Pray that God Steels The Supreme Court's Spine This Time

 I am still busy, but thought I would get in a post now and again. 

Joy Pullman at The Federalist has an article today entitled Supreme Court's Cowardice Allows Colorado To Keep Persecuting Christians. Pullman is referring to Jack Phillips, the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding because to do so violated his Christian beliefs. Mr. Phillips would sell anything in his store to anybody. But of course, that wasn't good enough. They insisted he must bake a custom designed wedding cake.

The U.S. Constitution unmistakably protects not only the freedom of speech but also the freedom of Christian worship. The First Amendment, which the Supreme Court holds is now extended beyond Congress to state governments, is extremely clear: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.”

U.S. governments may not prohibit the free exercise of religion, nor the freedom of speech. On both these counts, Phillips’ rights are clear and ought to be secured by courts.

Instead, however, his natural human rights have been ceaselessly mutilated by not only the entire machinery of Colorado courts but also the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Phillips’ favor, yet in such a narrow ruling as to allow a venomous transgender activist to immediately haul him back into court after speciously demanding that Phillips bake a transgender celebration cake.

The whole world seems to have been taken over by Satan, and he won't let any corner of it rest, it seems.  Misery and death follow in the wake wherever he strikes next.  One hopes that God will send us holy shepards to lead us, and give the Supreme Court some steel in their collective spine to finally say that this is simply not allowed.

Keep in mind that the claims of any of the LBTQ++etc. people that they were "born that way" have never been proven. There is no evidence for a gene that makes people gay or transgender. Thus the whole notion that LGBTQ++etc. rights is the same as the other civil rights causes fails. A person may be born of a different race, or be born in a different country, or be born with disabilities. But people choose an LBTQ++etc. lifestyle. That is on them.

The Greenie Left Starts Another Power Grab

 I know, I know.  I haven't been posting lately.  I have been busy lately.  I will likely be busy again next week, but I couldn't let this piece by Monica Showalter at the American Thinker entitled The greenie left is coming for your coffee now go to waste. I like my coffee, and I make 1 to 2 double espressos every day. As Ms. Showalter says, this is just another attempt to put us peasants in our place, while the elites get to enjoy a cup or two of coffee every day. Oh, and as a plus, they get to starve poor doffee farmers, who might not be able to grow much else on their properties.

What they want, of course, is to take away more stuff from us, the better to control us. It wasn't enough to target our gas-powered cars and tell us to take the bus. It wasn't enough to take away our electricity and natural gas in the name of 'going green' and tell consumers to freeze in winter. It wasn't enough to howl for an end to jet travel while greenie leftists bought carbon indulgences and continued to jet about with their private planes. It wasn't enough to take away our plastic bags, to ensure that we only use unsanitary bacteria-filled cloth recycle bags. It wasn't enough to take away our meat and tell us to eat bugs.

All these are things they are -- no, really -- trying to take away. In some cases, they have succeeded at such schemes, too, all for a phony and chimerical quest to stop global warming, which somehow never happens. Oftentimes, they have trashed economies of third-world countries that rely on production of raw materials and agricultural production, but not a problem for them. You can bet this coffee nonsense is going to worm its way into leftist discourse the same way every other bad idea has among the greenie-dictator set. They just can't stop grabbing for power.

Now coffee is to become a luxury item in their narrative, to be consumed only by the elites. As for the rest of us, have a cup of instant ... just like they do in prisons.

If the study cited by the New York Post has any actual scientific basis, it is not cited in the article. I suspect that as usual they have cherry picked the data to present the worst possible case. And of course, they have left out the health benefits of coffee.

The idea that we should reduce our "carbon footprint" rests on a couple of assumptions. One is that we can actually drive the global temperature up or down by our behavior. Another is that the current global temperature is the ideal. Neither assumption is true.  The fact is that world's temperature has been much warmer and much much colder and people were not even living on the planet at that time. In fact, the global temperature has been both warmer and colder in historic times, and humans have adapted to them.

The fact is that the global temperature is out of our control. In fact, it is the Sun controls our temperature. Showalter actually makes a good point that the "researchers" never ventured a guess as to how much giving up coffee would actually make in the total scheme of things. One suspects it would be like spitting in the ocean hoping to make it rise.

What Women Expect Is To Be Protected. And Have Gas Stoves to Cook With.

