Christians need to repent and be sure we are standing on God's side

 The shootings at the Covenant Church School in Nashville, Tennessee have rocked the Christian community hard.  Every one of us understands that the life of a Christian can be difficult because Christ himself predicted that we would be persecuted and killed for his sake.  That doesn't make it any easier.  Indeed, we are to bear these sufferings joyfully, which is even harder.  

I have mentioned it before, but Tucker Carlson often implies, but never says outright what is really going on with these violent acts, such as the Covenant School shootings in Nashville.  He came closest yesterday saying that the transgender movement was diametrically opposed to Christianity.  It is true, as far as it goes, but the obvious question is;  "Why?"  Carlson says that people who believe that they can change their genders believe they are God, whereas Christians know they are not God.  Again, true as far as it goes, but is there something deeper going on here?

Joy Pullman, at The Federalists has an article today entitled The Six Christians Martyred In Nashville Are A Call To Repentence For All Who Will Hear It that is quite explicit about what is going on.

If you weren’t aware that the West’s culture war is also a spiritual battle, let the martyrdom of Christ’s six precious saints in Nashville, Tennessee this week open your eyes. We “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

It should be no surprise that worshippers of demons rage against those bought and sealed with Christ’s holy blood, and identify Christians as their worst enemy. They hate us because of Christ. Our Savior, whose torture and triumph we honor next week with Holy Week and Easter, told us to expect their violent, unceasing hatred.

Putting Carlson's observations together with Pullman's essay, one realizes that this is indeed Satanic.  Lucifer was God's highest angel.  But he didn't want to just be an angel, one of God's creations.  He wanted to be God, to sit on His thrown.  It was this pride that caused him to be kicked out of Heaven by the Arcangel Michael.  It was this same pride with which he tempted the first humans and caused our fall.  We also wanted to be as God.

I don't discount that men can be evil on their own. For man is born sin, and sins all the days of his life. But what we are seeing today is a special kind of evil to attack society in this way. Normal people are protective of children. They are repulsed by grooming of children by drag queen story hours, convincing them thay are another gender, engaging in pedophilia. Even more, normal people don't shout their abortions. No, this kind of evil is demonic in origin. Christians can expect more of this demonic attack, so it is important to make sure you are on God's side.

Why We Carry Guns

 The repeal of the Jim Crow era law requiring citizens to obtain a permit to purchase a handgun was a big deal.  But Andrea Widburg's post at the American Thinker entitled The most dangerous guns are those in governmen's hands points to another big deal, to wit: that the governments' monopoly of force is a clear and present danger to its own citizens.

Tucker Carlson made a great point last night: There are about 70 million more guns in America than there are citizens, and gun owners have billions of rounds. If guns were inherently dangerous, America would be in a perpetual state of Armageddon-like warfare, but it’s not. That’s because most Americans are good people. But there is a group of people that should never be allowed sole possession of guns because when they go bad, they go very, very bad, and that’s government employees—and I’ve got the numbers to prove it.

With help from Rummel’s data and from other readily available (and uncontested) information on the internet, I was able to compile a short list showing what happens when just a few governments turn on their citizens—and all the numbers far exceed anything American citizens do to each other.

Turkey: In 1915, the Turkish government murdered an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

Soviet Union: In the 1920s through mid-1930s, Stalin went to war against the Kulaks, Ukraine’s independent farmers (the Holodomor). The government starved, executed, and deported the Kulaks, killing an estimated 7 million in less than a decade.

While that was a targeted mass murder, the Soviet Union generally attacked its own citizens, starving them, executing them, or sending them to gulags. Estimates range from 7 million to 20 million people dying from the Soviet government’s policies and purges.

China in the 1960s through 1970s: Mao made Stalin look like an amateur. We don’t know how many people died from executions, starvation, and slave labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but estimates range from 23 million to 46 million Chinese. Outlying estimates are that 50 million or more Chinese died for Mao’s statist vision.

Nazi Germany, from 1933-1945: Any disfavored civilians not already unarmed before the Nazis gained power were disarmed when the Nazis achieved power. The Nazis then executed 6 million Jews; 250,000 gypsies; 220,000 homosexuals, and, through slave labor, executions, and starvation, as many as 10 million Slavic people. The number of handicapped people killed is unknown. Another 19,000,000 European civilians were estimated to have died because they found themselves in the path of Hitler’s war.

