disease come from. As a practicing physician, he is at pains to explain that while the doctors may tell you things that are not true, it is not because they want to lie to you. For the most part, they just don't know any better. They have been lied to.  In addition, he has a number of youtube videos on The Proper Human Diet.

Since I have been eating what Dr. Berry calls a Proper Human Diet, I have, of course, lost weight. I feel younger, and move better. I have gotten rid of many pains, and I now go up and down stairs like I was still 40, not 70. I am off all drugs.  I look forward to each new day. The government, Big Pharma, Big Food, and the media have been lying to you. Those who tell you to eat a vegan diet are lying as well. We are predators, probably the apex predator on the planet. We are designed to eat mostly meat and fats. Embrace that status.

Schools Are Not The Place To Learn About Evil

Dennis Prager wonders Why Young Americans Are Not Taught About Evil at townhall.com today. He posits a number of reasons that mostly revolve around the fact that the idea that most of the genocides of the 20th century were communists, and most of the teachers are communist sympathizers.

The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.

Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, "On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion," "Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart... All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it."

It is true that atheists believe that people can be "good" without God. However, without God to lay down what is right from wrong, what people believe to be right and wrong is just various peoples' opinions. Without the 6th commandment, is it really wrong to murder another human being? What about people with disabilities? Can one justify killing them on the grounds that they will have a lesser quality of life? What about the very old, those with dementia, Downs syndrome? I have heard all these things and more "justified" by people. God, on the other hand, is absolute that "Thou shall not murder." Fyodor Dostoevsky in his book The Brothers Karamazov said that 'If God does not exist, everything is permitted." He was right.

Many leftists, though not all, are atheists and believe that people are basically good. But I have also heard many Christians who believe that people are basically good too. I have no idea where this idea comes from, though. If one reads the Bible, it is one long series of stories of men sinning against God and man. Our God does not recognize small sins and major ones. There is no such thing as a little white lie. That little white lie earns the one who commits it the same punishment as a mass murderer. In either case, God cannot stand to look at us and must turn away. Thus, hell is spending eternity apart from God.

If you want to understand just how evil men are, think of a predator taking down and killing its prey. It is usually as quick as possible given the predators weapons. Now, look at how Christ was executed. He was crueling and brutally beaten, then nailed on a cross through the most sensitive nerves in order to maximize the torture of the victim. If they hadn't gone overboard with the flogging, he might have lasted longer on the cross, thus extending his misery. As it was, the crucifixion was an agonizing affair to which we wouldn't subject any other creature, man's inhumanity to man.

Finally, good and evil should be enforced in schools, but students should learn these things at home and at church under their parent's guidance. It is not the schools place. Indeed, we place too much on the schools. Schools are there to teach a few descrete subject matters including reading, writing, mathematics, history, science, and civics. What is not in the schools wheelhouse are sex, CRT, activism, politics, and religion. Note that while any religion should not be either emphasized or denigrated, clubs should be allowed. On the other hand a brief peek at history should show that men are evil.

Where I agree with Prager is that knowledge of evil should cause people to reject the Left, and seek Christianity, for Christ promises to take this sinful person and make him acceptable to God.

Is John Kerry a demonic entity wearing a skinsuit?

 Apparently, John Kerry (he is a Vietnam veteran, you know) has grown desperate to shore up his "climate change" agenda.  According to Ben Bartee at PJ Media 'Climate Change' High Priest John Kerry Declares Virtual War on 'Deniers,' Calls Them 'Inexorable Threat'. And like a good little far left fascist, he threatens those who won't bend the knee to his outright lies.

The corporate state is intent, apparently, on ramping up its propaganda against so-called “climate deniers,” presumably to set the rhetorical groundwork for more extreme legal and social action against them in the future. So it dispatched something called its “climate envoy,” John Kerry, to Scotland with that aim.

...snip...

Here is the most incendiary portion of his comments:

Without facts or economics on their side, they flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it. They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism,’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a cult is the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.

This is an obvious truism at this point, but, of course, I would be remiss not to point out that these people always do what they accuse their opponents of doing. Freud got it right. From the Hunter Biden laptop hoax to the “safe and effective” COVID vax lie, lying in the service of their various profiteering and social engineering projects is their modus operandi. Climate change is no exception.

One has to wonder on what basis does Mr. Kerry make these threats? Al Gore was famously a "journalism" major, a degree that does not even need to exist, like underwater basket weaving. What is John Kerry's expertise? It is certainly not economics, meteorology, physics, or anything else that would make him someone we should listen to.

But, more to the point, we are again seeing an attempt to limit and crack down on free expression and debate. According to Kerry, no one is allowed to question the man-made climate change agenda, despite that if everything the climate alarmists wanted to do was done, the climate would only be theoretically 1 or 2 degrees cooler than if we did nothing. That's 1 degree in a world that varies from -128 degrees Farenheit in Antartica to 134 degrees Farenheit in Death Valley. I don't know about you, but spending untold TRILLIONS of dollars for such a tiny result seems...how should I put this...the stupidest descision ever made by man, on par with Eve taking a bite of the apple. The battle of Gallipoli was a genius move by comparison.

Humanity, for the record, is, in fact, inexorably threatened by humanity itself in a very real and meaningful sense, but the threat is posed not by “climate change” deniers but by technocrats like John Kerry (assuming he is actually human and not a demonic entity wearing a skinsuit).

Indeed.

Gun Grabbers Gonna Do What Gun Gabbers Do

The "news" that They're coming for your guns is not news to gentle readers of this blog. I have constantly warned you that the real goal behind such innocuous sounding phrases as "common sense gun laws" was eventual confiscation. I have warned you that the ATF and many in Congress want to create a database of gun owners and the weapons they have in order to confiscate those weapons.

In their wet dreams, Leftist gun grabbers dream of the police going door to door and shooting the residents and them confiscating their weapons. Still, it is good to see that Brad A. Girton had piece at the American Thinker yesterday that provided that warning to a larger audience. Even if a person is not themselves a gun owner, he should understand that the Second Amendment indirectly supports all his other rights. For without the implicit threat of the Second Amendment, his, and your, rights would have been gone long ago.

Leftist politicians rarely tell the truth. Their policies and ideals are so bad that they can't, and they know it, thus the nonstop hyperbole, grandstanding, and projection. It's infuriating that so many Americans either are unable to see this, thanks in part to a complicit MSM, or so blinded by their ideology that they choose to ignore the fact that they get endlessly played by those they keep electing.

As with any good totalitarian leftist regime, gun confiscation is at the top of the leftist wish list. It's much easier to institute control and compliance over an unarmed citizenry than it is an armed one. They may deny it, but deep down, this is what they want. All you have to do is watch and listen to them.

You hear them use code words like "military-grade weapons" and "red flag laws." Even our leftist administrative state is getting in on the action, as the ATF is now targeting gun dealers by denying more and more of their business licenses. It probably won't be long until this administration starts mandating that banks curtail any financial dealings with gun manufacturers and dealers, just as it has with the fossil fuel industry. House bills are already written to pin blame on gun manufacturers for gun-related crimes. Once instituted, there is no way those business can survive the legal onslaught that would come their way. Leftists may not be able to repeal the 2nd Amendment, yet, but they can sure regulate their way around it.

Leftists rarely tell the truth, except when the threaten you.  Noting St. Louis mayor Jones recent rant on guns:

This leftist playbook was recently revealed by progressive St. Louis mayor Tishaura Jones. Under her leadership, the city recently passed Bill 29, which repealed the city's open carry law, but that wasn't enough for her. Now she's proposing more "commonsense gun legislation," including but not limited to red flag laws, background checks, banning "military-grade" weapons, and prohibiting insurrectionists and those convicted of hate crimes from owning guns.

While I find red flag laws deeply concerning, as they blatantly infringe upon an individual's right to bear arms simply via another's accusation, the last two in the list really set the alarm bells off. Of course, Mayor Jones didn't specifically say what constitutes a "military-grade weapon," and I'm not going to put words into her mouth, but any time the government looks to limit something, it's only getting started. Military-grade weapons, or "weapons of war," is an extremely vague term that can mean whatever the government wants it to mean, which is exactly how the government wants it. All these people need to do is to open that door and stick their foot in it, and then, over time they'll be able to step right through.

