Is UK Conservative Party Leader, Kemi Badenoch, Iron Lady 2.0?

Published December 23, 2024December 23, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

The entire interview can be watched over at POWERLINE. These are the books leader Badenoch mentioned being key to her political evolution:

… Bari asks Badenoch if she read any books that influenced her intellectual evolution. Good question!

If Thomas Sowell came to mind, as it did to mine, you are correct. Badenoch found Sowell’s Basic Economics on a Google search for books about the subject and, she declares, “My whole world changed.” It’s a powerful moment that is worth taking in.

[….]

Badenoch also names Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (she names it first), Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and Roger Scruton’s How To Be a Conservative.

The Real Lie of the Year

Published December 21, 2024December 21, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

PolitiFact said the “lie of the year” was Trump saying that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. (CAUTION – SEE: here, here, here, here.) But in reality, the Democrat establishment gets the award in my opinion — AS — this is truly a scandal based on a coverup. Known as lies. To wit…

This is a must listen to Armstrong and Getty excerpt. Wow. The Wall Street Journal article is behind a paywall. So here is an unlocked version:

“How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge: Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.” (TOVINA.COM| Posted Below)

WSJ ARTICLE:

Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.

During the 2020 presidential primary, Jill Biden campaigned so extensively across Iowa that she held events in more counties than her husband—a fact her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted to a local reporter.

His superior in the Biden campaign quickly chided him. As the three rode in a minivan through the state’s cornfields, Anthony Bernal, then a deputy campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to contact the reporter again and play down any comparison in campaign appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband’s more plodding pace, LaRosa recalls being told.

The message from Biden’s team was clear. “The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad,” LaRosa said.

The small correction foreshadowed how Biden’s closest aides and advisers would manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office.

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen —were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.

Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public. “They body him to such a high degree,” a person who witnessed it said, adding that the “hand holding” is unlike anything other recent presidents have had.

The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid—which unraveled spectacularly after his halting performance in a June debate with Donald Trump made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue. Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket and was decisively defeated by Trump in a shortened campaign—leaving Democrats to debate whether their chances were undercut by Biden’s refusal to yield earlier .

This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations.

Many of those who criticized Biden’s insularity said his system nonetheless kept his agenda on track.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Biden “earned the most accomplished record of any modern commander in chief and rebuilt the middle class because of his attention to policy details that impact millions of lives.” Bates, who rejected the notion that Biden has declined, added that the president has often solicited opinions from outside experts, which has informed his policymaking.

He said it is the job of senior White House staff to have high-level meetings regularly and that they were executing Biden’s agenda at his direction.

He also said that staff alerted the president to “significant” negative news stories. Bernal, via the White House press office, declined to comment.

‘Good Days And Bad Days’

The president’s slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg , a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble.

Biden, now 82, has long operated with a tightknit inner circle of advisers. The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.

The structure was also designed to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.

The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees and other high-ranking officials. It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.

The strategies to protect Biden largely worked—until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and unable to complete his thoughts on live television. Much of the Democratic establishment had accepted the White House line that Biden was able to take the fight to Trump, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary .

Biden, staffed with advisers since he became a senator at age 30, came to the White House with a small team of fiercely loyal, long-serving aides who knew him and Washington so well that they could be particularly effective proxies. They didn’t tolerate criticism of Biden’s performance or broader dissent within the Democratic Party, especially when it came to the president’s decision to run for a second term.

Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.

They issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to people who received the message directly from White House aides.

Ideally, the meetings would start later in the day, since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning, some of the people said. His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the people said. The president, known for long and rambling sessions, at times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more time.

The White House denied that his schedule has been altered due to his age.

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

While it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.

That’s what Rep. Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Smith, a Democrat who then chaired the powerful House Armed Services Committee, was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation.

“I was begging them to set expectations low,” said Smith, who had worked extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights about the region but couldn’t get on the phone with him, Smith said.

After the disastrous withdrawal, which left 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans dead, Smith made a critical comment to the Washington Post about the administration lacking a “clear-eyed view” of the U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani government’s durability. It was among comments that triggered an angry phone call from Secretary of State Antony Blinken , who ended up getting an earful from the frustrated chairman. Shortly after, Smith got an apologetic call from Biden. It was the only phone call Biden made to Smith in his four years in office, Smith said.

“The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” Smith said. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said his interactions with the White House in the past two years were primarily focused on the reauthorization of a vital section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes broad national security surveillance powers. Biden’s senior advisers and other top administration officials worked with Himes on the issue, and he praised the collaboration.

But Biden wasn’t part of the conversation. “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior,” said Himes, who took office in 2009. Congress extended the surveillance authority for two years instead of the administration’s goal of five years.

Bates said that in every administration, some in Washington would prefer to spend more time with the president and that Biden put significant effort into promoting his legislative agenda.

One lawmaker who did get one-on-one time with Biden noticed that the president lacked stamina and heavily relied on his staff: Sen. Joe Manchin , the West Virginia Democrat-turned-independent who held up chunks of Biden’s legislative agenda during the first half of Biden’s term. Manchin said the job required a level of energy that he wasn’t sure Biden had been able to sustain.

“I just thought that maybe the president just lost that fight,” Manchin said in an interview. “The ability to continue to stay on, just grind it, grind it, grind it.”

Instead of Biden directing follow up, Manchin noticed that Biden’s staff played a much bigger role driving his agenda than he had experienced in other administrations. Manchin referred to them as the “eager beavers”—a group that included then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain . “They were going, ‘I’ll take care of that,’ ” Manchin said.

Klain, who was chief of staff for Biden’s first two years in office, said that “the agenda and pace” of the White House was at the “president’s direction and leadership.”

Dealing With Advisers

Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said.

One top cabinet member met one-on-one with the president at most twice in the first year and rarely in small groups, another former senior cabinet aide said.

Multiple former senior cabinet aides described a top-down dynamic in which the White House would issue decisions and expect cabinet agencies to carry them out, rather than making cabinet secretaries active participants in the policymaking process. Some of them said it was hard for them to discern to what degree Biden was insulated because of his age versus his preference for a powerful inner circle.

Bates said Biden has daily conversations with members of his cabinet. Several cabinet secretaries contacted the Journal at the White House’s request to attest to the smooth operations between their agencies and the White House. They said Biden would call them individually on the phone when seeking information or to give direction.

“I spoke with him whenever we needed his guidance or his help,” said Denis McDonough , Biden’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs and former chief of staff to Obama. “A lot of times it was him reaching out to us.”

Most often, however, they dealt with the president’s advisers, not the president himself, some of them said.

“If I had an issue or I needed attention on something, I had multiple avenues to explore to raise the issue,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “You don’t always have to raise the issue with the president.”

Vilsack, who also served as the agriculture secretary under Obama, said that presidents should primarily get involved when there’s a dispute between agencies.

Obama would often meet with smaller groups of cabinet members to hash out a policy debate, former administration officials said.

But that often wasn’t the experience under Biden’s administration. Instead, cabinet members most often met alone or with a member of the president’s senior staff, including Brainard, the economic adviser, or National Security Adviser Sullivan. The senior adviser would then bring the issue to the president and report back, former administration officials said.

Former administration officials said it often didn’t seem like Biden had his finger on the pulse.

Traditionally, presidents have more frequent interactions with certain cabinet secretaries—often Treasury, Defense and State—than others.

But Treasury Secretary Yellen had an arm’s length relationship with the president for much of the administration. She was part of the economics team that regularly briefed the president, but one-on-one discussions were more rare, and she typically dealt with the NEC or with the president’s advisers rather than Biden directly, according to people familiar with the interactions.

Some current and former administration officials said they would have expected a closer relationship between the two.

Bates, the White House spokesman, said Biden “deeply values Secretary Yellen’s expertise and counsel” and is “grateful for her service.” The Treasury Department declined to comment.

Defense Secretary Austin also saw his close relationship with Biden grow more distant over the course of the administration, with Austin’s regular access to Biden becoming increasingly rare in the past two years, people familiar with the relationship said.

During the first half of the administration, Austin was one of the cabinet members who would regularly attend Biden’s presidential daily briefing on a rotational basis each week. That briefing would be followed with a routine one-on-one in which Austin and Biden would meet personally behind closed doors.

Officials familiar with these meetings said they helped cabinet members to understand the commander in chief’s intentions directly, instead of being filtered through others, such as Sullivan, the national security adviser.

But in the past two years—a period when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza demanded the president’s attention—Austin’s invitation to the briefing came less frequently, to the point where the one-on-one meeting was seldom scheduled. When the one-on-one meetings did take place, they were more typically virtual meetings, not in-person. Still, Austin could always get an unscheduled meeting with the president if he needed it.

Bates disputed that there was any decline in regular contact or attendance to presidential daily briefings, adding that Austin “is a fixture in these briefings and they speak often.”

A Pentagon spokesman said Biden frequently called Austin on the phone for matters that varied from urgent to lower in priority.

Biden has a close relationship with Secretary of State Blinken, whom he has known for decades, former administration officials said.

Over four years, Biden held nine full cabinet meetings—three in 2021, two in 2022, three in 2023 and just one this year. In their first terms, Obama held 19 and Trump held 25, according to data compiled by former CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller.

Early in his vice presidency during the Obama administration, Biden sought to gather cabinet leaders once a week, saying in a speech that the synergy brought about by the regular meetings made the government more competent.

The White House said Biden meets with smaller groups of his agency heads and that the contemporary work environment means full cabinet meetings can be fewer and farther between.

In the fall of 2023, Biden faced a major test when Hur, the special counsel, wanted to interview him. The president wanted to do it, and his top aides felt that his willingness to sit down with investigators set up a favorable contrast with Trump, who stonewalled the probe into why classified documents appeared at Mar-a-Lago, according to people familiar with the sessions.

The prep sessions took about three hours a day for about a week ahead of the interview, according to a person familiar with the preparation. During these sessions, Biden’s energy levels were up and down. He couldn’t recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him, the person said.

A White House official pushed back on the notion that Biden’s age showed in prep, saying that the concerns that arose during those sessions were related to Biden’s tendency to over-share.

