Just two commentaries I enjoyed and wanted to share.
Nauseating Woke Lectures Are Masquerading As Ads: Gutfeld
Gutfeld mentions Gillette (see my past posts on that topic HERE and HERE)… to wit I use Jeremy’s Razors now. I have tried both the 6-blade and the 5-blade versions. I suggest the 6-blade for face people (it is a unique design that stays sharp)… I like the 5-blade because I shave my head as well as my face (less space between the blades for the bumpy head.
“So how did this happen? Well, all these nauseating lectures are now masquerading as ads, are the colleges churning out too many useless women’s study grads, so they end up in companies demanding tampons in men’s rooms and jockstraps in the women’s? Hmm. They view buyers as insects: stupid, gross, easily manipulated, someone to be punished, not celebrated.”
TRANS Sports Illustrated Model? Kim Petras Cover | Pseudo-Intellectual with Lauren Chen | 5/17/23 (Video: BLAZETV)
Woke Sports Illustrated Gets SLAMMED For Putting Transgender Model On Cover Of Swimsuit Edition (Video: SPORTS WARS)
Sports Illustrated DESTROYED For Using Trans Woman On Cover Of Swimsuit Edition! (Video: THE QUARTERING)
Watters: Elon Musk Speaks For All Of Us
“Now, everybody won’t be able to make enough money to speak freely. Okay, I accept that. So, we need to take the mob out, get our voices back and Elon speaks for all of us”
This week the left is trying to cancel Elon Musk for anti-semitism. In a tweet, Musk compared George Soros to supervillain Magneto. Apparently, this isn’t allowed because Soros is a Holocaust survivor.
(This was originally posted Jun 27, 2015 — I make a prediction herein [also HERE~n~HERE])
I wanted to post some of my early thoughts [rant] on the decision, followed by more rantings:
Two… yes, the number two, has now become an objective concept in law over and above millions of years of evolution (Natures Law), or God’s Law (Natural Law) honing or creating the ideal that is the “male-female” relation. Both of these ideas, Natures Law and natures God (from the Declaration), under-girded the philosophy of the movement that wrote the greatest document/contract in human history. [Take away that philosophy and you lose the document.]
The mission of the church in the West has just changed. Soon the number 2 will fall by the relativistic roadside to plural marriages. All these non-ideal familial structures (according to Nature or natures God) will erode the religious freedom the Founders set up.
But we have a generation that neither looks to history for guidance or to any religious/moral authority outside themselves.
This experiment will eventually fall into the edict of the French (Jacobin) idea of equality in outcome… And to be clear, the guillotine soon followed. Tyranny never follows far behind forced outcomes.
The priority of the male-female relationship is just a larger piece to the puzzle called “deconstructionism.”
My other thoughts for here is something I have said for quite a while now: “
“Leftism” eats itself
It always has. We have seen socialist groups fight for their agenda to be paramount (thinking of Russian and German historical hegemony that led to many deaths to accomplish this goal… before the end result of the power structure and well-known leaders took power — which caused even more deaths — Pol Pot, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, just to name a few well known 20th century Lefties). To Wit,
Because of the flag issue, already there is talk of the Jefferson Memorial (the founder of the party running around from activist issue-to-issue ~ they do this because they replace the God shaped vacuum with politics)… banning Gone with the Wind (even though a black woman [the first time in our history] won “Best Supporting Actress)… etc.
The hubris of the left can be seen as well in thinking that they [politicians] can control weather (the sun) by legislation. Or changing gender by the stroke of a pen. Pride predates the fall.
In the “rights” area I always point out that these “special rights” [not equal rights] are shown in conflict. Here is one example theorized by Dale Berryhill:
“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?”
Another example comes from an activist site:
“The gay rights movement has won rights and recognition that largely serve the interests of white, wealthy cisgender* gay men to the detriment of poor queers and queer people of color, and to the detriment of racial and economic justice more generally.” (*…related types of gender identity perceptions, where individuals’ experiences of their own gender agree with the sex they were assigned at birth.)
So you can see when you move from equal under the law to special interest groups getting special protections, these camps begin to battle each-other. They “eat” each-other.
This is how I see it.
On one level it shows a proclivity to self destruct when you remove God from the equation.
