Too Little, Too Late?

So, after all this time, the Durham Investigation has turned up an indictment against the lawyer representing the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.  You can read about it at the Epoch Times in an article entitled John Durhan Grand Jury Indicts Lawyer Whose Firm Represented Democrats In 2016. Nothing about any of the people whose names everyone knows, like James Comey, or John Brennan. I'm sorry, but the Durham so called investigation is a little too little, a little too late.

Which brings up the entire incompetence of our Republican representatives. Oh, they bloviate endlessly on Fox News and tell us what they think we want to hear. But what do they do? According to Joy Pullman at The Federalist, not much. We need to incentives our Republican representatives with a corn cob soaked in turpentine applied to their rear ends.

I urge gentle readers to read each of these articles.

Did Muhammad Exist

 How about something a little different?  Robert Spencer is at it again with a new edition of his book Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins. Andrew E. Harrod reviews Spencer's new book at the American Thinker in an article entitled Robert Spencer Deconstructs Islam. One of the things that Spencer points out, which is damning, is that for a number of years after the Arab conquest of vast territories, no one seems to have mentioned that they were doing this in the name of a prophet of Islam named Muhammad:

Spencer surveys the historical record of various of various societies like the Byzantine Empire that bore the brunt of Arab invasions in the Middle East and North Africa following Muhammad’s supposed death in 632. The surprising documentary result:

"No one who interacted with those who conquered the Middle East in the middle of the seventh century ever seems to have gotten the impression that a prophet named Muhammad, whose followers burst from Arabia bearing a new holy book and a new creed, was behind the conquests."

Spencer notes that “this silence is extremely strange. Islam, in its canonical texts, is an unapologetically supremacist religion.” Tellingly, “coins minted in the 650s and possibly as late as the 670s” by early Islamic caliphs like the Damascus-based Umayyads make no “reference to Muhammad as Allah’s prophet or to any other distinctive element of Islam.” Some of these coins even feature crosses, but “it is hard to imagine that such a coin would have been minted at all had the dogmatic Islamic abhorrence of the cross been in place at the time.”

In addition to the fact that Muhammad doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the years after his supposed death, unlike Jesus Christ, who was constantly invoked by those who knew Him in life, and who witnessed His ministry, His death and resurrection. But even the supposed holy book the Koran doesn't, in many places make sense. Now, here is a topic which I do not understand, so I am relying on Spencer here, but the written Arabic includes what are known as diacritical marks, dots placed above or below a character, that change the character. Spencer notes that with many of these problematic passages, if you take away the diacritical marks, the passage suddenly makes sense read as Syriac passages. This implies that the texts were borrowed from other sources.

In addition, Spencer notes that much of Islamic tradition is based on the supposed life of its "prophet" Muhammad. But these Hadiths were written many years after Muhammad's death. Spencer makes the point that many, maybe most, of these stories may have been manufactured to support various factions within Islam. More interesting, the Hadiths paint a picture not of man teaching peace and love, but of a warlord who ordered the assassination of his enemies.

The resulting potential for hadith fraud surrounding a holy lawgiver Muhammad is enormous, Spencer observes. Thus, “with Muhammad held up as an exemplar, the Hadith became political weapons in the hands of warring factions within the Islamic world. And as is always the case with weapons in wartime, they began to be manufactured wholesale.” “The consequence of all this was inevitable: utter confusion,” Spencer concludes; the “Hadith is riddled with contradictions.”

In the end, one must decide which God is the True God. There is Allah, who is vengeful, cruel event to those who believe in him, and fits all the qualities of Satan himself. Or there is the God of Creation, who knew each of us before the world began, who loves his creation and wants the best for each of us. (Oh, I know that there is another alternative, but we will leave that for another day. I do not believe it is possible to be an atheist.)

I would note that the God of Creation could care less about politics.  Yes, we try in our way to express God's will in our votes, but God is not a Republican or a Democrat.  There is, furthermore, a just reason for war, but we have often engaged in unjust wars.  Our God weeps for every child killed in the womb, of that I am sure.  But he also has as much affection for women as for men, and would not like us to treat them as mere objects.  And while He would be appalled at the way some of women dress, He also does not want them to be forced into nameless, faceless burqas.  God especially loves children.  How do I know?  Because Jesus loved children.  