The actual interview didn’t go well. Transcripts showed multiple blunders, including that Biden didn’t initially recall that in prep sessions he had been shown his own handwritten memo arguing against a surge of troops in Afghanistan.

The report—one of just a few lengthy interviews with Biden over the past four years—concluded with a recommendation that Biden not be prosecuted for having classified documents in his home because a jury was likely to view him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Insulated On Campaign

Biden’s team also insulated him on the campaign trail. In the summer of 2023, one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden’s re-election bid. The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him that attendees shouldn’t expect to have a free ranging question-and-answer session with the president. Instead, the organizer was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Biden would answer.

At some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.

Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline. Throughout his presidency—and especially later in the term—Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was vice president, or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies, people who have witnessed their interactions said.

These aides, which include Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams, were often with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye distance, the people said. They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.

The White House said that the work by staff to guide Biden through events is standard for high-level officials.

People who witnessed it felt differently. In the past, aides performing these duties were often on their phones, chatting with other people or fetching something from a car or a computer nearby, they said.

The president’s team of pollsters also had limited access to Biden, according to people familiar with the president’s polling. The key advisers have famously had the president’s ear in most past White Houses.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden had calls with John Anzalone, his pollster, during which the two had detailed conversations.

By the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren’t talking to the president about their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president.

Bates said that Biden stayed abreast of polling data.

But this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn’t getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.

Those fears intensified on July 11, when Biden’s top advisers met behind closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a road map for Biden’s victory. The message from the advisers was so disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from bad information. Donilon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

On July 13, Biden held an uncomfortable call with a group of Democratic lawmakers called the New Democrat Coalition, aimed at reassuring them about his ability to stay in the race.

The president told participants that polling showed he was doing fine. He became angry when challenged, according to lawmakers on the call. At one point, Biden looked up and abruptly told the group he had to go to church. Some lawmakers on the call believed someone behind the camera was shutting it down.

Biden dropped out of the race eight days later.

“… long to catch a glimpse of these things” | 1 Peter 1:12

Published December 17, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

I loved the commentary on the last portion of this verse… first the verse in a few different versions:

1 PETER 1:12

It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you. These things have now been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—angels long to catch a glimpse of these things (CSB)
It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you in regard to the things that have now been announced to you by those who brought you the good news through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. These are things that even the angels desire to look into. (ISV)
It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things. (NIV)
It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (ESV)

1 Peter 1:12 was mentioned in a recent sermon at my church, and I was fiddling with my Logos app and came across this (I kept the footnotes for the seminary grad):

The final clause with its reference to angelic desire (ἐπιθυμοῦσιν)⁹¹and activity (παρακύψαι)⁹²poses the riddle of how these ἄγγελοι (“angels”) are to be understood. While there was a tradition that angelic knowledge about redemption was superior to that of human beings,⁹³ the thrust of this clause seems rather to reflect an equally widespread tradition of the angels’ lack of knowledge⁹⁴ and of their resultant inferiority to human beings.⁹⁵ Hence they desire merely to glimpse⁹⁶ what is now openly proclaimed in the gospel.⁹⁷ Whether this further implies an envy on the part of the angels,⁹⁸ who can only see but not share in those salvific events, or whether the import is angelic fascination with these divine events now playing themselves out among human beings,⁹⁹ is difficult to determine on the basis of the limited evidence presented in the text. What does seem to be implied is that this angelic desire points to the greatness of what Christians now hear announced to them,¹⁰⁰ and further underlines one of the author’s main purposes for writing the letter: the readers live in a time firmly under God’s control when history is about to reach its climax. They therefore have reason rather to rejoice than to despair.¹⁰¹

The import of the verse as a whole serves to reinforce the idea of the unity of the origin and content of the witness of the OT and the Christian gospel: as the Spirit of Christ informed the message of the prophets, the Holy Spirit impels the proclamation of the gospel.¹⁰² That unity centers in Jesus Christ, the announcement of whose appearance (ἃ νῦν ἀνηγγέλη) is the fulfillment of the prophets’ message¹⁰³ and is itself the beginning of the eschatological fulfillment they foresaw.¹⁰⁴ That that new reality can already shape the lives of those who live within it is the thrust of the ethical admonitions that commence in the next section of the letter.

Paul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter: A Commentary on First Peter, ed. Eldon Jay Epp, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 112–113.

91 Chevallier (“1 Pierre 1/1 à 2/10,” 140) identifies it as a word whose precise meaning is hard to determine; he thinks it was chosen to serve as catchword with the ἐπιθυμίαις in v. 14*.

92 The “things” (ἅ) that they desire to glimpse are the τὰ … δόξας of v. 11*, which function as the antecedent of the other two pronouns (αὐτά, ἅ) in this verse as well.

93 It is reflected in such passages as Dan 7:16*; Zech 1:9*; 1 Enoch 1.2; 72.1; 108.5–7; Philo Fug. 203; cf. Kelly, 63.

94 It is reflected in such passages as Mark 13:32*; Rom 16:25*; 1 Cor 2:8*; 1 Enoch 16.3; 2 Enoch 24.3; Ignatius Eph. 19.1; they learn of redemption from the church, Eph 3:10*.

95 On angelic inferiority, see 1 Cor 6:3*; Heb 1:14*; 2:16*; as messengers, see Gal 1:8*; on their language, see 1 Cor 13:1*. That that implies that the angels here being discussed are the “dark spiritual forces that hold sway over the lower realms of being” (so Beare, 94) is unlikely, however; Eph 3:10* is probably a closer analogy than 1 Cor 2:8*.

96 The word παρακύψαι probably emphasizes here less the act of “peeping into” (as, e.g., John 20:5*) than the looking forth (a use Hart [48] notes it has assumed in LXX Greek) by the angels from heaven (e.g., 1 Enoch 9.1). Michaels (49) notes correctly that the point is their intense interest in the salvific events, with the implied limitations on their knowledge; more than that our author does not wish to say about angelic beings.

97 Kühschelm, “Lebendige Hoffnung,” 205; cf. Reicke, 81. See also n. 44 on 1:7* above.

98 So, e.g., Kühschelm, “Lebendige Hoffnung,” 205; Hillyer (“Servant,” 147) notes a tradition of angelic envy of humans as a result of the dignity that the Aqedah (sacrifice of Isaac) confers upon humanity, but none of the references cited (n. 35: Tanḥuma Wayyera 18; Soṭa 6.5; Gen. Rab. 56.3) even remotely supports this point.

99 So, e.g., Moffatt, 102; Calvin (43) thought it meant the angelic desire to see the kingdom of Christ, a living image of which is set forth in the gospel; Thomas Aquinas thought it meant that angels, rather than being frustrated at their lack of knowledge, never weary of knowing God’s plans (cited in Spicq, 57).

100 So, e.g., Leaney, 22; de Villiers, “Joy,” 74; Spicq, “La Ia Petri” 55; Scharlemann, “Descant,” 16.

101 So also Goppelt, 108–9. To find with Schweizer (30) that it means that the future glory of the return of Christ is greater than any angelic glory is perhaps to find more than is in the text.

102 So also Kelly, 62; Schweizer, 29. We are probably not to understand differing origins for the message of prophets (πνεῦμα Χριστοῦ) and evangelists (πνεῦμα ἅγιον) so much as to see the common origin of both in the divine Spirit who underlies both activities. The emphasis in v. 11* on the Spirit of Christ points to that figure as the center of both witnesses, something obvious in the case of the gospel. On this point see also Schelkle, 42; Hiebert, “Peter’s Thanksgiving,” 102.

103 Hort, 59; Margot, 26; cf. Brox, “Pseudepigraphischen Rahmung,” 70.

104 Cf. Goppelt, 109.

Stephen A. Smith Starting His Red Pill Journey | Still Holding Out

Published December 16, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

Stephen A Smith LOSES IT After Realizing Democrats
~ And ~
The Liberal Media LIED TO HIM About Jan 6th!

My Facebook thoughts when posting the raw Smith video:

RPT’S LONG NOTE 》》THEN THE VIDEO DESCRIPTION…

… this is an admission by JUST BY THE FBI Not only that, but this is a SPECIFIC type of resource the FBI uses. They have others. But the DOJ has other resources that do the same thing. As one example, the U.S. Department of the Treasury probably had undercover members in the crowd, as well as other federal government resources. Easily over a hundred may have been in place leading the crowd into violence.

I WANT TO SAY AS WELL that many a black person I have watched video admissions from have come to the same conclusion as Stephen Smith, but based on the CHARLOTTESVILLE LIE the current “president” [eat your pudding Joe] and most Democrats as well as many friends I have who are on the Left believe to be true and spread this lie incessantly.

The “Big Lie” Biden Continues To Spread

When these fine men and women are exposed to another part of the story — breaking the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Chicago Tribune, NPR, on and on… spell over them or the word-of-mouth info friends or family regurgitate — they have left the Democrat Party.

Keep lying and labeling through the media and universities via CRT and DEI regular, hard working Americans as “sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted (S.I.X.T.H.I.R.B.)” The GOP will continue to make gains as the O.G. freedom party [At least the base is all about freedom, compare me and others to the Left’s base.]

I say WORD-OF-MOUTH for a reason. I will give an example of a similar situation regarding the Bible I have encountered often. Here is an old response from me via the dial-up-internet days.

SOULCANNON SAID: “The fact of the matter is that the Bible is a document that is nearly 2000 years old (if you count the current calendar, which itself has been corrupted, warped, and stretched so many times) and the events and persons written within may have had a high probability of being fact.”

This is one of my favorite skeptical questions to deal with. Reason being is that the statement made is that the Bible being changed over time is “the fact of the matter is” (quoting SoulCannon, but not exclusively). SoulCannon, I will be talking to you for the simple fact that you made the statement, but I will really be speaking to the hundreds of people who really believe the above. So bear with me, okay.

Question posed to you: “Can you tell me where you got the information about the Bible being considerably changed and corrupted?”

