Month: May 2014

Josh McDowell Shares His Struggle With Circumstances and Coming to Faith

Published by Papa Giorgio

We have had some great commencement and convocation speeches these past few weeks, and some really horrible ones. But Liberty University — I don’t think — was ready for this honest, and at times, raw, testimony. Josh McDowell’s struggle against the odds and his hatred/blame of God creating seemingly insurmountable hurdles in his life that made coming to faith in Jesus Christ impossible to the natural mind. But we deal with a miraculous God:

Matthew 19:26

  • But Jesus looked at them and said, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Holman Christian Standard Bible)
  • Jesus looked hard at them and said, “No chance at all if you think you can pull it off yourself. Every chance in the world if you trust God to do it.” (The Message)

Josh McDowell is a prolific apologetic writer who has written classics in the defense of the Christian faith, based on his own skepticism. But only recently has he talked about his childhood and expanded on what drove him to this skepticism. The movie of this is called Undaunted (2012), and it is a must watch.

I wish to thank Pastor Matt in bringing this speech to my attention. And I ask you settle in and enjoy the huge dose of God’s hand working in one man’s life:

Fireman Reunited w/ Abandoned Baby He Rescued 18-Years Earlier

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via The Blaze:

After authorities got the anonymous 911 call, police and firefighters fanned out quickly to try locating an infant abandoned under a pine tree in a graveyard.

They looked and looked around Mt. Hope Cemetery in Champaign, Illinois on that chilly morning and couldn’t find the baby.

But on a whim, local firefighter Charlie Heflin — listening to the developing drama over his scanner — figured he’d take a different approach.

He simply went to a different cemetery.

But again, no luck. After not locating the infant, either, Heflin started to walk back to his truck…when he got the sense he should try again.

“I heard a little whimper when I got close to the tree,” Heflin told WFIE-TV in Evansville, Indiana. “I dug down inside this real huge pine tree and found her.”…

 

[HA!] Al Sharpton Defends Racist Rants: “It Was Only One Jew”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Video with h/t to Weasel Zippers:

Some quotes via Young Conservatives:

…He disparaged Jews as “diamond merchants” during the unrest of the infamous Crown Heights riots?

…He tried goading NYC’s Jewish community into an all-out fistfight, saying “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”?

…He referred to the Jewish owner of Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Fred Harari, as a “white interloper” for seeking to expand his business in Harlem? (You may have heard of Freddy’s. It was also known as the Harlem Massacre. One of Sharpton’s followers also disapproved of the “white interloper” and burned the store to the ground, murdering eight people including himself.)

But those tirades were just Sharpton’s anti-semitic ones. He’s also sermonized on “Greek homos” and “crackas” as well as bombarded former NYC Mayor David Dinkins with a barrage of N-bombs.

Democrats See Racists Under Every Bed (Sen. Rockefeller vs. Sen. Johnson)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via HotAir:

Two noteworthy details here. One: Rockefeller couldn’t be more casual in lobbing his grenade. He’s not out at a fundraiser with a drink in his hand, mindlessly babbling to some reporter with his guard down. He’s at an actual Senate hearing with a Republican senator sitting right in front of him, and yet it’s bombs away — and not for the first time. Congressional rules of decorum forbid swearing and personal insults, but if you want to charge the other side with racism for questioning Obama’s pet boondoggle, fire away. Two: Unlike most instances where this accusation is made, the target was present and eager to respond. Watch the very beginning and then the last few minutes of the second clip to see Johnson hit back. I would have walked out if I were him, but admittedly, his approach is smarter.

Listening to Dr. Ben Carson on the talk show circuit, and he said something interesting, which we see an over-doing of via the above video:

…this type of infantile adolescent behavior is still quite prevalent in our current political environment. Instead of “capping” their opponents, many in the political class engage in hyperbolic demagoguery in an attempt to demonize those who disagree with them. This is not surprising, because in his book “Rules For Radicals,” Saul Alinsky, the original radical community organizer and societal change agent, says you should never have a rational discussion with your opponent. Doing so would humanize him, and your goal is to demonize him. With this tactic, he states that you can incur your opponent’s wrath, causing him to respond angrily, and in many cases, irrationally, which then provides an opportunity to use that irrational response against him.

