1984 Redux

Kurt Schlicter had a piece at Townhall.com entitled Claims of Racism are the Last Refuge of a Shrill Harridan that echoed my post of 28 August entitled "Orwell's 1984 is a Warning, Not a Manual." But since great literature is taught, and instead the thinking of minor thinkers in third world hell holes is stressed, many liberals have probably never read George Orwell's 1984, and don't know the meaning or the historical context of this book.  It used to be required reading for all students.

It’s the abnormal remedies we should worry about. Once upon a time, presidents did not so blatantly pick and choose among their citizens, dividing them into the favored and disfavored so obviously and so cruelly. They did not openly insist that they would bypass the Congress by executive fiat and through unelected judges to effectively pass laws the people’s representatives rejected. They did not promise to restore unconstitutional laws that made criticizing them a crime. And the media did not openly admit their commitment to supporting their favored president by ignoring blatant corruption. The political coalition currently in power did not openly conspire to effectively exile a huge chunk of the electorate from participation in their own governance.

Abnormal actions spark abnormal reactions; when you throw out the rule book it becomes a very different game. Do they think the disenfranchised, many of whom defended this country in war, are just going to sit back and quietly accept that they no longer have any voice in their own lives, that they must obey the commands of hateful liberal bullies who delight in inflicting petty abuse and insults upon them? Or will there be a reaction? When you ignore the rules and customs and norms and laws, you should not be surprised when your opponents likewise ignore the rules and customs and norms and laws. And then what?

...snip...

She will try to confiscate guns or attempt to eliminate dissident Christianity by eliminating tax deductions for churches or decide to thrill her pals in San Francisco by ruining the Lone Star state’s economy by banning fracking, and someone like Governor Greg Abbot is going to tell her “No. No, we aren’t doing that here in Texas. Your rules no longer apply here. Not unless you can enforce them. And trying to do that would be a very bad idea.”

See, the problem is that the Left is getting greedy, seeing its new Utopia just around the corner, they can no longer wait while the rest of the world catches up, and us old farts die off.  No, they have to have it now!  Their haste will be their undoing.  The progressive approach has been so successful up until now.  But many revolutionaries are becoming impatient.  In bringing on the chaos now, they will lose.

On a slightly different note, what the heck is the Alt Right?  According to Wikipedia, the Alt Right sounds more like the Left to me.  In any case, I, like Schlicter, have never met anyone espousing the views expressed as being Alt Right, and I suspect the so called movement may be a false flag operations, that is assuming it is an operation, and not a part of George Soro's Astroturf groups.

Orwell's 1984 Is a Warning, Not a Manual

Karin McQuillan has a very powerful post over at the American Thinker.  McQuillan's post derives as much power from the supporting links as it does from McQuillan's writing itself.  The post is entitled Those KKK Republicans. The title is supposed to be sarcastic, but sarcasm doesn't come across in writing. To understand sarcasm one needs to hear the voice of the person making a sarcastic remark. So, how do I know the title is intended to be sarcastic? Because there were no, or exceeding rare KKK Republicans. The KKK was, and remains, a project of the Democrat party, and the racism it represents is a project of the Left.  That the Left has managed to project onto the right, including Christians, conservatives, and Republicans the guilt for slavery, a guilt that the Left actually owns, is maddening,

How this has happened has been an interesting story in its own right, as told by Kevin Williamson of the National Review.  Williamson's article entitled The Party of Civil Rights gives the true history of civil rights in this country from Abraham Lincoln on down. Go read Williamson's article because if you don't know this material, some of what D. C. McAlister writes will not resonate with you. McAlister's article at the Federalist is entitled Conservatism's 'Racism' Isn't What You Think It Is. McAlister:

Conservative intellectuals are saying the Republican Party is doomed because the ideals of conservatism have been inextricably marred by “white nationalism.” Leaders of the conservative movement, they say, must therefore abandon the Republican Party to “cranky old white people” and create a “new conservatism—a political vision that adheres to limited government principles but genuinely appeals to a more diverse America.”

This argument is wrong on two points. It fails to appreciate (1) how the politics of race is not just about race itself but the changing nature of politics since the 1960s (to see race within the frame of the 1960s and not 2016 is a grave error) and (2) how the Left has effectively used social psychology strategies to label, stigmatize, and delegitimize conservatism, principles of liberty, and traditional American values.

