Author: Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder Addresses Jordan Neely’s Death and Health Care

Published 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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 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:

  • “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 20th 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.)

medieval_warm_period

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

Medieval Graph

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)

Globe-1250x765-mit-Graphen-und-Linien-JPEG1

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 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 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 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:

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 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: seang200@hotmail.com

Gender-Neutral Pronouns An Attack on “Being” | The Imago Dei

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Moral standards…presuppose absolute moral standards, which in turn presuppose the existence of an absolute personality. In other words, they presuppose the existence of God. But what God?… Of all the major religious traditions, it is only biblical religion that affirms a God who is both personal and absolute. [Only biblical religion sees] that the idea of absolute personality is closely linked to the ideas of a Creator-creature distinction [as reflected in the imago Dei], divine sovereignty, and the Trinity. Compromise these and you compromise the personality of God. This precise pattern of thought is found only in the Bible and in traditions which are heavily influenced by the Bible. Is it then too much to say that morality presupposes the God of the Bible? I think not. — John Frame

I have been wanting to connect the reason I see gender-neutral pronouns like, they/them, ze/zim, sie/hir, are being used by the post-modern Left. The real — bottom line reason — is it dilutes evidences for God and every human’s “Imago Dei” Norman Geisler notes that “[t]he only ‘common ground’ with unbelievers is that they too are creatures in God’s image and live in God’s world.” Continuing he says,

  • But there are no common notions or methods; non-Christians approach the world differently from Christians, and they view it differently. We have a common world with unbelievers but no common worldview. The contact point with unbelievers is the imago Dei. But even here the “point of contact” is the “point of conflict,” for “if there is no head-on collision with the systems of the natural man there will be no point of contact with the sense of deity in the natural man.” Conflict is inevitable because of human depravity and sin.

I will emphasize our personal being in our language to bolster the point in this paragraph

Let me explain a bit more. Part of the Imago Dei in us all is that we get our “being” from it [“It” – the Ultimate Being]. In other words, an example I use is “can you refer to yourself in the womb of your mother without using personal pronouns? We have an “I” in our being. But that “I” has not always existed… it itself was brought into being by my, or your, parents. Who likewise had being, but “contingent ‘being,'” as they relied on others for their being.

I know, it is tough. But this “being” I am speaking of is argued well below, and is an excellent apologetic for God and the Christian worldview. Excerpted from my post, “Kalam Cosmological Argument ~ History and Argument“

PUT THUS:

We spoke of the universe as “the collection of beings in space and time.” Consider one such being: yourself. You exist, and you are, in part at least, material. This means that you are a finite, limited and changing being, you know that right now, as you read this book, you are dependent for your existence on beings outside you. Not your parents or grandparents. They may no longer be alive, but you exist now. And right now you depend on many things in order to exist–for example, on the air you breathe. To be dependent in this way is to be contingent. You exist if something else right now exists.

But not everything can be like this. For then everything would need to be given being, but there would be nothing capable of giving it. There would not exist what it takes for anything to exist. So there must be something that does not exist conditionally; something which does not exist only if something else exists; something which exists in itself. What it takes for this thing to exist could only be this thing itself. Unlike changing material reality, there would be no distance, so to speak, between what this thing is and that it is. Obviously the collection of beings changing in space and time cannot be such a thing. Therefore, what it takes for the universe to exist cannot be identical with the universe itself or with a part of the universe.

(From “Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God“)

An excellent short video explaining this all is this one,

Contingency Argument SPEED RUN!

In other words, our “being” has a Cause in His “Being.” Plato saw this dimly in his Theory of Forms:

Plato’s Theory of Forms is a philosophical concept that explains the nature of reality. The basic question goes something like this:

We can see trees, cats, circles and many other things in everyday life, and we can easily recognise each one as the thing it is supposed to be. But, if we look closer, we never really see anything like a “standard cat.” Every cat is different, and so is every tree and every drawn circle. Especially with geometric forms, they are never perfect. Every circle we can see in our world is either broken, distorted, pixelated, or in a myriad of other ways not “a perfect circle.” In fact, a perfect geometrical circle would need to be drawn with a line that does not have any thickness, and so would be invisible!

So how is it, Plato asks, that we are able to identify circles, trees and cats if have actually never seen a “standard” thing of each kind?

There are two worlds, Plato says: the world of physical objects and the world of Forms. The world of physical objects is the world we see around us, while the world of Forms is the world of abstract concepts and ideas. The Forms are perfect, unchanging, and eternal, while the physical objects we see around us are imperfect, changing, and temporary.

Norman Geisler explains this in differing ways with the following. And note, I have more in-depth reproductions of his arguments in the second half of this post — along with the PDF reproductions for download. But I am here desperately trying to dumb the argument down to make the broader point. Which is, the “pronouns” being foisted on us ARE AN ATTACK on the foundation of truth and reality, which is rooted in God’s “Being”, Image, transferred to us in a finite, now fallen way.

Based on Sufficient Reason

(See an excellent article at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

P1) A contingent being exists.

