AI...Leave the Thinking to Us

If you are someone of a certain age, you will remember the old Grayhound Bus commercials. If you do, you will also remember the motto: Go Grayhound and leave the driving to us.

I could not help but remember that old commercial as I read Cam Edwards over at Bearing Arms today. He has a post reporting that John Lott did some experiments with AI and discovered...surprise...AI Chatbots Have a Bias Towards Gun Control. I know, I was blown over. And why wouldn't they? After all, they are just sophisticated programs so it stands to reason that they would reflect their programmers biases. And let's face it, most of the people doing programming are Leftists or worse anarchists. You can find John Lott's full article at Real Clear Politics here.

Now, I am not what you would call the sharpest pencil in the box, nor am I the most talented writer.  But I would not trust anything I wrote to any AI. And if I found that a commentator I read was using AI to write his articles, I would quit reading that person's views. I am not a luddite, but I also want to always be in control of technology, not be controlled by it. As Edwards says:

I don't think we have any idea of what we're doing with AI, and I worry that we're all basically monkeys with machine guns when it comes to the tech. The anti-gun bias that's prevalent throughout these AI platforms is disturbing enough, but the real danger comes when humans start allowing AI to do our thinking for us.

The Life of a True Christian is Constant Repentance

I'm nursing a bad cold today, so I will not take a lot of time here. At the American Thinker today, Monroe Wesson has a piece entitled Escaping the State of Sin. From some of what he says, I suspect Wesson has had personal experience with one of the many 12 step programs. But he is correct that whatever your personal sin is, the solution is not to identify with it, but instead to rely on the power of Jesus Christ to forgive you sins, and to root them out of your life. He is right too that these proclivities we all have are put there to glorify God, to show His power to the world.

Sinning -- everyone does it. That is why God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to atone for our sins and provide a way that we can repent and become free of our sins. So why do some people find it so hard to accept their choices are sins? There are lies now accepted as truth, all designed to prevent people from repenting. While I knew this was the case, I didn’t realize how much it permeated the culture until I read an advice column about dealing with people who sin in a specific way. The first paragraph is as follows, (I’ve edited it, because when you fill in the type of sin, people suddenly lose all objectivity and treat the sins differently… as if one sin was preferable or better than another.)

“A person’s ___ isn’t a “lifestyle choice.” ____ people don’t choose to be ___; they are born that way. They can’t change being ____ any more than you can change being ____.”

You could fill in the blanks with all types of sins (gambling, alcoholism, drug addiction, theft, sexual deviancy, violence, etc…) and the basic premise remains the same. There is a lot to unpack, so I’m going to dissect this.

Wesson then proceeds to dissect and take apart the "advice" given to this individual by making clear that to continue is in fact his choice. Whatever we have, it is always our choice. What we need to to is turn to God to repent, and ask for help. Paul talks about this as the "thorn in his side." God doesn't relieve me of all my character defects because he knows I will get a swelled head if he did. Rather, he relieves me of some of them if he has a specific task for me, only to set them back. When one of these things comes up, I need to immediately repent and ask for forgiveness. I also use the method Jesus himself used: "Get behind me Satan." Then go about me life as if he did indeed do it and depend on Him to keep me on the straight and narrow.

One of the things I noticed in 12 step programs is that there is a tendency to remain trapped in that identity, as "I am an alcoholic." Yes, that will always be part of your identity, but you were born for so much more. You were born to be a child of God, one of Jesus brothers and sisters. Yes, 12 step programs get you going, but eventually, you must leave the nest, so to speak, and become what you were meant to be, and not your addiction.  The only reason to keep identifying with your addiction is because you love it more than God.  That way lies disaster.

“They can’t change being ____ any more than you can change being ____.” This is also true. Anyone that has been in a twelve-step program will learn this in step 1. “Admit you are powerless over your addiction and that your life has become unmanageable.” The most important part of overcoming sin is admitting that you can’t change on your own. It is incredibly important to accept this fact and to learn to stop judging yourself when you sin. But that isn’t the end of the journey to healing. Step 2 is “Come to believe that a power stronger than you can heal you.” You have probably gathered that the higher power that helped me was Jesus Christ. Whenever modern society talks about sins, they never talk about getting away from it, but simply your helplessness to get away from it. Yes, we can’t get away from sin on our own. That is why God sent Jesus Christ. Christ can change us. He can change our nature. He can make it so you don’t have to live in sin. He can fix the problem. You can’t.