 Christopher Chantrill over at the American Thinker today makes an interesting point in his article entitled Women Expect: To Have Gas Stoves. The point he is making is that asking what women want is the wrong question. What we should be asking is what do women expect. And what the expect is to be protected, and to be protected by men. Once conservatives realize this (we men are simple creatures after all) then we can fashion scare stories that move the needle in our direction. voil`a.  Women expect to be protected, and have gas stoves.

One of the most important things I know is a fundamental mistake of Sigmund Freud. Siggie asked: "What do women want?"

Everybody knows that Siggie was asking the wrong question. It is not what women want, it is what they "expect." And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

Once you read this, learn it, and inwardly digest it, life looks a lot different.

The limit case on women and protection is described in A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. Yes, what does a woman do in Berlin in May 1945 when it's been invaded by the Red Army and she's already been raped a few times? Bueller? Anyone?

So, what are some of the things that can be exploited to our advantage instead of the left's? Well, take all electric vehicles and amp up the negatives. We know that these vehicles are vulnerable to running out of energy at the worst possible moments. But they are also vulnerable to catching on fire. Oh, and the batteries use materials that demand huge amounts of energy to produce and pollute when they are disposed.

But women should be terrified by "EVs." Suppose a nice liberal lady goes to the Seattle Symphony in her "EV" and it's a really cold night and she has to stop at a charging station on the way home in a supermarket parking lot at 11:00 p.m. and there are drug dealers about? Of course, there are three charging stations in the basement of Symphony Hall, but good luck getting ahead of the Gold Membership patrons -- or matrons, as the case may be.

But, ladies, what happens in ten years when there are 50 charging stations in the basement of Symphony Hall and one of the "EVs" has a battery fire -- in a basement parking garage full of EVs with nice explodable lithium batteries?

You get the idea. Does it seem like playing dirty? Well, maybe, but the idea is to fight fire with fire. Meet the enemy where he is on the battlefield and show women that they do indeed need men and of course men need women. We used to know such things.  Then Betty Friedan said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.  Maybe somewhat true of the woman in question is rich, otherwise...

Now, the conceit of our lefty friends is that They Care about women, their rights, their welfare and their safety. But I say it's all a lie. Women's rights meant nothing in Berlin in May 1945, or in any blue city in America in 2023. Women's welfare adds up to nothing if she doesn't have a husband. Women are fundamentally unsafe -- especially in the Age of Depolicing -- without a man with a gun.

It's our job, each of us racist-sexist-homophobes, to teach our beloved women these practical facts of life.

Because women expect to be protected. And have gas stoves to cook with.

The Madness Continues Apace

 The madness continues apace.  The "woke" want to keep the normals on their heels to prevent us from figuring out that the whole "woke" agenda is a scam designed to enrich the "woke" at the expense of everyone else.  A couple of cases in point:

The Biden administration now wants to ban gas stoves according to an article at American Action News entitled Biden's Gas Stove Ban Is A Bigger Deal Than Democrats Think: This Business Owner Could Lose His Business. The owner in question is restaurantuer Stratis Morfogen who claimed on Tucker Carlson Tonight last night that switching to electric would reduce production by 40% and increase prices by 60%. The claim by the US Product Safety Commission that gas stoves are a health hazard is pure hogwash. Gas stoves have been in use in the United States since the early 20th century and they are just now claiming unhealthy air quality from these stoves? Please.

Then there is the hairbrained scheme to capture carbon dioxide, liquify it, and store it underground. At the American Thinker today, John M. Contino tells us about it in an article entitled Carbon Capture Is A Woke Fantasy.

Let's say you're brainstorming with some friends, trying to figure out how to cash in on the woke green wave. It would probably not occur to the less boldly imaginative among us to propose 1) capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from agricultural areas covering five Midwestern states (see map from a corporate website here), 2) dehydrating and compressing it into liquid form at various capture locations, 3) transporting it via brand new pipelines, and 4) sequestering it into its permanent rocky tomb a mile beneath the surface, safe from climate change, nuclear war, and all but the most severe cosmic catastrophes. As a bonus, liquid CO2 that survives burial has commercial industrial applications, like dry ice for food preservation or creating cloudy or foggy effects for Hollywood productions. It's also used in fire extinguishers and to carbonate soft drinks, and it is even an important cooling agent for cryogenic freezing, as was done, for example, to Ted Williams and his son John Henry.

If you're wondering where the money comes from for these enterprises, the Department of Energy has announced many tens of millions of dollars in funding for research and implementation of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects. Additionally, carbon credits for industry are shaping up to be a powerful incentive for generating private and public investor capital.

Where to start...