  1. This contingent being is caused either (1) by itself, or (2) by another.
  2. If it were caused by itself, it would have to precede itself in existence, which is impossible.

P2) Therefore, this contingent being (2) is caused by another, i.e., depends on something else for its existence.

P3) That which causes (provides the sufficient reason for) the existence of any contingent being must be either (3) another contingent being, or (4) a non-contingent being (necessary) being.

  1. If 3, then this contingent cause must itself be caused by another, and so onto infinity.

P4) Therefore, that which causes (provides the sufficient reason for) the existence of any contingent being must be either (5) an infinite series of contingent beings, or (4) a necessary being.

P5) An infinite series of contingent beings (5) is incapable of yielding a sufficient reason for the existence of any being.

P6) Therefore, a necessary being (4) exists!

Based on the Principle of Existential Causality

  1. Some limited, changing being[s] exist.
  2. The present existence of every limited, changing being is caused by another.
  3. There cannot be an infinite regress of causes of being.
  4. Therefore, there is a first Cause of the present existence of these beings.
  5. This first Cause must be infinite, necessary, eternal, simple, unchangeable and one.
  6. This first uncaused Cause is identical with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition

A mix of both

  1. Something exists (e.g., I do);
  2. I am a contingent being;
  3. Nothing cannot cause something;
  4. Only a Necessary Being can cause a contingent being;
  5. Therefore, I am caused to exist by a Necessary Being;
  6. But I am personal, rational, and moral kind of being (since I engage in these kinds of activities);
  7. Therefore this Necessary Being must be a personal, rational, and moral kind of being, since I am similar to him by the Principle of Analogy;
  8. But a Necessary Being cannot be contingent (i.e., not necessary) in its being which would be a contradiction;
  9. Therefore, this Necessary Being is personal, rational, and moral in a necessary way, not in a contingent way;
  10. This Necessary Being is also eternal, uncaused, unchanging, unlimited, and one, since a Necessary Being cannot come to be, be caused by another, undergo change, be limited by any possibility of what it could be (a Necessary Being has no possibility to be other than it is), or to be more than one Being (since there cannot be two infinite beings);
  11. Therefore, one necessary, eternal, uncaused, unlimited (=infinite), rational, personal, and moral being exists;
  12. Such a Being is appropriately called “God” in the theistic sense, because he possesses all the essential characteristics of a theistic God;
  13. Therefore, the theistic God exists.

IN OTHER WORDS, our being, the “I” that we experience the world through IS AN APOLOGETIC, EVIDENCE of God!

Our being has a logical argument from Thee Being.

Our being (ways in which something can exist or occur or to be presented, or stand) is rooted in a theistic argument that is much surer in it’s premises and explanations.

That aside, the Marxist [read here atheistic] attack on Western values and truth is rooted itself in negating the Judeo-Christian aspect of historical truth, or knowing Part of this argument is the enquiry into “what we can know.” Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution either state or assume this:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

[….]

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

[….]

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States…”

This title of Supreme Judge of the world establishes God not only as the Creator of the world but also as the source of moral law. This statement is in opposition to the idea of Deism, which says that there exists a supreme being or creator who set the universe in motion but does not intervene in human affairs or the natural world. This statement suggests that those writing the declaration believed that the God of the Bible was the ultimate judge of good and evil.

The final mention of God in the Declaration of Independence labels God as the giver of Divine Providence.

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

This is a statement of trust in the divine’s oversight and actions that would result in declaring independence from Britain. These four mentions of God show that the founding fathers had a clear belief in moral truth which originated from a supreme being. In an article for Intercessors for America, Tyler O’Neil states, “The leaders who formed our country based their arguments for independence on the laws of God, and they trusted Him to guide America through its struggles. They looked to faith as a bulwark of freedom, not as its opposite.”

What Role Did Religious Beliefs Play in the Founding of the United States?

Many religious backgrounds made up those living in Colonial America at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and Jewish congregations were all represented within the American Colonies.

It is well documented that 51 of the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention claimed to hold Christian beliefs. Even Benjamin Franklin, a proclaimed Deist, gave a call to prayer that contained several references to scripture on June 28th, 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was struggling to agree.

“The Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention God but references frequently concepts central to Christianity like morals, reason, and free will,” says David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a Texas-based group dedicated to promoting America’s Christian heritage. …

(CHRISTIANITY)

In other words, attacking the foundation of knowledge and beings able to know moral truths and reality is at the heart of the pronoun issue. It is both an attack on our freedoms here in America, as well as an attack on our freedoms discovered via Western culture writ large.

WOMEN IN APOLOGETICS notes the foundation of “truth” in part of their post:

Truth

There seems to be little consensus where there was once clarity on what constituted male and female, boy and girl, man and woman, he and she. This is evidenced in the growing number of people who identify as transgender (those who experience gender dysphoria, a condition that describes the “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity”) or those who identify themselves using other nontraditional gender terms. As such, it is becoming somewhat common for people to state or list their preferred pronouns in conversation, on social media, before meetings, or in email signatures. For example, during the 2020 election season, several Democratic presidential candidates put their preferred pronouns on their social media profiles.