Modern society tries to excuse sinful behavior by telling us that people can’t control themselves, because it is in their nature, and because it is in their nature, then they can’t be held accountable for their sins and therefore they do not need to repent.

This is a pernicious lie, created to drag men’s souls down to the same pit of misery and woe that our adversary inhabits. It uses truth to support a bad conclusion.

Wesson closes with a lesson in how to handle the sinners we know. But really, it follows from the Golden Rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you. Realizing that the individual is sick in spirit:

With all this in mind, how should we handle the sinners we know. #1) Don’t judge them. We all make mistakes, there is no use being self-righteous because your sins are different than theirs. Also, quit judging yourself. Accept that you are imperfect, and that God made you that way so that Christ can perfect you. If you must judge yourself, it should only be to the point of, “that was a sin, I need to repent.” Then go repent. #2) Treat them with kindness, yes, this includes yourself. #3) Don’t enable sinful behavior. Advocating to make sins socially acceptable or legal is going to ruin many, many lives. Don’t bail people out of the consequences of their bad decisions. #4) Protect the innocent. This means if you know someone’s sins are harming another person, especially a child, it needs to be reported to authorities. If you know the individual will cause harm to someone at a social gathering, do not invite them. If the person does not have a known history of harming others, then you have no reason not to invite them. #5) Invite them to repent, but don’t be overbearing about it. If they decline or reject your invitation, that is their choice, it shouldn’t change how you treat them.

Now, I will go back to nursing my cold.

Update:  Watch this video at Prager U.

Gun-Grabbers On A Fool's Errand

 Today, at Ammoland Dave Workman has an opinion piece entitled Opinion: Op-Ed in 'The Hill' Unintentionally Illustrates Logic Vacuum of Gun Control in which he notes that there is no gun control scheme that will stop school shootings, or indeed any criminal shootings.

Two sentences in the second paragraph of an Op-Ed in The Hill about gun control failures relating to the recent trials of James and Jennifer Crumbley—parents of Michigan school killer Ethan Crumbley—perhaps best illustrate the vacuum of logic within the gun control movement, guaranteeing that whatever restrictive laws anti-gunners adopt, they will always fall short.

Writing about the passage of the Public Act of 2023 in Michigan, Prof. Kimberly Wehle, University of Baltimore School of Law, asserts, “If that law had been in place in 2021, 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley might never have attempted the shootings because his parents — despite their shortcomings — may have complied with state law. Instead, they were found criminally liable for not imposing in their own home the very restrictions on gun access that Michigan lawmakers had neglected to enact.”

“If” is often called the “biggest word in the English language.” “Might” comes in a close second, probably in a tie with “may.” The sentence illustrates just how wrong—and perhaps wrong-headed—gun control proponents are about pushing restrictive laws and regulations, expecting people most likely to violate or merely ignore the law to suddenly comply. There is no reliable evidence of that ever happening in the history of mankind, dating from the slaying of Abel by his older brother, Cain, to the present.

Long story short, regardless of the number of times it is repeated, gun control proponents refuse to accept the reality that criminals and stubborn, stupid people do not obey every gun law. Indeed, they disobey most or all of them, figuring to not get caught. Based on what she wrote and how it is written, Wehle is an intelligent person with an interesting argument. She just happens to be mistaken.

Trained as they are in the use of language, words and grammar, lawyers tend to believe that words on paper can act in real life. What they forget is that words on paper only affect real life so long as people respect those words. But criminals do not respect words, including the criminals who intend to violate the Constitution by infringing our right to keep and bear arms. As Workman points out, felons still get guns, do not buy them from FFLs because they would get caught, do not observe waiting periods, or any other law including murder. Careless people also do not observe safe storage laws. The only people who are burdened by the thousands of gun laws in the various states and the Federal government are those not likely to violate them in any case.