First of all, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been much higher than today, and contrary to St. Greta of Thunburg, the planet did not burn to a crisp, and life went on. A Forbes article, no conservative site, points to levels as high as 4,000 ppm in the past, compared to 400 ppm today. Then there are volcanos, which emit more carbon dioxide than human activity.

Second are the benefits of CO2 to plants. First plants grow bigger and faster with higher CO2, which is why green house growers pump it in to their green houses. Plants also need less water when living under higher CO2 levels. So more CO2 helps to overcome desertification. Shouldn't that please environmental wackos?  After all, they blame deserts on us too.  Levels as high as 600 to 800 ppm would not be harmful to us.

Third, there is the cow flatulence nonsense. Cows, and other livestock, including you and me, fart. Cows fart a lot because they eat a lot of low nutrion feed like pasture grass. But they do not add to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere because they are just part of the carbon cycle. The grass breaths in CO2. It then strips off the oxygen, breathing that out so we can breath. The grass meanwhile uses the carbon as building blocks to form the celluose that is the backbone of blades of grass. The cow eats the grass, and releases the CO2 back to the atmosphere, so it can be utilized by more grass. Nature thus recycles the same CO2 in a great circle of life.

So what happened to the 4,000 ppm of CO2 that existed during the Precambrian period 500 million years ago? Most of that is sequestered in the vast layers of limestone around the earth. It was layed up by trillions of shell forming creatures in the ocean that died, and left behind thick layers of limestone. Indeed, these little creatures turn out to be a more productive way to sequester CO2 that the multibillion dollar Navigator project mentioned above.

Sequestering CO2 by liquifying it, and storing it underground is just a waste of money that serves no purpose except to enrich already rich people more at your a my expense.

The United States Should Mind Its Own Business

John Green, at the American Thinker today has an article entitled The World May Have To Do Without America For A Bit, in which he claims that America is so divided, so distrustful of other Americans, that we can not effectively provide the "Pax Americana" that we have imposed since the end of World War II. Indeed, Green thinks we are heading towards a national breakup, as citizens flee blue states for red ones.

In a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, 39 percent of Americans consider other Americans to be America’s greatest threat. That’s more people than consider China our greatest threat (25 percent). It’s almost twice as many as those that consider Russia our greatest threat (20 percent).

Of those polled, 22 percent say Democrats are our greatest threat. That would include people like myself, who believe the Dems have become the American communists -- determined to destroy everything that makes us exceptional -- as a necessary measure to marshal in a socialist utopia.

Another 17 percent say that Republicans are the greatest threat. Those would be our fellow citizens who have bought Biden’s semi-fascist baloney and Merrick Garland’s “white supremacist” propaganda. So much for returning comity and normalcy to the American conversation.

Meanwhile, the world is full of threats. Russia wants to reconstitute the Soviet empire, and is chipping away at eastern Europe to do it.

Islamic fundamentalists want to create a caliphate, and seem to think that enough murder and mayhem will convince the world’s population to join the “religion of peace.” Or maybe they just want to kill the nonbelievers for the fun of it. It’s hard to tell.

China just wants everything. But they aren’t resorting (yet) to the grotesque methods of Russia or the Islamic fundamentalists. They’re simply trying to buy it all with their Belt and Road initiative. They seem to think that world domination is a simple real estate deal. Hopefully they’re wrong -- but who knows?

...snip...

The American contest of ideas has devolved to: personal freedom advocated by the Right vs statism advocated by the Left. Open dialog advocated by the Right, vs no dialog commanded by the Left. There will be no quick compromise or resolution.

It’s no exaggeration to point out that unless there’s a sudden outbreak of sanity and reason, we are approaching a national breakup. Americans are already beginning to sort themselves between red and blue states on the basis of ideology. If this trend continues, there will eventually be a winner and a loser, and the breakup will not be pretty. Hopefully we’ll find a peaceful resolution, but achieving ideological alignment will take years.

I will leave quotes from Green's article here. In terms of imposing a "Pax Americana" on the World, I suspect that our current disunity will be good for the rest of the World. Certainly, other countries should pay their own way for defense of their own borders. Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) are long obsolete and we should pull out of them. Instead we need to concentrate on internal matters, with the exception of reinvoking the Monroe doctrine, which states that the Western Hemisphere is our sphere of influence. Communists need to get out.

Then there are the wars in which there seems to be no American interests involved whatsoever.  We have spent huge amounts of money and lost the lives of young men and women for what?  Many of these foreign inbroglios have been the result if treaties that we never should have gotten into in the first place.  No less than George Washington warned us against becoming entangled in such treaties.  Now is a good time to dientangle ourselves.  