In contrast, the Christian worldview asserts that God created people to be either male or female. Genesis 1:27 reads, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.” God did not intend for sex and gender (identity) to be separate from one another; they are synonymous. To adopt a different worldview on sex and gender would be to reject the truth. Nevertheless, the culture today is attempting (with some success, unfortunately) to convince Christians differently. 

To not call someone by their preferred pronouns, like,  xe/xir/xirs, ze/zir/zirs and fae/faer/faers, is liked to a “human rights violations.” In fact, those prouns are an attack on what it is to be human.

Our essence.

Our being.

Dennis Prager says it is a war on human order. Which is a war on God:

Genesis 3:5 has the serpent (the Devil) tempting Adam and Eve. Half-truths are the best the Serpent can come up with, but the commentary I love on this verse will follow. I will highlight some points in it. 3:5 reads: “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (CSB).

Here is the commentary:

The climax is a lie big enough to reinterpret life (this breadth is the power of a false system) and dynamic enough to redirect the flow of affection and ambition. To be as God,25 and to achieve it by outwitting him, is an intoxicating programme. God will henceforth be regarded, consciously or not, as rival and enemy. Against this human arrogance ‘the obedience of the one’ and his taking ‘the form of a servant’ show up in their true colours (Rom. 5:19; Phil. 2:7).

So the tempter pits his bare assertion against the word and works of God, presenting divine love as envy, service as servility, and a suicidal plunge as a leap into life, ‘All these things will I give thee …’; the pattern repeats in Christ’s temptations, and in ours.

— On knowing good and evil, see on 2:9 [see below].

25. Or, gods (AV). The word ’ĕlōhîm can be used generically to include the angelic orders; see on 1:26.

2:9

…. The knowledge of good and evil is perhaps best understood in this living context. In isolation it could mean a number of things, many of them with biblical support. The phrase can stand for moral or aesthetic discernment (e.g. 1 Kgs 3:9; Isa. 7:15); yet Adam and Eve are already treated as morally responsible (2:16, 17) and generally percipient (3:6) before they touch the tree. It could be a hebraism for ‘everything’ (i.e. man is not to covet omniscience); yet it can hardly mean this in 3:22. It has often been regarded as sexual awakening, in the light of 3:7; recently R. Gordis suggested that this tree thereby offers a rival immortality to that of the tree of life, in the procreation of a family and a posterity. This too is open to several objections, including the fact that 3:22a is incompatible with it (heaven is sexless in the Old as in the New Testament), and that God instituted marriage after forbidding the use of the tree that is said to symbolize it.

In the context, however, the emphasis falls on the prohibition rather than the properties of the tree. It is shown to us as forbidden. It is idle to ask what it might mean in itself; this was Eve’s error. As it stood, prohibited, it presented the alternative to discipleship: to be self-made, wresting one’s knowledge, satisfactions and values from the created world in defiance of the Creator (cf. 3:6). Even more instructive is the outcome of the experiment; see on 3:7. In all this the tree plays its part in the opportunity it offers, rather than the qualities it possesses; like a door whose name announces only what lies beyond it.

Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 1, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1967), 67–68, 73.

Yep. It is all a big lie. And the extreme gender confusion with it’s high rate of suicide is literally “a suicidal plunge as a leap into life.”

And the battle goes on…

And another point. Lets say you work at a Starbucks in West Hollywood, and you have 4-people who each have chosen a preferred pronoun[s]. For example, here are some of the choices:

  • So one person uses “xe, xem, xyr, xyers.”
  • Another uses “ne, nem, nir, nerself.” 
  • Yet another uses “ci, cer, cer, cirs.”
  • And lastly this person uses “ve, vis, ver, verself.”

How is one supposed to keep track of all that hogwash so as not to get fired? It is impossible for even these 4 to keep it straight. In Michigan they are making these felonies:

A new Michigan bill would make it a hate crime to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.”

The Michigan Hate Crime Act, designated HB 4474 , passed in the state House on Tuesday and now goes before the Michigan Senate.  It will replace the existing Ethnic Intimidation Act and expand the categories of people protected by the law.

The new bill would include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression” as classes protected against intimidation.

[….]

If passed, the hate speech legislation would make violators guilty of a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

(DAILY CALLER | see DAILY WIRE as well)

AMERICAN THINKER notes this religious attack implicitly at the beginning of their article:

God-fearing people recognize that the effort to demolish the two God-given genders is a shaking of the fist at the Almighty. After all, the first chapter of the Bible says: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). This paradigm empowers females who are created in the imago dei. They are different from males, but equal to them at the level of essence. Nature and biology confirm God’s binary design.

Unfortunately, we live in a post-Christian society. Sane arguments often fall on deaf ears. The secular elites who control education and the media have marginalized those who provide biblical explanations. Given this sad reality, might there be another way to end the compelled speech of pronoun lunacy in which people can decide by which pronouns they will be referred?

[….]