Gentle readers will want to read the whole piece, though they should not expect to change any minds. Despite the many gun laws on the books, gun-grabbers are sure that just one more law will finally crack the code. It comes from a misunderstanding of the purpose of laws. The real purpose is to state what is expected, and to outline society's punishments if those expectations are not met. For that, you don't need a kagillion laws detailing everything down to the gnat's nuts. The gun-grabbers are on a fool's errand if they think their ideas will prevent crime.

The Importance of Hand Writing

 At The Federalist a few days ago, Daniel Coupland made The Case for Cursive In a Digital World. He cited things like the fact that without learning cursive writing, one cannot read cursive writing, and thus historical documents such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights would be illegible to our children. But these documents are of immense importance to our history.  But even reading the letters of our grandparents can be enlightening.  They were real people, after all.  

Of more immediate concern, he noted that students that hand wrote notes in class learned better than those who typed. And with practice, one can become quite fast at writing very legible freehand documents. My father, always an average writer in cursive, once marveled at a city clerk back in the day who took notes for the village council meetings in cursive, very quickly. These notes were good enough that they could be kept as official records. But this city clerk was quite old and his career spanned back to the early 20th century.

Gentle readers should read all of Coupland's piece, and if your state does not include it in the curriculum, agitate for it. Personally, I get tired of carrying around a perfectly good pen, only to have to "sign" things with my finger. It seems so childish.

But what I wanted to write urge gentle readers to agitate for is a different kind, and even older style of cursive known as italic. I remember as a child learning cursive writing using a variation of the Palmer method. Once students picked up on it, usually around the 6th or 7th grade, they would begin to stylize their writing, sometimes to the point of illegibility. For instance, the letter "t" requires that you stroke up and then down along the same line. But when writing fast, the straight line becomes a loop. This causes the whole page to be filled with loopty-loops, which are illegible.

Palmer is very strict in that each letter starts from the base line. Thus, the student may not see the "s" or the "r" in the lower case "s" and "r" as written in Palmer. When writing fast, the tendency is to just round off the "s" and "r" into a little mounds. Along with other letters that are rightly round such as "a" and "o" what you often end up with is a series of mounds and loops with little to distinguish one letter from another.

The style I have in mind takes the child's knowledge of printing and begins to simply tie the letters together. The emphasis is always on legibility and as such, letters start where they naturally start. Many people believe that I use calligraphy, but I don't. I use italic style as taught by Getty and Dubay. The style of writing goes back to the Italian merchants of the renaissance, who had to record their trades, contracts, and other business documents very quickly.

All the reasons Coupland gives for teaching cursive, by which he no doubt means Palmer method cursive, apply to italic cursive as well. But the students learn italic faster, because it grows out of printing, yet it maintains legibility, which is why we write things down. Who would know the plays of Shakespeare if he could not write?

Pray for Those Duped by Islam - But Don't Condone What They Do

 If you, gentle readers, have been around for a while, you know my feelings on Islam.  You know that I have said on multiple occasions that whoever Muhammad was supposedly listening to in that cave, it was not an angel from God.  I have even put it more forcefully, that Allah is the devil himself.  But it seems I did not know the half of it.  But Sha'i ben-Takoa tells us the rest of the story in an essay at the American Thinker entitled Exploding the Myth that Islam Is an Abrahamic Religion.

The author states the purpose of his essay right from the start:

The Gods of Political Correctness dictate that all religions are of equal worth; that there are “…three great Abrahamic religions,” and “The Arabs are Semites too, so they can’t be anti-Semites.” All three of these sacred cow clichés need to be slaughtered on the altar of truth.

I won't go into the idea that all religions are of equal worth. A look at say, Buddhism, where the notion is that the individual goes through many lives eventually achieving nirvana, or god like being, clearly contradicts with Judaism and Christianity. Both can not be correct. Clearly, one is correct and the others are all false. Chose wisely. Now as to the other two...

While Christianity and Islam are both offshoots of the Jews and took from them the concept of having one’s own holy writ, their self-definitions as new faith communities were radically different. The Koine Greek language narratives that Christians append to their version of the Hebrew Bible purport to be a continuation of Jewish history. The Catholic Church even defines itself in Latin as Verus Israel, the True Israel.