MANUSCRIPT EVIDENCE

The Book of Isaiah! The Christian church’s earliest manuscript, of the book of Isaiah in complete form, it held in its grasp was dated at 900A.D.. But thanks to a shepherd boy, the Qumran caves coughed up a load of Biblical manuscripts and papyri fragments. One was a complete book of Isaiah that was dated at 100B.C.. After many textual scholars and critics went through this particular scroll, they found eleven letters different than the manuscript dated at 900A.D.. All the changes in the letter style did not change any of the meanings of the words they were found in. so after more than 1,100 years, a perfect example of the unchanging Word of God is exemplified.

The Jewish Masoretic scribes who would copy, say the book of Genesis, would know how many letters were in that book (76,064 Hebrew letters), he would literally count out the precise number of times each of the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet occurred in the text. He would also make notations on the margin of the page to assure that no letters were added or taken away. If even one letter was missed or added improperly, the master scribe would destroy the imperfect copy, lest an error creep into the holy text of the Word of God. This same process is still used in Israel to this day.

Some people think the Bible has been copied from the older manuscripts and papyri fragments and then copied into the Latin Vulgate; then into the Wycliff; then the Tyndale; then the Coverdale; then the Matthew Bible; then into the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Rheims, Douai, Authorized King James (KJV), American Standard (AS), New American Standard (NAS), New International Version (NIV), New King James Version (NKJV).

This is not the case. I will show two different ways of putting this controversy, which is nothing, more than not knowing the facts of the matter:

Greek and Hebrew Latin Vulgate = a = b = c = d = e = etc., etc. = New International Version (NIV); so by the time we reach our present age the Bible has been changed, much like the telling of a secret in a circle of children.

The New International Version actually used all the available (earliest) manuscripts and papyri fragments as their bases (which we will discuss later). They added [+] that information to the Rabbinical priests quoting scripture as well as the early church fathers. They then added that to the notes and commentaries on the Hebrew and Greek translators commentaries on the (still used) manuscripts they used to make past versions and copies.

So its: Early Greek Manuscripts + Early Translated Copies + Early Christian Quotes + Papyri Fragments + Early Notes and Commentaries = New International Version (NIV)

In other words, such playing the “game of telephone” thinking is easily overturned with facts. Such myopic beliefs are easily refuted, and many people begin to question their sources of information that warp their thinking. The same is happening in the political spectrum. Which is why my site is called RELIGIO-POLITICAL TALK

Stephen A. Smith revealed on his show that there were 26 FBI informants in the crowd on January 6th when the Capitol was stormed and says that he’s sick and tired of finding something else that the Democrats have lied about.

He highlights Kamala and Democrats claiming that Trump was a threat to democracy when it turns out Trump was right about this all along being rigged.

Watch below — Via, THE RIGHT SCOOP:

Stephen A Smith is sick of defending Democrats after ‘conspiracy theories’ continue to come true, like FBI informants instigating violence during January 6th:
“The news comes amidst a bombshell report from the Justice Department that revealed the FBI had at least 26 confidential… pic.twitter.com/q8xskoMp6H

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) December 15, 2024

Violent Democrats Support Killing ~implicitly~ CEOs

Published December 15, 2024December 15, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

Here is Craig Gottwals teeing up his visit at the ARMSTRONG & GETTY SHOW:

I [Craig Gottwals] had a quick visit with Armstrong & Getty this morning to discuss the UHC CEO murder, America’s reaction thereto, why so much of the ire on this topic is off base, Obamacare’s medical loss ratio mandate, the Medicare cost shift, and some super simple advice on purchasing insurance products. Since 2009, I’ve been on air with Jack and Joe well over 100 times. It’s always an honor to be on their show. (The fuller interview can be found at Craig’s site, HERE)

This video should be combined with Larry Elder’s I uploaded yesterday. See also Steve Forbes thrashing Elizabeth Warren and the Left’s moral rot. FOX has a good article as well.

Larry Elder Addresses Jordan Neely’s Death and Health Care

Published December 14, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

Some Blame Jordan Neely’s Death On a Lack of Healthcare

… Larry Elder sets the record straight.

The article Larry started with is this one from HEATHER MAC via The City Journal:

… If Neely had not killed anyone by May 2023, it was not for lack of trying. In 2019, Neely punched Filemon Castillo Baltazar in the head as the 65-year-old waited for a subway in Greenwich Village. In June 2021, he walloped Anne Mitcheltree in the head inside a deli in the East Village; she was in her late sixties. In November 2021, Neely broke the nose and fractured the eye socket of a 67-year-old woman as she exited a subway on the Lower East Side.

When he was not assaulting the elderly, he was terrifying other New Yorkers. In June 2019, Neely banged on the door of a subway ticket agent’s booth and threatened to kill her. Yet Neely was still allowed his freedom.

The homeless lobby regularly intones that the mentally ill are no more likely to be violent than the sane. That claim ignores the fact that the drug-abusing mentally ill, which category encompasses virtually all of the madmen roaming America’s city streets, are far more likely to be violent. Even Neely’s heavy use of the synthetic marijuana K-2, however, was not enough to get him permanently locked up. K-2 is even more likely to trigger violent outbreaks than other illegal drugs, due to its strength and powerful psychological effects. No matter. Neely’s 42 arrests resulted in brief jail stints, at best, and Neely’s hundreds of encounters with outreach workers always left him free to return to the streets, even though he was on the city’s Top 50 list of most intractable vagrants. …

Here is his reading two points from the Heritage Foundation article:

Eleven years after the passage of Obamacare, Americans buying health insurance under the law are still worse off financially than before the health law was enacted.
Obamacare more than doubled health insurance costs for workers and families, with the national average premium increasing by 129 percent from 2013 to 2019.

And lastly, the article from the USA Today:

“The ACA was not designed to reduce costs or, the law’s name notwithstanding, to make health insurance coverage affordable for the vast majority of Americans,” says health care consultant Kip Piper, a former government and insurance industry official. “The law uses taxpayer dollars to lower costs for the low-income uninsured but it also increases costs overall and shifts costs within the marketplace.”

The Medieval Warming Period

Published December 13, 2024December 13, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

First posted in January of 2015

Listen carefully, very carefully. This is [one of] the most important climate change clip you will ever watch – and only 4mins long. Watch and judge yourself. ABSORB the graph shown. THINK on it. USE your brain.

SEE:

More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was real, global, & warmer than the present (2013)

“For someone to think that 1998 or 2010, or even 2014 are the warmest years… you have to be smoking something.” ~ RPT [Me]

NEW GRAPHIC (12-2024)

~ Larger picture here, ON X ~

Here are a few evidences — of the many — that indicate it was much warmer in the past and that 2014 wasn’t even near the warmest year [even assuming this to be true!]. The first piece of evidence to show is a recent studies dealing with giant clams.

CLAMS

Clams hold pearls and insights to Earth’s climate history. Two recent studies examining clams and coral samples in the South China Sea suggest the climate was warmer during the Medieval period than during modern times.

Two studies out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that the climate was warmer in the Roman and Medieval warm periods than today, despite much lower atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

“This new paper adds further material to the substantial body of real-world proxy evidence establishing that today’s global temperature is within natural ranges of past changes,” Dr. Hong Yan with the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Studying giant clams and coral reefs, scientists were able to reconstruct sea surface temperature changes going back 2,500 years. What the clam and coral data show is the Roman and Medieval warming periods impacted East Asia and the western Pacific. The study provides further evidence against the theory that there was little global temperature variation until the 20th century.

Both Chinese studies provide evidence for what is called the Medieval Warm Period, which took place during the late Roman Empire and Middle Ages. The period preceded a time of cooling known as the Little Ice Age…..

(DAILY CALLER)

More from the Chinese Academy of Sciences via Watts Up With That:

Two recent papers, one is in Earth-Science Reviews and the other is in Chinese Science Bulletin, have studied key chemical contents in micro-drilled giant clams shells and coral samples to demonstrate that in the South China Sea the warm period of the Middle Ages was warmer than the present.

The scientists examined surveys of the ratio of strontium to calcium content and heavy oxygen isotopes, both are sensitive recorders of sea surface temperatures past and present. The aragonite bicarbonate of the Tridacna gigas clam-shell is so fine-grained that daily growth-lines are exposed by micro-drilling with an exceptionally fine drill-bit, allowing an exceptionally detailed time-series of sea-temperature changes to be compiled – a feat of detection worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself.

By using overlaps between successive generations of giant clams and corals, the three scientists – Hong Yan of the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Yuhong Wang of Fudan University, Shanghai – reconstructed a record of sea-surface temperature changes going back 2500 years.

The Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods both showed up prominently in the western Pacific and East Asia. Sea surface temperatures varied considerably over the 2500-year period.

Changing patterns of winter and summer temperature variation were also detected, disproving the notion that until the warming of the 20^th century there had been little change in global temperatures for at least 1000 years, and confirming that – at least in the South China Sea – there is nothing exceptional about today’s temperatures.

Dr. Yan said: “This new paper adds further material to the substantial body of real-world proxy evidence establishing that today’s global temperature is within natural ranges of past changes.” Dr. Soon added: “The UN’s climate panel should never have trusted the claim that the medieval warm period was mainly a European phenomenon. It was clearly warm in South China Sea too.”

(WUWT)

NORTHWEST PASSAGE

Another example is that in the the 1500’s till the late 1800’s passages that are now iced over allowed for what is termed as the Northwest Passage… Exxon or cars weren’t around then?

“If you are like me and bit foggy on the Northwest Passage, here is a five cent refresher. The British coined the term Northwest Passage for the potential northern oceanic pass that would allow vessels to move between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The earliest explorations for the fabled passage were by Cortes in 1539. The late 1500’s were marked by British explorers, Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and John Davis. Several expeditions followed, all with little success of finding the passage but tempered by the acquisition of new lands. Some attempts lead to deaths of entire crews. Notable of these is the Sir John Franklin expedition in which all of the crew members were lost to starvation, scurvy, cannibalism, and lead poisoning from food sealed in tins. The first to transverse the Northwest Passage was Sir Robert McClure using a combination of both sledge and ship. Ironically this was done during the search for Franklin’s team in which McClure’s own ship became trapped in the ice for three winters. The passage was finally conquered entirely by sea by the Norwegian Amundsen in 1906.”