The Time to Act is Now

A political science major at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, Olivia Rondeau tells us that Non-Compliance With Tyrannical Laws and Leaders Is American As Apple Pie. Rondeau takes us through a brief history of civil disobedience from Thoreau to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. More importantly, she points out the case for the morality of civil disobedience. And the moral case goes back to the Biblical book of Acts, Chapter 4, and specifically 4:19 and 20. If you find yourself having to choose between obeying either man or God, you have no choice but to obey God.

Our rights, remember, come from God.  You can test this for yourself by observing the nature of people.  People are alive, and unless killed, will live until God himself decides to end that life.  People have the power of speech, and left to themselves, this power is freely exercised.  People naturally have liberty, can move about, and see to their livelihood, take such actions as to defend themselves and their families.  The tyrannical acts of the British government against the rights of the colonists is what sparked the Declaration of Independence. 

Thoreau makes the point that our natural rights are constantly threatened by government overreach, and it is up to us to stand up and protect them.

Not only is it moral to disobey laws that infringe on individual rights, it is morally necessary. Jim Crow segregation ended because people broke the law. Chattel slavery ended because people broke the law. So, for modern forms of government tyranny, such as medical mandates, it is clear that non-compliance is necessary to successfully fight back, despite the dangers that naturally accompany such a response.

At American Colors, Alexander Solzhenitsyn muses on how civil disobedience might have changed the lives of himself and his fellow Soviet subjects:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Make no mistake, that Biden and those around him mean to do to us what the Soviets did to Russians. The time to act is now.

Remembrance of 9/11/2001

 Today is the 11th of September, 2021.  For those of us who were alive at the time, I don't think any of us will forget where we were when it happened.  For me, I was at the Navy Yard in Washington, DC.  I was watching the breaking news broadcast of the burning first tower.  When the second plane hit, I turned to the person beside me and said "We are at war!"  Later, a plane hit the Pentagon.  I could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon.  I could have been there giving a briefing, but fortunately wasn't.  Some of our people were.

Several months later, I told my wife that we should get permits to carry concealed.  She agreed. and so I started the process of getting each of us our permits.

Over at Bearing Arms Tom Knighton tells his own story of 9/11 in How 9/11 Helped Make Me A Gun Owner. You should read Knightons post. It is both poignant and deeply personal. The bottom line, however is:

For me, though, the first was 20 years ago today. That was the day I decided I would get a gun.

Not a day has passed where I felt bad about that decision.

A gun is a tool, like a fire extinguisher. You hope never to need it, but if you do, nothing else will do. That realization is what came over Mr. Knighton that day. The idea that if he needed a gun to defend himself, his wife and children, what would he do? I had a gun, but what hit me in that moment was that too often I could not access it if I needed it. So I deceded to carry it wherever legal.

AR-15s Are America's Rifle

At The Federalist, Mark Overstreet has a somewhat optimistic article entitled AR-15s Are Why Leftists Can't Commit Taliban Atrocities Here. I say it is an optimistic article because, frankly, I haven't seen anyone telling the Leftists "No." Still, some may be inspired by Overstreets piece. Check it out.

Chipman Nomination Down For the Count

 According to the Epoch Times Biden Withdraws Nomination of Gun Control Advocate David Chipman to Head ATF. While Chipman certainly did not deserve to be the head of the ATF, I worry that the * administration will nominate someone even worse, but without Chipman's baggage.

Just as the job of a District Attorney is to provide justice, not to convict people by any means necessary, so the head of the ATF is to fairly enforce the law as Congress has written it, not to as he would like it to be to have been written. We have seen the ATF play fast and loose with the law, and it would be nice to see someone who enforced the law as written without the ego or an agenda.

There Are No Noncombatants In The Fight for Life

 Another article on the them of speaking out, below, is Christopher Bedford's article entitled The Left Has Made It Perfectly Clear: There Are No Civilians In The Fight For Life, And We Must All Speak Up Now.

I will not quote any of the article, but instead I will urge gentle readers to go read it for themselves. It isn't long. For all the vitriol Texas has received, their new law is not that extreme. When you can detect an actual heartbeat, you know you are not "doing a procedure to get rid of a clump of cells." No, it is a life...a human life at that. That child has as much of a right to life as her mother.