The God that includes 100% justice, 100% love, 100% grace, 100% hatred for sin, etc. (not emphasizing parts of God one agrees with or on and demphasizing or muting aspects of God one disagrees with). You know, the Judeo-Christian concept of God, the bedrock to our Republic.
GK Chesterton said, “When a man ceases to believe in God he does not believe in nothing, he believes almost in anything.”
So I like it because the chaos of the secular world shows the Christian-theistic worldview works. I also like it because this dysmorphism exists primarily on the left of the political spectrum ~ which makes sense because they are a) more secular, and when religious they b) have more of a proclivity to emphasize one aspect of God over another in their theology (pick-and-choose the God they serve).
So I like it because it shows that while the GOP is also chaotic to some extent, it works better when its ideals are leaned on (trade-offs). (The Utopian ideal of the lefts base do not believe in trade-offs.)
(RPT PREDICTION) ALL THAT BEING SAID… there is a dangerous aspect to this. As the left eats itself, they have historically looked for scape-goats. Jews and Christians are typically the fall-guy… especially in the 20th and 21st Century. More violence will follow.
The left “KNOWS” its goals are well meaning, and so find acknowledgment that they are true and society “NEEDS” them ~ again, based on the “well meaningfulness.”
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severley, because we have deserved it, because ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human persons in God’s image.”
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), 292 (Full text).
So, in the West as these “well-meaning” ideals works themselves out, expect more legal, cultural, and violent expression against those who hold to a historical, conserving theology and expressing this in public life.
This is the downside, and as RJ Rummel pointed out in his fourth book in his series, “Death by Government,” that as democracies become more undemocratic, policies begin that cause more death to its own citizens. Of course this is not an immediate happenstance, but legal and jail-time pre-date these outcomes. For instance, the next move will be gay-couples demanding to be married in churches and bringing those cases to the courts.
I will end this rant with a quote from a man who knows personally about this “secularization”
“More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’ Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; … [and] if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.'”
Quoted in Ericson, Edward E. Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947-2005. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006, page 577.
Dennis Prager first reads from a year-old article about Jennifer Sey’s predicament (PART ONE), then he has her on to interview her (the below video is part 2). Jennifer’s book is:
This Silent Majority Showed Up in A Decisive Manner: Jennifer Sey (LAURA INGRAHAM | February 18, 2022)
Executive Shares Why She Walked Away from Woke Culture | Will Cain Podcast (FOX NEWS | November 21, 2022)
Cancel Culture with Jennifer Sey | Phil in the Blanks Podcast (DR. PHIL | July 9, 2022)
UPDATE: Vivek Ramaswamy Interviews Jennifer Sey
In this episode, Vivek Ramaswamy and Jennifer Sey engage in a thought-provoking conversation about the definition and potential dangers of “woke” culture, particularly in relation to free speech and corporate America. Jennifer Sey, a former executive who left her job after expressing an unpopular opinion on school closures, shares her personal experiences navigating the world of wokeness. They discuss the impact of wokeness on various aspects of society, including the creation of hostile work environments, censorship, and the importance of maintaining apolitical spaces in a diverse democracy.
Jennifer Anne Sey is a former artistic gymnast, author, and business executive born in 1969. She has an impressive athletic background, having been a seven-time member of the U.S. Women’s National Team and winning the 1986 U.S. Women’s All-Around National Championship. Sey also represented the U.S. in international competitions such as the 1985 Women’s World Championships and the 1986 Goodwill Games. After retiring from gymnastics, Sey transitioned to the business world, where she has had a successful career.
(This was originally posted Nov 19, 2015, I have refreshed media and edited esthetics a tad)
I have been too busy as-of-late to keep up with “Concepts,” an article in a local small paper. This recent article did, however, peak my interest and awoke me from my slumber. (As usual, you can click the graphic to enlarge to be able to read the article if so desired [below].) Per John’s modus operandi he conflates separate issues and then makes his point at the end that has nothing to do with his previous points or set-up. I myself will jump around Mr. Huizum’s article a bit, clarifying and expanding [correcting mainly] his thoughts as space surely does not allow him but it does me.
Let’s jump into this statement and where I think John, as an atheist, puts all his cookies into the “science” bag, otherwise known as “scientism.”