This brings me to Jones's most disturbing statement: "prohibiting insurrectionists and those convicted of hate crimes" from owning guns. We've already seen how loose our federal government is when it comes to labeling citizens as "insurrectionists." Would local leftist leaders be at all different? Of course not.

In fact, let's take this a step farther. With our federal Justice Department labeling concerned parents voicing opinions at school board meetings as "domestic terrorists," what would stop local authorities from targeting them as well? Or the fact that certain crimes against certain "oppressed" or "victim" groups, as determined by the administrative state, constitutes forgoing your 2nd Amendment rights, too? This is nothing but blatant political weaponization against "enemies" in the guise of "commonsense" gun laws, with the government picking and choosing the winners and losers. In the 17th century, they were called "witch hunts."

These are clear threats, issued by a mayor of a big city against people who have not committed any crime, but to defend themselves and their families against the gangsters, racketeers, drug dealers, human traffickers and other trash who are Mayor Jones preferred constituents. Let that sink in. The preferred constituents of the Democrat party are now no longer the hard working men and women, but the people stealing from the hard working men and women. And they do not want you to be able to defend yourself against these people.

Meanwhile, John Lott has a piece over at The Federalist asking Do Gun-Control Groups Care What Casuses Mass Shootings? Everytown Lawsuit Says No. In the case of the Buffaloe mass shooter, the evidence is staring them in the face, but they ignore it to go after the seller of the gun the mass shooter used. Once again we see gun-grabbers using the intramental theory of crime, when the real answer is the evil intent of the criminal.

The Biden administration has already put nearly 2,000 gun sellers out of business in just two years. Just a few years ago, a lawsuit helped drive the 200-year-old Remington Arms into bankruptcy. But activists won’t stop suing gun shops and anyone else that comes close to the industry.

Last week, attorneys from Everytown Law, the legal arm of Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, filed a lawsuit against a shop that sold the gun used in the fatal shooting of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022. The murderer is a racist who specifically targeted racial minorities. Everytown claims the attack “could have been prevented,” but in fact, the gun seller performed all of the proper background checks.

Others are also being sued, including the 18-year-old murderer’s parents and social media companies that allegedly “transformed and addicted” the murderer by allowing extremist content on their sites.

But the lessons from this shooting, like many other mass public shootings, are hiding in plain sight. One needs only to read the killer’s manifesto.

“Areas where CCW [carrying a concealed weapon] are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack,” wrote the shooter. “Areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack.”

But Everytown ignores those quotes. Nor does the organization mention that the Buffalo mass murderer self-identified as an “eco-fascist national socialist” and a member of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.” The shooter expressed concern that minority immigrants have too many children and will damage the environment. “The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world,” he wrote. “Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

First of all, doing everything correctly according to government mandates is supposed to be a defense against lawsuits. The fact that the suit was not immediately dismissed shows bias on the part of the judge. But just as a car dealer is not responsible for a drunk driver driving drunk in a car they have sold and killing someone, a gun dealer is not responsible for someone misusing a gun they have sold. But this logic is lost on Everytown because their true goal is to confiscate guns. Of course, they jump on a heinous crime to promote their agenda, but it is the agenda that they are advancing. That cause is gun confiscation.

Unfortunately, lawsuits, such as this one by interest groups like Everytown, are more interested in punishing people they oppose or causing others to change their behavior in desired ways than seeking the truth. With billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s deep pockets, Everytown does not worry about funding its lawsuits. The same can’t be said for their targets, such as a small gun store. Social media companies aren’t going to be bankrupted by the lawsuits, but they may be even more likely to censor material that gun-control groups such as Everytown dislike.

The killer wasn’t born an eco-fascist. For the sake of our society’s health and safety, we should be thinking twice before engaging in hyperbolic alarmism that can work impressionable young people into a frenzy, though lawsuits when we disagree with people isn’t the obvious answer. And when someone does go crazy, people need to be able to defend themselves. It’s either that or we could give in to gun-control activists by giving shooters more “great places of attack.”

The Cooling Effect of Carbon Dioxide

 Well, this is interesting.  Tom Anderson has put the global warming and CO2 issues in perspective for us, using actual...you know...physics.  His piece can be found at the American Thinker today entitled Button Upu Your Overcoat. The greenhouse effect, while true for greenhouses, has always been suspect when applied on a planetary basis. Looking at CO2 from a physics perspective, it is not a warming agent, but actually a coolant; one of a number of negative feedback mechanism that prevent our planet from running away in any direction.

The idea that carbon dioxide (CO2) drives global warming or “climate change” now enjoys unquestioned authority and near universal approval. As burgeoning public policy, nationally and in some states, it is seeping into what once were private matters of choice (e.g., light bulbs, kitchen cooktops). Many scientists, primarily physicists, consider the belief pure supposition, however, and colossally off track.

...snip...

Evidence is that CO2 is overall a coolant. First, it radiates incoming solar energy and outgoing terrestrial heat away to space. This is visible as cooling in satellite images not only of Earth but also of Mars and Venus, climate change’s orbiting poster child.

It is an “infrared radiation active” gas, absorbing and emitting radiant energy from the sun -- but not the entire spectrum. Like any molecule, it absorbs only “spectral bands” (beams) of solar energy (sunlight) that “resonate” with its “quantum number,” a measure of the energetic space between its nucleus and electron rings as developed by Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the early 20th Century.

And this:

NASA scientists advised against using fossil fuels to warm the planet in 1971 because they were “atmospheric coolants” with a potential, alarmists claimed, for triggering an ice age. They are still coolants.

Also, while aerosols from combustion cool in direct proportion to their increase, CO2’s warmer (but still tardy) emission bands would quickly “saturate,” damping off any temperature increase. All later studies and the IPCC agree on this, and it means no “runaway warming.”

All of this has been known to the IPCC and climate scientists since at least the 1970s, when global cooling was the scare, but probably well before then. Whether it is global cooling, or global warming or just climate change, the big bad bogeyman has always been fossil fuels. Why is that? Because, this has always been about forcing the West, particularly the United States to give up fossil fuels to weaken it. It seems to be working.

Saying the Sotto Voce Part Out Loud

 Yesterday, at the American Thinker Vic Hughes gave us The Blunt Truth About Global Warming Models. I urge gentle readers to go and read the whole article, but the (spoiler alert) blunt truth is that these models can't predict the temperature of any global climate.

I may be one of the first scientists in the country to know that predicting long-term temperatures is not possible.

Almost 50 years ago, while in grad school, I had a contract from an Army research lab to use a state-of-the-art models to predict long-term temperatures. I quickly realized that the goal of the project, to forecast accurately the temperature long-term, was impossible because small errors in data inputs could result in huge forecasts errors. Equally important was that errors compounded so quickly that it caused the error ranges to explode. The results were junk. As an example, what good is a temperature forecast with an error range of plus or minus one hundred degrees?

I give university speeches to scientists and tell them: if you ever see some data or forecasts, your first question has to be "what's the error range?" If you don't know the error range, the data are almost useless. It's not coincidental that the Climate Mafia don't highlight this problem

So what about modern technology solving these problems? These error problems are still true today. It's not that the long-term temperature forecasts are wrong; it's that they can't be right. All global warming modelers know this, or they are incredibly stupid, or they just lie about it for money or power.

Got that? It's not that the long-term temperature forecasts are wrong (which they are) but that they can't be right. Think about it. Our local weather forecaster seems very competent at using the various near-term models to predict the short-term weather between a few hours and 7 days out. But if you notice, all her predictions are stochastic in nature. We have tomorrow, for example, a 20% chance of rain "later" in the day. What then will the range be 100 years from now?  Truth be told, the range of predicted temperatures exceeds the diurnal range.