For example, if someone asked another person about me: “What do you think of Newt?” They would need to respond something like: “I hate Newt. He is a tyrant. He never does what you ask of her.” Note that “he” is used when Newt is the subject of the sentence, and “her” is used at the end when Newt is the object of the sentence. If they failed to honor my preferred pronouns and said, “…He never does whatever you ask of him…” this would be a violation. I would report this, and press charges, if possible.

Mary could likewise insist on her pronouns being “She” and “Him.” Those speaking or writing about Mary would have to write something like: “I appreciate Mary. She is a great friend. I have no better friend than him. She is a great listener.” Or she could insist on “He” and “Her” (as does Newt).

Can you imagine if as many people as possible insisted upon this practice? Might it cause the regime of verbal tyranny to collapse? Though we are in the process of butchering English with the improper use of “they,” the mind can factor in this mutation and get used to it. However, since native English speakers calculate pronoun case automatically and subconsciously, it would be nearly impossible to speak and write in a way that could satisfy those who insist on different gendering pronouns that are case-dependent.

Yep. It is impossible to satisfy such people. This thinking “wresting one’s knowledge, satisfactions and values from the created world in defiance of the Creator.”

SOME APOLOGISTS DISCUSS THE ISSUE:

Douglas Groothuis w/Melissa Dougherty

Today, I interviewed Dr. Groothuis about the craziness we see around us and what we can do about it. Dr. Groothuis holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is a Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary. He is the author of sixteen books and has also published over thirty academic articles in journals as well as dozens of pieces in publications.

Nancy Pearcey w/Babylon Bee’s Ethan Nicolle

Editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle welcome Professor Nancy Pearcey. She is professor of apologetics and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University and author of several books, most recently Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Prof. Pearcey’s books also include Total Truth, Finding Truth, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo and How Now Shall We Live? (co-authored with Chuck Colson). They talk about sexuality, gender, abortion, and Christianity’s high view of the human body.

Topics Discussed

  • Abortion… scientific human life vs modern Personhood Theory
  • Biological Sex vs Gender
  • The Christian’s high view of the material world and the human body due to belief in the incarnation of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the new heaven  and earth.
  • Trusting in a design vs individual revolt against nature and biological realities
  • Language as a front in the culture war
  • All of our actions endorse a worldview
  • What about people who identify as “gay Christians” or some other adjective placed before the word Christian?
  • Nudity in medieval Christian art

Unnamed People w/Melissa Dougherty

There’s a postmodern ideology that is plowing through our world that aims to dismantle all societal and moral norms. This ideology is responsible for how we have gotten to the point in society where language is rebranded and “sex” and “gender” are separate. Now, there are supposedly unlimited genders. If this isn’t disturbing enough, the logical conclusion of this ideology (which really functions like a religion) is that age should be flexible, too. Kids should have the freedom to choose what age they identify as… as sexual beings. This ideology says this is good, liberating, and empowering.

This is completely shocking. And absolute garbage that should be talked about and brought to light.

Pro Female Shirt Likened to Swastika!? #WarOnWomen

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Trans identified males are taking medals, team berths and sponsorship dollars away from women. And not a single athletic brand is standing up for the protection of women’s sports.– Jennifer Sey’s Substack

Wow. The Democrat Left is cray-cray…. and in all their redefining of fascism, Hitler, and the like as normal thoughts of common sense, they — in the end — diminish real evil. Making it nothing but a passing thought/weapon to emote about something they disagree with rather than a real historical evil meant to warn of actual dangers of man’s nature.

FLASHBACK POST: Female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to transgender rivals competing against them in women’s sporting categories, an eye-opening United Nations report has revealed. (RPT)

BREITBART fills us in on the latest misuse and diminishing of real evil:

A pair of teenage girls at a California high school are accusing officials in their athletic department of comparing their “Save Girls’ Sports” t-shirts to “swastikas.”

Kaitlyn and Taylor, who play on teams for Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California, say they were disrespected by school officials when they wore their “Save Girls’ Sports” shirts in response to a transgender player who rarely attended practice and should not have qualified, but who was still placed on a varsity team, displacing Taylor, Fox News reported.

Now the girls are suing their school.

“My initial reaction was like, I was really surprised, because it was like, why is this happening to me?” Taylor said. “There’s a transgender student on the team. Why am I getting displaced when I’ve worked so hard and gone to all of the practices, and this student has only attended a few of the practices.”

The girls allege in their lawsuit that school officials made them remove their activist shirts and were told they were creating a “hostile environment” at the school. They also say that officials said the shirts were the same as wearing a swastika.

[….]

Attorney Julianne Fleischer alleges that the school violated her clients’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and their Title IX protections.

“We’re seeing more and more women and young girls speak up and challenge these policies that are allowing biological boys to join and participate in these sports,” Fleischer insisted. “And so there’s lawsuits that are popping up all around the country. We’re hopeful that even with the incoming administration and Congress that we’re going to see real positive change to Title IX that actually upholds and safeguards the rights of women to participate in their sports and to be safe and to be able to compete amongst one another.”

[….]

For instance, a girls’ high school volleyball team at a Christian school in Merced, California, recently forfeited a game because they did not wish to compete against a trans player.

