It's Time To Take Down Big Businesses

Also, another quick note.  Gentle readers should go read J. B. Shurk at the American Thinker today in an article entitled Deep State Plutocrats Have Nowhere to Hide.

The worst mistake the Deep State ever made was to turn conservatives against Big Business. Traditionally, fighting corporate power was the purview of the political left. Conservatives have generally backed “free markets” because they despise socialism’s predilection for choosing economic winners and losers. Conservative voters have long seen government regulation as more of a threat than Wall Street wheeling and dealing.

...snip...

What’s changed over the last ten years is that the vestigial boundary between private markets and government force has all but disappeared. Strangely enough, the corporate embrace of woke-ism as a social philosophy that should be imposed upon consumers has had the serendipitous effect of shattering the imaginary wall once separating Big Business from Big Government. Parents began asking why Target and Disney were shoving transgenderism and child sex changes down their throats. Moviegoers started resenting how Hollywood studios had replaced entertainment with divisive re-education seminars on “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” and “global warming.” Voters were forced to acknowledge that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and corporate news shows were censoring conservative speech and promoting far-left propaganda. Consumers realized that banks were systematically punishing them for their Second Amendment advocacy, religious affiliations, and political beliefs. All of these corporate provocations fell like sledgehammer blows upon conservatives’ heads, and Americans who once gave corporations a quiet pass became increasingly loud and angry.

Shurk points to just who is the problem, but provides no possible solution. Well, I have one. In the early part of the 20th century, so-called "trust busting" was big, and the government went after all sorts of monopolies. These massive corporations have again become monopolistic, and we need to break them up again. Companies like BlackRock need to be broken up. Banks need to be separated again. We need more local and regional banks and corporations and fewer national and international ones. We need to go back to local restaurants and get rid of the national chains. companies like Google and Microsoft also need to be divested of a lot of their services, which should go to smaller more agile competitors. Just as Standard Oil was broken up, so should giant, unaccountable businesses.

What You Are Aborting Is Not Your Body

 Just a quick note.  I have mentioned on several occasions that abortion is murder and thus I can not support it.  The child growing in the mother's womb is a separate human being, not the mother herself.  Thus the "my body, my choice" argument fails.  The Supreme Court in its Dobbs decision turned the question of the limits of abortions back to the states, which was a correct decision as far as it went.

But there is a deeper place to which the Court might have gone, and it is to look at our founding documents, specifically, the Declaration of Independence. Bill Guild at the American Thinker does exactly that in Abortion and the Constitution.

Let's go back to square one. In spite of any opinion one might hold, ours is a constitutional republic. So the laws that govern abortion must reflect our Constitution or be struck down. That's why the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson was so significant.

The Declaration of Independence states that:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

No one would deny that the Declaration represents the theoretical principles of our government, while the Constitution is the legal embodiment of those principles. In turn, it is the courts that ensure our laws reflect our founding principles.

Please read all of Guild's short post.

Taking Note of History

 Once again, I do not have a lot of time today.  The news is occupied with the "horse race," otherwise known as Trump vs. Harris.  Oh, they throw in stuff like "WW3 is about to begin.  Run in circles and go and hide!"  Or they distract us with the current Taylor Swift drama.  Meanwhile, the (formerly) Great Britain has fallen into absolute totalitarianism. C. A. Skeet has the story at PJ Media entitled Britain Is Now a Totalitarian State. Oh, and it is threatening to extradite Elon Musk, and by extention anyone else, who dares to get crosswise with its Fuhrer...er...Prime Minister.

There are lessons in what is happening in (f)GB to the United States. You can find those at the American Thinker in a piece by E. Jeffrey Ludwig entitled Western Civilisation In Decline. I urge readers to read this post as well. But back to Skeet:

We can safely declare, without exaggeration or hyperbole, that Britain is now a totalitarian state. The ruling machine may not yet have the absolute control that Stalin did, but it's not for lack of trying. The British government's hysterical Chicken Little response to online support for this past week's rioting is proof enough for anyone paying attention that it attaches no value whatsoever to Western principles like freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

Here's a video of an elderly man being arrested in his home for "improper use" of social media for "some comments that [he] made" on his Facebook page. The two Stasi thugs masquerading as police officers are doing the dirty work for a government that, not too long ago, declared that "just following orders" was not an excuse for human rights violations. And yet...

This is where Britain is now, and if there's a definition for it other than "totalitarian," I'm open for suggestions.

To be sure, the (formerly Great) British push to criminalize speech which goes against the official narrative and represents the common sense of the average citizen...er...surf has been going on for some time. Like Leftists here in the United States tearing up our constitution and using it for toilet paper, Leftists in the UK have been tearing up the Magna Carta. What were, at the time of America's founding considered the "rights of Englishmen" are no longer.

The British rioters have been deemed "far-right" by the state apparatus, and you know what that means. It means the state will be relentless and ruthless in tracking down every single one of them and prosecuting them to the fullest extent of whatever arbitrary interpretation is used to stretch and twist the law this particular week. Their crime is not rioting. Their crime is running afoul of state ideology. The J6 defendants could offer them some legal advice.