UPDATE

New York Times Mentions by Mistake

(WESTERN JOURNAL) The New York Times ran an editorial Saturday about the effect climate change had on discovering the Northwest Passage that appears to contradict claims the Arctic ice is melting at cataclysmic rates.

Global warming would have helped famed fur trader Alexander Mackenzie discover a Northwest Passage connecting North America to China, according to a NYT editorial from author Brian Castner.

His piece contains one significant caveat: Mackenzie’s 1789 trip happened during an era of above normal ice packed in the North that occurred before widespread fossil fuel use.

“Mackenzie paddled during the Little Ice Age, a few centuries of below-normal cold,” Castner wrote before noting Mackenzie’s failed attempt probably would have been successful had temperatures been at normal ranges.

“If he had undertaken his trip during average conditions, or at our current global temperatures, he would not have been stopped by ice,” he added.

“If the ocean hadn’t been icebound, would the fur trade have followed him down the river to China?

Would a summer Deh Cho have been Canada’s own Mississippi River? Would settlers have wagoned in, a northern Oregon Trail?”…

VIKINGS

Another hint are the Vikings and how they flourished.

Here are some great excerpts from a book[s] on the subject that include Icelandic and Greenlandic Vikings:

The warm climate during the MWP [Medieval Warming Period] allowed this great migration to flourish. Drift ice posed the greatest hazard to sailors but reports of drift ice in old records do not appear until the thirteenth century (Bryson, 1977.)
The Norse peoples traveled to Iceland for a variety of reasons including a search for more land and resources to satisfy a growing population and to escape raiders and harsh rulers. One force behind the movement to Iceland in the ninth century was the ruthlessness of Harald Fairhair, a Norwegian King (Bryson, 1977.)
Vikings travelling to Iceland from Norway during the MWP were probably encouraged by the sight of pastures with sedges and grasses and dwarf woodlands of birch and willow resembling those at home.
Animal bones and other materials collected from archaeological sites reveal Icelandic Vikings had large farmsteads with dairy cattle (a source of meat), pigs, and sheep and goats (for wool, hair, milk, and meat.) Farmsteads also had ample pastures and fields of barley used for the making of beer and these farms were located near bird cliffs (providing meat, eggs, and eiderdown) and inshore fishing grounds. Fishing was primarily done with hand lines or from small boats that did not venture across the horizon (McGovern and Perdikaris, 2000.)
The Greenland Vikings lived mostly on dairy produce and meat, primarily from cows. The vegetable diet of Greenlanders included berries, edible grasses, and seaweed, but these were inadequate even during the best harvests. During the MWP, Greenland’s climate was so cold that cattle breeding and dairy farming could only be carried on in the sheltered fiords. The growing season in Greenland even then was very short. Frost typically occurred in August and the fiords froze in October. Before the year 1300, ships regularly sailed from Norway and other European countries to Greenland bringing with them timber, iron, corn, salt, and other needed items. Trade was by barter. Greenlanders offered butter, cheese, wool, and their frieze cloths, which were greatly sough after in Europe, as well as white and blue fox furs, polar bear skins, walrus and narwhal tusks, and walrus skins. In fact, two Greenland items in particular were prized by Europeans: white bears and the white falcon. These items were given as royal gifts. For instance, the King of Norway-Denmark sent a number of Greenland falcons as a gift to the King of Portugal, and received in return the gift of a cargo of wine (Stefansson, 1966.) Because of the shortage of adequate vegetables and cereal grains, and a shortage of timber to make ships, the trade link to Iceland and Europe was vital (Hermann, 1954.)

THE SUN

To support the sun being involved, here is another short video:

Another example of this warming comes from the production of wine and the trading boom and crop and animal growth and productivity during this medieval warming period in the Roman Empire. Vineyards on the Salisbury Plains, and other parts on England that wopuld be impossible today:

Farmers and peasants in medieval England launched a thriving wine industry south of Manchester. Good wines demand warm springs free of frosts, substantial summer warmth and sunshine without too much rain, and sunny days in the fall. Winters cannot be too cold — not below zero Fahrenheit for any significant period. The northern limit for grapes during the Middle Ages was about 300 miles above the current commercial wine areas in France and Germany. These wines were not simply marginal supplies, but of sufficient quality and quantity that, after the Norman conquest, the French monarchy tried to prohibit British wine production.

TREES

And my final example, one I used in a more layman way with high school students at West Ranch High School was the following. I have wanted to get this copied and up for a long time, and I have the time now. But for the tree lovers, the following will be new information to them surely… and note how the 1990 IPCC graph at the top of this post matches the Chinese one below. This much warmer weather/climate (by three[+] degrees) allowed for higher tree lines in the past:

…3-Degrees Warmer

Tree rings can be counted to date the time of an event, and their summertime width is greater under good growing conditions (warmth, rainfall) than during poor growing seasons (cold, dry). They are limited by the distance back in time researchers can find live trees, dead trees, or buried wood from an earlier time which can be accurately dated to its growth period.

In mountainous northwestern Pakistan, more than 200,000 tree-ring measurements were assembled from 384 long-lived trees that grew on more than twenty individual sites. The 1,300-year temperature proxy shows the warmest decades occurred between 800 and 1000, and the coldest periods between 1500 and 1700.¹²⁸

Mountain tree line elevations are another sensitive and highly accurate proxy for temperature change. A number of studies of European tree lines testify to the fact that tree lines, farming, and villages moved upslope during the Medieval Warming and back with the Little Ice Age.

A recent study of tree line dynamics in Western Siberia showed that advances in tree lines during the warmer weather of the 20th century were “part of a long-term reforestation of tundra environments.” Two Swiss scientists, Jan Esper and Fritz-Hans Schweingruber, note that “stumps and logs of Larix sibirica can be preserved for hundreds of years” and that “above the tree line in the Polar Urals such relict material from large, upright trees were sampled and dated, confirming the existence, around A.D. 1000, of a forest tree line 30 meters above the late 20th century limit.” They also note, “this previous forest limit receded around 1350, perhaps caused by a general cooling trend.” Thus, the Siberian tree lines testify to the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age well outside of Europe.¹²⁹

Lisa J. Graumlich of Montana State University combined both tree rings and tree lines to assess past climate changes in California’s Sierra Nevada. The trees in the mountains’ upper tree lines are preserved in place, living and dead, for up to 3,000 years. Graumlich says:

A relatively dense forest grew above the current tree line from the beginning of our records to around 100 B.C., and again from A.D. 400 to 1000, when temperatures were warm. Abundance of trees and elevation of tree line declined very rapidly from A.D. 1000 to 1400, the period of severe, multi-decadal droughts. Tree lines declined more slowly from 1500 to 1900 under the cool temperatures of the Little Ice Age, reaching current elevations around 1900.¹³⁰

Graumlich’s tree evidence confirms both of the last two 1,500-year cycles: the Roman Warming/Dark Ages climate cycle and the Medieval Warming/Little Ice Age. Severe drought, which has been documented in California during the latter part of the Medieval Warming, obscured the timing of the shift from the Medieval Warming to the Little Ice Age. However, both events were clearly evident.

Cave stalagmite cores confirm the global nature of the 1,500-year cycle found in ice cores, seabed sediments, and trees. Their carbon and oxygen isotopes and their trace element content vary with temperature. Moreover, the stalagmites go back further in time than the tree evidence. One German stalagmite goes back more than 17,000 years. Cave stalagmites have been found in Ireland, Germany, Oman, and South Africa whose layers all show the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, and the Roman Warming.¹³¹ A number of the stalagmites also show the unnamed cold period that preceded the Roman Warming.

In southern Ontario, pollen shows that the warmth-loving beech trees of the Medieval Warming gradually gave way to cold tolerant oaks as the Little Ice Age came on—and then the forest became dominated by pine trees. The oak trees have been making a comeback in Ontario since 1850 and the beech trees can be expected to resurge as the Modern Warming continues in the centuries ahead.¹³²

Remains of prehistoric villages in Argentina were analyzed by Marcela A. Cioccale of the National University of Cordoba to determine where Argentina’s native peoples lived over the past 1,400 years. Using carbon-14 dating, she found that the inhabitants clustered in the lower valleys during the Dark Ages period, and then moved higher up the slopes as the Medieval Warming brought “a marked increase of environmental suitability, under a relatively homogeneous climate.”¹³³ Habitation moved up as high as 4,300 meters in the Central Peruvian Andes around 1000 as the Medieval Warming not only raised temperatures but created more stable conditions for farming. After 1320, people migrated back down the slopes as the colder, less stable climate of the Little Ice Age set in.

Yang Bao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reconstructed China’s temperature history for the last 2,000 years from ice cores, lake sediments, peat bogs, tree rings, and the historic documents that date back farther in China than in any other country. He found China had its highest temperature during the second and third centuries, toward the end of the Roman Warming. China’s climate was also warm from 800 to 1400, cold from 1400 to 1920, and then began to warm again after 1920.¹³⁴ (See Figure 4.1.)

Figure 4.1: 2,000 Years of Chinese Temperature History

Source [for above figure]: Y. T. Hong et al., “Response of Climate to Solar Forcing Recorded in a 6,000-Year Time-Series of Chinese Peat Cellulose,” The Holocene 10 (2000): 1-7.

[128] J. Esper et al., “1,300 Years of Climate History for Western Central Asia Inferred from Tree Rings,” The Holocene 12 (2002): 267-77.

[129] J. Esper and F. H. Schweingruber, “Large-Scale Tree Line Changes Recorded in Siberia,” Geophysical Research Letters 31 (2004): 10.1029/2003GLO019178.

[130] L. J. Graumlich, “Global Change in Wilderness Areas: Disentangling Natural and Anthropogenic Changes,” U. S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-15-Vol. 3, 2000

[131] F. McDermott et al., “Centennial-Scale Holocene Climate Variability Revealed by a High-Resolution Speleothem 018 Record from SW Ireland,” Science 294 (2001): 1328-331; S. Niggemann et al., “A Paleoclimate Record of the Last 17,600 Years in Stalagmites from the B7 Cave, Sauerland, Germany,” Quaternary Science Reviews 22 (2003): 555-67; U. Neff et. al., “Strong Coherence between Solar Variability and the Monsoon in Oman between 9 and 6 kyr ago,” Nature 411 (2001): 290-93; and Tyson et al., “The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming in South Africa,” South African Journal of Science 96, no. 3 (2000).