Cambodia: Between 1975 and 1979, under Pol Pot, the government killed between 1.7 and 2.2 million of its own citizens, out of a population of around 8 million people. That’s a lot more than 10.2 murders per 100,000.

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We’ve already seen the current government and its media allies menacing those American citizens it views as a threat to its power (e.g., January 6, which increasingly looks like a Reichstag Fire event; the unending, unconstitutional pretrial internment of the J6 prisoners; Democrat leaders who encourage violence; the purging of the historic record about attacks on Republican politicians; the weaponization of the IRS; etc.). I don’t like to think what it could do if it felt there were no barriers to action.

One commenter feels that the United States hasn't had any cases of demicide. Apparently he hasn't connected the dots from mere harrassment to actual killings on an industrial scale. Like all criminals, they don't start out killing people. They start out small, and their crimes continue to get worse and worse unless stopped. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop these criminals before they can get worse. Most of these things mentioned are crimes being committed uncer color of law and should be punished. It remains to be seen whether our Republican representatives will punish them for any of this.

I would also point out that adding yet more gun laws to the books while failing to prosecute the ones we already have is pure lunacy. Indeed, if crimes are not to be prosecuted, then they shouldn't be on the books at all. But if we are on our own to defend ourselves, we must have the means to do so.  It is not the social contract we grew up with, but it seems it is the social contract into which we are being forced.

Another Jim Crow Era Law Falls, No Thanks to Governor Roy Cooper

 Let me say that the North Carolina Legislature has finally done it.  They have over ridden a veto by Governor Roy Cooper and the old Jim Crow era gun law that forced a person to get permission from the local sheriff before buying a hand gun is no more.

Now, some may complain that this makes it easier to purchase a weapon.  And it does in a way.  But stopping to buy a 5 dollar permit from the sheriff before going into a gun shop and going through an even more rigorous step of subjecting oneself to a National Instant Background check (NICS) was redundant.  In this day and age, the sheriff is unlikely to know you from Adam unless you have gotten in trouble, in which case you would be flagged in the NICS. As I say, the stop at the sheriff's office was redundant.  Sheriffs wanted the revenue, such as it was, and who knows, they might get some more information should you commit a crime.

Of course, the Jim Crow era law would still be staining North Carolina if it wasn't for the constant efforts of Grass Roots North Carolina and the leadership of Paul Valone. Valone wrote an article earlier that pointed out that sheriffs across the state typically do not revoke these permits once issued, even if the person to whom it is granted commits a felony. In Mechlanberg County, for example, 38% of gun permits were still in effect even though the grantee of the permit had committed a felony. In other words, the sheriffs' permits were not very effective at keeping guns out of the hands of people who would misuse them.

Valone and the Grass Roots North Carolina have been saying that for at least 20 years.  The Legislature finally listened, no thanks to Roy Cooper.

You can read more of Paul Valone's and the GRNC's exploits here and here.

Is This Why Americans Are So Fat??

 I may have mentioned to gentle readers on a number of occasions that cattle do not contribute any new carbon to the atmosphere.  They merely recycle carbon that is already in the carbon cycle.  Thus, even if we give the devil his due and say that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is causing global warming, (and it is not) cattle ranching is not part of it.

Recently, the government produced a new food pyramid supposedly to improve our "health."  You can see this pyramid at the Good Ranchers site in a blogpost entitled New Government Funded "Food-Pyramid" Says Lucky Charms Are Healthier Than Steak. And if you beliefe that, I have a bridge to sell you in New York City, but you will have to move it yourself.

Buckle up. This one is a doozy. You probably missed it, but in September 2022, the White House hosted a conference that focused on nutrition, health, and hunger in America. Dariush Mozaffarian, who was one of the main organizers of the event and is currently Dean of the Tufts School of Nutrition — presented a newly designed food pyramid that only cost 3 years of time and millions of taxpayer dollars. The new wisdom they found? Lucky Charms are healthier than steak.