The Christian high school is only one of a growing list of school teams that are refusing to play against opponents with transgender players. A lawsuit was filed this year against San Jose State University (SJSU) and the Mountain West Conference for allowing a male athlete to play on the SJSU women’s volleyball team.

To date, five colleges have refused to play against SJSU over the school’s inclusion of transgender player Blair Fleming.

The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA)  is also being sued by several groups over its policy of allowing transgender players to play as women.

A Couple Brave Girls Speak Out Against the #WarOnWomen

Daily Caller describes their longer video of the above clip, “Save Girls’ Sports” is now a Nazi phrase? These people will never learn, will they?”

PJ-MEDIA agrees, they haven’t learned what the issue… the real issue is about:

This past week has seen certain LGBT issues take center stage again after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) officially declared that sex-segregated spaces at the Capitol, like bathrooms and locker rooms, “are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” This commonsense policy that protects women has prompted all sorts of outrage from the radical left. Naturally, the left doesn’t see it this way and is fuming over it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said the policy is “endangering all women and girls.”

Her response was the epitome of stupid, but she wasn’t the only one distorting the issue.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) offered his office bathroom for Representative-elect [Tim] Sarah McBride to use and declared “There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone.”

And then there’s Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), who said, “My GOP colleagues, who privately tell me they don’t hate LGBTQ+ people, should find the courage to reject the dehumanizing rhetoric. Your silence is deafening.”

Her tweet, dripping with the kind of condescension we’ve come to expect from progressive Democrats, misses the mark entirely. This isn’t about hate. The debate over policies like barring biological men from women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports isn’t about hate — it’s about protecting basic rights and common sense. 

Americans have every right to defend spaces and opportunities specifically designed for women. These aren’t trivial issues — they involve fundamental questions of fairness and safety that, for some reason, the radical left has completely abandoned because it’s now owned by the transgender lobby.

Remember, it took a long time for women to get the same opportunities as men. Think about it. Title IX, the landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, was only passed in 1972. Nearly fifty years later, the idea of biological men competing in female athletics has become the cause du jour of the radical left, completely undermining the intent and spirit of the law.

Men who claim to “identify” as women enjoy biological advantages that cannot be erased with plastic surgery or hormone treatments. It doesn’t matter what a man’s “preferred pronouns” are or if he puts on a dress. He’ll have higher bone density, muscle mass, and lung capacity, giving him an edge that his female athletes simply can’t match.

Allowing biological men into women’s sports effectively robs women of the chance to compete on an equal playing field and, sadly, has stolen accolades and opportunities from real women.

The same principles apply to private spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. It’s not “dehumanizing” or “degrading” to say that women and girls deserve privacy and safety. It’s not hateful to expect boundaries rooted in biological reality. It’s about respect — both for real women’s needs and for the truth.

Balint’s claim that silence equals complicity is a typical identity politics tactic, demanding moral submission instead of fostering meaningful debate. And Democrats never want to debate the issues. Particularly this one. 

The real issue is the left’s refusal to acknowledge that concerns about protecting women’s sports and private spaces are grounded in science and shared by many Americans. Conservatives must reject the false narrative that defending women’s rights is anti-LGBTQ. This debate isn’t about hate but about fairness, dignity, and recognizing biological differences are real and cannot be erased.

A VOLLEYBALL UPDATE:

PJ-MEDIA writes about the lawsuit, I will follow that up with a HOT AIR update:

… Luckily, some college athletes have had enough of this type of nonsense, and they’re taking legal action.   

San Jose State volleyball player Brooke Slusser, along with SJSU associate head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose, and 10 other college athletes have filed a lawsuit against the school and the Mountain West Conference, the NCAA Division I conference in which the school plays.The women claim that their Title IX rights have been violated by SJSU allowing a transgender athlete on the volleyball team.  

“Among the allegations in the lawsuit are that SJSU coach Todd Kress gave the player in question preferential treatment, that the Mountain West amended its transgender athlete participation policy without following conference protocol and that the conference fostered an unsafe environment by allowing the athlete to play,” according to ESPN. 

Fox News reported that several female athletes were overlooked for scholarships because of the transgender player’s “physical dominance.” The lawsuit documents also suggest that Slusser felt her personal safety was in danger when the transgender athlete and another player got together and put a plan in place to have the ball spiked right at her head in a match with Colorado State. 

Upon hearing about the plan, Batie-Smoose attempted to stand up for the girls on the team by talking to Kress and filing a Title IX complaint, but she was suspended from the program. “They took away the only safe space we had,” Slusser said of losing her coach. She also accused the school of silencing people who were just trying to stand up for what’s right.   ….

HOT AIR posts on the growing legal challenge growing in California:

… Last week I wrote about a Title IX lawsuit filed by players and one coach against the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team. The lawsuit was filed because the SJSU team includes a trans woman whose athletic ability exceeds that of other members of her team or, according to the lawsuit, of any player on any women’s team.

During practices in August 2024 immediately before the 2024 season Slusser and Batie-Smoose saw that Fleming was hitting the ball with more force than in 2023 and far harder than any woman they had ever played or coached with or against.