“To my knowledge, science has not yet discovered a purpose for the universe,…”
This is key (*Big Booming Voice w/Echo Effects*): science will NEVER find a purpose for the universe.
“Purpose” — as such, is the area exclusively reserved to that of philosophy and theology, not science. From reading previous article’s by John, he seems to have a distorted view of epistemology and how one expresses “truth statements” with a coherent foundation/worldview. Let us define some words and concepts as we continue on our journey brought to us by “Concepts.”
Epistemology – “the branch of philosophy concerned with questions about knowledge and belief and related issues such as justification and truth.”
C. Stephen Evans, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 39.
What John seems to place as his “ultimate truth” is science. This view is commonly referred to as “scientism.” What is scientism, you ask?
Scientism constitutes the core of the naturalistic understanding of what constitutes knowledge, its epistemology. Wilfrid Sellars says that “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”‘ Contemporary naturalists embrace either weak or strong scientism. According to the former, nonscientific fields are not worthless nor do they offer no intellectual results, but they are vastly inferior to science in their epistemic standing and do not merit full credence. According to the latter, unqualified cognitive value resides in science and in nothing else. Either way, naturalists are extremely skeptical of claims about reality that are not justified by scientific methods in the hard sciences.
William Lane Craig and Chad Meister, God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009), 35.
In another article scientism is explained as well as naturalism and the differences:
CODE ~ Accidental?
One gram of DNA – the weight of two Tylenol – can store the same amount of digitally encoded information as a hundred billion DVD’s. Yes, you read correctly, I said a hundredbillion DVD’s. Every single piece of information that exists on the Earth today; from every single library, from every single data base, from every single computer, could be stored in one beaker of DNA. This is the same DNA/Genetic Information/Self-Replication System that exists in humans and in bacteria (which are the simplest living organisms that exist today and have ever been known to exist). In short, our DNA-based genetic code, the universal system for all life on our planet, is the most efficient and sophisticated digital information storage, retrieval, and translation system known to man.
…scientism (an epistemological thesis) with naturalism (an ontological thesis). Scientism is the view that we should believe only what can be proven scientifically. In other words, science is the sole source of knowledge and the sole arbiter of truth. Naturalism is the view that physical events have only physical causes. In other words, miracles do not happen; there are no supernatural causes.
One should keep in mind that a coherent worldview answers at least four important questions about life that science (especially “scientism”) cannot, getting back to purpose. Ravi Zacharias makes accessible these questions by stating that a “coherent worldview must be able to satisfactorily answer four questions: that of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny” (Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil [Nashville, TN: Word Publishers, 1997], 219–220). Science can be used, and should be used, as a tool in making a reasonable case for purpose and meaning in life.
Science, then, is merely a handmaiden of these richer studies in life’s ultimate meaning, not the determining factor.
“Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science” (Edward Feser, Blinded by Scientism [March 9th, 2010]). Which is one reason that it is self refuting, because, it itself is a philosophical proposition ABOUT science while claiming not to be. Which two philosophical naturalists admit in a moment of honesty:
Lewontin: “we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Searle: “There is a sense in which materialism is the religion of our time, at least among most of the professional experts in the fields of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and other disciplines that study the mind. Like most traditional religions, it is accepted without question and it provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered.”
Again, the belief that science alone gives us knowledge is a philosophical statement, not a scientific one. This is no longer science, but the scientistic worldview of naturalism, which affirms that nature is all there is and that only science can give us knowledge. As the late astronomer Carl Sagan put it: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Dawkins, like Sagan, speaks more as an amateur metaphysician than as a scientist.
I dealt a little with origins in a previous review of one of his articles in the past, but the point is that John places on science’s plate a proposition that it will never be able to answer. Maybe a Tennyson poem will assist in explaining to John the meaning of the universe without God:
In writing the poem, Tennyson was influenced by the ideas of evolution presented in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation which had been published in 1844, and had caused a storm of controversy about the theological implications of impersonal nature functioning without direct divine intervention. The fundamentalist idea of unquestioning belief in revealed truth taken from a literal interpretation of the Bible was already in conflict with the findings of science, and Tennyson expressed the difficulties evolution raised for faith in “the truths that never can be proved”.
Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world’s altar-stairs That slope thro’ darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
This poem was published before Charles Darwin made his theory public in 1859. However, the phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw” in canto 56 quickly was adopted by others as a phrase that evokes the process of natural selection. It was and is used by both those opposed to and in favor of the theory of evolution. However, at the end of the poem, Tennyson emerges with his Christian faith reaffirmed, progressing from doubt and despair to faith and hope, a dominant theme also seen in his poem “Ulysses.”
…Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed…
…So runs my dream, but what am I? An infant crying in the night An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry…
…If e’er when faith had fallen asleep, I hear a voice ‘believe no more’ And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’
No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamour made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying knows his father near…
Atheists themselves say that nothing matters in a universe without God giving it meaning:
Which leads me into another statement John makes near the end of the article, and, has in it a self-refuting statement of sorts. I will explain, John says:
I do not think atheists are more or less happy than believers, so it is possible to live a useful life without a belief in a god. Scientists may not know what the purpose of the Universe is, but we the living find our own purpose for living, which is often just to help or be interested in others.
The mass murderer or tyrant may find his purpose in doing what he does. The rapist as well. Those actions we rightly abhor may be the ones that provide purpose or fulfillment in theirs. You see, John has no code that he can ascribe to himself and expect others to follow… outside of wish fulfillment that is.
He says that life’s meaning is “often just to help or be interested in others.” What a trite explanation of existence! Mussolini explains to John the related topic of relativism and John trying to impose HIS MEANING onto the masses, or think that the masses should agree with him when Tennyson so pointedly says that nature’s purpose is “red in tooth and claw” ~ here is another view that lines up more with John’s view rather than the Judeo-Christian ethic:
“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 pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
Again, let us see what another person who may understand the complexities of the issue a bit more than John shows us, and that is Malcolm Muggeridge (a British journalist, author, satirist, media personality, soldier-spy and, in his later years, a Catholic convert and writer), who said:
“If God is ‘dead,’ somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Heffner.”
Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 32.
I know John HOPES people see reality like he does, but he does not have a meta-narrative that is internally consistent to express to mankind the need to “help or be interested in others.” The Nazi’s thought they were doing this? Why are they wrong and John right? He has no epistemology that is internally consistent to help him ask these non-scientific questions. So while he can feel that the atheist can have a happy life, aside from this Epicurean goal, happiness is not synonymous with moral, or meaningful in the ultimate sense.
Epicurean ~ “Epicurus (341-271 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who was born on the isle of Samos but lived much of his life in Athens, where he founded his very successful school of philosophy. He was influenced by the materialist Democritus (460-370 B.C.), who is the first philosopher known to believe that the world is made up of atoms…. Epicurus identified good with pleasure and evil with pain.” He equated using pleasure, diet, friends, and the like as “tools” for minimizing bad sensations or pain while increasing pleasure or hedonism.
Taken from Louise P. Pojman, Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Press, 2002), 499; taken from a chapter from my book dealing with homosexuality and natural law, footnote #42.
I will zero in on a point that John makes, but that is lost on him in his making an either/or distinction in the extremes.
“If God created the natural laws and if God were omnipotent, I would have to assume that God could also destroy them or make them unworkable or eliminate them.”
True enough, but, we can ad a third understanding to John’s statement: He [God] could intervene from-time-to-time in nature. For example, the virgin birth. The miracle was in no way the development and birth of Jesus, the miracle was in the conception. God introduced unique genetic material to Mary’s womb. The Laws of Nature took over from there. There was a standard nine month pregnancy followed by a normal birth.
Lewis defines a miracle thus: “I use the word Miracle to mean an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” He describes the integration of miraculous intervention and the natural world in this way: “It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t. … If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. … The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern. … And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent.
Now, I think John also confuses some laws that he uses all the time. The Law of Morality for instance.
John Huizum has complained about the evils done in the name of religion in the past, and so posits a “law” that he expects others to see and adhere to, namely, murder in the name of God is morally, or absolutely wrong. However, in the naturalist view of the world, evil is not absolutely wrong… just currently taboo.
Books like, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1997), and, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual (Coercion Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), make the point that rape — for instance — was a tool of survival in our evolutionary past, and so not “morally wrong” in any absolute sense. Not morally wrong because it aided the only real principle of nature, survival. If not absolutely wrong in the past, than theoretically rape is useful for our survival in the future. A position taken by Islamists in some part of our world surely.