McAlister goes on to note that many white Americans' frustration with minority groups is not because of racism, which is a belief in the supremacy of one race over another, but rather with the constant accusations of racism any time some group or another doesn't get their special basket of fee stuff from the Government goody bag.  An example is the recent finding by the 4th Circuit that North Carolina Voter Id law is Unconstitutional. Supposedly it burdens minorities unfairly. But anyone can see that a photo ID is needed for many transactions of considerably lesser importance than voting, but which a minority person is likely to engage.  As anyone who considers the issue even casually can see, minorities are being used a s a beard by the Democrat Left to make our voting laws less secure and allow the Left to more easily engage in voter fraud.  To constantly cry racism only makes people angry when they can see it is purely manufactured rage.

But, as McQuillan notes, the problems with the constant name calling and the use of the term "enemy" for people the Left has policy disagreements with is more dangerous, and has deeper implications that just winning the latest policy battle:

Now the unthinkable is happening. We are living in a period when Democrats are normalizing the demonizing of conservatives and Christians as evil people beyond the pale. We are all KKK. As predicted, violence follows vilification. Trump supporters have been punched, hit with a crowbar. robbed, spat upon, thrown to the ground, injured by a soda can thrown at the back of the head, and pelted with dog feces. In San Jose and Minneapolis, police have stood by and allowed the violence. A black Trump supporter who voiced his opinion in a bar was shot. Democrats think we deserve it.

Many of us know history, even if our liberal "friends" do not. If this continues, it is only a matter of time before we will see Brown Shirts coming after Christians, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians and anyone else the Left decides needs to become the subject of a 2 minute hate. I know the Left doesn't understand this, but until they stop with the demonizing and begin treating conservatives as normal Americans with important principles that should be listened to, not steamrolled over, I think I will keep my guns.

Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Nothing

Glenn Fairman takes on Stephen Hawking and what he calls "Scientism" in a piece at the American Thinker entitled The Theory of Nothing. I do take a certain exception to what Fairman calls Scientism in that the same things that Hawking claims to show God doesn't exist, I find prove he does. Can I take my proof to court? No, of course not, and neither can Hawking. In the end, one must believe, or not, because of Faith. I have felt the hand of God moving in my life. I am sorry that a great man like Stephen Hawking has not. But that is a small quibble, and Fairman is entitled to his opinions. Fairman:

Indeed, why the intense human desire to "know:” to find meaning, to love, to connect with the transcendent "other?" Yet, if mind and quark are the byproducts of merely sterile molecular bodies in motion, why meaning at all? What prompts the search for origins and astral mechanics when material either exploded into being from nothingness or continues to drone on in cataclysmic cycles with no teleological end or significance? If introspective human lives are accidental absurdities, what relentless existential drive moves us to discern a consistent harmony within the cosmos, a character antithetical to naturalism’s presumption of hostile indifference?

But from the perspective of Scientism, the metaphysical questions are DOA. What cannot be empirically poked or prodded is not only outside the purview of intelligent inquiry, but beneath its sphere of interest. If science is the exhaustive study of causes and mechanics, then why is its program so narrowly focused on the epidermal to the exclusion of a transcendent first cause. Why is an anxious yet aloof science either fearful or unwilling to consider possibilities that might unify and grant coherence to the grand vision? Focused against the backdrop of these questions, this supposed "most intelligent man in the world of science," and those if his ilk, seem trapped in a hall of mirrors -- wrapped in a hermeneutic cocoon of their own construction.

Fairman sees Scientism as he calls it, as somehow antithetical to the Spirit filled life of Faith. Yet that wasn't always so. When Newton propounded his laws of motion, he did not think he was doing anything other that explaining the nature of God's design, Likewise Copernicus, and even Galileo did not view their discoveries as anything more than an explanation of what God had created. Even Einstein had a belief in a rational universe because God is rational.  Science is a only tool, a method, a technique, for understanding the world around us not through anecdote and superstition, but through evidence that is put to the test. A scientists observes a phenomenon, creates a theory to explain it, test the theory by designing appropriate experiments, then publishes his findings. For science to be valid, it must be subject to proof, which means it can be proven false. Indeed, the fact that a theory can be s falsified is the hallmark of true science, and an attitude that everything we think we know is only a theory is the mark of a true scientist.  Circular reasoning and theories that can not be proven false have no place in science.  But then, science can only go so far.  It is a tool, not an ideology.  It is one, and only  one, way of seeing the world.  Indeed, that is what got Galileo into trouble.  He too tried to claim more for his discoveries than could be claimed, and the Church slapped him down.

Around 10 years ago, I stumbled upon a book,entitled The Victory of Reason by Robert Stark that made a case that freedom, capitalism, science and technology all came about because of a Christian belief that the universe was rational, because God is rational.  If God is rational, then it makes sense to interpret the Bible as rational.  Certain social changes occurred as a result of evolving Christian culture that encouraged cooperation, the idea of one gaining profit from his own labor, the growing belief in the dignity of the individual, eventually the end of slavery in the Christian world, and so on that made the development of science and technology possible.