What was Doc Carson speaking of? in part, one of the 12-Rules of Radicals is used by Democrats, here is the rule:

  • RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions (Glen Beck);

Here is more of it explained… and exploited:

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Conservatives have a tendency to try to win every debate with logic and recitations of facts which, all too often, fail to get the job done because emotions and mockery are often just as effective as reason. The good news is that liberals almost never have logic on their side; so they’re incapable of rationally making the case for their policies while conservatives can become considerably more effective debaters by simply adding some emotion-based arguments and sheer scorn to their discourse. This has certainly worked on Twitter, where conservatives keep making the Obama campaign look like buffoons by taking over its hashtags. (TownHall)

We see Democrats and liberals using this tactic all the time, in more-and-more frequency in fact. Well, that aside, here is the response by Republican Senator Ron Johnson to this smear:

“You Have Become What You Hated” ~ Opie & Anthony on the Left

Published by Papa Giorgio

(CAUTION: Strong Language)

Via The Blaze:

Radio hosts Gregg “Opie” Hughes, Anthony Cumia and comedian Jim Norton, of the popular “Opie and Anthony Show” on SiriusXM, went on a fiery tirade Tuesday against “trigger warnings” and the current culture on college campuses, which they argue is producing childish adults unprepared to deal with the “real world.”

Norton also scolded the progressive left for becoming “exactly what you hated.”

“You have become exactly [like] the conservative, religious book burners of the 40s and the 50s and the 60s. You are it!” he said. “You are the speech repressors, you are the hypersensitive ones, you are the ones who want people fired immediately, you are the ones calling for people’s jobs. You have become what you hated.”

The discussion that preluded his rant got heated after Norton brought up a recent story out of Wellesley College where “hundreds” of outrage college students objected after a lifelike sculpture of a sleepwalking man in his underwearwas erected on campus. Students ended up creating a petition to have it removed.

“Oh my god,” Hughes responded. “We are raising a nation of pu***es, we’ve been saying it for years.”

…read more…

Going Against the Consensus ~ New Wave of IPCC Heretics

Published by Papa Giorgio

All the links associated with this recent story are dead (too much traffic… I was dealing with this here at RPT a few weeks ago — so I sympathizese), so I am working with this larger excerpt found at What’s Up With That (h/t to Climate Depot):

Doing science by consensus is not science at all, says the climatologist all the alarmists love to hate. Not that the enmity bothers Judith Curry too much — and certainly not as much as the debasement of impartial inquiry by which the warmist establishment keeps all those lovely grants coming.

When climatologist Judith Curry visited Melbourne last week she took the time to chat with Quadrant Online contributor Tony Thomas. The professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology is something of a stormy petrel in the climate-change community, as she has broken ranks with alarmist colleagues to question the articles and ethics of the warmist faith. This has made her less than popular in certain circles, even inspiring Scientific American, house journal of the catastropharians, to brand her “a heretic” who has “turned on her colleagues.” [excerpt below]

Excerpts:

THOMAS: What empirical evidence is there, as distinct from modelling, that ‘missing heat’ has gone into the deep oceans?

CURRY: Basically, none.  Observations below 2 km in the ocean are exceedingly rare, and it is only since 2005 that we have substantial coverage below 700 metres.

THOMAS:  Are you supportive of the line that the ‘quiet sun’ presages an era of global cooling in the next few decades?

CURRY: One of the unfortunate consequences of the focus on anthropogenic forcing of climate is that solar effects on climate have been largely neglected.  I think that solar effects, combined with the large scale ocean-circulation regimes, presage continued stagnation in global temperatures for the next two decades.

THOMAS: If the skeptic/orthodox spectrum is a range from 1 (intense skeptic) to 10 (intensely IPCC orthodox), where on the scale would you put yourself

(a) as at 2009

(b) as at 2014,

and why has there been a shift (if any)?

CURRY: In early 2009, I would have rated myself as 7; at this point I would rate myself as a 3.  Climategate and the weak response of the IPCC and other scientists triggered a massive re-examination of my support of the IPCC, and made me look at the science much more sceptically.

The story mentioned above from Scientific American likewise is found elsewhere in full, at the journal Nature:

In trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon, it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines.

For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics. But over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black¬board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”

She reserves her harshest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For most climate scientists the major reports issued by the United Nations–sponsored body every five years or so constitute the consensus on climate science. Few scientists would claim the IPCC is perfect, but Curry thinks it needs thoroughgoing reform. She accuses it of “corruption.” “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC,” she says, “because I think I don’t have confidence in the process.”

Whispered discreetly at conferences or in meeting rooms, these claims might be accepted as part of the frequently contentious process of a still evolving area of science. Stated publicly on some of the same Web sites that broke the so-called Climategate e-mails last fall, they are considered by many to be a betrayal, earning Curry epithets from her colleagues ranging from “naive” to “bizarre” to “nasty” to worse.

All of which sets up the two competing story lines, which are, on the surface at least, equally plausible. The first paints Curry as a peacemaker—someone who might be able to restore some civility to the debate and edge the public toward meaningful action. By frankly acknowledging mistakes and encouraging her colleagues to treat skeptics with respect, she hopes to bring about a meeting of the minds.