Riots far more destructive and murderous occur on the regular by coordinated elements that an honest media would accurately describe as "far-left" or "Islamist," but instead are described by our palace eunuchs as "mostly peaceful." Had the British rioters waved a Palestinian flag or two, Kamala Harris could start a fund to bail them out.

Much like Stalin dispatching Trotsky in Mexico, or a Moroccan gutting Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam, the totalitarian mindset is nothing if not global in outlook. You might not be interested British virtue signaling, but British virtue signaling is interested in you. Hence, we have Elon Musk, an American citizen on American soil under the protection of the American Bill of Rights, being threatened with prosecution by UK authorities for posting opinions on the social feed of his own company.

You were wondering how Elon Musk got into this story. Well, it seems that one Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner threatened to extradite anyone anywhere who fell afoul of their so-called "laws." Here is how Skeet handled it:

And what horrific crimes did Elon commit that raise the specter of a possible extradition request? According to that insufferable socialist rag, the U.K. Independent, he "launched a tirade" on his platform X against Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

ELON LAUNCHED A TIRADE!!!

But that's not all. He used his platform to "...attack Sir Keir personally..."

ELON MADE A PERSONAL ATTACK!!!

"...as he appeared to fan the flames of discontent..."

ELON FANNED THE FLAMES!!!

...in an "apparently unprovoked attack on Starmer and the UK government"...

FIRST A PERSONAL ATTACK, NOW AN UNPROVOKED ATTACK!!!

Yes, Musk used words. I remember when people used to think rationally here remembering that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Oh yes, words can sting. But proportionality demands that the punishments fit the crime. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. I would note that Sir Keir Starmer has an entire army at his disposal, whereas Musk has...Teslas? The whole fiasco seems out so of proportion as to be laughable. After all, anyone who doesn't care for Musk's comments can turn them off. I certainly do along with most other social media.  But that is the point, isn't it.  Leftists cannot stand to be laughed at.

This is the essence of totalitarian regimes. They cannot stand to be laughed at or ignored. It is true here in the USA and there in (formerly) Great Britain. They know they are doing wrong, but fear if the citizens realize it there will be consequences. To forestall those consequences, they intimidate as many as possible.  They jail some, put others in "re-education camps" and if necessary, execute still others.  Oh, but there will be consequences. The question is, will the consequences be merely kicked out of office, and living to fight another day, or will the perpetrators be hanged for crimes against humanity. Note that I do not advocate the latter, I just take note of history.

The Evil of Abortion

 Today, at the American Thinker the Rev. Jim Harden has a post entitled Barbarism in America: The Harris-Walz Agenda. The Harris-Walz agenda should be angering and outraging every American. But the push to bring abortion back to the national stage should shock everyone with righteous anger.

The Supreme Court rightly turned the abortion question back to the states to decide individually. After all, there is no provision in the Federal Constitution for abortion. It simply is not one of the few things assigned to the Federal Government. But of course, that is not what Harden is concerned about.

No, What Harden is concerned about is the pagan and barbaric nature of abortion in general, and of so-called post birth abortion, or infanticide. In the Bible, one of the ancient gods, Moloch, whose images included a fiery belly into which people would throw their first-born children, in the hopes that Moloch would give them more children. But of course, what the King James calls "passing children through the fire" offended the Most High God beyond our understanding. So it was that when Ahaz, king of Judah passed his children through the fire, God brought disaster on Israel and Ahaz.

In a move that should outrage every American, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who is now Kamala Harris' running mate, recently signed into law the Pro Act, a bill that allows babies born alive to be left to die if the child survived an abortion attempt. This legislation, now law in Minnesota, represents a level of barbarism that should have no place in a civilized society.

Some will claim this is an overstatement. However, eight infants born alive have already been lost to post-birth abortion -- bald-faced infanticide.

This barbaric policy is a brutal reality where newborns, who survive attempted abortions. Abortion is unethical to start with as the purpose of medicine is to heal and maintain the health of the patient -- every ethical doctor knows a pregnant woman represents two patients. Abortion neither heals nor maintains the health of either patient, stopping the healthy function of the woman’s reproductive system and snatching life itself away from the baby.

One of the justifications pro-abortion Left uses is the "my body, my choice" argument. But this agrumemt is specious, at best. It is not just "her body." There is her body and the body of the person temporarily living inside her. We are, after all, mammals. Mammals carry their children to full term inside the mother's body. The term "foetus" is a medical term for a stage of development, not to imply that the child inside is not a child. And to dehumanize that child by calling it a "clump of cells" is...well let's call it what it is...it's evil.

This clash of civilizations between the values of life and the barbarism of the Harris-Walz agenda is stark, to say the least. But do our elected representatives are under prepared to solve this massive issue. The Right only talks about abortion in terms of arbitrary gestational age restrictions, while the Left hammers the campaign trail with the rhetoric “You’ll lose your rights unless we have abortion on demand!” The Left knows that the fear of loss is more powerful than vain debates on when we should start protecting human beings -- which is how they keep winning elections.