Where Fleming stood out was spiking the volleyball and blocking on the front row due to Fleming’s leaping ability and hitting power, which far exceeded that of any player in the conference and was the most explosive of any player that SJSU’s Associate Head Coach has observed in collegiate women’s volleyball…

Fleming’s spikes were estimated to be traveling upwards of 80 miles per hour, which is faster than a woman hits a volleyball.

Now the University of Utah has filed a motion to join that lawsuit.

Utah State University has filed a motion to join a federal lawsuit against the Mountain West Conference, challenging the organization’s transgender participation policy.

The move comes after the state’s Republican political leaders — including Gov. Spencer J. Cox, Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz — urged the university to join the lawsuit that was filed last week in U.S. District Court by 11 volleyball players and one coach in the Mountain West.

USU volleyball player Kaylie Ray is one of the 12 plaintiffs in the original lawsuit. According to Utah State’s motion, the Aggie volleyball team took an anonymous survey and 11 players, including Ray, decided to not play an October match against San Jose State “due to concerns of fairness and to communicate that they do not agree with the TPP (transgender participation policy) and hold strong personal and political beliefs that transgender women should not be permitted to compete in women’s sports.”

BRAVO! ??????

Klinefelter Syndrome Is Treated, Not Normalized | Gender Binary

Published by Papa Giorgio

I have recently come across a list of “sexes” pictured to the right. The person posting this noted:

  • Saw this and wanted to copy it and share it. We love our black-and-white dichotomy because it’s so easy to then label and categorize folks. But it is a LOT more complex than that. Not asking ANYONE to change their conclusions. Just become more aware of the complexities so that you don’t look so ignorant when you post simplistic memes and such…..

A few years back I looked into an example from this list, which I will excerpt how rare these are:

  • The term Klinefelter syndrome (KS) describes a group of chromosomal disorder in which there is at least one extra X chromosome to a normal male karyotype, 46,XY. XXY aneuploidy is the most common disorder of sex chromosomes in humans, with prevalence of one in 500 males. Other sex chromosomal aneuploidies have also been described, although they are much less frequent, with 48,XXYY and 48,XXXY being present in 1 per 17,000 to 1 per 50,000 male births. The incidence of 49,XXXXY is 1 per 85,000 to 100,000 male births. In addition, 46,XX males also exist and it is caused by translocation of Y material including sex determining region (SRY) to the X chromosome during paternal meiosis.

A great – short – video regarding the most common occurrence from above is this:

HEALTHY MALE recommends this treatment of this most expressive DISORDER:

Infants and children with Klinefelter syndrome should be examined by their doctor at least every two years to monitor their physical development.

They may need support from specialists to manage any problems with speech, learning, behaviour or psychiatric issues.

Testosterone treatment might be prescribed for boys with Klinefelter syndrome who have a very small penis.

Monitoring the growth and hormone function of boys with Klinefelter syndrome in the lead-up to puberty helps guide decisions about testosterone treatment, which may become necessary.

Testosterone treatment is recommended to many adults with Klinefelter syndrome.

If you have Klinefelter syndrome and are not receiving testosterone treatment, your hormonal function should be checked every 12 months.

I emphasized “disorder” because I have been wanting to connect a thought by C.S. Lewis discussing morality. But as you read the below, a substitution of this debate regarding “the binary” view can be inserted.

[T]his Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature). . . .

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

And an older quote that makes the above point, sorta, for law is this:

…Proponents of gay marriage fail utterly to comprehend the idea that laws are made with society, not the individual, in mind. That is why they also fail to grasp the idea that law is predicated upon averages, not outliers. Interestingly, both libertarians and progressives suffer from this lack of under­standing.

[….]

But more often they try to undermine the link between marriage and childrearing by pointing to outliers—marriages in which couples choose not to have children or cannot have them because at least one partner happens to be infertile. But this argument only reveals the weakness of the progressive understanding of the law. Put simply, rules that are justified by the average case cannot be undermined by the exceptional case, otherwise known as the outlier. Thus the old maxim, “Hard cases make bad law.”…

Mike S. Adams, Letters To A Young Progressive (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2013), 81, 82.

Adam and Eve would have been made fully, male and female. Many years later the curse brought mutations into the mix. We do not “add” to god’s ideal, we keep it all the while showing love and respect for the Imago Dei to all without changing societal norms, sports, culture to fit or adapt to outliers… genetic mutations. We treat these disorders.

Treat them.

This is key.

You do not treat the normal, but abnormal.

An article notes that for the first time in the U.K., a major London hospital has launched Europe’s first multidisciplinary clinic for children with the rare genetic condition Klinefelter syndrome.

The centre at the Evelina Children’s Hospital will aim to improve diagnosis of children with the condition, which can cause serious problems including infertility and cardiovascular disease.

Around one in 660 men are affected by the condition.

Males with the condition are born with an extra X chromosome. Typically, a male baby has one X and one Y chromosome and a female baby has two X chromosomes.