Fairman again:

If science, as understood by Hawking, means the end of philosophy, then it also means the end of ethics: that same ethics that (ideally) battles the destruction of the tender and voiceless for the shortsighted benefit of some misbegotten utilitarian good. Hailing himself as the de facto champion of brute fact over discarded value, Hawking becomes the poster boy of desiccated inquiry that is emblematic of modernity’s mental labyrinth - where deluded raw sensory intelligence, divorced from Right Reason and theistic moral vision and virtue, leads the pursuit of knowledge into a waterless desert of quantitative abstraction. In truth, it is not Scientism’s poverty in apprehending the world that is so objectionable; it is the insistence that its contemptuous methodology has uncovered all that there is to see...

...snip...

If the truth be known, human science as we know it could not have flourished as the product of a wholly naturalistic mental construct. Indeed, how could an unordered brain come to the conclusion that a magnificent logic, undergirded by an elegant mathematics, was to be the ruling principle erupting from the frenzy of a feeble cosmos? Having been mysteriously spawned as bastards of such cruel chance or necessity, what compelled man to attempt the derivation of physical laws and coherence from naturalism’s subsumed prima facie chaos? Without an a priori intuitive capacity for material transcendence or even the possibility of discerning the complex motifs of pattern and design, are we not as orphans abandoned in a self-contradictory jungle -- where speed, strength, violence, and clever rapacity are the primary “virtues” selected for? Fortunately, for us and for Hawking, naturalism is an untenable theory. It cannot adequately explain the inception and fine-tuning of the universe, and it surely cannot adequately explain the man who values.

What Fairman is noting here, and it is quite true, is without Christianity (and without the gun) the world belongs to the young, the strong, and the most aggressive. Everyone else must either submit, or be killed. In such a world, there is no time for speculation, there is no process for open communication. Indeed, these things are the last thing the local warlord wants. In the end, I don't think it is so much science that is the problem, as it is Hawking's belief that he is his own higher power.   Fairman has hit the nail squarely on the head when he speaks of "These myopic antagonists of an intelligent Designer...?" I pray that before he dies, Steven Hawking, the beneficiary of so much Christian grace, will wake up to the realization that he has been working all along for Him, expounding His great design.

Update, 9/11/2016:  I was thinking about this in the shower this morning when I remembered the Infinite Monkey Theorem I hearit years ago during a statistics course (so that is a LONG time ago) and it involved the infinite monkey typing the complete Sonnets of Shakespeare, but the effect is the same. Little noticed, however, is that while the monkey would surely eventually do it, purely by accident, the time it would take would be more than the age of the universe. Similarly, the chance of the accidental development of life, much less self conscious life that can conceive of a transcendent being is so vanishingly small as to sound absurd.  If it were any other topic, Hawking or any other scientist would have cried Occam's Razor and concluded that an Intelligent Designer created the universe and the life we enjoy.

Congratulations to Kim Rhodes

This is a story that I meant to pick up some time ago, but other things intruded. I can become simply flabbergasted at the seemingly incredible abilities of some people. For me, most things are moderately difficult, though I do seem to have reasonably good reflexes and such. But then a truly talented person comes along and shows me what "reasonably good reflexes" means. Such is the story of six times Olympic shooter Kim Rhode.

Congratulations Kim.

It is too bad that so many of our fellow countrymen did not see fit to at least root for Kim, even if they do not agree with her.  I suspect that to watch Annie Oakley shoot was similar to watching Kim.  One has to stand in awe of such a talent.  

Its a matter of Trust

If you want to know why I am voting for Trump, even though he was not my choice, and I think he will not be the kind of President to restore our Constitutional Republic, here is one (and only one) of the reasons: Here's How a President Hillary Will Destroy Gun Rights Without Repealing the Second Amendment. Remember that I don't feel that the Second Amendment is necessary to have our gun rights. Those rights were granted by God to all people. At the same time, those and your other rights only practically exist if a) the Government respects them or b) you can defend them. By putting into the Constitution the Bill or Rights, of which the Second Amendment was one, the new United States was demonstrating that the Government trusted the People. It was a strange new thing then. Governments did not before trust the people. The people were always regarded as ready to revolt at any time, and the Government's job was to keep them under its thumb, by divine right, or whatever justification the rulers could plausibly come up with.

Indeed, trust is the basic operating principle of our form of government.  The representatives are to be drawn from the People, to represent the interests of the People, and to return to their former lives as one of the People.  We have lost some of that.  But the principle remains.  Whenever the representatives vote against the will of their constituents, as they did with the imposition of Obamacare, we can rightly say that the representatives have separated themselves from the people, and are no longer representing Us.  They have become at that point an old world ruling class, and it becomes incumbent on us, the People, to vote them out of office.