[132] I. D. Campbell and J. H. McAndrews, “Forest Disequilibrium Caused by Rapid Little Ice Age Cooling,” Nature 366 (1993): 336-38

[133] M. A. Cioccale, “Climatic fluctuations in the Central Region of Argentina in the last 1000 years,” Quaternary International 62, (1999): 35-47.

[134] Yang Bao et al., “General Characteristics of Temperature Variation in China during the Last Two Millennia,” Geophysical Research Letters 10 (2002): 1029/2001GLO014485.

S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 63-66.

SOME MORE TREE EVIDENCES:

Greta’s Thunberg’s Northern Sweden Was 3°C Warmer 9300 Years Ago…Trees once grew where tundra is today:

9300-year old vegetation remnants found under receding glaciers in Northern Sweden show that the trees once grew where tundra exists today, meaning it was warmer (NO TRICK ZONE)

A new Swedish publication titled New Presence Of Beaver (Castor fiber L) in the Scandes sustains warmer-than-present conditions and a patchily treed and rich mountainscape finds that trees once grew up to 700 meters above today’s current treeline in Northern Sweden (Lapland, locations 1 and 2).

Over the past 120 years the climate has warmed, and so there’s been glacier and ice patch shrinkage. This has unveiled earlier vegetation and life.

The concerned vegetational remnants that were found represent tree exclaves in ice-empty glacier cirques, the study says.

Found were megafossils of pinus sylvestris with signs of being gnawed by beaver (Castor fiber L.) from different sites in northern Sweden which today are tundra.

They age 9500-9300 cal. yr BP and are located 400-700 m above present-day tree lines.

[….]

These exposed megafossil remnants represent former tree stands that were later on extirpated and entombed by snow and ice for many millennia. At -0.6°C/100 m lapse rate, it means it was then over 3°C warmer than now in this region at a time when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were well below 300 ppm.

For a great interactive map one should see this link embedded in the below graphic, after the excerpt from WUWT. The full (translated to english) study can be found HERE….

MISC. EVIDENCES

The idea of a medieval warm period was formulated for the first time in 1965 by the English climatologist Hubert H. Lamb^[1]. Lamb, who founded the UK Climate Research Unit (CRU) in 1971, saw the peak of the warming period from 1000 to 1300, i.e. in the High Middle Ages. He estimated that temperatures then were 1-2 ° C above the normal period of 1931-1960. In the high North, it was even up to 4 degrees warmer. The regular voyages of the Vikings between Iceland and Greenland were rarely hindered by ice, and many burial places of the Vikings in Greenland still lie in the permafrost.

Glaciers were smaller than today

Also the global retreat of glaciers that occurred in the period between about 900 to 1300^[2] speaks for the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. An interesting detail is that many glaciers pulling back since 1850 reveal plant remnants from the Middle Ages, which is a clear proof that the extent of the glaciers at that time was lower than today^[3].

Furthermore, historical traditions show evidence of unusual warmth at this time. Years around 1180 brought the warmest winter decade ever known. In January 1186/87, the trees were in bloom near Strasbourg. And even earlier you come across a longer heat phase, roughly between 1021 and 1040. The summer of 1130 was so dry that you could wade through the river Rhine. In 1135, the Danube flow was so low that people could cross it on foot. This fact has been exploited to create foundation stones for the bridge in Regensburg this year^[4].

Clear evidence of the warm phase of the Middle Ages can also be found in the limits of crop cultivation. The treeline in the Alps climbed to 2000 meters, higher than current levels are^[5]. Winery was possible in Germany at the Rhine and Mosel up to 200 meters above the present limits, in Pomerania, East Prussia, England and southern Scotland, and in southern Norway, therefore, much farther north than is the case today^[6]. On the basis of pollen record there is evidence that during the Middle Ages, right up to Trondheim in Norway, wheat was grown and until nearly the 70th parallel/latitude barley was cultivated^[4]. In many parts of the UK arable land reached heights that were never reached again later.

Also in Asia historical sources report that the margin of cultivation of citrus fruits was never as far north as in the 13th century. Accordingly, it must have been warmer at the time about 1 ° C than today^[7].

Archeology and history confirm interglacial

Insects can also be used as historical markers for climate. The cold sensitive beetle Heterogaster urticae was detected during the Roman Optimum and during the Norman High Middle Age in York. Despite the warming of the 20th century, this beetle is found today only in sunny locations in the south of England^[8].

During the medieval climate optimum, the population of Europe reached hitherto unknown highs. Many cities were founded at this very time with high-altitude valleys, high pastures and cultivated areas, which were at the beginning of the Little Ice Age again largely abandoned^[9].

The Middle Ages was the era of high culture of the Vikings. In this period their expansion occurred into present-day Russia and the settlement of Iceland, Greenland and parts of Canada and Newfoundland. In Greenland even cereals were grown about this time.. With the end of the Medieval Warm Period the heyday of the Vikings ended. The settlements in Greenland had to be abandoned as well as in the home country of Norway, during this time, many northern communities located at higher altitudes^[10]. The history of the Vikings also corresponds very well to the temperature reconstructions from Greenland, which were carried out using ice cores. According to the reconstructions, Greenland was at the time of the Vikings at least one degree warmer than in the modern warming period^[11].

[1] Hubert H. Lamb, The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and Its Sequel, in Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology 1 (1965) 13-37

[2] Jean M. Grove, Roy Switsur, Glacial geological evidence for the medieval warm period

[3] Climate News, The Alpine Glacier and the Eisman Ötzi

[4] Wolfgang Behringer, Cultural History of the Climate: From the Ice Age to Global Warming (also Google Books )

[5] Hubert H. Lamb: Climate and Cultural History, Reinbeck 1989

[6] Wilfried Weber, The Development of the Northern Wine Ranges in Europe

[7] De’Er Zhang, Evidence for the existence of the medieval warm period in China

[8] John M. Steane, The Archeology of Medieval England and Wales

[9] Thomas Gale More, Global Warming: A Boon to Human and Other Animals

[10] Willi Dansgard et al., Climatic changes, Norsemen and modern man. Nature 255 24-28

[11] Science Skeptical, Is Greenland Greener? No – colder

INTERACTIVE MAP (linked)

More here: “Medieval Warm Period Project”

UPDATE

This comes by way of WUWT!

Michael Mann and his team of ~~data manglers~~ like-minded scientists like to tell us the Medieval Warming Period was just a “regional” event rather than global, because if it was global, that destroys their narrative. This new study shows it also occurred in South America, and adds to the growing body of southern hemisphere locations. as we can see in this map below, note the red markers where it was warmer than normal. Sure seems global to me.

The above UPDATE is really a larger — more in-depth interactive map.

Site Construction Finished

Published December 13, 2024December 13, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

UPDATED INFO!

It cost a bit of $$$, but the peeps at Codeable.io (in my case, Patryck and Javin) took my request, which was basically:

“I like my current theme to my website, how can I keep this look but have it updated so it works well with the latest hosting updates to PHP?”

I purchased my theme in 2014, and the company that made it went out of business.

They said,

“We got you.”

And they did. Yay! They also made sure a favored “plug-in” of mine, Special Text Boxes, was running well with the updates. How they did that is their little secret. Lol.

Here is my TRUSTPILOT review:

Keeping My Site’s Old WordPress Theme, Current

For background. I had a theme for my WordPress site in 2014 from a company that is now defunct. The updated theme I purchased in 2022 was a totally different layout. I did not like the new look. I preferred my simple layout. The problem was the new PHP updates to WordPress would cause a fatal error. So I held on for a couple years but it needed to be addressed. So I happened upon a company through a recommendation, Codeable Aps, and in a short time my site was updated, looking the same (YAY!), and ready to go through many years of updates. Awesome!

I would highly recommend the team at Codeable Aps. The guys that helped me were Patryk Kachel and Jayvin. Thanks guys.

I second myself. Thanks Guys!

~~FYI, some maintenance and construction on my site will be going on over the holidays (Holydays).~~

The ‘Fascist’ Slur – Used by the Left Since Stalin

Published December 1, 2024December 9, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager often notes that “Stalin labeled Trotsky a fascist, even though Trotsky and Lenin were the fathers of the Bolshevik Revolution.” Tiger Droppings discussed tis a bit:

Was listening to Dennis Prager, who is an expert in Soviet Union propaganda and speaks Russian. It was a common tactic for the Stalinists to label all their enemies Fascists, and even labeled Trotsky a fascist, who was one of the most ardent Communists in the entire Revolution. Once Trotsky was labeled a Fascist, his days were numbered.

Its interesting how similar all the tactics of the modern left are to the Communists of the early 20th century.

On a recent appearance on the Patrick Bet-David Podcast, Dennis makes the point again:

ADAPTED QUOTE FROM THE AUDIO:

As I mentioned earlier, my field of study I was one of seven students in all of Columbia University to major in what was called Communist Affairs[….] At the Russian Institute at the School of International Affairs. I learned Russian, went to communist countries every year[…] I wanted to understand the enemy… that was basically what it was [for]. I learned Russian to read Pravda and Dostoyevsky, not to be able to converse. And so I know the left very, very well and. The first use of this terminology was from Stalin. Stalin called Trotsky a fascist. Trotsky, with Lenin, founded the Bolshevik party, not Stalin. Stalin was one of the early leaders, but the founders were Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky was the head of the Red Army in the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution.

You can’t get more Communist than Trotsky, but he became an opponent of Stalin after Lemin’s death and he fled the Soviet Union [and] fled to Mexico. Stalin sent the assassins to kill him with an ice pick, which was done in Mexico.

He called Trotsky a Fascist.

So every one of your listeners [to the PBD Podcast] needs to understand this. [….] All leftists since Stalin have done the exact same thing, they call their opponents fascists. There is no exception. That is what they do. They call them the worst possible names.