But Muslims do not claim this. On the contrary, the Koran plagiarized many of the stories in the Hebrew Bible but always with changes, and when a Muslim is asked to explain the different versions of the same stories, he will say the Jews stole them from Islam.

When asked to explain how this theft happened since the former text came into the world in the year 1313 BCE at Mt. Sinai and the latter over 2,000 years later, in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, the Muslims say that Musa (the Arabic mispronunciation of the Hebrew name Mosheh) brought the Koran down from Mt. Sinai—not the Torah as the Jews believe. And then, down below, the evil Jews snatched it away from Musa and re-wrote it and called it their Torah. When Muhammad came along, he restored the original text, today’s Koran.

No wonder no one is not allowed to question any part of Islam or put it to critical scrutiny. In contrast, Paul tells us to test everything and hold onto what is good.  Only a wide-eyed moron could believe such a tale as Muslims tell.

As for the cliché that Islam is an Abrahamic religion, this is a head-on collision with the Biblical text. The greatest authority on what is Abrahamic was Abraham himself, who accepted that he had to expel his first-born son Ishmael from his family, community, and country because he was not at all “Abrahamic,” like his father.

To Jews, Abraham was the kindest man in the world, which is probably why God chose him. For the religious revolution that Abraham ignited (ethical monotheism) was not only the concept of one God but a kind God—versus the capricious, cruel, and often immoral gods in pagan pantheons.

Islam is not Abrahamic because Ishmael was, as the Bible prophesies, a “wild ass of a man,” a normal physical male but with the spirit of an undomesticated jackass. And indeed, the behavior of Muslims throughout history and certainly in our time reveals them not to be the progeny of a kind man, for they are masters of cruelty, being head-choppers, mutilators, and skyjackers, with a particular appetite for raping and the satanic torture of women.

Their Allah smiles on mass murder and no less the glorious sacrifice of oneself, viz. suicide. Islamists are totalitarians who license themselves to murder anyone who ridicules their idea of a prophet, with the very idea of a prophet also pilfered by them from the Jews.

As for the cliche that Arabs are Semites, no, they are Hamites. Yes, Muhammad was an Arab descended from Ishmael, one of Abraham’s eight biological sons, but Judaism also makes clear that Ishmael was not his father’s spiritual heir. Ishmael is expelled (Genesis 21:9) from his father’s Promised Land for his antediluvian propensity for violence. His expulsion at age sixteen came about when he jealously mocked his little half-brother Isaac at the latter’s weaning party. Then, Isaac’s onlooking wise and perceptive mother, the Matriarch Sarah, who had watched Ishmael grow up, realized he was capable of murdering her son after her aged husband’s passing. For that, he had to go.

Gentle readers should read the whole article as it has many bones to pick with Islam, by one who is necessarily close to Islam and understands it well. In his last paragraph ben-Takoa says that Islam should be outlawed in America. I agree in principle, but feel that doing so would overturn First Amendment jurisprudence, leaving Christians equally vulnerable. Besides, you can outlaw something, but you can not change a man's heart. Only the Holy Spirit can do that. Therefore, pray for the poor souls duped into Islam by the devil, but don't condone what they do.

Maintaining Christian Standards

 At the American Thinker today D. C. Larson has a post entitled Christianity's unchanging standards which points out that...surprise...God still hates sinful behavior. When Jesus tells the scribes and pharisees in Luke that he came to call sinners, the question is: call them to what? Call them to repent, to change their minds and their ways.  But you can not very well get them to change their ways by telling them they are doing things all wrong.  On the other hand, you cannot condone sinful behavior.

A brief philippic by writer Chris Kratzer is presently making social media rounds. "Evangelical Christian: What the hell did you expect me to do?" is premised on a foolish and blasphemous fancy.

I'm not an evangelical, but a lifelong traditional Catholic. Still, the obvious flaw in Kratzer's message compelled me to comment.

Reduced to vital essence, it asserts that believers in a loving Christ are hypocrites if they don't also embrace sinful behaviors.

That notion enjoys favor from those who would remake God to reflect current secular peculiarities. (Of course, we are called to change the world, not indulge its negatives.) Loving people who sin, while despising actions that violate His Will, is very much in accord with Jesus's example.

John 8 recounts that while Christ refused to condemn a woman accused of adultery, He counseled her to "sin no more."