The nation needs pro-life statesmen. These men and women need to understand that all people are equally valuable, from conception until natural death -- whether in an IVF clinic’s freezer, a woman’s womb, or on their deathbed -- deserving of blessing and protection. Then they must have the resolve to stand in front of the barbaric horde of radical pro-abortion extremists, exposing the evil of abortion, and say, “If you want to hurt those women and babies, you’re going to have to go through me.”

Please read the entire post.

Update:  Please also read the article at The Federalist entitled 'Pull Off a Leg or Two': Planned Parenthood Staff Discuss Havesting Baby Parts In Unsealed Footage, that is if your stomach can take it. This footage was siezed by Kamala Harris when she was AG of California and kept under wraps. And no wonder as it is damning stuff. But it fits with her and Walz's overall agenda.

On Climate Change, Pot Meet Kettle

 James T. Moodey at the American Thinker has an article explaining measurements taken at his Weights and Measures gas-physics test facility that showed that there is no "greenhouse effect" at Greenhouse Gases are a Scientific Myth.

Despite the oncoming tropical storm Debby, I need to go to work, so I ask gentle readers to read the whole article. As Moodey noted, when natural gas is burned, the result is carbon dioxide and water, the building blocks of life when acted upon by plants. But more importantly, tests show that carbon dioxide does not retain heat any more than any other gas. Indeed, what retains the heat is water vapor, as anyone can observe who lives in a humid environment like North Carolina.

It turns out that the source of the greenhouse gas theory was a paper produced in 1861 by John Tyndall based on flawed measurements using seriously flawed equipment. Such equipment would not pass muster in the modern world, yet because of the money to be had from government grants, academics did not question Tyndall's paper. Instead, they accepted it and produced results that showed what the government wanted. So, when they claim climate change deniers are taking funds from the oil companies that color their views, they are simply projecting what they themselves are doing. Pot meet kettle.

Voting As If Our Lives Depended On It

 I send a little Jeremiad from Andrea Widburg today at the American Thinker entitled The Harris-Biden administration has broken the Pax Americana.

The Pax Americana existed from 1945 until 2021 when America was the world’s strongest nation. There were regional wars but, for the most part, American pressure kept them from escalating into nuclear chaos or complete regional collapse. 9/11 shook that system, Obama’s “leading from behind” weakened it, and the Harris-Biden administration destroyed it. We now tremble on the brink.

After explaining some similar historical examples she launches into a list of current events that threaten to blow up in our faces with perhaps nuclear consequences. The Kingston Trio's song is apt. She concludes with "(This fall, vote as if your life depends on it because it really may.)"

Gentle readers should read the whole post. Of course I am not in favor of using fear as a means of getting people to take action. I trust in God, who works for the ultimate good, though we may be individually inconvenienced. But Andrea Widburg is ultimately correct that we must vote as if our lives depended on it, because it may.

Living In the Former USA

 Anthony DeBlasi has an autobiographical article at the American Thinker today that reminded me of...well...me to a certain extent. Oh, DeBlasi is older than I am if he fought in Korea. And he has more artistic talent that I do. Still, I can relate to An American Who Became an Alien. I have noted how many of our former freedoms have been restricted or done away with entirely. I often feel like I am living in the Former United States of America, where the states are just provinces of the Federal government, not independent sovereign states. And while technology has made many things better, one cannot help but feel that overall, life is worse, not better.

I have to get ready for Church so this post will be necessarily short, but I encourage gentle readers to read the entire article at the American Thinker. But the heart of it is here:

Anthony talked and played classical music with a schol chum and painted murals on school walls with another. Later, a college friend introduced him to something new from England called “high fidelity.” Anthony had seen 78 rpm records turn to LPs, then 45s, then “stereo.” He saw records and film “replaced” with magnetic tape. He saw radio “replaced” with television, and saw black-and-white turn to color.

...snip...

Anthony bit, chewed thoroughly, then spat out the Enlightenment and its spin-off socio-political theories and isms. They denied or rejected God, which went counter to his discoveries. To deny God is to deny self. To reject God is to reject life, a form of blindness that leads to radical error and suicide, spiritual if not physical. To him, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, and other manipulators of the facts of life were to be pitied, not enshrined. So-called social “science” and social “engineering” were arrogant, pseudoscientific non-disciplines at odds with reality, human intelligence, and life itself. Judeo-Christian tenets rooted in the facts of life were ultimately more enlightening, more human, more liberating than social theories spun out of abstractions based on wish lists. Reason and science that lead instead of serve humans are misapplied.

Anthony married a girl from Scotland, had three children, and lived in New England thereafter. His beloved Sicilian parents died close to the age of 90. With growing disbelief and indignation, Anthony witnessed cradle misfits trash a wonderful culture by polluting young minds with puerile social theories.

Feeling like an alien in his own country, Anthony misses the depth and breadth of freedom he once enjoyed – and fought for – in an America that lost its marbles after mid-century. Happily his love of writing never left him.

I was one of those who were warped by the "cradle misfits" that found their way into the schools. It has been a long and painful path back to God, which I could only do because He did it for me. I take no credit. Now I really must start getting ready for Church.