Now, I realize the difference between "weather" and "climate." But climate is made up of temperature, humidity, rainfall patterns, vegetation, and so forth. In fact, climate is as regional and as specific as is weather. And the sum of the "weather" makes up "climate." Which brings us back to the fact that long-term forecasting of temperature cannot be right.

Since your input data are critical to forecasting the Chaotic Future, fully understanding past temperatures is also critical. The Climate Mafia create the entirely bogus concept of an "average Earth temperature" to create a bogus base data set for their bogus models. The Warming Scammers like to use a garbage temperature history that starts about 1850. The Scammers say that their increased temperatures since 1850, just coincidentally at the end of a three-hundred-year cooling cycle, represent the rise of the industrial pollution age. In 1850, and even in 1950, only a small percentage of world's population could even be considered close to industrialized. Look at India, Africa, and China then: almost medieval energy use patterns until really recently. Humans have been around in their current form for many tens of thousands of years. To say the weather since the 1850s is representative of anything from a statistical perspective is a joke.

So what kind of temperature data do we have since 1850?

With oceans and ice caps covering over 80+% of the world's surface, we have virtually no reliable long-term data on any of that, other than the last few decades. Even then, you are talking about a relatively small number of measuring devises in all those places. (Do you check the weather a few hundred miles away to know if you need an umbrella?) How about the temperature trends in deserts, on mountains, in the middle of Africa, South America, Siberia — at sea level, a hundred feet elevation, a thousand feet elevation? The data are so bad in all of the Southern Hemisphere — half the globe — that there are only a few datasets even close to reliable since the 1850s. There are almost no real, reliable, and complete long-term data globally, and particularly none reliable enough to create model of a chaotic system entirely dependent on very accurate input data.

So, why pick 1850? What makes that the goldilocks year when everything was just right? Man has been around for 1.2 million years, of which Homo Sapiens has been around 200,000 years. We know the climate has been much warmer in those 200,000 years. Did anyone study what effect those warmer temperatures had? No, they did not because the entire climate mafia is a stove pipe operation, which doesn't bring in other relevant disciplines such as archeology, paleontology, and so forth. The fact is that the conclusions were already made, and then the facts were force fit to draw the pre-determined conclusions.

Once again, I need to point out that most of the environmentalist mafia's beliefs are based on an assumption that the earth is a fragile environment. Further, they believe that man's technological prowess can damage the world forever and make the earth uninhabitable. Again, if archeology were studied as part of the climate prediction process, they would see that past civilizations have cut down vast swaths of rain forests in the Amazon for farming. But when those civilizations disappeared, the jungle relentlessly took over and left no trace. Plants and animals seem able to survive a wide variety of climatic conditions.

More importantly, say you had perfect data and a perfect model. How could we possibly know what impact that will have? Another thought experiment: How much will temperatures vary where you live today? Ten degrees? Twenty degrees? Thirty? How much does it vary in a year? For most of the U.S., that number might be 50 degrees, a 100 degrees. So plants and animals have adapted to 20-degree temperatures changes in a day or 100-degree temperature changes in a year. Somehow a 1- or 2-degree temperature change in a hundred years is going to take them out? That's ridiculous.

I alluded above to a pre-determined conclusion, to which the climate mafia had cherry picked and fitted facts to match. That pre-determined conclusion was the neo-malthusian belief that there are too many of us on "space ship earth." The world is estimated to be carrying 8 billion of us today. For neo-malthusians, however, they are sure that we are running out of various strategic metals and other resources. Remember when "peak oil" was a thing? Then we discovered fracking and suddenly we have over 200 years of proven reserves. Having not studied physics, they don't realize that all the resources that the earth had in the past are still here and can be recycled. Man is not like other animals, after all.

So what does all this have to do with climate? The climate scam was created to force the population down. How much seems to be under debate. Fossil fuels were seen as the great engine of human growth. But fossil fuels also put CO2 into the atmosphere. And CO2 had been shown to be a greenhouse gas. Indeed, when pumped into greenhouses, it caused plants to grow more abundantly. Voi'la. Thus the drum beat started with books like Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb and scare stories in the media. Eventually it became government policy with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol by Al Gore in 1997. Note that the Senate has never ratified the Kyoto protocol. Nevertheless, the U.S. government has continued to act on it as if it had.

Thus we come to the topic of today's highlighted piece by Jerome R. Corsi at the American Thinker entitled Will New EPA Regulations Starve Millions of People? Corsi points to a 45 page comment on regulations proposed by the EPA by Richard Lindzen and William Happer, both prominent climate scientists. Happer and Lindzen believe that the EPA regulations will kill millions of starvation if implemented.

Two distinguished climate scientists have filed with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a 45-page comment on the proposed regulation the EPA announced on May 11, 2023, setting emission standards that would require nearly all of coal- and gas-powered plants in the U.S.to capture almost all—90 percent—of their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2038 or shut down.

In their comment, William Happer, professor of physics, emeritus, Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, emeritus, make both a legal and a scientific case that the EPA’s proposed new rule is based on ideologically driven polices with no basis in legitimate climate science. In a document that appears to be the prelude to filing a lawsuit to block the EPA from implementing the proposed regulation, Happer and Lindzen lay out a science-based case arguing that the new EPA rules designed to limit the use of hydrocarbon fuels in the nation’s power plants could end up reducing the world’s food supply so dramatically that billions of people worldwide would be at risk of death by starvation.

As the Left gets closer and closer to achieving its goals, the sotto voce part becomes quite loud. They intend to starve a great part of the world population to death as the most practical way to reduce the population numbers. These people, who have arrogated to themselves the role of God, in their pride, believe that in the future too many of us will be useless eaters, so need to be disposed of. The arrogance is breathtaking. Let us pray we can stop them yet.

Our Ruling Class Pretends to Be God

 J. B Shurk  has a rather personal and meditative essay that starts out recounting a nurse who killed children she viewed as not worthy of life.  It is sickening to think that someone took such a decision unto herself.  But what allowed her to believe that this was her decision to make? For that matter, what makes women believe it is their decision to murder her unborn child?   Exploring the answer to such question generated Save Lives, Save the World at the American Thinker.

A thirty-three-year-old British nurse was recently convicted of murdering "seven fragile babies" and attempting to kill at least six others. For her "campaign of child murder," she has been given a life sentence with no chance of parole. All of her victims had been born with medical complications and were only a few hours to a few days old. She injected air into their bloodstreams and added poisons to their intravenous feeds. During her murder spree, she consciously targeted the "extremely vulnerable." Her ordinary appearance combined with her self-image as a "conscientious, hardworking, knowledgeable nurse" provides another stark reminder of the prevalence in this world of what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil."

Crimes such as these affect me. I feel the same revulsion when I see what remains after the bloody massacres carried out by child soldiers in parts of Africa or by gangs of teenagers on America's city streets. The carnage is always so reckless and perfunctory — as if such consequential damage has no consequence at all. This soul-destroying idea that life does not matter — that murder is as insignificant as doing laundry — is the kind of evil that sends shivers down my spine. It is also the kind of evil that totalitarian regimes mass-produce in faithless societies.

I will not pretend to know what form of wickedness so contorted that British nurse's heart that she could maliciously betray her most sacred professional duties, but it is difficult not to wonder whether a Western culture that celebrates abortion and euthanasia as exemplars of "freedom" might have had something to do with the blight on her soul. When ordinary people are force-fed a media diet in which "shouting your abortion" is glorified as female empowerment and suicide is condoned as a moral choice, they lose sight of the precious sanctity of every life.

I feel like screaming, "Life matters!" Protect it; cherish it; fight for every breath you've got. These temporary lives we have are not ours alone. They were not given to us by an all-knowing political State. They were given to us by our all-knowing God. To treat life so flippantly as to believe it means nothing when we choose to destroy it surely must sadden and offend our Creator in ways that we cannot comprehend. To reach out and save someone — now, that is a blessing for both the life being saved and the life doing the saving. In every act that helps make it possible for another to live, we fill our lives with life, too. Imagine if Western governments used the power of their media platforms to promote that truth.