...snip...

As you can see, Lucky Charms receives a 60 while ground beef is at a 26. Beef Steak ranked a little above 30 on the chart, which means both beef items received half the score of Lucky Charms. If we turn our attention to the green section, we see that chocolate covered almonds received a 78 and should “be encouraged” in someone’s diet. Chocolate covered nuts should be encouraged while beef and a majority of commonly consumed meats should be minimized.

This new food pyramid is being touted as the most comprehensive and science-based nutrient profiling system to date, which honestly just isn’t a surprise anymore. This is happening in a country where congress declared pizza to be a vegetable, and if tomato paste can make pizza a vegetable then maybe luck can make the charms healthy.

Now, I don't want to tell anyone what to eat, but my own cardiologist said to me once that if I wanted to lose weight, the best way was to cut down on the carbs. And the worst carbohydrates one can eat, in terms of fattening a person up are any of the grains. Those would be wheat and wheat products, corn and corn products, oats, barely, rice etc. Sugar in all its forms is of course not good for you. Similarly, vegetable oils like corn oil and canola oil are not recommended.

So, what should you eat if you are keeping your weight down? Well, meat, eggs, fish, vegetables like broccoli and brussels sprouts, the occasional carrots and sweet potatoes. You can also eat moderate amounts of nuts and fruits in season (without sugar, of course.)  Counterintuitively, heathy fats should make up a substantal amount of your diet by calorie count.  These would be olive oil, cocoanut oil, pork fat (which is delicious, by the way.)  Whatever you do, don't eat highly processed foods like Lucky Charms.

Citizens Own Guns, Slaves and Serfs Do Not

 Our media are not very good at reporting what goes on in other countries, particularly our neighbor to the North.  Now, I don't know much about how the Canadian legal system works, but apparently Justin Trudeau has published an edict termed an Order in Council (OC) that tells legal gun owners in Canada that:

...(Canada) f roze the movement of handguns. Canadian citizens cannot now buy, sell, or transfer handguns within Canada, nor bring them into the country. Eventually guns in Canada will be extinct with this rule.

Hank Vanderbeek has the story at the American Thinker entitled Gun Control in Canada. You would think that gun laws in Canada would be similar to those here in the States, but no. Canadians have no guarantee of their rights to a gun, or to anything else for that matter. Note, that Canadians have the same rights as we do, indeed as every person born in the world does, but their rights are not acknowledged nor are guaranteed. Thus, Canadians' rights can be more easily trampled.

The United States truly is exceptional in that its founding documents for the first time in history stated that the purpose of governments is to protect its citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property. I look at America's founding as inspired by God, our Creator.

The reason Justin Trudeau gave Canadian citizens for the gun freeze were the same reasons leftist Americans give time and again. He said, “Canadians have the right to feel safe in their homes, in their schools and in their places of worship. With handgun violence increasing across Canada, it is our duty to take urgent action to remove these deadly weapons from our communities. Today, we're keeping more guns out of our communities and keeping our kids safe.”

Liken Trudeau’s statement to banning all safe drivers from the highways and allowing only drunk drivers to drive, because taking guns away from lawabiding citizens leaves the lawbreakers with guns.

It is unclear how a freeze on the movement of handguns is going to stem rising handgun violence. The Order of Council is reserved for emergencies and meant as a temporary measure. Restricting movement of handguns versus confiscating Canadians’ handguns is somehow going to end or reverse the “emergency” of rising handgun violence.

Trudeau offered no empirical evidence to support his new emergency public policy. I searched and found nothing to back up Trudeau’s connection between handgun ownership and rising handgun violence in Canada. There is a plethora of data showing that handgun ownership by law-abiding citizens is not the basis for the rising handgun violence in America. In fact, just the opposite.

You should read Vanderbeek's article. It is fundamentally a cautionary tale, as if Anerican gun owners didn't have enough cautionary tales from around the world. Australia, for example, or England, or New Zealand, or Germany, or...well...the rest of the world is pretty much a cautionary tale. Tyrants do not want their subjects to own guns, for what should be obvious reasons. Citizens have guns and know how to use them; subjects and serfs do not.