Mr. Kratzer apparently misses this point. One must repent and ask for forgiveness. The out and proud queer, for example, clearly have no intention, at least for now, of repenting (but as long as they are alive, there is hope!) Therefore, while we should treat these people with compassion, we cannot forgive them, and God enjoins us to hate what he hates.

I would also note that Jesus had the power to declare all the people of Israel forgiven for all their sins, but he did not do so. He had the power to heal everyone in Israel of all their diseases and infirmities. But he did not do so. One has to look not only at what he did and said, but what he did not do or say.

Jesus advocated turning away from deviant actions, not embracing them as one's legitimate 'identity.' Christ's admonition is the polar opposite of the 'anything goes' philosophy espoused by Kratzer and his weak-willed adherents.

There are unchanging Holy standards. Man lacks authority to alter them. They should not be thought vulnerable to popular preference for convenience and comfort. Perverting Christ's message so that deviancy is allowed to thrive without being rightly criticized is contemptible.

...snip...

Placing human logic above God's Word is of course folly. But more importantly, it is dangerous. Romans 12:2 can guide us: "And be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God."

A later verse speaks of "Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good."

There are many on the internet preaching things that are not the gospel. Often, what they preach is subtly different from what the Bible teaches. Many speak of loving the sinner but hating the sin. This is nowhere in the Bible, and death was often meted out for many sins in ancient Israel. Jesus' example is more compassionate, but we must always understand that God's moral laws are unchanging, as He is unchanging. We must seek to conform ourselves to Him, not the other way around, and seek forgiveness for our weaknesses. Martin Luther said that the life of a true Christian is one of constant repentance. Amen.

More Guns, Less Crime

At Bearing Arms, Cam Edwards has a piece noting that Everytown's Concealed Carry Claims Debunked By Reality. The dogma, that more guns equals more crime, is very strong with this bunch. In fact, as has been proven time and again, never more positively that with John Lott's study More Guns, Less Crime, the opposite is true. And New Jersey becomes the latest state to prove it after the Bruen decision.

The Bruen decision is the worst thing that's happened to the gun control lobby in years. Yes, it overturned the "may issue" carry laws that were still in place in a handful of anti-gun states, which is bad enough from the perspective of the anti-gun crowd, but it also put to test the fundamental premise of the gun control movement; more guns means more crime.

According to an Everytown post on X, referring to an article in News From The States:

Applications for concealed carry permits in New Jersey skyrocketed by nearly 3000% after the Supreme Court’s reckless Bruen decision made it easier to secure permits by upending the state’s existing strong gun safety laws.

More guns do not make us safer.

As Edwards notes, there really has been a 3,000% increase in applications for concealed carry permits. But rather than seeing a similar spike in gun crimes, the opposite has happened. According to an article by the AP, not a gun friendly organization:

New Jersey recorded the lowest number of shootings in 2023 since record keeping began in 2009, Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday.

Murphy, a Democrat, and other officials announced the milestone, calling it a “great achievement for public safety.”

“We must also hold in our thoughts the victims of gun violence and their loved ones and must recommit ourselves to the fight to fully eliminate gun violence from our state,” Murphy said.

In 2023, 924 people were shot in the state, down 13% over the previous year and the first time fewer than 1,000 were shot in a year, officials said. Of the more than 900 shot, 191 were killed, officials added, down 8% over the previous year.

There is a common notion that when thieves threaten with a you with a gun, and take something of value from you, that they are just taking "stuff." But in reality, that "stuff" was something you had to work to acquire. If it is worth $100, and you make $10/hour, that represents 10 hours of your life. You cannot be made whole. So that is one thing, and I don't think it should be treated so lightly: 10 hours of your life that you will never get back. But then David Codrea asks a very good question: what if the thief wants to take (the rest) your life? Bad enough they want to steal part of your life, but wanting to steal the rest of it too?

I think the people running Everytown, Moms Demand Action, Brady, and other groups trying to ban guns understand this calculus. They also understand the fact that having guns and training makes us a potential threat to their agenda. But the Second Amendment wasn't just to defend against tyranny.  So, they cannot under any circumstances admit the truth: more guns, less crime.