Comedians Bill Burr and Jim Jefferies slammed cancel culture in response to SNL firing its new cast member Shane Gillis over jokes GIllis made about Chinese people in the past.
After Shane Gillis was fired by Saturday Night Live over previous comments, former SNL comedians Rob Schneider and Norm McDonald stepped up to defend Shane. Even Bill Burr chimed in on “cancel culture” and how a bad joke shouldn’t ruin your life.
With economic pundits predicting disaster over the horizon for the Trump economy, Larry decides to compare the doom and gloom to the months prior to the 1992 presidential election, which propelled Bill Clinton to the presidency. Just what were the pundits saying leading up to that election, and what were they saying directly afterwards? How does this parallel the leadup to 2020? Larry answers all these questions and more. He also gives us a peak into a lucrative career path he decided to pass up, despite his obvious talent.
This is one of the many convos on SANTA CLARITA COMMUNITY’S Facebook Page about a meeting to “Stop Gun Violence: SCV’s Message to Mitch McConnell”
(ME) Stop gun violence, health insurance for all, free college, etc., etc. All these Utopian ideals are just that. Fiction.
(SANDRA RC) Hey Sean, not fiction as it works in other countries. Are you saying that we’re sub-standard?
(ME) Sandra RC mmm no, it doesn’t work in other countries. There is a myth about Australia. The first being that there are more guns now owned in Australia than before the 1996 massacre (3.2 million vs. 3.6 million).
The following is from a post on my site: “Mass Shootings Have Decreased ~ Obama vs. Australia”….
…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.
For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…
In places like the UK, Jamaica, and the like, violent robbery and home invasions while the occupants are home are VERY high. It is a dangerous place to live in, and many wish they could protect their loved ones.
And of course there is this moving testimony of one of the patrons at Luby’s Massacre:
(STILL ME) Sandra RC — in other words, they [the countries you are thinking of] are sub-standard. Or the purported beliefs about what they have done and accomplished with gun control — those beliefs are sub-standard.
Some More Stuff
…Since the gun ban, Australia has issued 37,000 gun licenses in the past five years, a jump from 177,675 to 215,462. In New South Wales (NSW), gun ownership has gone up 10%.
Alarmingly, in 22 of the state’s 600 postcodes, registered guns outnumber people.
Here’s the part that will annoy every anti-gun advocate in a thousand mile radius:
Got that? Gun ban in 1996. The government flat out confiscated weapons. It was mandatory. A gun grab. Now more people than ever have guns. Gun crime has not gone up. Because gun bans totally work…NOT….
MYTH: GUN CONTROL IN AUSTRALIA IS CURBING CRIME
Fact: Homicides were falling before the Australian firearm ban. In the seven years before and after the Australian ban, the rate of decline was identical (down to four decimal places). Homicides dropped steeply starting in 2003, but all of this decline was associated with non-firearm and non-knife murders (fewer beatings, poisonings, drownings, etc.). 33
Fact: Crime has been rising since enacting a sweeping ban on private gun ownership. In the first two years after the ban, government statistics showed a dramatic increase in criminal activity. 34 In 2001-2002, homicides were up another 20%. 35
From the inception of firearm confiscation to March 27, 2000, the numbers are:
The sad part is that in the 15 years before the national gun confiscation:
Fact: Gun crimes have been rising throughout Australia since guns were banned. In Sydney alone, robbery rates with guns rose 160% in 2001, more than in the previous year. 36
Fact: A ten-year Australian study has concluded that firearm confiscation had no effect on crime rates. 37 A separate report also concluded that Australia’s 1996 gun control laws “found [no] evidence for an impact of the laws on the pre-existing decline in firearm homicides” 38 and yet another report from Australia for a similar time period indicates the same lack of decline in firearm homicides. 39
Fact: Despite having much stricter gun control than New Zealand (including a near ban on handguns) firearm homicides in both countries track one another over 25 years, indicating that gun control is not a control variable. 40
MYTH: THE AUSTRALIAN GUN BUYBACK REDUCED MASS HOMICIDES
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Fact: The number of mass homicides and the number of people killed in mass homicides in Australia has gone up since the gun control initiatives of the mid 1990s.
