Author: Papa Giorgio

The New Morality | State Religion

Published by Papa Giorgio

Albert Mohler’s [important] Briefing from 4-20-18. My previous post on this is entitled: “California Wants To Curtail Free Speech.” Usually I grab a smaller clip from THE BRIEFING, but this is an attack on our faith that needs full attention. Here is the descriptions from the shows segments:

  • California set to enact legislation barring sale of any books expressing orthodox Christian beliefs on sexuality (NATIONAL REVIEW has an important article on this “wind change.”)
  • Christians no longer welcome? What’s really behind the line of questioning in a Senate committee hearing (Dennis Prager discusses Cory’s TOTALITARIANISM)
  • Army chaplain under fire after refusing to facilitate a marriage retreat for same-sex couples (Here is the ARMY TIMES article)

THE FEDERALIST has an important article on the matter as well. The entire article is worth spending some time with over a cup of joe:

FactCheck.org has joined Snopes as another sneaky liar with their article on Apr. 25 entitled “California Bill Wouldn’t Ban the Bible.” Although per the “Editor’s note,” “FactCheck.org describes itself is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk false stories,” it is not without its left-wing biases.

Article author Angelo Fichera claims that California Assembly Bill 2943 has no bearing on the sale not only of the Bible but also of any Christian book that makes the case, in whole or part, for orientation, identity, or behavior change. Although Fichera asserts claims about AB 2943 banning books “are indeed not supported by the language in the legislation,” he does not actually analyze the contents of the bill.

The extent of his “research” is to cite a tweet from the bill’s author, California assemblyman Evan Low, and an email from attorney Anthony J. Samson, a registered state lobbyist who “provided Low with technical assistance on the bill.” Another quote from Samson is now offered in the updated Snopes article.

Low and Samson are hardly impartial sources. They have a vested interest in getting the bill passed into law before massive opposition can galvanize. FactCheck.org never bothered to do the most basic investigative work of all: “factcheck” the bill’s author and his assisting attorney in relation to the language of AB 2943.

FactCheck-org would never take Donald Trump’s or Jeff Sessions’s word for what a certain anti-immigration bill of theirs says. So why does FactCheck-org take the word of Low and Samson about what AB 2943 allegedly says, particularly since it appears to be at odds with the wording of the bill?

[….]

Bill’s Author Agrees It Can Apply to Churches

Now let’s go back and see how the bill’s actual wording applies to Low and Samson’s remarks. Low’s first comment in his tweet is a devastating new admission: “A church or individual may still practice conversion therapy if they do so without charging for this fraudulent service.” The flipside of this statement is that “a church or individual” cannot “practice conversion therapy” if there is a charge for the service.

Contrary to what many supporters of the bill have been saying, the bill’s application extends beyond mental health professionals (note that the Snopes article claims this is unclear). There is no exemption for religious instruction. We now have confirmation from AB 2943’s author that the bill would indeed apply “to a pastor, Bible study or house church leader, member of a parachurch organization working to help people afflicted by same-sex attractions, or indeed anybody who attempts change if goods or services involve an exchange of funds.”

AB 2493’s wording does not support Low’s second statement: “It does not ban bibles nor does it ban the basic sales of books as some would have you believe.” The only way that such a statement, particularly the second half, could be true is if the sale of a book were not included as “a transaction… which results in the sale… of goods… to any consumer” or did not come under the heading of “selling a financial product.” It is difficult to see how that could be the case.

For example, the California government’s own guide to “Understanding California’s Sales Tax” gives as its first example of how “sales tax . . . depends on the tax rate and the dollar value of the goods sold” that of a retailer who “sells five books costing $20 each” at a tax rate of 8 percent (my emphases). There is no puzzling over whether the sale of “books” could count as a sale of “goods.” It’s obvious.

“Goods” are broadly defined in AB 2943 as “tangible [movable] chattels bought or leased for use primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.” By what rationale, then, can Low claim the sale of books is excluded from the bill’s designation “sale of goods”? If Low were so concerned to exclude book sales from his bill, he would have to have excluded “books” from the category of “goods” explicitly…..

Bret Baier’s Interview of James Comey (plus more)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Former FBI Director James Comey on decision-making process in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, origins of the anti-Trump dossier, memos of conversations with President Trump and new book ‘A Higher Loyalty.’