…read more…

Climate Depot has another story linked to that Marco Morano entitles: UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol admits no global warming for 17 years – Rips bias in IPCC – UN’s ‘inbuilt alarmism made me step down’ – ‘By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years’ — in it we find nuggets like:

….The report also illustrates just how outmoded the IPCC has become since it was founded in 1988. Its reports are written over a period of three years, and finished months before publication.

When preparations started on AR5, the world hadn’t warmed for 13 years. That is a bit odd, if you believe the models, but not odd enough to merit a lot of attention.

By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years. That is decidedly odd, but hard to accommodate in a near-final draft that has been through three rounds of review.

After the report was finalized, but before it was published, a number of papers appeared with hypotheses about the pause in warming. AR5 was out of date before it was released.

The IPCC model… is broken.

[….]

Authors who want to see their long hours of IPCC work recognized should thus present their impact as worse than the next one.

It was this inbuilt alarmism that made me step down from the team that drafted the Summary for Policy Makers of Working Group 2. And indeed, the report was greeted by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: famine, pestilence, war, death all made headlines.

…read more…

Richard Tol, Leslie Woodcock, James Lovelock, and others all feel the sting of the machine they were a part of.

Hashtag Diplomacy ~ #BringBackOurBalls (Updated w/ Dan Joseph)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dan Joseph adds a bit to the understanding of the political nature of the Nigerian government.

(Some cartoons added at the end)

I just think this pop-culture, feel good diplomacy in our current administration is horrible!

Richochet has this:

Russia is invading its neighbors, China is expanding its claims over the western Pacific, and Islamic militants are terrorizing Syria, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria and other nations. But fear not, America: President Barack Obama has ordered his forces to deploy high-yield tactical hashtags across social media.

As the administration drastically cuts the U.S. military, the State Department’s Jen Psaki launched a brutal fussilade of tweets at Vladimir Putin, complaining that Moscow wasn’t living up to “the promise of hashtag.” Today, a pouty Michelle Obama is facing down Nigeria’s murderous Boko Haram with a hashtagged photo uploaded to Instagram.

Let’s all pray North Korea doesn’t march south or Chuck Hagel will have to curate an anti-Juche Pinterest board.

Steyn Online has this GREAT story that puts it all in perspective:

Obama administration foreign policy long ago passed the stage of self-parody. Yet it has written a new chapter in self-parody as State Department spokesman Jen Psaki engaged last week in “hashtag diplomacy” on Twitter to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine. ABC News picks up the story in “#That’sCold! Russians, US in hashtag battle.” Long story short: the Obama administration has opened up another front in which it is losing to Russia. (Powerline)

(To Wit)

I become more and more embarrassed on a daily basis by these Progressive imbeciles who populate the State Department and other U.S. Government agencies, who probably really believe that Vlad Putin cares about someone’s Twitter hashtag and whether or not living up to it will send bad optics to the rest of the world. Jen Psaki seems to believe that Russia can be shamed into cooperating in the Ukrainian crisis simply because they aren’t living up to a “binding” hashtag.

Which of course, isn’t binding at all. It’s actually quite stupid. Jen Psaki declared that Russia hasn’t been following up their hashtag with action.  So, there’s that.

If anyone wonders why we’re in such trouble it’s because you can bet that Jen Psaki and the rest of the brain trust at the State Department, up to and including John Kerry, go to bed every night thinking that they’ve outwitted Putin and every other world leader that they deal with.

Poor Jen. (Rotten to the Core)

#BringBackOurBalls

It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared – on social media! – and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening.

But then what isn’t? The blogger Daniel Payne wrote this week that “modern liberalism, at its core, is an ideology of talking, not doing”. He was musing on a press release for some or other “Day of Action” that is, as usual, a day of inaction:

✦ Diverse grassroots groups are organizing and participating in events such as walks, rallies and concerts and calling on government to reduce climate pollution, transition off fossil fuels and commit to a clean energy future.

It’s that easy! You go to a concert and someone “calls on government” to do something, and the world gets fixed.

There’s something slightly weird about taking a hashtag – which on the Internet at least has a functional purpose – and getting a big black felt marker and writing it on a piece of cardboard and holding it up, as if somehow the comforting props of social media can be extended beyond the computer and out into the real world. Maybe the talismanic hashtag never required a computer in the first place. Maybe way back during the Don Pacifico showdown all Lord Palmerston had to do was tell the Greeks #BringBackOurJew.