(33) Australia Institute of Criminology, AIC NHMP 1989/90 to 2011-12
(34) Crime and Justice – Crimes Recorded by Police, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000
(35) Report #46: Homicide in Australia, 2001-2002, Australian Institute of Criminology, April 2003
(36) Costa targets armed robbers, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2002
(37) Gun Laws and Sudden Death: Did the Australian Firearms Legislation of 1996 Make a Difference?, Dr. Jeanine Baker and Dr. Samara McPhedran, British Journal of Criminology, November 2006.
(38) Austrian firearms: data require cautious approach, S. McPhedran, S. McPhedran, and J. Baker, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2007, 191:562
(39) Australian firearms legislation and unintentional firearm deaths a theoretical explanation for the absence of decline following the 1996 gun laws Public Health, Samara McPhedran, Jeanine Baker, Public Health, Volume 122, Issue 3
(40) Firearm Homicide in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand: What Can We Learn From Long- Term International Comparisons?, Samara McPhedran, Jeanine Baker, and Pooja Singh, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, March 16, 2010
Obama vs. Australia
The American Spectator has this great information that sets the record clear by giving guidelines to the debate:
Type “mass shootings” and “common” into a search engine and you’ll get all sorts of breathless commentary that might lead one to believe there Americans face a genuine epidemic of shooting rampages. A few headlines:
[….]
Homicide in America is far more common than it ought to be. But mass shootings — defined as four or more murders in the same incident — constitute a minuscule share of the total, as I discuss in “The Shooting Cycle” in the most recent edition of the Connecticut Law Review…
I want to break here and post something Mother Jones said in trying to define what a Mass Shooting is… “she” says this:
Broadly speaking, the term refers to an incident involving multiple victims of gun violence. But there is no official set of criteria or definition for a mass shooting, according to criminology experts and FBI officials who have spoken with Mother Jones.
Mother Jones then goes on to quote the definition — after being ambiguous about it — as four or more [excluding the shooter]. Wikipedia says this:
The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no “cooling-off period” between the murders. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location where one or more people kill several others.
It is odd to me why Mother Jones would be ambiguous about it while at the same time use the accepted FBI terminology/definition. At any rate, I HIGHLY suggest reading this Debunking of Mother Jones’ “10 Pro-Gun Myths,” worth the read.
Obama recently praised Australian gun-control.
ANN COULTER tackles this “Australian Stat” often mentioned. She quotes the New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal as saying this:
Rosenthal also produces a demonstrably false statistic about Australia’s gun laws, as if it’s a fact that has been carefully vetted by the Newspaper of Record, throwing in the true source only at the tail-end of the paragraph:
“After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. … Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent … said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.”
John Lott Responds:
…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.
For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…
…ELSEWHERE he states:
…This is actually pretty amazing given the threat that the government could actually again try to confiscate guns in the country. That imposes a real potential tax on gun ownership.
Australians own as many guns now as they did at the time of the Port Arthur massacre, despite more than 1 million firearms being handed in and destroyed, new research reveals.
A University of Sydney study has shown there has been a steady increase in guns imported into the country over the past decade, with the number of privately owned guns now at the same level as 1996. . . .
Weirdly, gun control advocates are claiming that the buy back is lowering suicides at the same time that they are upset that gun ownership is back to it pre-buy back levels. One doesn’t need a semi-auto to commit suicide. While Australia’s population grew by 20 percent between 1997 and 2011, apparently its gun ownership rate grew by 45 percent. If they are right, the pattern should have been clear: suicides with guns should have plunged in 1997 and then quickly grown after that. Obviously that pattern wasn’t what was observed….
Crime is dropping recently in Australia, but this can be attributed to gun ownership rising back up to the previous rates before the ban. GAY PATRIOT comments on the before mentioned Obama quote about Australia:
I reiterate the two hidden rules of “Common Sense Gun Laws:”
1. “We only want to keep guns away from dangerous persons.”
2. “Anyone who owns a gun is a dangerous person.”
NATIONAL REVIEW also makes the point that in order to praise Australian “success,” one is praising anti-Constitutional actions:
Let me be clear, as Obama likes to say: You simply cannot praise Australia’s gun-laws without praising the country’s mass confiscation program. That is Australia’s law. When the Left says that we should respond to shootings as Australia did, they don’t mean that we should institute background checks on private sales; they mean that they we should ban and confiscate guns. No amount of wooly words can change this. Again, one doesn’t bring up countries that have confiscated firearms as a shining example unless one wishes to push the conversation toward confiscation.
[….]