I’ll give you one other Law about the left. And that is that there is no example of the Left being in power, whether in the country or the university, and allowing dissent. There is no example, and I have my favorite example as Prime Minister Ardern, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, during the lockdowns, said this:

[Extended Quote:] We will continue to be your single source of truth. We will provide information frequently. We will share everything we can. Take everything else you see with a grain of salt. And so, I really ask people to focus.[….] remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth. [This was regarding Covid and Covid lockdowns and information. Most of what the New Zealand government pushed turned out to be – in fact – wrong.]

[….] Guess where she is now? Harvard. She’s teaching at Harvard. She is a kindred spirit to Harvard, Harvard!, whose motto […] means truth. But it’s a joke. It means nothing to any Left-wing group. Truth is, what is the Soviet Communist newspaper that I learned Russian to read called? Pravda. Pravda means truth.

Truth in the Left-wing world is what they say it is. It has no objective reality. The Oregon Education Department announced the idea that math has a correct answer is, is white supremacy.

CLARITY ON THE SUBJECT:

The NATIONAL REVIEW article Dennis Prager is reading from can be found here: “Biden White House Pressured Amazon to Censor Vaccine-Skeptical Books, Internal Emails Reveal” The PRAGER U video mentioned (and the excerpt I included) can be found here: “Big Business & Big Brother”. And the other THOMAS SOWELL video is via this YouTube Channel. Must read JIM JORDAN’S Twitter thread as well.

THOMAS SOWELL QUOTE:

Question to Thomas Sowell: Talk about President Obama. Do you think he’s a socialist?

Thomas Sowell: No, not technically, I suppose, because socialism usually means the government ownership of the means of production. The pattern he’s following is much more like that of the fascist, where the government leaves the production in the private hands, and the politicians tell them what to do, and that’s much more politically viable because, after the government forces the private industry to do something and it turns out disastrously; you can always haul the people from private industry up before congressional committees, denounce them on television and so forth. Leaving out the fact that it was you who forced them to do what they did.

How biased are these pushes? Mollie Hemingway and Laura Ingraham explain:

‘The Federalist’ editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway discusses NewsGuard’s global disinformation index categorizing right-leading media outlets as ‘risky’ and left-leaning outlets as ‘least risky’ for disinformation on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’

Larry Elder reads from Thomas Sowell’s 2012 article, “Socialist Or Fascist? Government Ownership Of The Means Of Production Means That Politicians Also Own The Consequences Of Their Policies…” (HUMAN EVENTS). I go out of my way to add to the audio by inserting various videos from Jonah Goldberg, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan, Kamala Harris, etc.

MUSSOLINI QUOTE:

“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”

Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.

SOCIALISTS/MARXISTS BECAME FASCISTS

Here is an extended quote from Dinesh D’Souza’s book, THE BIG LIE, detailing the easy switch from socialist leaders and unions to fascist — overnight:

…on March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called themselves fascisti or fascists.

In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marxists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratulations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolutionary socialist. And this is how he saw himself.

That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow socialists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.” For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism.

Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini’s socialist credentials were impeccable. He had been raised in a socialist family and made a public declaration in 1901, at the age of eighteen, of his convictions. By twenty-one, he was an orthodox Marxist familiar not only with the writings of Marx and Engels but also of many of the most influential German, Italian, and French Marxists of the fin de siecle period. Like other orthodox Marxists, Mussolini rejected religious faith and authored anti-Catholic pamphlets repudiating his native Catholicism.

Mussolini embarked on an active career as a writer, editor, and political organizer. Exiled to Switzerland between 1902 and 1904, he collaborated with the Italian Socialist Party weekly issued there and also wrote for Il Proletario, a socialist weekly published in New York. In 1909 Mussolini made another foreign sojourn to Trento—then part of Austria-Hungary—where he worked for the socialist party and edited its newspaper. Returning the next year to his hometown of Forli, he edited the weekly socialist publication La Lotta di Classe (The Class War). He wrote so widely on Marxism, socialist theory, and contemporary politics that his output now fills seven volumes.

Mussolini wasn’t just an intellectual; he organized workers’ strikes on behalf of the socialist movement both inside and outside of Italy and was twice jailed for his activism. In 1912, Mussolini was recognized as a socialist leader at the Socialist Congress at Reggio Emilia and was appointed to the Italian Socialist Party’s board of directors. That same year, at the age of twenty-nine, he became editor of Avanti!, the official publication of the party.

From the point of view of the progressive narrative—a narrative I began to challenge in the previous chapter—Mussolini’s shift from Marxian socialism to fascism must come as a huge surprise. In the progressive paradigm, Marxian socialism is the left end of the spectrum and fascism is the right end of the spectrum. Progressive incredulity becomes even greater when we see that Mussolini wasn’t just any socialist; he was the recognized head of the socialist movement in Italy. Moreover, he didn’t just climb aboard the fascist bandwagon; he created it.

Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.

In any event, Hitler was an obscure local organizer in Germany when Mussolini came to power and, following his famous March on Rome, established the world’s first fascist regime in Italy in 1922. Hitler greatly admired Mussolini and aspired to become like him. Mussolini, Hitler said, was “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.” Hitler modeled his failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 on Mussolini’s successful March on Rome.

When Hitler first came to power he kept a bust of Mussolini in his office and one German observer termed him “Germany’s Mussolini.” Yet later, when the two men first met, Mussolini was not very impressed by Hitler. Mussolini became more respectful after 1939 when Hitler conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway, and France. Hitler continued to uphold Mussolini as “that unparalleled statesman” and “one of the Caesars” and confessed that without Italian fascism there would not have been a German National Socialism: “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt.”

Hitler was, like Mussolini, a man of the Left. Hitler too was a socialist and a labor leader who founded the German Socialist Workers’ Party with a platform very similar to that of Mussolini’s fascist party. Yet Hitler came to power in the 1930s while Mussolini ruled through most of the 1920s. Mussolini was, during those years, much more famous than Hitler. He was recognized as the founding father of fascism. So any account of the origin of fascism must focus not on Hitler but on Mussolini. Mussolini is the original and prototypical fascist.

From Socialism to Fascism

So how—to return to the progressive paradigm—do progressives account for Mussolini’s conversion from socialism to fascism, or more precisely for Mussolini’s simultaneous embrace of both? The problem is further deepened by the fact that Mussolini was not alone. Hundreds of leading socialists, initially in Italy but subsequently in Germany, France, and other countries, also became fascists. In fact, I will go further to say that all the leading figures in the founding of fascism were men of the Left. “The first fascists,” Anthony James Gregor tells us, “were almost all Marxists.”

I will cite a few examples. Jean Allemane, famous for his role in the Dreyfus case, one of the great figures of French socialism, became a fascist later in life. So did the socialist Georges Valois. Marcel Deat, the founder of the Parti Socialiste de France, eventually quit and started a pro-fascist party in 1936. Later, he became a Nazi collaborator during the Vichy regimeVacques Doriot a French communist, moved his Parti Populaire Francais into the fascist camp.

The Belgian socialist theoretician Henri de Man transitioned to becoming a fascist theoretician. In England. Oswald Mosley, a socialist and Labor Party Member of Parliament, eventually broke with the Labor Party because he found it insufficiently radical. He later founded the British Union of Fascists and became the country’s leading Nazi sympathizer. In Germany, the socialist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann embraced Hitler and produced plays during the Third Reich. After the war, he became a communist and staged his productions in Soviet-dominated East Berlin

In Italy, philosopher Giovanni Gentile moved from Marxism to fascism, as did a host of Italian labor organizers: Ottavio Dinale, Tullio Masotti, Carlo Silvestri, and Umberto Pasella. The socialist writer Agostino Lanzillo joined Mussolini’s parliament as a member of the fascist party Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, became Mussolini’s top adviser in Salo. Gentile’s disciple Ugo Spirito, who also served Mussolini at Salo, moved from Marxism to fascism and then back to Marxism. Like Hauptmann, Spirito became a communist sympathizer after World War II and called for a new “synthesis” between communism and fascism.

Others who made the same journey from socialism to fascism will be named in this chapter, and one thing that will become very clear is that these are not “conversion” stories. These men didn’t “switch” from socialism to fascism. Rather, they became fascists in the same way that Russian socialists became Leninist Bolsheviks. Like their Russian counterparts, these socialists believed themselves to be growing into fascism, maturing into fascism, because they saw fascism as the most well thought out, practical form of socialism for the new century.

Progressivism simply cannot account for the easy traffic from socialism to fascism. Consequently, progressives typically maintain complete silence about this whole historical relationship which is deeply embarrassing to them. In all the articles comparing Trump to Mussolini I searched in vain for references to Mussolini’s erstwhile Marxism and lifelong attachment to socialism. Either from ignorance or from design, these references are missing.

Progressive biographical accounts that cannot avoid Mussolini’s socialist past nevertheless turn around and accuse Mussolini—as the Socialist Party of Italy did in 1914—of “selling out” to fascism for money and power. Other accounts contend that whatever Mussolini’s original convictions, the very fact that his fascists later battled the Marxists and traditional socialists clearly shows that Mussolini did not remain a socialist or a man of the Left.

But these explanations make no sense. When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx anticipated and hoped for.

Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism. In Russia, for example, there were bloody confrontations between the rival Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later the Bolsheviks split into Leninists and Trotskyites, and Trotsky ended up dead on Lenin’s orders. These were all men of the Left. What these bloody rivalries prove is that the worst splits and conflicts sometimes arise among people who are ideologically very similar and differ on relatively small—though not small to them—points of doctrine.

In this chapter I will trace the development of fascism by showing precisely how it grew out of a doctrinal division within the community of Marxian socialists. In short, I will prove that fascism is exclusively a product of the Left. This is not a case of leftists who moved right. On the contrary, the fascists were on the left end of the socialist movement. They saw themselves not as jettisoning Marxism but as saving it from obsolescence. From their perspective, Marxism and socialism were too inert and needed to be adjusted leftward. In other words, they viewed fascism as more revolutionary than traditional socialism.

[….]

Mussolini didn’t believe in race and he wasn’t initially a nationalist; rather, he was a revolutionary syndicalist. The term syndicalism refers to the associations or syndicates to which workers belonged. These were autonomous workers organizations that resembled unions, but they were not unions because the syndicates were organized regionally rather than by corporation or occupation. As dedicated Marxists, the revolutionary syndicalists agreed with Marx that class associations were primary, and that they must be the organizing principle of socialist revolution.