The Left has been on the march for a long time. Here at home, they keep trying to take away the guns, despite the acknowledgement in the Second Amendment that the government shall not infringe the right. They keep throwing things against the wall...anything that might stick. Banning semiautomatic rifles, banning hand guns, banning pistol braces, taxing ammunition out of existence, have all been tried and no doubt they will try other sick ideas. The Bruen decision was important, but the only Supreme Court ruling the Left respects are those they agree with. So, we always must be vigilant.

The Second Amendment is the difference between freedom from tyrannical freeze laws, infringement, and the right of ownership.

Don't Take the Bait

Once again, gentle readers, I am presenting more information about the Left's efforts to subvert the United States. Anyone who is paying attention can see that they are very far along the road to doing exactly that. John Klenoff has an article at the American Thinker entitled The Worst Prison Is The One You Don't Know You're In:

What if I told you that a very powerful man has, in his own words, been "infiltrating governments" around the world to implement a surveillance state, strip you of your property rights, and remove your freedom of speech?

And what if this same man was pushing policies that benefited big corporations (too big to fail) while bankrupting millions of small businesses (too small to save)? More and more of the struggles that individuals and small businesses face point back to Klaus Schwab and the prison he is erecting, a prison few of us have ever even heard of. Its name? Technocracy!

The man Klenoff is writing about is Klaus Schwab, an engineer, and economist, and a Communist who seems to be the personification of the typical evil genius who wants to take over the world. He even looks like an evil genius, though his lack of a sense of humor seems to preclude having an evil genius laugh, bawahahahaha.

Klaus Schwab is a German economist and engineer who is the founder and executive chairman of WEF.

Schwab is concerned about elected officials who are "too often caught in traditional, linear (and non-disruptive) thinking or too absorbed by immediate concerns to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation”. Instead of trusting the open marketplace and the established rules and customs of the Western liberal democratic system, Schwab wants a planned economy based on what is called "public-private partnerships".

In practice, these public-private partnerships resemble fascism, which its initiator, Benito Mussolini, described as the merger between the corporation and the state.

In this spirit of authoritarianism, Schwab works closely with China and has praised China as an optimal model. In fact, he keeps a bust of Lenin, who imposed communism onto the Soviet Union, in his personal study.

While the Left likes to scream "Nazi" whenever they can't think up a relevant arguement, as you can see, the distance between a Communist and a Fascist is pretty small. Both Mussolini and Hitler were Communists, but each realized that if they left the means of production in the hands of the owners, they could influence those owners to do the will of the state. That of course, is what is happening here in America. For example, the push to change from gasoline powered to electrical powered vehicles is driven by the government in with the "cooperation" of big business.

One wonders why there were no widespread inventions, other than those that improved state functions before the modern era. In fact, many of the technologies that were developed in modern times were first developed in ancient times as well. But because nobody could claim ownership and make money from their invention. This caused them to keep their inventions secret, which died when the inventor died. What changed was the modern idea of intellectual property. This intellectual property was recognized with a patent, that gave the owner of that property rights to receive compensation for its use. As a result, technologies of all sorts exploded starting in the 18th century. As the population increased, the unit costs of production came down, making a greater variety of things as well as more sophisticated things available at affordable prices.

No one elected evil genius Schwab and his fellow self appointed "elites."  These people believe they are the ones who can best tell everyone else how to live their lives. And they think they can control everyone throughout the world with the new technologies such as high speed super computers, algorithms and AI. Of course they want you driving electric vehicles because then you won't be able to travel as far. Limited range is a feature not a bug. But here's the thing: not everyone has the same priorities in life as the Davos swells.

Schwab and the Davos swells intend to centrally control the economy of the whole world. Now these people, including Bill Gates have never come up with something new in their lives. I am sure he thinks that it is the best way, but the truth is that central planning has never worked well for the average person. It may work well for Schwab because he will be able to have whatever he wants. The rest of us, not so much. In fact, under Schwab's plan, we return to a Hobbsian world wherein life for us is nasty, brutish and short.