As Mr Payne notes, these days progressive “action” just requires “calling on government” to act. But it’s sobering to reflect that the urge to call on someone else to do something is now so reflexive and ingrained that even “the government” – or in this case the wife of “the government” – is now calling on someone else to do something…

~Arguments about why Hillary Clinton refused to put Boko Haram on the State Department terror list are about as useful as an Obama hashtag right now. But it is worth remembering that the group’s first terrorism attack was a recent as 2011. They are, therefore, part of the same metastasization of jihadist violence throughout the northern half of the African continent as the Benghazi assault and the Kenyan shopping-mall attack. This growth of al-Qaeda affiliates went on throughout almost the entirety of Obama’s first term, but because Joe Biden had a cute line (“bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive”) nobody paid any attention to it. #NothingToSeeHere.

…READ IT ALL…

 

Political Correctness Takes Hold In Veteran’s Health-Care* (*So-Called)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Political Correctness creeps its way into American life in the worst ways imaginable. With thanks to — of course — leftist ideology and management. For instance, a triple-amputee Iraq veteran struggles with VA bureaucracy, or the covering up veterans’ deaths at the now infamous Arizona VA hospital. And while the following is not an “American” story, it highlights the onerous decay of “government guided” healthcare:

Moonbattery notes that military criminals play into the above example with a truly unique American story that wreaks of tragedy.

A Democratic Administration has predictable priorities:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has formally approved the request of Pvt. Bradley Manning, convicted for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, to be temporarily transferred out of military custody in order to undergo expensive hormone therapy and surgery to become a woman.

Manning leaked the documents while in a snit because he wasn’t getting along with his boyfriend. Any number of Americans and their allies had their lives placed in danger as a result. A sane civilization would have promptly executed Manning for treason.

Instead, we are paying for a criminal’s sex change. A criminal that caused — directly — the deaths of U.S. military [and allies] deaths as well as intelligence operators deaths leading also to the shutting down of many undercover operations meant to protect the general public from future terrorist attacks.

Moonbat continues:

As the [supposed] medical needs of Manning, convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison for stealing 750,000 classified defense department documents in order to disseminate them to Wikileaks, were being assiduously attended to by America’s defense establishment, untold hundreds of American servicemen and women suffering from genuine life-threatening and acute medical conditions have allegedly been left to die on at least seven waiting lists managed by the US Veterans Administration. …

Phoenix VA doctor Dr. Sam Foote was the first to publicly expose the scandal when he claimed that up to 40 people in his jurisdiction alone had died preventable deaths while on VA waiting lists.

Sex change treatments can last several years and, in Manning’s case, will cost taxpayers up to $40,000. The 2014 published Medicaid reimbursement for a colonoscopy is $479.39.

It all makes perfect sense for an administration that honors IDAHOT Day instead of Armed Forces Day.

See my post on Obama ignoring “Armed Forces Day” but pandering instead to the LGBT community. I am sure the LGBT community is proud that its own Leftist have made “Chelsea” its honory parade marshall:

Today, the nation’s largest Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Celebration Committee announced on its website that WikiLeaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning has been chosen to represent the event as a 2014 Honorary Grand Marshal. (HotAir)

Our Pandering President Ignores “Armed Service Day”

Published by Papa Giorgio
What Presidents Do on Armed Forces Day

(Above photo) Former president George W Bush was in Bentonville, Arkansas attending a separate ceremony for 14 living recipients of the Medal of Honor. The event also raised money for the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and Foundation. He chose to not be at the opening ceremony of the September 11 Memorial Museum because he didn’t want to stir emotions.

(GayPatriot — V the K) Saturday was Armed Forces Day. But instead of expressing gratitude to the men and women who serve in uniform, the Obama Administration chose to honor ‘Pander to Gay Victimhood Day,’ a.k.a. ‘International Day Against Homophobia Or Transphobia.’ In addition to the Administration’s usual policy tools of Tweets and #Hashtags, U.S. Embassy in non-Muslim countries were instructed to raise rainbow flags in gratitude to wealthy gays and lesbians who donate so generously to the Democrat Party…

…read more…

This is what are embassies were doing on Amred Forces Day, via the Obama admin, Via Moonbattery: At least Old Glory still flies above the apparently larger rainbow flag. For now, anyway. Small wonder our adversaries don’t take us seriously anymore.

Conservative Firing Line noted the following as well:

It seems Obama really doesn’t think much of those who serve in our military. Saturday, May 17, is Armed Forces Day — a day created by Harry Truman in 1949 to celebrate all the branches of the military.

Obama, however, failed to mention Armed Forces Day on Twitter, Weasel Zippers noted. Instead, he chose to mark “International Day Against Homophobia Or Transphobia,” even using the #IDAHOT hashtag. He also marked the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.