Here, Shurk's meditation takes a turn, noting that when life is considered meaningless, then it becomes cheap. On the other hand, when we realize that our lives have never been our own, that our lives belong to the one who created us, and that each one is precsious and unique, then we discover that our lives do have meaning.

What are we to do about this ongoing threat to humanity? We must return to God, of course! We must return to a culture that remembers how to celebrate life. We must reach out to others and give them purpose and, in so doing, save those who are already slipping away. The truth of the matter is that politics and elections will never accomplish what you are already capable of accomplishing this very day.

...snip...

Seek God's guidance, defend life, and find happiness — that's a far more serious promise than the horse pucky that Klaus Schwab and the WEF-holes sling around.

When I was young, I knew everything. It wasn't until I started learning that I realized how little I knew. The older I get, the more certain I've become that I'll be buried with more questions than answers. Yet I know this: there is no hole in our lives too big for God to fill. That makes sense, doesn't it? God created the world and everything in it; there is no problem weighing us down that He has not also afforded us the means of lifting from our shoulders. I have learned far more from those times when I've been knocked down onto the mat than those times I remained standing — because every difficult experience has forced me to figure out how to get back up and find my balance.

Like Shurk, once I discovered that I didn't know so very much, I began to question everything. That humbling of myself led me to God. This in turn is what first convinced me that the whole global warming...er...cooling...er....climate change theory was nonsense. Indeed, the underlying assumption of the environmentalist movement (not the same as the conservation and stewardship movements) is flawed. The unspoken assumption is that our environment is fragile, on a knife edge even. And our technologies are so powerful that they threaten to overwhelm this fragile environment and kill us all. But an omniscient God would have foreseen these things and would design our world so we couldn't screw it up as the enviro-whackos believe. As I have studied over the years, I keep finding evidence that He is in control, not the "experts" who believe themselves to be at the helm.

The genius of our founders was that they understood that there is a God, and that they were not him.  This understanding led to the founders creating a Republic that attempted to protect our pre-existing rights to life, liberty, and happiness.   Too bad our ruling class does not have this understanding. 

More Reasons Not To Buy a Tesla

 Over at The Federalist, Stella Morabito has a report on her vacation experience renting a Tesla. So, how did she like her Tesla? Inquiring minds want to know. She tells us I Rented A Tesla For A Week And Am Totally Sold on Gas Powered Cars. I have not test driven a Tesla, but I have driven a Chevrolet Bolt once for a short ride from Chapel Hill to the Raleigh-Durham Airport. I can attest to feeling stressed as I did so over this short ride. Supposedly the car was fully charged all night at the Enterprise office. However, shortly after getting on the road, the car indicated a low battery charge, and this continued all the way to the airport.

But let Morabito tell you herself:

While planning a week-long trip to the Seattle area recently, I wondered aloud to my husband if we should rent a Tesla. Neither of us had ever driven an electric vehicle before. The price difference between the long-range Tesla Model 3 and a standard mid-size gas-fueled vehicle was pretty negligible.

We agreed it would be an interesting learning experience despite our objections to the eco-agenda to phase out gas-powered vehicles. We also don’t believe EVs are particularly environmentally friendly since they need batteries that require the strip-mining of rare earth minerals such as lithium and cobalt. The World Economic Forum knows this very well and is likely looking for heavy limits on EV mobility after eliminating gas-powered vehicles.

But more people like us are also finding some very practical reasons to object to Teslas. There’s a glut of them on the market now despite subsidies and price reductions. After test-driving one for an entire week (instead of just 30 minutes,) we learned we will never buy a Tesla or any EV as long as we have the option of gas-powered vehicles or even hybrids. Read on for seven big reasons why. (Yes, “mileage may vary.”)

And here is where Morabito gives her reasons, most of which are deal breakers. She isn't nit-picking, these are very real problems. If they do eventually ban gasoline powered cars, I expect the U.S. will resemble Cuba where 1950s automobiles are kept running on canibalized parts long after the cars useful life.

The first thing that she mentions is that driving an EV is a nail-biting experience as the car's charge keeps dropping. Will it make it to the next charging station? This is because there are only 15,000 charging stations in the entire U.S, compared to 50,000 gas stations. The length of time required to charge an EV means that it would be nice to use that time more wisely than sitting and waiting...and waiting...and waiting. Perhaps always have a book available? Another problem is that those charging stations are not evenly scattered, and in some cases, you may be taking your life in your hands if you have to recharge at night.

She notes that texting while driving is required. I have experienced this on some cars where the radio is a touch screen affair. But a radio can be turned off and doesn't hamper your drive at all. It is annoying, but not dangerous.

Texting while driving is considered dangerous and mostly illegal. How ironic that in a Tesla, you are dependent upon the touch screen that sits between the driver and passenger seat like a big laptop. The interface is not intuitive, and autopilot is too new and unpredictable to use safely.

Luckily for us, there was always a passenger available to cope with the screen. We had to be in motion in order to check for a charging station nearby. There’s nothing intuitive about the air conditioning. Ditto for the radio, which we could only “turn off” by reducing the volume. The windshield wipers are supposed to be automatic, but when it started raining, we realized they were “turned off.” After fishing around the screen, we finally pulled over to consult YouTube to get them working again.

The door locks are another issue. On a normal car, even if the battery goes dead, you can unlock the car with a key cleverly hidden in the remote. Similarly, if you lose battery power in a Tesla, or heaven forbid the battery lights on fire, and you are inside the car, you may be stuck. On a normal car, you can still manually unlock the car, but a Tesla?  Of course, the lack of a manual is a necessary virtue signal to the "paperless" male bovine excrement. When you are out in freezing weather, and it is raining, and your signal is only 1 bar, do you really want to be looking on your phone for instructions on how to change a tire only to discover you don't have a spare tire?

I agree with Mrs. Morabito. Don't buy the things. Period.

Here's a wild idea: Teach each and every child proper English

 I found this profoundly disturbing.  What is the purpose of educating children if we are not going to educate them, but rather affirm that their ignorance is correct?  We should save the taxpayer money and just fire the teachers.  After all, what of value do they teach?  Let's be clear here: thousands of generations of children have picked up sex on their own, no special training necessary.  As for the rest of the woke agenda, we got along fine without it before.  So just fire the teachers.

Olivia Murray has a post at the American Thinker today entitled Teaching proper English to black children is 'white racial superiority' for California 'educators' . It should be seen rather as doing these children a favor. My grandmother grew up and lived her entire life in a rural farming community where   certain idiomatic eccentricities were prevalent. But my mother displayed none of these because teachers taught her the right way to speak.  Will children be resentful now?  They may be.  But they will be appreciative later when they realize what a great gift was given to them.  And their children will not have any resentment, since they will grow up hearing proper English.

What happens when there’s a spelling test, and “ask” appears? If only certain colored children (white) were taught the proper pronunciation, that means only certain colored children (white) will be able to sound it out and spell it correctly — talk about a disadvantage, manufactured no less, and only possible when you have leftists doing the “thinking.”

What Ms. Drake is suggesting, would actually yield a wildly bigoted result; she’s advocating we take the first step towards illiteracy, but only for those in the black community. How’s that for irony? In a roundabout way, she argues that withholding a legitimate education (that’s what objective English instruction is, after all) from black children is the good and moral thing to do. For someone who would undoubtedly claim that slavery is the worst evil to ever exist, what does she think of wholesale illiteracy? Is that not slavery?

...snip...

There’s this wild concept, one these teachers probably haven’t ever considered, but it’s pretty simple: just treat every child equally. We live in an English-speaking nation, so if you’re an educator, maybe just teach proper English to each and every child, regardless of their skin color or how they speak. A good English education should not be exclusive to white students, but rather available to all students. A child’s future is infinitely brighter when they understand the native language and can speak it well.

A Little Good News

 How about a little good news for a change?   We are always hearing that the sky is about to fall at any moment.  And I am just as guilty of bringing you, gentle readers, the bad news.  But as Marian Tupy tells us at Prager University, it's The Best Time To Be Alive. And it truly is, at least for us, and for millions of people around the world. It is better to live today in a small apartment with air conditioning, running water that is safe, indoor toilet, electricity, and all the rest, than it was to live in Versailles Palace. I can remember when there was no internet and everything you learned was by going to the library. But having access to a library and an automobile was more than my grandparents had. My parents grew up going to the outhouse. Ugh.

