When Did We Vote to Have Our World Turned Upside Down

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

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

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

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Author Praises Pope Benedict

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

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

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

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

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

What Works and What Does Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even Ray Epps Can't Keep Quiet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Seconds Count...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go After ESG Collusion With Antitrust

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

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

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

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

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