Very much in keeping with this class emphasis that was so central to Marx, the syndicalists, strongly influenced by Sorel, sought to rally the labor syndicates through a general strike that would overthrow the ruling class and establish socialism in Italy. This is what made them “revolutionary.” They intended to foment revolution, not wait for it to happen. They were considered the smartest, most dedicated people in the Italian Socialist Party and they occupied the left wing of the party.

The big names in revolutionary syndicalism were Giuseppe Prezzolini, Angelo 0. Olivetti, Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corridoni, Paolo Orano, Michele Bianchi, and Sergio Panunzio. Most of them were writers or labor organizers. All of them were socialists, and shortly all of them would be camelascists, even though Labriola opposed Mussolini’s regime when it came to power and Corridoni, who was killed in World War I, didn’t live to see it.

Mussolini was their acknowledged leader. He knew them well and conspired with them at meetings and rallies. He read their books and articles and published in their magazines like the Avanguardia Socialista, founded by Laboriola, which was the leading journal of syndicalist thought. Mussolini also reviewed and published the leading syndicalists in his own socialist publications.

Like all revolutionary socialists, the syndicalists had little faith in democratic parliamentary procedures and, consistent with Sorel and Lenin, they sought a charismatic leader who would inspire the workers to action. Mussolini, more than anyone else, fit their prescription. Mussolini was the one who led the syndicalists into a union with the nationalists in order to form the new socialist hybrid called fascism in Italy and (with some modifications) National Socialism in Germany.

The syndicalists organized three general strikes in Italy in 1904, 1911, and 1913. Mussolini supported the strikes. The 1904 strike began in Milan and spread across the country. Five million workers walked off their jobs. The nation was paralyzed: there was no public transportation, and no one could buy anything. Even so, the strike ended without causing either the fall of the government or the installation of socialism.

Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the NAZI Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 65-70, 82-83.

What “Is” Fascism ~ Two Old Posts Combined

Tulsi Gabbard Explains “How She Got ‘Here'” w/Triggernometry

Published November 28, 2024November 28, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

“They called me a traitor. They did it to Donald Trump, they do it with Tucker Carlson, they do it with Bobby Kennedy… Anyone they deem a political threat.”

Trump appointee Tulsi Gabbard explains why she left the Democratic Party, and how they tried to destroy her.

Watch the full episode here:

‘Democrat Elites Just Want Power’ – Tulsi Gabbard (An hour and 5-minutes)

Tulsi Gabbard – How I Got Here

The super interesting part I didn’t know about starts at the 8:55 mark – the “townhall” video library thing. Wow. CNN campaigned a while back on “Facts First.” Yeah right. They meant “DNC puppet to put a thumb on the scale” campaign.

Asking for Contributions… Hosting at Go-Daddy (Sticky Post)

Published November 28, 2024December 1, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

I haven’t asked for financial help in 15-years, but since the company I worked for for many years almost went under during the Hollywood strike, I have had to find employment elsewhere. And, the monetary shortfall is being felt by me. So below are my Venmo info or a way to Zelle me. Honestly, anything will help towards my $1,379.40 goal by February, 2025 payment deadline.

Even A $Buck$ Would Help

So, I humbly ask if you have benefitted at all from some info, or link to another argument against the Left, or some Apologetic argument that helped with rearing a child well or responding to a skeptic. Drop some money if you can afford to part with it. Much thanks and blessings your way. We re all hurting a bit in tis Democrat incensed (worked up, enflamed) economy, so I understand. Trust me I do.

Zelle: [email protected]

Be Thankful For Our Turkey Day History! (RPT)

Published November 28, 2024November 28, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

My other yearly posts are:

The art is with thanks to Joyful Heart and their THANKSGIVING page:

One should note that this is a DISTINCTLY Christian Holiday, via COLD CASE CHRISTIANITY:

….Regardless of how people may feel about the Thanksgiving Holiday, one thing should be obvious to even the most casual observer of history: Thanksgiving was (and still is) founded on the Christian notion we have something to be thankful for and someone to be thankful to. These first observers of Thanksgiving understood who it was they were to thank. Over and over again, through the early years of the colonies to the most difficult days of our national history, believers and leaders have affirmed and humbled themselves to the providence and protection of God. Those who initiated this national holiday intended it to be a day of thanksgiving and prayer; a day in which all of us could offer thanks to the God of the Universe.

This wonderful historical tour by professor Cameron G. Thies adds to the beauty of this historical trip down the US of A’s memory lane (this was originally a LIBERTARIAN REPUBLICAN post, but that blog is no more, sadly):

In 1534, Jacques Cartier of France set off to discover a northwest passage to China. Though encouraged by his discovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on his first voyage; and, in a subsequent voyage, his discovery of the St. Lawrence River, he eventually accepted that what he had discovered wasn’t a northwest passage, but was a vast territory inhabited by various tribes of Indians, with a harsh and unforgiving climate. In three voyages, he traded with the Indians, possessing as he did useful things made of metal, that the Indians found to be quite valuable since they had not mastered metal-working. But, because of the harsh winters and Indian raids, the place was less than ideal for colonization.

In 1604, an attempt was made by the French to establish a permanent colony at St. Croix, in present day Maine, on the Bay of Fundy. (The bay is located between Nova Scotia on the east and New Brunswick and Maine on the west.) The site was terrible. The change in altitude from inland to the coast acted like a flue, bringing the freezing cold wind from the northwest down upon the settlement. Half the colony died that winter. The next year, the survivors relocated across the bay, at Port Royal. This became the first permanent European settlement in the Americas north of Florida, following the abandonment or other end of the Viking settlements at the onset of the Little Ice Age.

The first permanent English colony in the Americas north of Florida was established at Jamestown, Virginia, two years later, in 1607. This colony would have failed if not for the assistance of the local Indian tribe, the Powhatan Indians. Even so, the colonists and the Powhatan Indians recurrently warred against each other. To cement the peace treaty ending one of these wars, an Indian princess named Pocahontas married one of the leaders of the colony, John Rolfe. She converted to Christianity and returned with her husband to England where she entered society as a lady. In 1619, the colony organized a representative body, the House of Burgesses, to provide local government.

The Virginia colony had been founded as a joint stock company based on the prospect of discovering gold and diamonds and such. But, as an investment, the company proved to be a complete loss. The king dissolved the corporate charter, and reorganized the colony as with a royal charter. But, eventually the colony began turning a profit with the cultivation of tobacco.

Further to the north, a second permanent English colony was organized in Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, in 1620. It, like the original location of the French in the Bay of Fundy was unfortunately sited in terms of the local climate. Cape Cod, jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, directed the warming currents of the Gulf Stream eastward, leaving the shores of the bay particularly cold. The first winter proved very harsh, and half the settlers perished. An Indian named Squanto of a local tribe arrived on the scene and helped the survivors with fishing, hunting and planting. The local tribe allied with the colony and became something of a conduit for the exchange of metal tools and such for furs acquired from inland tribes.

The Plymouth Bay colony consisted of religious dissidents, known as Puritans, for whom the Church of England, though a Protestant church, was a backsliding church. Their journey to the New World was a search for an isolated place where their rules would be law. It is possible that their celebration of Thanksgiving was in keeping with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, an eight-day holiday, that is to culminate in a community-wide dinner. During the week, you are to live outdoors, if this is possible, and eat outdoors, under an open canopy. It is a time to remember the wandering in the desert, when Israel was guided by the Shekinah Glory and God was with his people. It is also a time to anticipate when the Shekinah Glory will return, and when God will again be with his people.

Squanto

The Story of Squanto… WHY the Pilgrims saw God’s providential hand on their lives, and gave thanks to God for this Providence over the course of mankind. Here, Eric Metaxas talks about some of this history in his WALL STREET Journal article (as well as an excellent video by Ben Shapiro):

The story of how the Pilgrims arrived at our shores on the Mayflower—and how a friendly Patuxet native named Squanto showed them how to plant corn, using fish as fertilizer—is well-known. But Squanto’s full story is not, as National Geographic’s new Thanksgiving miniseries, “Saints & Strangers,” shows. That might be because some details of Squanto’s life are in dispute. The important ones are not, however. His story is astonishing, even raising profound questions about God’s role in American history.

Every Thanksgiving we remember that, to escape religious persecution, the Pilgrims sailed to the New World, landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620. But numerous trading ships had visited the area earlier. Around 1608 an English ship dropped anchor off the coast of what is today Plymouth, Mass., ostensibly to trade metal goods for the natives’ beads and pelts. The friendly Patuxets received the crew but soon discovered their dark intentions. A number of the braves were brutally captured, taken to Spain and sold into slavery.

One of them, a young man named Tisquantum, or Squanto, was bought by a group of Catholic friars, who evidently treated him well and freed him, even allowing him to dream of somehow returning to the New World, an almost unimaginable thought at the time. Around 1612, Squanto made his way to London, where he stayed with a man named John Slany and learned his ways and language. In 1618, a ship was found, and in return for serving as an interpreter, Squanto would be given one-way passage back to the New World.

After spending a winter in Newfoundland, the ship made its way down the coast of Maine and Cape Cod, where Squanto at last reached his own shore. After 10 years, Squanto returned to the village where he had been born. But when he arrived, to his unfathomable disappointment, there was no one to greet him. What had happened?

It seems that since he had been away, nearly every member of the Patuxets had perished from disease, perhaps smallpox, brought by European ships. Had Squanto not been kidnapped, he would almost surely have died. But perhaps he didn’t feel lucky to have been spared. Surely, he must have wondered how his extraordinary efforts could amount to this. At first he wandered to another Wampanoag tribe, but they weren’t his people. He was a man without a family or tribe, and eventually lived alone in the woods.

But his story didn’t end there. In the bleak November of 1620, the Mayflower passengers, unable to navigate south to the warmer land of Virginia, decided to settle at Plymouth, the very spot where Squanto had grown up. They had come in search of religious freedom, hoping to found a colony based on Christian principles.