Most stories you see on television are designed to scare you. In fact, there is no climate crisis. Yes, it may get warmer, or cooler but future generations will survive. The world is not overpopulated. We are not running out of oil. In fact, we have 200 years supply in the ground right here in America, if the Biden administration would let us use it. Our crime problems are easily solved, again if a certain political party would let us. But please, go watch the 5-minute video, and turn off the news.

Another Branch of the Deep State Needs Cleaning Up

 Olivia Murray over at the American Thinker has a post reporting that ATF's director says the quiet part out loud and refers to inalienable rights as a 'priviledge'. Apparently the Biden administration has decided that if the Supreme Court wants to reinforce the 2nd Amendment rights under the Constitution, they will simply ensure that there are no gun dealers form whom to buy. At some point, the Court will have to deal with the right of dealers to engage in lawful commerce. Really, this is just more lawfare.

According to the Western Journal the ATF has been shutting down FFL dealers at alarming numbers over the last several years. When will the one near you be shut down, and for what minor infraction.

Now aside from the fact that the ATF has absolutely no right to exist, I know enough about the bureau to know they have one of the worst reputations out of the more than 438 federal agencies, so it’s reasonable to assume at least some of the “compliance” investigations weren’t “lawful” — as loosely as you can use that term for an agency that’s unlawfully operating. Just because the ATF calls their unreasonable searches and seizures a “request” or a compliance “inspection” doesn’t make it so; I can only wonder if 122 firearms dealers last year told federal agents to take a hike until they came back with a warrant?

According to the Western Journal article, Joe Biden’s ATF Director Steve Dettelbach said of the business owners with revoked licenses, “They’re not going to have the privilege of being a gun dealer anymore.”

Someone needs to remind Dettelbach, and every other aspiring despot in Biden’s regime, that rights come from God, not government — the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, was written to affirm this reality, and this government, this brilliant and extraordinary new government conceived in liberty and born out of a rebellion to tyrants, would guarantee that it was not a benevolent authority doling out “privileges” at it saw fit, but rather a safeguard for inalienable rights that came from a moral Authority; nothing more, and nothing less.

The ATF is supposed to enforce the Congressionally written laws governing alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives fairly. They are not supposed to inject their own personal agenda into their enforcement. And speaking of agendas, no matter who the President is, the ATF has had an anti-gun agenda. But keep in mind that guns are just tools, objects that have no evil spirit of their own. Therefore, there can only be one reason for the huge effort to deny Americans their Second Amendment rights...

Playing Games With Us

One must understand what the Left is attempting to achieve with the Trump indictments, or we are likely to find ourselves out maneuvered again. Catherine Yang and Jan Jekielek at the Epoch Times have an important article explaining what is really going on at Trump Indictments Meant To Demoralize and Provoke Americans: James Lindsay. I hear a lot of people who are beyond outraged by the Trump indictments, particularly because so many Democrats have committed actual crimes, yet suffer no legal jeopardy. I fear that such people are ready to follow anyone who claims to sock it to the other side. But such blind rage is not what we need. What we need is a dispassionate restoration of actual equal justice under the law. What we need is a restoration of the rule of law and Constitutional governance.

“There’s a very deliberate operation going on,” Mr. Lindsay said on an episode of American Thought Leaders: Now with Jan Jekielek on EpochTV. People in the know refer to it as “fifth generational warfare,” he said, and although it may sound convoluted, it is simple once you look at the tactics.

They then take us on a tour of these tactics and their purpose:

DARVO, or “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender,” is a psychological tactic that has been coined to describe a pattern of manipulation by abusers.

“Every time that something comes out, they deny that it happened, they attack the person making the accusation, and then they try to reverse the roles of victim and offender so that they’re the poor victim, but somebody else is the offender,” Mr. Lindsay said.

He says we all see this tactic play out in the media cycles: “Every time there’s a scandal that comes out around the Biden family, they turn around and they deny that it happened, attack Trump, and try to make it out that Trump is some kind of actual criminal offender and they of course, are not.”

“This is a classic technique,” Mr. Lindsay said.

...snip...

The 1960s “Rules for Radicals” have been updated, and Mr. Lindsay says the playbook can be found online at BeautifulTrouble.org.

One of these core principles is “middle-level violence,” which puts your opponent in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” decision dilemma.

“You don’t hit them too hard, you don’t hit them too soft, so you’re clearly not the aggressor … and then you make use of their reaction,” Mr. Lindsay said. It bleeds into a second tactic of taking advantage of that provoked response.

In familiar terms, parents may remember a common provocation tactic between siblings: a younger brother holds up his finger in front of his sibling’s face. “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you!” he taunts.

“There’s no physical contact, so there’s no justification for a physical response,” Mr. Lindsay explained. “And if you give one it’s going to be ‘Mom, he hit me!’ right? And then at the same time it’s so overwhelmingly annoying that you can’t ignore it.

“It’s enough of a provocation to necessitate a response, but not enough of a provocation to justify the response that you get. That’s middle-level violence,” he said.

This tactic is being played out with the “vague” and “sprawling” indictments against President Trump, he explained.

Clearly the tactics are working. We are all annoyed. What is happening to Trump is clearly unfair, but letting those who commit actual crimes go scot free is unfair also both to us and to them. When we let people off, we deny their humanity.  For surely, they know right from wrong but chose wrong.   

 At the same time, I am concerned that we are getting locked into a Trump nomination. Now, Trump did a lot of the things that conservatives have sought for years. But he wasn't perfect, and we should not be building a cult of personality. Rather we should be looking around for a plan B and plan C at the very least. We should also be looking into election integrity.  And a prayer of two never hurt.

Is the Catholic Hierarchy Ashamed of Christ?

 I got home yesterday from work and was too exhausted to put Andrea Widburg's post at the American Thinker up for gentle readers to ponder, so I am doing it this morning. Widburg's post is entitled In Chicago, another sign of the Catholic Church's decline. In this case, Chicago's Cardinal Cupich decided to attend a gathering of "faiths" in a mistaken attempt at ecumenicism. Note that ecumenicism is meant as between Christian denominations, not to include paganism, Islam and other belief systems.

Ms. Widburg is apparently Jewish. The God of Creation first revealed Himself to Abram, later called Abraham, the father of all Hebrews. And she is correct that before He revealed Himself, the entire world was pagan. They generally tried to appease their capricious "gods" by sacrifices, often human sacrifices including their children. Jonathon Cahn writes about these ancient "gods" in his book Return of the Gods, specifically Baal, Astarte (Ishtar) and Molech. The Catholic Church employs trained exorcists to cast out demons, so why a Catholic Cardinal would be associating himself with demons is cause for concern.

I’m not a Catholic, but I have an abiding respect for Catholicism’s role in bringing down the paganism that dominated Europe before the Church took over. At least one Catholic cardinal, though, seems to have forgotten that time. How else can we explain Cardinal Blase Cupich’s decision to participate in a Wiccan-organized conference to “enrich” his faith?

Before the Jews, the world was entirely pagan. People across the known world worshipped a panoply of gods tied to the visible and invisible phenomena of the earth. The gods didn’t provide an overarching morality. Instead, they were capricious beings that constantly needed to be placated, and they especially liked blood, whether animal or human. The stories of the Roman gods are a soap opera of vanity, matricide, patricide, incest, insanity, and random violence.

The Jews brought something new: a single, invisible God who had a powerful moral code that He demanded of His followers. The shorthand for this is “ethical monotheism.” Through Jesus, ethical monotheism spread beyond the Jews. Eventually, throughout Western Europe, it was the Catholic Church that took up this banner.