Obama gave the impression that gun-violence is on the increase. This is false. As both Pew and the Department of Justice recorded last year, the majority of Americans believe that gun violence is proliferating when it is in fact dropping. This year marked a 20-year low. More than anything, America has a copycat problem in its schools.
Just a long side-note, continuing with the AMERICAN SPECTATOR article:
…The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that from 2002-2011, 95 percent of total homicide incidents involved a single fatality, 4 percent involved two victims, 0.6 percent involved 3 victims, and only .02 percent involved four or more victims. Another study performed between 1976 and 2005 yields similar results — that less than one-fifth of 1 percent all murders in the United States involved four or more victims. In other words, the bottom line is that out of every 10,000 incidents of homicide, roughly two are mass killings.
Further, contrary to what the zeitgeist may suggest, mass shootings are not on the rise. Prominent criminologist James Alan Fox has found “no upward trend in mass killings” since the ’70s. Take campus statistics as an example: “Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders across campuses in any given year,” Fox told CNN (and roughly 99 percent of these reported homicides were not mass shootings). “Compare that to over 1,000 suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug overdoses.” Mass shootings on college campuses lag far, far behind many much more prevalent social and mental health problems.
The rare nature of these incidents also holds true for safety in K-12 schools, which garnered a significant amount of attention in the wake of the tragedies in Columbine and Newtown. According to two reports by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of a child “dying in school in any given year from homicide or suicide was less than one in 1 million between 1992 and 1994 and slightly greater than one in 2 million between 1994 and 1999.”
Of course any story like the above needs a positive one added to it. The Blaze has this:
Two armed criminals reportedly put a gun to a 17-year-old girl’s head on Monday night as she was outside retrieving something from a car. The man, whose intentions still aren’t entirely clear, then ordered the teenager to take them into her house — a decision that would prove to have deadly consequences.
Peering out the window of the St. Louis home were the girl’s mother and father, each prepared to protect their daughter with deadly force. There was also a 5-year-old boy in the house, though his relationship to the family wasn’t known on Tuesday.
The girl’s father, a 34-year-old man, reportedly observed the men walking towards his home while holding a gun to his daughter’s head, a sight that no father ever wants to see. He quickly retrieved his firearm and his wife did the same.
The brave dad then confronted the two criminals and opened fire, hitting both suspects with accurate shots…
Jojo Ruba, executive director at Faith Beyond Belief discusses the recent conversion therapy ban passed by Edmonton city council and what the ban will mean for Christian counselors and Christians in general.
Luther Comments:
“Yet not I.” That is to say, not in mine own person, nor in mine own substance. Here he plainly showeth by what means he liveth; and he teacheth what true Christian righteousness is, namely, that righteousness whereby Christ liveth in us, and not that which is in our own person. And here Christ and my conscience must become one body, so that nothing remain in my sight but Christ crucified, and raised from the dead. But if I behold myself only, and set Christ aside, I am gone. For Christ being lost, there is no counsel nor succour, but certain desperation and destruction must follow.
The following story starts will quote first BREITBART, following it will be a portion of an article (and audio) from an NPR PIECE.
(BREITBART) National Public Radio aired a remarkable interview on Sunday’s Weekend Edition with Allan Edwards, a Presbyterian pastor who is gay, yet lives a heterosexual life. Torn between his sexuality and his faith, he chose his faith–without trying to “convert” his attraction to men, and without trying to change his religion to fit his personal preferences. The conversation between NPR’s Weekend Edition and Edwards–and his wife–sheds light on an often overlooked constituency in the debate over gay marriage.
Edwards explains that he began to realize he was attracted to men during his teenage years, at the same time he was active in his church youth movement. He realized immediately that there was a conflict between his sexuality and his faith, and tried to find a justification in the Bible for living a gay life as a Christian. He could not, he says–and so he chose to live a heterosexual life, in accordance with the teachings of his church. He does not deny his gay sexuality, but does not act on those feelings, he says.
In that way, Edwards says, he is no different than anyone else. Everyone, he says, experiences some kinds of forbidden desire, or a sense of discontentment with their lives, and they have to adjust their behavior to their values and goals. He and his wife have a sexual relationship, despite his attraction to men, and they are expecting their first child. He is reluctant to judge others, but when pressed by Montaigne, says that he believes those who try to adjust Christianity to accept same-sex marriage are “in error.”
He acknowledges that others might call his lifestyle one of suppression–one that is doomed to divorce or suicide. He disagrees, and says that his relationship with God comes before other parts of his identity, including his sexuality….