Klinefelter syndrome can also cause problems with learning, attention, energy levels and socialising.

[….]

Infertility or relative lack of testosterone can be treated with gonadotrophin-releasing hormone or testosterone replacement therapy, but patients need access to a range of medical specialties including geneticists, endocrinologists, neurodevelopmental and psychological support.

The clinic will bring all these specialties together under one roof.

RPT Remembers a Giant in Intelligent Design

Published by Papa Giorgio

Because of the political season, I had missed the passing of a giant in the Intelligent Design community passing away a couple months ago. I have used his arguments well in debating I.D. online since the late 1990’s in forums like Space Battles and Volconvo (back in the day). I also have a couple excerpts from his book Zombie Science, that I do not remember what I used them for. Surely it was a debate online somewhere. Those will be at the end.

I have a post that includes Jonathan Wells on a panel that decimated some leading evolutionists here: Michael Behe & Stephen Meyer Destroy Challenge to Flagellum Motor. Cross Examined has a good interview with him HERE.

Here is the late Dr. Wells Bio:

Jonathan Wells (1942-2024) received two PhDs, one in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and one in Religious Studies from Yale University. A Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, he previously worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the supervisor of a medical laboratory in Fairfield, California. He also taught biology at California State University in Hayward.

Dr. Wells published articles in Development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, BioSystems, The Scientist and The American Biology Teacher. He is the author of Charles Hodge’s Critique of Darwinism (Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), Icons of Evolution: Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong (Regnery, 2000), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), and The Myth of Junk DNA. He was also co-author with William Dembski of The Design of Life (FTE, 2008). His last solo book, Zombie Science (DI Press, 2017), showed how evolutionary theory — “though empirically dead” — continues to stalk our scientific and educational institutions. Dr. Wells also did research and writing on developmental information in embryos that is outside of, and inherited independently of, their DNA.

(Many archived articles linked here: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE)

A favorite article of his I love, and used an excerpt from for a paper in a philosophy class, is this one:

Darwin of the Gaps

The video is the full Icons of Evolution movie, here is the description:

Some of these icons of evolution present assumptions or hypotheses as though they were observed facts; in Stephen Jay Gould’s words, they are “incarnations of concepts masquerading as neutral descriptions of nature.” Others conceal raging controversies among biologists that have far-reaching implications for evolutionary theory. Worst of all, some are directly contrary to well-established scientific evidence. Most biologists are unaware of these problems. Indeed, most biologists work in fields far removed from evolutionary biology. Most of what they know about evolution, they learned from biology textbooks and the same magazine articles and television documentaries that are seen by the general public. But the textbooks and popular presentations rely primarily on the icons of evolution, so as far as many biologists are concerned the icons are the evidence for evolution.

Some biologists are aware of difficulties with a particular icon because it distorts the evidence in their own field. When they read the scientific literature in their specialty, they can see that the icon is misleading or downright false. But they may feel that this is just an isolated problem, especially when they are assured that Darwin’s theory is supported by overwhelming evidence from other fields. If they believe in the fundamental correctness of Darwinian evolution, they may set aside their misgivings about the particular icon they know something about. On the other hand, if they voice their misgivings they may find it difficult to gain a hearing among their colleagues, because (as we shall see) criticizing Darwinian evolution is extremely unpopular among English-speaking biologists. This may be why the problems with the icons of evolution are not more widely known. And this is why many biologists will be just as surprised as the general public to learn how serious and widespread those problems are.

There is a part two to the above, but it is more of a lecture form well-worth the watch as well:

In his latest book Zombie Science, biologist Jonathan Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? Wells gave a presentation about Zombie Science at the book’s national launch party recently in Seattle. (see more about the presentation here https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/jon…) Watch as Wells explores a new wave of icons walking the halls of science while putting some familiar corpses back in the grave. New topics include DNA, the human eye, vestigial organs, antibiotic resistance, and cancer. Looking past the current zombie outbreak, Wells offers a hopeful vision of science free from the clutches of materialist dogma. Wells himself is something of an iconoclast, railing against the tyranny of science’s Darwin-only advocates. His first book, Icons of Evolution, became an international hit by dismantling the outdated and underwhelming “proofs” of evolution that have littered textbooks for decades. For doing so, he was attacked by Darwin’s defenders and became one of the most hated figures of the intelligent design movement.

Icons of Evolution’s website is here. I pray it is kept up:

Icons of Evolution
Home of Biologist and Iconoclast Jonathan Wells

I have read the bulk of his writings, but if you are not familiar with him or Intelligent Design, I suggest this book for your shelf:

A couple remembrances by his colleagues:

Here are those promised quotes, I created them in my Microsoft Word, September 2017:

Eighteen Winged Dragonflies.