Kurt Schlichter keeps pointing out that the United States military has not won a single war since WWII. Perhpas if we concentrate on internal matters and in this hemisphere, we can return it to its roots as a strong defense force, not unlike Switzerland, where a rifle is behind every blade of grass. Oh, and get rid of the woke officers. We need more Chesty Pullers and George Pattons, not to mention Grants and Shermans.  

Will Courts Pin Back the Ears Of Anti-Gun Legislators?

Jacob Sullum has a piece out today at Townhall.com entitled The 3rd Circuit Considers Whether Nonviolent Crimes Justify The Loss Of Second Amendment Rights. The plaintiff in the case is Randy Range who pleaded guilty of fraudulently obtaining $2,458 in food stamps by misrepresenting his income. He was given a sentence of 3 years probation, fined $100, and paid $288 in court costs.

Obviously, Randy Range is not your violent criminal type. He made a mistake, and paid the price. What has bothered me all along is how an anti-gun government can create prohibited persons by simply creating felonies. All they have to do seemingly is make the penalty for every crime one year or more in prison. They don't have to impose that penalty, just that it is on the books.

In any case, Range attempted to buy a hunting rifle and was turned down. Thinking this was a mistake, he asked his wife to buy it for him. He did not realize that his conviction for a relatively minor nonviolent crime meant he had given up his Second Amendment rights.  I am sure that such was never explained to him either by the court or by his, no doubt, court appointed lawyer.  

Range's initial confusion about his status is not surprising, since the rule he inadvertently violated does not make much sense. Although it is ostensibly aimed at protecting public safety, it does not require any evidence of violent tendencies. In a Nov. 16 decision that was vacated last week, a 3rd Circuit panel said that policy nevertheless is "consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation" -- the constitutional test that the Supreme Court says gun laws must pass. Surveying the history of status-based gun prohibitions from 17th-century England through ratification of the Second Amendment, the panel perceived a pattern of disarming people "who did not respect the law," whether or not they posed a violent threat.

A brief that the Firearms Policy Coalition submitted on Range's behalf reaches a strikingly different conclusion. "Historically, firearm prohibitions applied to dangerous persons," the brief says. "There is no tradition in American history of banning peaceable citizens from owning firearms."

That take jibes with a 2019 dissent that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. "Legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns," she said. "But that power extends only to people who are (SET ITAL) dangerous.(END ITAL) "

Hopefully, the courts will pin back the ears of these anti-gun legislators, who are entirely too numerous.

Two Tiered Justice System Strikes Again

The story is brewing that President Biden stored classified documents among unclassified papers in a think tank closet in Washinton, DC. Oh the horrors! Why has the FBI not raided his home? On the case today, at The Federalist is Margo Cleveland in an article entitled There's A Difference Between Biden's and Trump's Classified Documents Snafus. But It's Not What You Think. As she is at pains to point out, the National Archives and Records Administration cooperated with the Obama/Biden administration. Trump, not so much.

But the similarities between the situations remain striking, with the classified documents both at Mar-a-Lago and at the Biden think tank, comingled with unclassified documents, reportedly including “top secret” documents, and stored in a closet.

At least, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was private and protected by the Secret Service, while the Penn Biden Center was located at a busy D.C. office building that spanned some 10 stories and included numerous public areas, including a reception area on the roof that hosted weddings and other private events.

...snip...

So if the NARA had legitimate concerns about Trump’s possession of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, the NARA “would have worked to arrange for the documents to be preserved under the auspices of NARA control in a location chosen by Trump, as it had done with Obama.”

But the NARA didn’t work with Trump, with the records instead suggesting that “a backbench bureaucrat’s partisan grievance spurred the FBI’s nakedly political raid on Trump.” And that is where the real double standard is seen.

Who knows, too, what classified documents the FBI might have discovered had it raided all the Biden and Obama properties mere months after they left office, as agents did to Trump?

We’ll never know that answer, though, because the NARA properly partnered with the former Obama-Biden administration. And that is the appropriate comparator to consider, not how the NARA or the DOJ responded to the recent discovery of Biden’s secreted classified documents. Of course, given their very public mistreatment of Trump, the NARA had to refer the case to the DOJ, and Attorney General Merrick Garland had to assign a U.S. attorney to investigate the matter.

Once again, we see the difference in how the justice system works for Democrats and against Republicans.