Their journey was very difficult, and their celebrated landing on the frigid shores of Plymouth proved even more so. Forced to sleep in miserably wet and cold conditions, many of them fell gravely ill. Half of them died during that terrible winter. One can imagine how they must have wept and wondered how the God they trusted and followed could lead them to this agonizing pass. They seriously considered returning to Europe.

But one day during that spring of 1621, a Wampanoag walked out of the woods to greet them. Somehow he spoke perfect English. In fact, he had lived in London more recently than they had. And if that weren’t strange enough, he had grown up on the exact land where they had settled.

Because of this, he knew everything about how to survive there; not only how to plant corn and squash, but how to find fish and lobsters and eels and much else. The lone Patuxet survivor had nowhere to go, so the Pilgrims adopted him as one of their own and he lived with them on the land of his childhood.

No one disputes that Squanto’s advent among the Pilgrims changed everything, making it possible for them to stay and thrive. Squanto even helped broker a peace with the local tribes, one that lasted 50 years, a staggering accomplishment considering the troubles settlers would face later.

So the question is: Can all of this have been sheer happenstance, as most versions of the story would have us believe? The Pilgrims hardly thought so. To them, Squanto was a living answer to their tearful prayers, an outrageous miracle of God. Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford declared in his journal that Squanto “became a special instrument sent of God” who didn’t leave them “till he died.”

Indeed, when Squanto died from a mysterious disease in 1622, Bradford wrote that he wanted “the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in heaven.” And Squanto bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims “as remembrances of his love.”

These are historical facts. May we be forgiven for interpreting them as the answered prayers of a suffering people, and a warm touch at the cold dawn of our history of an Almighty Hand?

Story Time:

On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs.

Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.

“But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness,” destined to become the home of the Kennedy family. “There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning.

During the first winter, half the Pilgrims – including Bradford’s own wife – died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.

“When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.” Yes, it was Indians that taught the white man how to skin beasts. “Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. “Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments.

Here is the part [of Thanksgiving] that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share.

“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well. They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. Nobody owned anything. They just had a share in it. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California – and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.

Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives.

He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.

“That’s right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened?

It didn’t work! Surprise, surprise, huh?

What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation!

But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently.

What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.

“‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God,’ Bradford wrote. ‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense…that was thought injustice.’

Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point?

“Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.

Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result?

‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’

Bradford doesn’t sound like much of a… liberal Democrat, “does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes.

“Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph’s suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the ‘seven years of plenty’ and the ‘Earth brought forth in heaps.’ (Gen. 41:47)

In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves…. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.

And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.'”

Now, other than on this program every year, have you heard this story before? Is this lesson being taught to your kids today — and if it isn’t, why not? Can you think of a more important lesson one could derive from the pilgrim experience?

So in essence there was, thanks to the Indians, because they taught us how to skin beavers and how to plant corn when we arrived, but the real Thanksgiving was thanking the Lord for guidance and plenty — and once they reformed their system and got rid of the communal bottle and started what was essentially free market capitalism, they produced more than they could possibly consume, and they invited the Indians to dinner, and voila, we got Thanksgiving, and that’s what it was: inviting the Indians to dinner and giving thanks for all the plenty is the true story of Thanksgiving.

The last two-thirds of this story simply are not told.

Now, I was just talking about the plenty of this country and how I’m awed by it. You can go to places where there are famines, and we usually get the story, “Well, look it, there are deserts, well, look it, Africa, I mean there’s no water and nothing but sand and so forth.”

It’s not the answer, folks. Those people don’t have a prayer because they have no incentive. They live under tyrannical dictatorships and governments.

The problem with the world is not too few resources. The problem with the world is an insufficient distribution of capitalism. [1]

[1] Rush Limbaugh, See, I Told You So! page 70.

One should see my stuff on the topics as well:

Native American History In Public School (Howard Zinn Refuted)
Johnny Depp & Disney vs. History (h/t ~ Brad Thor);
Mayan and Aztec “Terrorism” Vs. Christopher Columbus
Did Europe Destroy Native American Culture?
A Rebuttal Of The Lefts View of Columbus and the New World;
Trail of Tears, Death Toll Myths Dispelled (This is a link elsewhere, to which the following is the main premise):

(Editor’s note: A recent federal bill memorializing as a National Historic Trail what has come to be known as the Cherokee Indian Trail of Tears is based on false history, argues William R. Higginbotham. In this article, the Texas-based writer delves into the historic record and concludes that about 840 Indians not the 4,000 figure commonly accepted died in the 1837-38 trek west; that the government-financed march was conducted by the Indians themselves; and that the phrase “Trail of Tears” was a label that was added 70 years later under questionable circumstances.) The problem with some of our accounts of history is that they have been manipulated to fit conclusions not borne out by facts. Nothing could be more intellectually dishonest. This is about a vivid case in point.

Happens every Thanksgiving, doesn’t? Some bleeding heart liberal you’re “related to” gets on their moral high Crazy Horse and lectures about how horribly rotten the white man was to the Native Americans. Which is why this year we’re throwing in the tomahawk. Time to scalp the facts about the Indians. Feathers not dots….

MYTH: THE NATIVE AMERICANS WERE A PEACEFUL CULTURE TO WHOM THE CONCEPT OF WAR WAS FOREIGN

FACT: MANY WERE BRUTAL, CONQUERING ***HOLES

Native Americans warred with each other since, forever. Sometimes it was over hunting or farming grounds, sometimes revenge, sometimes to steal, sometimes to kill. I don’t say this to demonize them, they were no different than any other regressive, Neolithic cultures on other continents.

But the truth is that the only way settlers were able to conquer this land was through the help of Native Americans who teamed up with them to settle the score with the other, more assholish tribes. You think Cortes was able to conquer with only 500 Conquisadors. Course not, it took 50,000 ANGRY allied Native Americans who’d had it up to here with being enslaved and forced to carry gold for the other, Native Aztecs.

Some of of the Indian tribes were the most brutal in existence.

They practiced enslavement, rape, cannibalism, would sometimes target women and children, tribes like the Commanchees would butcher babies and roast people alive… and by the way, where do you think we LEARNED scalping?

MYTH: NATIVE AMERICANS WERE AN ADVANCED SOCIETY

TRUTH: NOT EVEN CLOSE

Smell that? It’s your sacred cow being torched. After I scalped her, of course. Unlike Rome, Greece, China, or pretty much any great empire which had already existed at that time, the Native Americans didn’t have advanced plumbing, transportation, mathematics or really… anything that led to the iphone on which you’re currently watching this. That whole beautiful “horseback Indian” culture you read about? It’s a lie because they hadn’t even domesticated horses. Not only that, but they didn’t even use the WHEEL. No really. 1400 AD… no wheel.

Even more reason that, when you’re that far behind, the clash of civilizations is going to be THAT much more drastic when the new wheel-using world catches up to you.

MYTH: THE SETTLERS DELIBERATELY INFECTED NATIVES WITH SMALLPOX BLANKETS TO WHIPE THEM OUT

TRUTH: ONLY IDIOTS COULD POSSIBLY BELIEVE THIS

Think about it. You really believe Europeans waged microbial, biological warfare… long before discovery, mass acceptance or even close to an understanding of advanced germ theory?

So it’s not true. You can look forever for historical accounts of mass smallpox blankets being pajamagrammed to the peaceful Indians, but you won’t find them. But there is SOME truth to the myth, which brings us to our final point.

MYTH: EUROPEANS COMMITTED MASS GENOCIDE. KILLING EVERY NATIVE AMERICAN FOR SPORT

TRUTH: NOT EVEN CLOSE

However, it is estimated that at high as 95% of pre-Columbian Native Americans were in fact killed off by disease, WHY? Because Europeans introduced new diseases to which the Native Americans hadn’t developed an immunity not only with THEMSELVES but now contact with animals like again HORSES which Native Americans hadn’t domesticated. Again, because they were such an archaic, unadvanced society.

Sure there were plenty of bloody, horrendous, unimaginable battles that occurred, and generally when it comes to neoloithic tribes and more advances settlers, the guys with the boom-boom sticks win. This isn’t exclusive to America or all that uncommon.

But Europeans were not hellbent on wiping out Native Americans, they were actually encouraged to bring the people into European culture and convert them to Christianity. Plus, inter-marrying was incredibly common. How else do you explain Johnny Depp, Angalina Jolie, Kid Cudi and even imaginary Elizabeth Warren claiming to be 1/16^th Cherokee?

Killing people is bad. But so is milking, misleading and guilting all future generations for crimes they didn’t commit. Yep, Europeans conquered the Native Americans, created a Constitutional Republic, and advanced in mere centuries what Natives couldn’t do for thousands of years here on the plot of land that is America. So close this smartphone window, go enjoy your turkey and tell your social justice warrior cousin at the table to shut that mustached, single-origin-coffee drinking-hole. Or just… hand him a smallpox napkin.

SOURCES

Indigenous Americans didn’t invent the wheel: QUORA
Native Americans were introduced to horses by Spaniards: SCIENCE NEWS
Smallpox blanket hoax: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Time table of Native American wars: U-S-HISTORY
Easy to read reference guide of conflicts from 1540 on: LEGENDS OF AMERICA
Details of Colonial Indian wars: LEGENDS OF AMERICA
Clashes with European settlers: WEST VIRGINIA ARCHIVES & HISTORY
Comanches butchered babies, ate enemies: DAILY MAIL
Capitalism over cannibalism: THE BLAZE
Reject the lie of white “genocide” against Native Americans: FREE REPUBLIC
Native Americans “National Day of Mourning”: UNITED AMERICAN INDIANS OF NEW ENGLAND
Obama’s Thanksgiving messages regularly fail to actually thank God: BREITBART
8 little known Thanksgiving facts: THE BLAZE
Top 5 Thanksgiving proclamations: THE BLAZE

BONUS ARTICLES:

Our Rebel Thanksgiving (AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE)
A Typical US Worker Will Earn Enough This Morning to Pay for a Thanksgiving Banquet (FEE)
Thanksgiving and America (IMPRIMIS)
The other capitalist Thanksgiving story: How trade saved the Pilgrims, and the U.S. (ACTON INSTITUTE)

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Religio-Political Talk (RPT)

"I never discuss anything except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss." ~ G.K. Chesterton

Author: Papa Giorgio