Here are three short examples by atheists themselves making my point… er… really their point:
E X H I B I T ~ A
Atheist Dan Barker Says “Child Rape Is Morally Okay”
Richard Dawkins Says Rape Is Morally Arbitrary!
William Provine Evolution and the Meaning of Life
You see, who can REALLY say Hitler was wrong? “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question” ~ Richard Dawkins. Ahh, no its not. Granted, it is for the person (John) who looks to nature alone for meaning, and his HOPE is that others see his view of life.
“Some unfortunate humans—perhaps because they have suffered brain damage—are not rational agents. What are we to say about them? The natural conclusion, according to the doctrine we are considering, would be that their status is that of mere animals. And perhaps we should go on to conclude that they may be used as non-human animals are used—perhaps as laboratory subjects, or as food.”
James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 186.
Um, in other words, the evolutionist has no way to say that the mentally ill cannot be made into chum/food, or NAZI like experiments.
But this “hope” wasn’t the basis for important decisions in our nations history, thank God! Like the writing of the Constitution for instance, written in the language of Natural Law, or in the Nuremberg Trials. A great example for what we are talking about here.
At the Nuremburg trials, when the judges/magistrates from Germany were being defended, one of the strongest arguments was that they were operating according to the law of their own land (cultural relativism). To that, a legitimate counter-question was raised, “But is there not a law above our laws?” John Warwick Montgomery, in his book The Law Above The Law, describes their argument:
“The most telling defense offered by the accused was that they had simply followed orders or made decisions within the framework of their own legal system, in complete consistency with it, and that they therefore ought not rightly be condemned because they deviated from the alien value system of their conquerors”
John Warwick Montgomery, The Law Above the Law (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1975), 24.
Nevertheless, the tribunal did not accept this justification. In the words of Robert H. Jackson, chief counsel for the United States at the trials, the issue was not one of power – the victor judging the vanquished – but one of higher moral law. Mr. Huizum has no foundational ethic or moral to make life meaningful in this ultimate sense. Which is the inclusion that real justice truly exists.
Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.
So far from John not seeing “the God-factor expressed in any law of nature he is aware of,” the Laws of Logic, the Moral Laws, Mathematics, and the like are glimpses into the “God-Factor.” Whether John admits to this or simply defines the proposition out of being considered (see below) is his convoluted lot in life of competing/self-refuting propositions guided by a metaphysical assumption about reality… not mine.
Professor: “Miracles are impossible Sean, don’t you know science has disproven them, how could you believe in them [i.e., answered prayer, a man being raised from the dead, etc.].”
Student: “for clarity purposes I wish to get some definitions straight. Would it be fair to say that science is generally defined as ‘the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us’?”
Professor: “Beautifully put, that is the basic definition of science in every text-book I read through my Doctoral journey.”
Student: “Wouldn’t you also say that a good definition of a miracle would be ‘and event in nature caused by something outside of nature’?”
Professor: “Yes, that would be an acceptable definition of ‘miracle.’”
Student: “But since you do not believe that anything outside of nature exists [materialism, dialectical materialism, empiricism, existentialism, naturalism, and humanism – whatever you wish to call it], you are ‘forced’ to conclude that miracles are impossible”
Norman L. Geisler & Peter Bocchino, Unshakeable Foundations: Contemporary Answers to Crucial Questions About the Christian Faith (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Bethany House, 2001), 63-64.
This leads me to my final correction of some bad thinking on John’s part. When he says, “No scientific formula ever needed an asterisk or a caveat that said ‘God willing,'” the asterick merely precedes the formula and is next to the word “science.” Without the Judeo-Christian metaphysic, science would not be possible:
…as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)
To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity…
Again, Mr. Huizum seems to have strayed — as usual — far away from rational inferences based on a good understanding of the issues, rooted in history, easily accessible to him. Again, he just opines in the hope that others will dote over his “wisdom.” Not me, someone has to keep him honest.