Obama is currently finding ways around Congress to impose regulations to keep Americans from getting their hands on guns, or if not to disarm them, to subarm them.  Or, his latest, to put your local gunsmith out of business, thereby ensuring your weapons will eventually be worthless.  He, obviously doesn't trust us, so why should we trust him?  But Hillary will do the same, and worse.  she has already shown a great interest in following the Australian model.  Being a criminal herself, she naturally believes that everyone else is just as criminal as she is.  Despite reports like the recent on from the Crime Prevention Research Center, she nonetheless projects onto you and me her own larcenous heart. She literally runs around with her hands clapped over her ears yelling "La la la la, I can't hear you."  But the bottom line is that Hillary doesn't trust you, or me, and indeed looks upon us as the enemy.  That is not only sad, but extremely dangerous.  Like Obama, Hillary will not be the President of all Americans, but only those Americans who agree with her.  Those Americans would be the so called "progressive left."

The so called "progressive left," which as variously also been named Communist, Fascists,  Liberals,  ad nauseaum, do not trust people like you and me.  Indeed they look upon us, their fellow Americans, as the enemy.  Hillary represents these people.  Under these circumstances, I feel I must do everything legally in my power to see that she does not achieve the highest office in the land,   Your mileage, as they say, may very.

The Second Amendment is a Warning, Not a Challenge

Personally, I feel no need to compromise on any gun control proposal, no matter how benign it may be.  As the linked report indicates, we already have 20,000 gun laws in these United States, most of which are never used by prosecutors, except as a bargaining chip in getting potential criminals to admit to something and to get their conviction.  Well, with so many to choose from, prosecutors certainly don't need another one.

But, in fact, they do need another one.  They need to rile up their base to get them out on voting day, or any day in the month or so leading up to the election that they can take time out of their busy schedules of watching Dancing With the Stars and American Idol, or chasing after the latest from the Kardashians.

I spoke with such an uninformed person last night who honestly believes that you can buy a gun as easily as you can by a candy bar.  I have news for him.  Unless he is known in criminal circles, and they trust him, he can not buy a gun illegally.  Anyone selling guns illegally will either know the person he sells to, or will require the person to be vouched for by someone he does know.  The only way to buy one legally is to go through the process of obtaining a pistol permit, which involves a background check.  Then he has to go to a gun dealer, who will want him to surrender his pistol permit, but will still require that he fill out a form 4473, which will involve another background check, all before he can trade dollars for gun, and take home his chosen gun.  Even so, he now can keep it at his house, but he can not carry it legally anywhere else without going through a State approved course ($150 at last count) and paying a fee of $90 to have yet another background check, not to mention having your fingerprints taken, all so you can carry said gun anywhere the State has not designated as a gun free victim disarmament zone.  Sound as easy as buying a candy bar?

A number of such thoughts went through my head as I read today, at BearingArms.com Dems Want Compromise on Gun Control Legislation? Here it is: For instance I still remember the old Jesse Helms quote:

Compromise, hell! That’s what has happened to us all down the line—and that’s the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at the time?

I will even go so far as to say to those who would interpret our Second Amendment out of existence: You have no right to do so, any more than you have a right to eliminate our First Amendment rights. Those rights were an acknowledgement of rights given by God to all people. They were not put in our Constitution as a challenge to Government to figure out how to take them, but a warning not to try.  You persist at your own peril.  Whether we have a Second Amendment or not, we still have our rights.

Molon Labe.

People stampeding like cattle over a little noise

I had always thought people in North Carolina were a more sensible lot.  And then stuff like this happens and you begin to wonder. I would point out that we have gotten a lot of people coming from New York and points North. One has to wonder, what with them bringing their politics with them, whether they are not also bringing their intolerances as well.

Some years ago, I had some of the neighbors over for July 4th. Now, our property, butts up against a working farm, complete with horse and cattle pastures, and the occasional fox, wolves, and poisonous snakes, mostly copperheads. The guy who lives there shoots at these critters with a 410 gauge shotgun. Evening was approaching, and suddenly we heard a few shots from the shotgun. Well, it is the country after all. One of the "ladies" immediately became upset, and wondered how her children could survive with such goings on so close to where they lived. I told her that if she didn't want to see or hear the activities that happen on farms, perhaps she should go back to living in the city. She left shortly thereafter, and the rest of us had a good time watching the fireworks over the trees.

I remember one gun writer years ago who opined that concealed carry was better because one didn't want to scare the white women.  As I recall, though, he included a lot of pantywaists and other such fools of all colors and both sexes in that term "white women."