‘Special Report’ host Bret Baier sat down with the former FBI director; Baier reacts to Comey’s responses on ‘The Story.’

S.C. congressman reacts to fired FBI Director James Comey’s comments in interview with ‘Special Report’ anchor and the potential legal implications.

The ‘Special Report’ All-Stars react to Bret Baier’s interview with the former FBI director James Comey.

Fired FBI director James Comey sat down with Bret Baier for an interview on Fox News; former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski reacts to this and more on ‘The Story.’

Jim Comey’s book tour did not work out as planned.

Not Little – Abnormal

Published by Papa Giorgio

This was posted almost 6-years ago… updated videos

(Via HotAir) Comedy gold via Mediaite from a man who once worried aloud about Guam tipping over. I managed to hold it together when he uttered “the M-word” in the course of denouncing the M-word, but the lulz began to roll after about three minutes. The first rule of apologizing for insensitivity: When expressing your remorse to the offended group, always refer to them as “abnormal.”

The Utter Collapse of Trump-Russia Gate

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Rush Limbaugh discusses the utter collapse of the conspiracy known as “Russian Collusion.” The latest bombshell is by Rep. Devin Nunes, which I add near the end of this first hour [35-minutes here] of yesterdays show (TRANSCRIPT), destroys the narrative every news org (save one) has been making. B-u-t, people like to be told what to think, and so “group think” looms large on the Left.

Rep. Nunes Drops a Bomb On Russia Probe (BOOM)

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Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says no official intelligence was used to start the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.

Yaron Brook Responds To Socialist Arguments One-By-One

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I will first post this popular question during the Q&A of the below linked lecture. (Just a note, while I am not on board for a fully idealized “Ayn Rand Objectivism,” but many aspects are just true.) Very important:

(FULL VERSION of Dr. Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute arguing that “Equal is Unfair – The Inequality Advantage” at The University of Exeter.) The following is more of Dr. Brook’s responses during Q&A:

Doing the Impossible Motivating Young People to be Responsible

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Jordan Peterson is an unlikely Youtube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos and line up to hear his speeches and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.

Guns SAVE Lives! A CDC Study Uncovered

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THE DAILY WIRE squashes the anti-gun peoples MANTRA:

…A new report from Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck shows that recently unearthed surveys from the CDC, which were never made public, show that Americans use guns in millions of defense scenarios every year on average.

Reason reports:

… Kleck conducted the most thorough previously known survey data on the question in the 1990s. His study, which has been harshly disputed in pro-gun-control quarters, indicated that there were more than 2.2 million such defensive uses of guns (DGUs) in America a year.

Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck’s results. But Kleck didn’t know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.

Kleck discovered that the CDC asked about defensive uses of guns in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) in 1996, 1997, and 1998.

The CDC survey, which Kleck described as “high-quality,” asked respondents: “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?”

Reason notes that the survey instructed respondents to leave out “incidents from occupations, like policing, where using firearms is part of the job” and it excludes instances where firearms were used in a defensive manner against animals.

One key point that Kleck noticed was that the only people who were asked that question were people who admitted to owning guns. This is a problem because Kleck found in his surveys that “79 percent of those who reported a DGU ‘had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview.’” Because of this, Kleck argues that the CDC’s numbers needed to be rounded up, as Reason notes:

At any rate, Kleck downloaded the datasets for those three years and found that the “weighted percent who reported a DGU … was 1.3% in 1996, 0.9% in 1997, 1.0% in 1998, and 1.07% in all three surveys combined.”

Kleck figures if you do the adjustment upward he thinks necessary for those who had DGU incidents without personally owning a gun in the home at the time of the survey, and then the adjustment downward he thinks necessary because CDC didn’t do detailed follow-ups to confirm the nature of the incident, you get 1.24 percent, a close match to his own 1.326 percent figure.

Kleck found the results to be astonishing as they strongly confirmed his prior work, which had been attacked by those pushing the gun control narrative:

The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995). …. CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.

The newly discovered CDC surveys severely damage gun control narratives pushed by the media, including a poorly written piece last week by NPR’s Samantha Raphelson, who just happened to be unaware of Kleck’s discovery of the surveys. Raphelson’s report backed the National Crime Victimization Survey’s ultra-conservative lowball number of only 100,000 defensive uses of firearms per year…

Here is a good portion of what is referenced above via REASON’s article:

….Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck’s results. But Kleck didn’t know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.