I genuinely admire practicing Jews, even though I think they are wrong. But one has hope that the Holy Spirit will guide them to Christ, who was of course a Jew. Widburg notes that in some cases, Christianity was advanced by the sword. Now there were some cases of discrimination against Jews in Europe that probably caused some to at least feign Christian beliefs in order to save their lives. Look at George Soros, who participated in the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews. These were wrong-headed, period. If she is writing about the Crucades, these were actually self defense, and as I have maintained, are perfectly within the Christian and Jewish tradition.

It is as if the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is ashamed of Christ. But as Christ said in Luke 9:26 "For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels." The Church should stand up to the world and loudly proclaim the Gospel at every opportunity rather than bowing to it, or giving it any credibility by claiming "ecumenism." Unfortunately, the average faithful Catholic has no idea what the Catholic hierarchy is doing

If the Catholic Church doesn’t stand against paganism, one has to worry what basic principle it will abandon next.

Get Used To Being Called "Peasant"

 John F. DiLeo notes that Those EV Shortcomins Aren't Shortcomings At All. What he means by "shortcomings" are the impractical nature of electric vehicles, powered as the are by huge, expensive and environmentally destructive batteries, for doing the things normal Americans do. I recently saw an advertisement for an electric Jeep Wrangler that showed it out into the wilderness. No mention of just how they were going to recharge to get home again. So why isn't this a shortcoming?

Stay home. Stay safe. Stay still. Stay where we can watch you.

The conclusion is inescapable: In the final analysis, the EV pushers don’t see any gaps or contradictions. All the needs you have that EVs simply don’t meet, can’t meet, will never meet – well, these aren’t really needs at all.

You’re wrong to want to gather in groups of thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. All those EV shortcomings aren’t really shortcomings at all. Freedom of assembly, as described in the obsolete First Amendment, is dangerous, don’t you see, from the perspective of your betters.

I believe that the ultimate goal is to get us to all buy an EV, and 10 years later, no cars at all. The real goal is to keep you close to home, just like most people lived prior to the invention of the bicycle in the late 19th century. Thus 15-minute walking cities.  Travel will be for the kleptocratic elites. You and me? Get used to being called "peasant."

Speaking Out

At the American Thinker today, Greg Maresca continues to warn that the Biden Administration, and by extension the Democrat party either by cheering it on, or by its silence, is in the throes of persecuting the Christian church. You can find it at Religious persecution in a first world country. Of course, it is happening not just here, but also in Finland where two Lutherans are being prosecuted for straying from the LBGTQabcdefg++ othodoxy and quoting the Bible.  The horror!

In February, an FBI whistleblower from their Richmond, Virginia field office leaked a report about spying on "radical-traditionalist Catholics," labeling them as "potential domestic terrorists."

FBI director Christopher Wray claimed the report was "a single product by a single field office."

Hearings conducted by chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan revealed evidence that Wray had perjured himself, as FBI field offices in Los Angeles and Portland and perhaps others were also monitoring Catholics.

Perhaps this is why the FBI is too busy to investigate the Richmond riots orchestrated by Antifa in 2020 or those BLM-led riots and their $90 million in donations that vaporized into luxury real estate for their leaders.

Just as law abiding gun owners are not the problem when it comes to any sort of crime, let alone gun crime, so traditional Catholics are not the problem either. Yes, many do use battle rosaries. Indeed, I own one myself, and have prayed the rosary. But a battle rosary is a weapon to battle the Evil One, not to do battle against people. One prays the rosary for God's intervention against abortion, or persecution, or for the health of a loved one, for example. Indeed, the faithful believe that God hears our prayers and responds in His time. So, unless, the FBI and other government agencies are being led by the Evil One, there is no terroristic threat. But if they indeed are being led by the Evil One, then they should fear rosaries.

Moreover, the FBI has been delinquent in investigating pro-life clinic fires and church arsons, while their brethren in the DOJ keep the heat on the Little Sisters of the Poor. "Catholics" the FBI should be investigating are Hunter and Joe Biden.

The FBI has morphed into yesteryear's Soviet KGB.

When was the last time a Catholic posed a threat or orchestrated a terrorist attack? Watch out for their assault rosaries, poisoned holy water, and putrefying incense, and especially those who attend the traditional Latin Mass.

Rep. Jordan's Judiciary Committee will not resolve this grave injustice that is nothing but a rogue collection of redactions, obfuscations, and delays. James Comey, Merrick Garland, and Wray will never be held responsible any more than the Clintons, Obama, or that self-professed "devout Catholic" Biden will.

So much for tolerance, equity, and inclusion.

That collective bureaucratic yawn coming from Washington will only embolden the weaponization of the federal government — the nation's true domestic threat.

Democrats believe they are above reproach as they smear their doors with the blood of aborted babies, serving as their political Passover. However, when human nature and history weigh in, as they most certainly will, fate will have its say.

I wonder if those persecuting Christians even understand the references made in the last paragraph. More appropriate might be that abortion is the equivalent of feeding children to into the firey belly of Molech. We know Jesus weeps every time a child is aborted. I ask each time someone speaks in favor of aborting our chidren: Do these people hear what they are saying? It is the same when people mutilate children so they can pretend to be another sex other than the one they were born to be. Do these people hear themselves?

Mr. Maresca quotes Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller's famous poem about people standing by while first the communists, then the trade unionists, then the Jews were persecuted. But of course, Hitler persecuted Christians as well. I will not stand by without at least saying something. I may disagree with certain Catholic doctrines, but we all believe that Jesus Christ is Lord of All. We all believe in the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I will not stand by, and neither should you.

China's Weaknesses

 Andrea Widburg has a good quick analysis of China's internal problems. Widbrug in turn points to a video by Ben Shapiro that names five weaknesses, some of which could be solved, but are not likely to be. But the majority of them are unavoidable. Shapiro's video is only 9 minutes long, so it is worth watching.

Shapiro is also correct that if one listens to many sources, one gets the impression that China is an overwhelmingly powerful country that is going to eat our lunch soon economically, militarilly, and technologically. These messages are intended to keep us scared and divert our attention from things happening at home that point to a growing tyranny.

Watch Shapiro's video, but keep your eyes on the corruption going on here at home.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a German word that means the pleasure derived by someone from another's misfortune. Usually, someone must feel that the other's misfortune is somehow deserved. Otherwise, one would feel sympathy for them. But in the case of Dick's Sporting Goods, their misfortune is richly deserved. Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms has the story entitled Dick's may have to close stores due to anti-gun decisions.

According to National Review

In remarks made to the Goldman Sachs Retailing Conference and first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, CEO Edward Stack explained that the 3.9 percent decline in the company’s sales during the third quarter could be partially attributed to its ban on the sale of assault-style rifles and on the sale of all firearms to customers under 21 years old — both of which were implemented in the wake of the Parkland shooting in February.

As Knighton notes, it was perfectly within the rights of Dick's to eliminate AR-15s from its stores. They are a private company, after all. But then:

Honestly, it couldn’t happen to a better company. You see, while I might not like its decisions, Dick’s is a private entity (even if publicly traded) and can make whatever decisions it chooses so long as it doesn’t disobey the law. Had it stuck with just not selling AR-15s, so be it. I’d have thought it was a stupid decision but within the company’s rights.

But Dick’s couldn’t just leave it there. It had to institute a discriminatory age limit for long gun sales – something that is blatantly illegal to do – and then double down by hiring lobbyists to push an assault weapon ban.

Dick’s deserves what’s happening to it.

We fortunately have a Cabela's nearby, and on the occasion, I need something in the way of sporting goods, I go there.  There is no equivalent word in English, but what I feel about Dick's is schadenfreude.

Election Integrity

I have two today, both from the American Thinker dealing with election integrity. The first is entitled Muskegon: Who says heroes are hard to find? by Jack Gleason. Gleason is reporting on a Gateway Pundit report that proves election fraud took place at least in Michigan. But the implications are that it probably occured in numerous states by what is essentially a ballot manufacturing operation. It has been turned over to the FBI, where it will clearly die because too many Democrats will be implicated in this fraud. And of course, the Courts have already indicated that they will ignore any evidence presented to them.