I don't think in the end that Schwab and his cronies can pull off their totalitarian scheme though.  I think Scwab has bitten off more than he can chew.  He has been seduced by the technologies.  Yes, it may be inconvenient to avoid these technologies, but if we do, we can still be free.  Schwab intends to encluse us in a tech prison.  Don't take the bait.

The Climate Castrophists Are Anti-Life

Ron Ross has a post at the American Thinker today entitled Good news sucks for climate cultists in whichs he points to a number of good news items that the climate alarmists either ignore or attempt to spin as bad news.

There’s a war against happiness. Climate alarmists bury good news and exaggerate bad news. They have made up their minds to be miserable and they’re determined to take the rest of us down with them.

For example, have you heard that over the past 30 years there has been a 14 percent increase in the Earth’s green vegetation? Deserts are getting smaller and forests are getting lusher. That gain even has a name: “Earth Greening.” Not surprisingly, 70 percent of it stems from the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere! Zaichun Zhu, one of the scientists who measured the greening, says it’s equivalent to adding a new continent of green vegetation twice the size of the mainland United States.

The benefits of the increased vegetation are widespread: “It means more food for insects and deer, for elephants and mice, for fish and whales. It means higher yields for farmers; the effect has probably added about $3 trillion to farm incomes over the past 30 years, so less land is needed to feed the human population and more can be spared for wildlife instead.” We’ve given a raise to all commercial farmers around the world. Increased supply eventually results in reduced prices.

The connection between increased carbon dioxide and increased plant growth is a perfect example of “negative feedback” in that the added vegetation from Earth Greening takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. A physicist friend of mine reminds his students, “We live in a negative-feedback world. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

Unfortunately for climate alarmists, the entire theory is based on positive feedbacks creating runaway catastrophes. Thus they can predict silly things like global warming will somehow produce global cooling and we will end with snowball earth and of course we will all die! If you happen to be a young person with little experience of life, you might react to the global climate change cult with over the top fear just like St. Greta of Thunberg at the U.N.

Matt Ridley, at Human Progress points out that:

This greening is good news. It means more food for insects and deer, for elephants and mice, for fish and whales. It means higher yields for farmers; indeed, the effect has probably added about $3 trillion to farm incomes over the last 30 years. So less land is needed to feed the human population and more can be spared for wildlife instead.

Yet this never gets mentioned. In their desperation to keep the fearmongering on track the activists who make a living off the climate change scare do their best to ignore this inconvenient truth. When they cannot avoid the subject, they say that greening is a temporary phenomenon that will reverse in the latter part of this century. The evidence for this claim comes from a few models fed with extreme assumptions, so it cannot be trusted.

This biological phenomenon can also help to explain the coming and going of ice ages. It has always been a puzzle that ice ages grow gradually colder for tens of thousands of years, then suddenly warmer again in the space of a few thousand years, at which point the huge ice caps of Eurasia and North America collapse and the world enters a warmer interlude, such as the one we have been enjoying for 10,000 years.

Attempts to explain this cyclical pattern have mostly failed so far. Carbon dioxide levels track the change, but these rise after the world starts to warm and fall after the world starts to cool, so they are not the cause. Changes in the shape of the earth’s orbit play a role, with ice sheets collapsing when the northern summers are especially warm, but only some of these so-called “great summers” result in deglaciation.

Recent ice cores from the Antarctic appear to have fingered the culprit at last: it’s all about plants. During ice ages, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere steadily drops, because colder oceans absorb more of the gas. Eventually it reaches such a low level – about 0.018% at the peak of the last ice age – that plants struggle to grow at all, especially in dry areas or at high altitudes. As a result gigantic dust storms blanket the entire planet, reaching even Antarctica, where the amount of dust in the ice spikes dramatically upward. These dust storms blacken the northern ice sheets in particular, making them highly vulnerable to rapid melting when the next great summer arrives. The ice age was a horrible time to be alive even in the tropics: cold, dry, dusty and far less plant life than today.

The good news for humanity is that CO2 has been increasing, partly becasue of man's use of fossil fuels, but more generally because of the warming itself. If we want a greener planet, we meed to keep pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. the current level of CO2 is just over 4 parts per million (4 ppm), but 6 ppm is not too much, and it would help all life.

Clearly, climate alarmists are anti-life.