Kleck’s new paper—”What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?“—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998.

Those polls, Kleck writes,

are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001).

Kleck was impressed with how well the survey worded its question: “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?” Respondents were told to leave out incidents from occupations, like policing, where using firearms is part of the job. Kleck is impressed with how the question excludes animals but includes DGUs outside the home as well as within it.

Kleck is less impressed with the fact that the question was only asked of people who admitted to owning guns in their home earlier in the survey, and that they asked no follow-up questions regarding the specific nature of the DGU incident.

From Kleck’s own surveys, he found that only 79 percent of those who reported a DGU “had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview,” so he thinks whatever numbers the CDC found need to be revised upward to account for that. (Kleck speculates that CDC showed a sudden interest in the question of DGUs starting in 1996 because Kleck’s own famous/notorious survey had been published in 1995.)

At any rate, Kleck downloaded the datasets for those three years and found that the “weighted percent who reported a DGU…was 1.3% in 1996, 0.9% in 1997, 1.0% in 1998, and 1.07% in all three surveys combined.”

Kleck figures if you do the adjustment upward he thinks necessary for those who had DGU incidents without personally owning a gun in the home at the time of the survey, and then the adjustment downward he thinks necessary because CDC didn’t do detailed follow-ups to confirm the nature of the incident, you get 1.24 percent, a close match to his own 1.326 percent figure.

He concludes that the small difference between his estimate and the CDC’s “can be attributed to declining rates of violent crime, which accounts for most DGUs. With fewer occasions for self-defense in the form of violent victimizations, one would expect fewer DGUs.”

Kleck further details how much these CDC surveys confirmed his own controversial work:

The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)….CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.

For those who wonder exactly how purely scientific CDC researchers are likely to be about issues of gun violence that implicate policy, Kleck notes that “CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.”

NPR revisited the DGU controversy last week, with a thin piece that backs the National Crime Victimization Survey’s lowball estimate of around 100,000 such uses a year. NPR seemed unaware of those CDC surveys.

For a more thorough take, see my 2015 article “How to Count the Defensive Use of Guns.” That piece more thoroughly explains the likely reasons why the available DGU estimates differ so hugely….

California Wants To Curtail Free Speech

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GAY PATRIOT opines well:

The California Legislature is fast-tracking a bill that would make it illegal to publish, sell or exchange any book critical of transgenderism or not critical of the idea that sexual behavior can be changed. I am not making this up.

[….]

They are claiming that promoting (or even discussing) the idea that humans can choose to control their own sexual behavior is “consumer fraud,” because it’s obviously impossible for any human being to manage their sexual urges. Except for straight intoxicated college men, who are expected to behave like chaste monks.

I note that the California Legislature is not banning books or speech on how cancer can be cured with crystals, or explaining the “health benefits” for women of stuffing rocks into their vajayjays.

AB 2943, as amended, Low. Unlawful business practices: sexual orientation change efforts.

Existing law, the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, makes unlawful certain unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices undertaken by any person in a transaction intended to result result, or whichresults results, in the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer. Existing law authorizes any consumer who suffers damages as a result of these unlawful practices to bring an action against that person to recover damages, among other things.

Existing law prohibits mental health providers, as defined, from performing sexual orientation change efforts, as specified, with a patient under 18 years of age. Existing law requires a violation of this provision to be considered unprofessional conduct and subjects the provider to discipline by the provider’s licensing entity.

This bill would include, as an unlawful practice prohibited under the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual. The bill would also declare the intent of the Legislature in this regard.

David French notes “the California State Assembly is set to vote on a bill that would actually — among other things — ban the sale of books expressing orthodox Christian beliefs about sexual morality.” Continuing in NATIONAL REVIEW, French notes,

Yes, ban the sale of books.

Assembly Bill 2943 would make it an “unlawful business practice” to engage in “a transaction intended to result or that results in the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer” that advertise, offer to engage in, or do engage in “sexual orientation change efforts with an individual.”

The bill then defines “sexual orientations change efforts” as “any practices that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” (Emphasis added.)

BARB WIRE condenses the outcome:

  • AB 2943 prohibits: (1) advertising sexual orientation change efforts, (2) offering to engage in sexual orientation change efforts, and (3) engaging in sexual orientation change efforts. The bill prohibits every individual, whether a pastor, clergy, or licensed therapist, from advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts.

Sick!