UBX is one of a family of genes called “Hox genes,” which affect head-to-tail development. In 2007, Donald Prothero published a book defending evolution. The book included a photo of a four-winged fruit fly to illustrate how “big developmental changes can result from small genetic mutations.”99 The book also claimed that modern four-winged dragonflies evolved from ancient dragonflies that had more wings, and it featured a drawing of an eighteen-winged dragonfly together with a four-winged dragonfly. According to its caption, the drawing illustrated “the evolutionary mechanism by which Hox genes allow arthropods to make drastic changes in their number and arrangements of segments and appendages, producing macroevolutionary changes with a few simple mu­tations.”100

In November 2009, Prothero (together with Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer) debated Discovery Institute senior fellows Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg. During the debate, Sternberg pointed out that eighteen-winged dragonflies never existed.101 A few days later, Prothero responded in a blog post that Meyer and Sternberg had “completely missed the point” of the illustration. According to Prothero (apparently having forgotten the number of wings in his drawing), “the text clearly points out that the twelve-winged dragonfly is a thought experiment, an illustration to show that a simple change in Hox genes allows the arthropods… to make huge evolutionary changes by simple modifications of regulatory genes.”102

But the text in Prothero’s book did not identify the eighteen-winged dragonfly as a “thought experiment.” Instead, it stated, “Experiments have shown that a few Hox genes cause arthropods to add or subtract segments, and other Hox genes can produce whatever appendage is needed.” Thus the “macroevolutionary transition from one body form to another with a completely different number of segments and appendages is a very easy process.”103

In 2013 Prothero published another book, Bringing Fossils to Life, which claimed that “a tiny change in Hox genes can make a big evolutionary difference.” Indeed, “the fossil record confirms this idea that simply switching on or off Hox genes allows abrupt changes not only in appendages and wings, but even in the number of body segments.”104

Two pages later the book reproduced the 2007 drawing of an eighteen-winged dragonfly, with a caption that stated, “Fossils demonstrate that many early arthropods were capable of adding or losing wings or other appendages…. This cartoon of real fossils shows how this multiplication or reduction process can rapidly produce entirely new body forms from a single [Hex] mutant.”105

So in 2009 the eighteen-winged dragonfly was an imaginary thought experiment, but in four years it evolved into a real fossil! Isn’t zombie science amazing?

Jonathan Wells, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2017), 72-74.

Four-Winged Fruit Flies

NORMAL FRUIT flies have two wings. Behind each wing is a tiny “balancer ” that vibrates rapidly during flight to stabilize the fly’s movements. In the 1970s, geneticist Edward Lewis discovered that by artificially combining three separate DNA mutations in a fruit fly embryo he could transform the balancers into a second pair of normal-looking wings92 93 To some people, Lewis’s discovery seemed to corroborate the neo-Darwinian theory that DNA mutations provide the raw materials for evolution, and biology textbooks started using photos of a four-winged fruit fly to show students what mutations can accomplish.

But the mutant four-winged fruit fly lost its balancers in the bargain. Worse, the mutant wings do not have any flight muscles. So the four-winged fly has great difficulty flying and mating, and it cannot survive for long outside the laboratory94 95 It is a sideshow freak, an evolutionary dead end.

Yet some textbooks in 2000 featured photos of four-winged fruit flies, and some continue to do so. For example, Freeman’s 2014 Biological Science includes a photo of the four-winged fly, accompanied by text stating that mutations “can turn a segment in the middle part of the body into a segment just like the one that lies in front of it.” So instead of having balancers “the transformed segment now bears a pair of wings.” No mention of the fact that the mutant wings are effectively dead, or that the fly is severely handicapped.96

Jonathan Wells, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2017), 71.

Joe and Mika Survived Their Trip to Trump’s Death Camp!

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is an excerpt via Megyn Kelly On Rumble:

PJ-MEDIA has a field day with this:

In the wee dark hours of Friday morning, President-elect Donald Trump’s Goldshirt thugs stormed into the West Palm Beach home of MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, abducted the couple at gunpoint, and immediately removed them to one of Literally Hitler™’s hastily erected concentration camps.

I’m kidding, of course. Mika and Joe spent a nice time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate and expressed several differences of opinion, for which Trump had them sent immediately to Gitmo.

Not really. “We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so,” Scarborough said Monday morning from his usual perch on the “Morning Joe” set, free from any obvious signs of abuse. “What we did agree on,” Brzezinski added, “was to restart communications.”

Before we continue, please allow me to remind you that everything is stupid. 

“Don’t be mistaken. We are not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump,” Scarborough assured his audience of panty-wetting progressives. “We are here to report on him” and provide insights in “these deeply unsettling times.”

Ha-ha. Too late. You can’t spend eight years demonizing somebody as Literally Hitler™ and then enjoy drinks and snacks at his swanky Florida home, argue politely for a bit, and then leave freely without normalizing Trump.

Joe and Mika, you ignorant sluts (with apologies to Dan Aykroyd), your visit with Trump was entirely normal — and normalizing. American politicians do these little background talks with people like you all the time.

You were not brave souls venturing into the belly of a murderous beast, whose bloodlust is unprecedented in American politics. You’re part of the well-paid, highly credentialed elite, kept on by MSNBC for your ability and willingness to instill completely unnecessary panic among some of America’s most vulnerable and worst-informed citizens.

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. and Mrs. Morning Show Hosts, but you aren’t the heroes of this story. ….