But please, gentle readers, go read both articles, perhaps over a cup of coffee. Gleason summarizes the Gateway Pundit article, but the Gateway Pundit article is much more detailed. As I said, the chances of this exploding in the mainstream media is next to nil, unless it proves useful to get rid of or embarrass someone.

The real question is what do we do about it? We know we cannot depend on the FBI (read Gestapo or KGB). Despite John Nantz's belief, bless his heart, that the majority of the FBI is not corrupt, there have been too many incidents, dating back decades, to still believe that the FBI is anything but the secret police of the Democrat party. I dare you to prove me wrong!

Jay Valentine has a solution, but it takes county level groups, and there are 3,143 counties in the U.S., working with often uncooperative county registrars of elections, to ferret out the addresses used by ballot manufactures to send ballots to leftists who will fill them out for Democrat candidates. These leftist fraudsters believe in the old saying "vote early, vote often" as indeed one such seems to have voted 8,000 times.

The world of U.S. election fraud tactics changed forever -- in the most fundamental of ways -- last week with the Gateway Pundit publication of the alleged 2020 Michigan ballot manufacturing factory.

Days later, the Michigan Secretary of State confirmed that indeed this event did take place, adding a little different spin -- the system caught this fraud before it impacted an election. Interesting that now, three years later, an admitted massive election fraud event did occur -- yet not one person has been jailed. Not one prosecuted. Not one indicted. Crickets!

One would think Michigan would have announced such a “catch.” But no, only diligent citizens who dug out a State Police report that would otherwise have lain dormant -- forever.

Anyone who now believes Republicans will win 2024 ballot harvesting, while leftists can print new ballots in the basement, is delusional.

Well, maybe they caught this one fraudster. Maybe. But were there others in that county who were not so unlucky? We don't know. What about other counties? We don't know. Is the same thing going on in other states? As I said, the FBI is involved now, so we are unlikely to ever find out. They can not discuss an ongoing investigation, that will go on forever, dontch know.

But enough complaining about the Gestapo...er...FBI. What do we do about it? Jay Valentine proposes to use his fractal analysis software, that has proven itself in catching insurance fraud, to find the addresses where fraudulent ballots are sent and weed these out of the system by outing them publically. Groups using his software have found restaurants, shopping malls, convenience stores and vacant lots where many of these fake voters "reside." They don't care about the names of the fake voters, but they want to prevent the system from sending ballots to these addresses.

Using Fractal technology, we compare every address in the voter registration file with its corresponding real-estate property description. We do not care who lives there. We ignore who owns the building.

We are delivering an “address-driven” fraud detection system.

Addresses don’t lawyer-up. They do not have court cases protecting their right to vote -- even if fake.

With the Undeliverable Ballot Database™ the Fractal team, now working with state legislators in a growing number of states -- is freezing scammy addresses.

...snip...

Why are addresses so important?

Addresses have constraints. You can create more voters than there are people -- states like Pennsylvania do it all the time. There is no way to challenge this, as the courts will not intervene.

People come and go, they change their names.

Addresses are a different matter.

Every address must exist in the real-estate property roll -- even a church paying no taxes. Addresses don’t move around. Addresses accumulate information -- year built, type of business, number of bedrooms, baths, additions, single-family or apartment, think of 80 to 120 attributes for any one address.

Addresses are accurate -- county tax assessors drive around to see if someone built a lean-to on a vacant lot -- then send a tax bill.

By blocking addresses, not people who may or may not be fake, we automatically prevent a lot of voter fraud. The fraudsters will likely find ways around this, and we will have to stay on top of this to prevent the next wave of ballot fraud. Note that the Supreme Court has declared one vote for one person. Voter fraud steals your and my legal votes. The Courts will not hear any evidence, as the Kari Lake campaign discovered...again. The Gestapo...er FBI will bury evidence. We must take the bull by the horns ourselves and make such evidence so public the MSM cannot ignore it.  The solution is not to do the same illegal thing the lawless side is doing, tempting as that may be.  The solution is to outthink them.

The Parallels Between 1930s Spain and America Now

 Evita Duffy-Alfonso has a message for our Leftist kleptocratic elites in an article at The Federalist entitled What My Family's Bloody History In The Spanish Civil War Teaches About FBIs Assault On Catholics. Duffy-Alfonso notes that historically, authoritarian regimes feared, and therefore hated Christians. As a result, they spy on them, ban them in some cases, execute them in others. The FBI spying on Catholics is no surprise given the regime they serve is such an authoritarian regime.

Many Americans have never heard of the Spanish Civil War because it’s often ignored by the history books or overshadowed by World War II, but its history is important given the context of our government’s current demonization and targeting of Catholics.

On Wednesday, House Republicans revealed that FBI Director Christopher Wray lied when he testified that only one field office was involved in a memo labeling traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. Subpoenaed documents, which the FBI attempted to withhold from Congress, revealed that multiple FBI field offices were involved in drafting the memo.

Moreover, the FBI lied when it stated after a whistleblower exposed the memo that the bureau “will never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.” The GOP-released documents show in detail that the FBI has already infiltrated Catholic communities with various informants to create the infamous memo.

Duffy-Alfonso then delivers a brief history of the Spanish government's slow buildup of persecutions of Christians, principally Catholics and non-communists, the wealthy, and anyone that opposed the leftist government.  Like all Leftists, murder is one of the tools they use to control the public.

In the run-up to the civil war, the Republicans began their campaign of religious persecution with simple anti-religious policies, such as the banning of all religious schools and removing crucifixes from classrooms. Then they deemed all religious marriages invalid in the eyes of the state.

Anti-church propaganda eventually escalated from smear campaigns to the burning of churches and mass executions of Catholic religious and laypeople by the end of the war. Properties were seized and stolen, and conservatives were convicted of crimes in kangaroo court rulings, leading to unjust executions.

The good news is that the author's great grand parents survived the Spanish Civil War. But they were separated for much of it. And they suffered greatly. But they found each other after the "late unpleasantness." God was obviously looking out for them. Alfonso-Duffy warns us about the parallels between the Spanish leftist persecution of Catholics and the American leftists current persecution.

By the end of the war, a reported “13 bishops, 4,172 priests, 2,364 monks and friars and 283 nuns and sisters,” and an unknown number of lay people were killed.

We cannot be apathetic toward the FBI’s targeting of Catholics, nor can we fail to speak out against the cultural demonization of Christians, whether that be at Dodgers games or on the lips of Vice President Kamala Harris.

...snip...

Surveillance techniques once reserved for foreign terrorists are being used on faithful Catholics, not because the FBI truly believes Christians are racist, but because the FBI is threatened by Catholic theology, just like the communists in Spain.

To be clear, all Christians pose a threat to irreligious, authoritarian governments. Catholics, however, with their centuries-old hierarchy, traditions, and unchanging stances on things like abortion, birth control, and marriage, have been uniquely positioned to oppose Marxism and therefore uniquely targeted throughout history.

If we don't stop them, things will not end well.

Pride Goeth Before The Fall

Mike VanOuse has an outstanding article today at the American Thinker that asks the question, and it needed asking, Are You Sure You're Proud of Your Country?  Is that feeling really pride, or is it gratitude? Pride was the sin of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and it infected the first parents there. It has been with us ever since. Gratitude, on the other hand, is elevating, making us better people than we are naturally. What we may feel is not pride but love of country. Even now, when our country is being run into the ground by scoundrels, kleptocrats and tyrants, we may feel ashamed.  We may wonder what the rest of the world thinks of us.  But patriots still also feel love of country generated by gratitude for being lucky enough to find ourselves here. VanOuse has thus clarified my own thinking on an emotional topic.

But were all those patriotic displays from 911 expressions of pride? What if the question was "How grateful are you to be an American?"

Are you grateful that 100% of those who live in "poverty" in America are considered "wealthy" by 80% of the rest of the world? Are you grateful to live in the only country whose founding documents declare that the people rule the government, rather than the converse? Are you grateful to live free of fear from invading armies? Are you grateful for modern amenities such as electricity, indoor plumbing, wireless internet, Bluetooth, cell phones, air-conditioning, heat, automatic transmissions, power-steering, medical care, etc., ad nauseam?