How did this young man come to find his identity within the Christian faith? Simple, if Jesus is who He claims to be, then he [pastor Edwards… and we/us] should believe what Jesus believes. Simple:
(NPR)
Allan Edwards is the pastor of Kiski Valley Presbyterian Church in western Pennsylvania, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. He’s attracted to men, but considers acting on that attraction a sin. Accordingly, Edwards has chosen not to act on it.
“I think we all have part of our desires that we choose not to act on, right?” he says. “So for me, it’s not just that the religion was important to me, but communion with a God who loves me, who accepts me right where I am.”
Where he is now is married. He and his wife, Leanne Edwards, are joyfully expecting a baby in July.
[….]
He didn’t understand how he could resolve his feelings, he says, and had little support from his friends. “I didn’t know anyone else who experienced same-sex attractions, so I didn’t talk about it much at all,” Allan says.
But at a small, Christian liberal arts college, he did start talking.
“My expectation was, if I started talking to other guys about this, I’m going to get ostracized and lambasted,” Allan says. “I actually had the exact opposite experience … I actually was received with a lot of love, grace, charity: some confusion, but openness to dialogue.”
Allan considered following a Christian denomination that accepts gay relationships, but his interpretation of the Bible wouldn’t allow it, he says.
“I studied different methods of reading the scripture and it all came down to this: Jesus accepts the rest of the scripture as divined from God,” he says. “So if Jesus is who he says he is, then we kind of have to believe what he believes.”
In other words, Christ’s claims and later His backing his claim with the Resurrection should make any one WANT to thank his/her creator by worshiping Him in obedience for the work done for each of us on Calvary. Pastor Edwards is building riches in his heavenly home in his obedience.
Wesley Hill, who is a scholar of New Testament studies and happens to be an openly gay Christian. He says the Bible makes it clear that marriage is between one man and one woman. And so, subjects himself to the will of the Lamb… not subjecting the Lamb to his will:
Now… I would be remiss to note as well that there are many people who once were gay, but through Christ’s redeeming power they no longer identify as homosexual. There is a play list of some testimony in this regard at Theology, Philosophy and Science’s YouTube Channel: Ex-Gay People.
The above testimonies and viewpoints add to a previous upload of mine a while back with three church leaders talking about this same-sex attraction but duty to God ~ and it is this duty to God that gives a new identity (a “new man” if you will):
The three men in the above interview (see below) have a powerful testimony to God working in their lives. They take Scripture serious and share their struggles openly and honestly in this interview by Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio for his show, “Unbelievable” (http://tinyurl.com/d2sgjrz). This interview and some other recent insights via Stand to Reason and Girls Just Wanna Have Guns, has me evolving and honing my apologetic on this more and more (See #4 of my cumulative case: http://tinyurl.com/acqhcfv).
▼ Sean Doherty is associate minister at St Francis, Dalgarno Way in London and teaches theology at St Mellitus College;
▼ Sam Allberry is associate minister at St Mary’s Church, Maidenhead;
▼ Ed Shaw is part of the leadership of Emmanuel Church, Bristol.
This is the larger interview of which I isolated Sean Doherty’s portion here.
And Savi Hensman of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and Anglican blogger Peter Ould debate the issues in the interview.
Here I am adding a video by First Things, and it is a short talk about a woman who is gay but has chosen to live towards truth. While I am not a Catholic, I am an admirer of people who sacrifice for the faith:
Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith
— from First Things on Vimeo —
Eve Tushnet is a lesbian and celibate Catholic freelance writer. She studied philosophy at Yale University, where she was received into the Catholic Church in 1998. She writes from D.C., and has been published in (among others) Commonweal, First Things, The National Catholic Register, National Review, and The Washington Blade. Eve blogs at Patheos.com.
And one of the most important presentations delineating the issue of “can a Christian be a homosexual?” is by Dr. William Lane Craig (see also his article, “Christian Homosexuals?” & “A Christian Perspective on Homosexuality“). His other noteworthy videos are these:
Another pastor who grew up in the mix of the LGBT culture… and his in-depth knowledge of what is often “Messy Grace” in a fallen world.