Sure, other countries have those things. Where'd they get them?

In my own case, my ancestors came from Northern Europe. There they lived under various monarchs, some good, some bad. But all of them exhibited to some degree or another the tendency to tyranny. I have said before that feudalism is the rule by the toughest, most ruthless thug around, who intimidates everyone else to bow down to him on pain of death. That they call themselves "noble" and "king" is only self-aggrandizement.  I am so grateful that my ancestors escaped to America. I read about the goings on in Europe and I shake my head.

Among the seven deadly sins, pride is the chief and progenitor. There is a particular sin named after a city that was destroyed in the Bible, called Sodom. Scripture says that the sin of Sodom was pride (Ez. 16:49-50). Today, practitioners of that proclivity identify themselves by the term "Pride" and wave their own flag. Irony is poetic.

There are also factions of society that apply the term "Pride" to their skin tone, as if that had anything to do with moral superiority. Those who bandy this drivel about demand reparations for cultural sins two centuries past, based on outward appearance.

This pale author's ancestors are 25% French, 25% Irish, and 50% Slavic. The word, "Slav" derives from the term "slave," going all the way back to the Roman empire. There were Irish slaves on the American continent long before the international African slave trade was a thing. Skin color means absolutely nothing when it comes to victimhood.

Although the founding documents declare that "all men are created equal," proponents of "pride" are quick to point out that the men who penned those words owned slaves. Duh. They were born, apart from volition, into a community and family where slavery was the norm. They had no more culpability in the nature of their nativity than the slaves did in their own.

But unlike millennia of generations before them, they did something about it — as did the hundreds of thousands of pale men who sacrificed their lives on battlefields to end slavery. For some macabre reason however, those demanding reparations feign to forget them. Maybe they're not grateful.

Of course, the notion of white supremacy is roundly derided by all right-thinking persons. But then, why is not the reparations movement also derided? Why do some assert that only whites can be racist? Having a love for one's own culture is not evil, but making the whole of your identity out of what in the end is an accident of birth is sinful pride. Moreover, it opens one to the call of those who would enslave us all.

The back of the dollar bill sports the phrase "E Pluribus Unim," translated, "Out of Many, One." It celebrates that America has one culture comprising many members. The modern use of the word "pride" is an attempt to segregate the "one" into contending factions: Re-Pluribus, Un-Unum Us. Division is a strategy to destroy: "divide and conquer."

Most of the people propagating "pride" phraseology do so out of sincere compassion for their fellow humans, calling it "social justice." They don't know that they're being played as pawns in a gambit for domination that, if won, will find them in gulags, branded as useful idiots: blind, pathetic fools.

Once again, you have been warned. Heed the warning.  Go and read VanOuse's article and ponder where we are heading.

How Little Things Change

 If you are like me, you have probably scratched your head over just why the FBI felt the need to infiltrate the Catholic Church.  The reason given, that Catholics were a hot bed of white supremacy rang hollow.  While I do not agree with all the Catholic theology, and one must buy the whole package, the basic theology is the same as Lutheranism.  So it was with interest that I read John Daniel Davidson's article at The Federalist entitled The FBI Targeted Traditional Catholics Because The Will Never Accept The Left's Pagan Morality.

It turns out the FBI memo targeting Catholics as potential domestic terrorists wasn’t limited to “a single field office,” as FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed under oath last month to Congress. In addition to the Richmond, Virginia, field office, the agency’s Los Angeles and Portland offices were also involved.

The memo, which was leaked earlier this year, singled out what it called “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” who attend parishes that offer the Latin Mass, which the FBI seems to think are hotbeds of “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.”

Outrageous as it was for the FBI to try to monitor, surveil, and investigate American citizens based on their religion, it appears to have been a coordinated effort — an effort that Wray lied to Congress about, according to a newly unredacted memo obtained by House Republicans after months of FBI stonewalling.

Setting aside the absurd pretext that traditionalist Catholic parishes are fonts of “white supremacy” and potential terrorism, it should come as no surprise that the FBI would target Latin Mass-attending Catholics.

Why? Because the FBI has become a tool of the permanent regime in Washington, which will tolerate no resistance to their ideology — an ideology best understood as pagan morality. Abortion, gender ideology, and the thinly-veiled racism of critical race theory in particular are considered sacred by the regime. Traditional Catholics — or “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” in FBI parlance — oppose these things and will never accept them.

...snip...

The reason why is that Catholics who attend Latin Mass tend to take the Catholic Church’s teachings seriously. Unlike supposedly “devout” Catholic Democrat politicians, including President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Latin Mass-attending Catholics oppose abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism, and racism in the guise of CRT.

They oppose these things not because they’re on the political right but because they accept the Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage and homosexuality, as well as the doctrine of imago Dei, that all people are created in God’s image, regardless of race or sex, and therefore all are equal in the eyes of God. This doctrine, by the way, is one of the pillars of Western civilization, without which our entire system of constitutional self-government would collapse.

I have attended mass at Catholic parishes, and sat in Bible study with other Catholic men. They like are "conservative" because the the Bible is "conservative," now. But when God first revealed himself to mankind and set these rules in stone, they were radical, and most people rebelled, preferring the pagan gods. How little things seem to change. I pray God sweeps these demons out of our lands and turns all eyes to him. Amen

Leftists Have No Other Principle Than Power For Themselves

 The other day I had a post by Ranjit Singh in which he pointed out that not everyone from India is a pacificist.  The demanding moms had brought up the attack in a Sikh temple as a way to talk about their Cause, which is disarmament for you and me.  Today, Singh has another article at Bearing Arms entitled Moms Demand Action admits it's the who, not the how, with violence. Moms Demand Action is one of a number of gun grabber groups that use lies, cherry picked data, inflated statistics, or just made up sh*t, in order to fool the general public into supporting the Cause. It reminds one of the Muslim principle of taqiyya, which is to lie in the furtherance of Islam. But I digress.

It is in the gun controllers’ DNA to lie, repeat lies, double down on lies when called out, dissemble, cherry pick and inflate statistics, and then call YOU a liar for pointing out their lies. But they have no shame or remorse about lying because it’s for The Cause for disarming all of us.

According to Moms Demand Action on X, formerly twitter:

Six years ago today, a protest by white supremacists over the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, VA, escalated into violence, and a white supremacist killed 32-year-old counter-protester Heather Heyer.

The fact that Heyer was killed with a car BY ThE WHITE SUPREMACIST implies that they know that it is the killer, not the tool used to kill, that needs to be dealt with. It is this semantic sleight of hand that reveals the lies in support of The Cause. No one is talking about removing every single thing that can be used as a weapon in order to make us all safer. Why not? Well, because man's ingenuity at fashioning weapons out of pretty much anything means that we would all be forced back to the stone age.  Even so, no one can put the technology of flint knapping back in the bottle.

It doesn’t seem to have dawned upon them that #DisarmHate in the context of Charlottesville would mean impounding the attacker’s car and forcing him to use ride share services or public transit. But we know that’s now what they’re after. I am yet to see anything from gun controllers asking for the removal of every object that can be used as a weapon — knives, axes, baseball bats, chemicals, gasoline, vehicles, etc. — from someone bent on committing violence. They dissemble because they’re after our guns.

This is also a common and valid criticism of red flag laws from the Second Amendment community. Red flag laws as written and implemented take away only the guns from people accused of being dangerous. If the target of a red flag confiscation is so dangerous that he or she cannot be in possession of a firearm, why are that person’s other potential weapons not taken away?

...snip...

Besides the question of other potential weapons, the other important question to ask about red flag laws is why a person considered dangerous enough to be stripped of his or her firearms be allowed to roam free instead of being involuntarily committed or confined?

While the demanding moms implicitly recognize that it is the person, not the thing that kills, they really don't care. The only important thing is advancing the Cause, by whatever means necessary. That "by any means necessary" philosophy has marred every leftist Cause, because it reveals that they have no other principle than power for themselves.