There were a specific event mentioned by Mick West… here is the Chilean UFO mention: “Explained: Chilean Navy “UFO” video – Aerodynamic Contrails, Flight IB6830”
It may take a sec to load — Twitter
This is why President Trump calls them the Enemy of the People…. pic.twitter.com/24ezuSn7K4
— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) September 8, 2019
The New York Times celebrates child “pornography,” drag queens. NEWSBUSTERS has a bit on this story that Dennis Prager reads from. 100% FED-UP also has a story on this:
Mr. Atheist thinks these are verses Christians would rather skip. Some probably would, but in this episode, we walk through them and explain why context is key. Mr. Atheist seems unfamiliar with the ancient near-eastern contexts and languages that inform the proper translations and understandings of several passages on his list. (Also, The Bible On Slavery: Part One | Part Two)
“The Factual Feminist” host Christina Hoff Sommers joins Bill Maher to discuss the state of modern feminism.
…The two spend most of the time pointing out and ridiculing the absurdity of leftist victim culture. The greatest example Sommers provides of just how broken and nonsensical the Left has become is when she details how she is now treated when she speaks on college campuses, where she not only needs security, but the universities set up “safe rooms” for the poor dears who are subjected to some opinions differing from their own.
Maher’s language gets salty a couple of times near the end, but most of the video clean. For those unfamiliar with Sommers, she’s always worth listening to….
(PJ-MEDIA)
GATEWAY PUNDIT has some great links in their set-up of the video:
In a previous appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight Dr. Epstein revealed that Google can take a 50-50 split among undecided voters and change it into a 90-10 split with no one knowing they had been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail… It has to do with their search suggestions.
Far left Google has a history now of election interference.
In June James O’Keefe and Project Veritas released alarming new undercover video, leaked documents, and testimony from a Google insider revealing the tech giant’s plans to meddle in US politics and “prevent a Trump situation in 2020.”
The tech giants already pulled this off in 2018.
In January Dr. Epstein revealed that just one Google shift in search results on Election Day in 2018 shifted from 800,000 to 4.6 million votes to Democratic candidates…
FULL video interview HERE.
I mean besides smaller government, religious freedom, pro-life advancement, his support of our police and military, his wanting a protected border, proper immigration, foreign policy positions, his judgeship choices, etc, etc… but mainly because he isn’t anti-burgers:
Here is another example that I really like… besides this:
This is GREAT NEWS for the normal guy who loves liberty:
The Trump administration is turning out the lights on Obama-era rules that set onerous energy-use requirements for some of the most commonly used lightbulbs.
the Energy Department will repeal a regulation enacted under President Barack Obama, set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020, requiring an expanded number of lightbulbs in the U.S. to be in compliance with stricter energy efficiency standards. That regulation change was spun off of a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush that aimed to gradually phase out energy inefficient bulbs like incandescent and halogen bulbs.
The regulation that’s being eliminated would have redefined four categories of incandescent and halogen bulbs so that they would be subject to existing energy efficiency rules from which they were previously exempt. It would have applied to about half of the 6 billion lightbulbs used in the U.S., experts have said.
The Trump administration said that the Obama rule is a misreading of the 2007 law.
The standards had been scheduled to take effect in January 2020 and applied to roughly half of the 6 billion lightbulbs in use. The Trump administration’s new rules will likely be challenged by environmental groups.
[….]
As Nicolas Loris, an economist who focuses on energy notes, no regulations are needed if energy-efficient bulbs are superior in cost and function.
There’s no mandate forcing families or businesses to use inefficient lighting. Consumers can voluntarily replace inefficient bulbs with more efficient ones if they so choose.
The practices of being resourceful and saving money are intuitive, which means that the economy does not need mandates or rebate programs to nudge families into making decisions the government thinks are best for consumers.
In fact, many families and businesses are switching over to LED bulbs because of the cost savings.
According to the National Manufacturing Electric Association, “The general service LED bulb now accounts for approximately 70 percent of the shipments in the general service lamp category.
“Because of their longer life, it is estimated that by the end of 2019, 80-84 percent of the general service lamp sockets will be occupied by LED and [compact fluorescent lamps], while the halogen incandescent bulb is estimated to be in 16-20 percent of these sockets,” the industry association says.
Clearly, the Trump administration trusts consumers to make the smart choice. And, in an era where energy production is going up and emissions are going down, its trust is well place.
The lightbulb rule rollback creates a clear contrast to the Democratic Party. As a reminder, seven hours of draconian climate crisis proposals included 3rd-world abortions, meat taxes, and a gutting of our energy industry.