ORIGINALLY POSTED OCT 3, 2013 — JUST UPDATED “DEAD” MEDIA
I wish to post some ideas and thoughts by others here that will allow a framework to reply to such a challenge. Many professors will infect young minds with this idea, which is, “you cannot criticize Marxism, socialism, or the like because its ‘pure form[s]’ have never been implemented on earth.” To which I would reply to said professor that he then would not be able to criticize Christianity, Republicans, Capitalism, etc…. because the ideal they hold has never been purely implemented on earth. [In Christianity I would note that the faith was modeled perfectly in the man of Christ Jesus.]
So if you have a professor who is harping on Capitalism, Bush, Republicans, Reagan, Newt, Ted Cruz, whomever…, you just need to point out that since FDR’s “New Deal” and Johnson’s “Great Society” all they are really criticizing is regulation and redistribution. Because we are far from a truly free-market.
So, what are some good resources to build a cumulative case or allow deeper — non-sophomoric thinking as the author of The Politically incorrect Guide would say — on this subject? While I responded to the person where I work with the quick answer of, “that is essentially copping out of dealing with what is produced by such beliefs,” my thinking on the matter goes beyond how I could or can express it in the work environment. This frustration of quick interactions has led me partly to blog on various topics so not only myself, but others can access this “nugget” if-you-will for both personal edification and learning or linking to friends, co-workers, and family that you discuss this issue with. Especially young people at university.
I do wish to note that just because I am posting items by others below, it does not imply I fully agree with their position stated or worldview. For instance I use Student of Objectivism’s (SO) video (spliced with a quick “baked in the cake” precursor), while I enjoy and agree with Ayn Rand on many points… on many others I disagree. I CAN recommend wholeheartedly — for the lover of theology that really wishes to understand the political divide — a book by Thomas Sowell entitled, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. While this is a must read for any political junkie, it is all the more powerful for one who believes in The Fall of mankind, objective grounding of ethics, man’s spark of life/creativity as well as mankind’s depravity. So to all the pastors and apologists that read this… add that book into your reading hopper.
Okay, I wanted to begin with this chapter, at least the opening pages of it, the chapter can be seen below.
In it the author notes that “baked into” socialism is serfdom… by violence if necessary. Scott Huber of Brightlight Books comments well on this idea and the book:
Williamson ended Chapter 1 (see that summary here) with the observation (from Hayek) that socialist planners always lead an economy on the “road to serfdom”. This is because socialist economic planning cannot work because the planners cannot have enough information or knowledge to make the proper economic decisions. So, in lieu of having enough knowledge to properly make economic decisions, they opt for varying and escalating levels of coercion to enforce their Plan.
In Chapter 2, he begins by refuting what he calls the high school debater’s trick of claiming that socialism in “theory” is great (and true and just and compassionate, etc.) but it just gets screwed up in practice.
Not so, he says:
In truth, the theory behind socialism is deeply flawed: it is intellectually narrow, inhumane, and deeply irrational in that it fails to account for the ways in which knowledge works in a society. Socialism in theory is every bit as bad as socialism in practice, once you understand the theory and stop mistaking it for the common and humane charitable impulse.
Here is a key question? How is economic value determined? Next, we can ask a slightly different set of questions: How should economic value be determined and, perhaps more importantly, by whom?
Williamson argues that on the issue of determining economic value Marx (and every socialist) is a moralist. How so?
Because for Marx, and every other socialist, the value of economic activity, which is to say the value of any product or service, is (or more precisely should) be objectively related to the labor of the worker who produces it. This contrasts with the subjective approach of the capitalist marketplace which basically says that the value of a product or a service is related to how people in the marketplace subjectively value it.
In other words, let’s say you spend a lot of time, human labor, and other resources to produce something. The socialist approach to value says that your product is, at least roughly, worth the sum of the costs required to produce it especially the labor costs. To price it higher or lower is an injustice.
Marx’s analysis is morally normative [i.e. what should be] in that he insists that, since labor is the measure of value, wages must equal the price of the product. The mere existence of profits – squeezing economic value out of a product beyond what workers are paid – for Marx was proof of capitalist’s exploitation of workers. It was indistinguishable from outright theft.
And, according to Williamson, it’s this moral (and moralizing) context that fuels Marxists’ and other socialists’ revolutionary fervor. Note Marx’s most famous quote: The point of philosophy is not merely to understand the world, but to change it. And at the point of a gun if necessary, which it usually is since free people do not readily cooperate with the revolution.
“Communism is a great idea, it just hasn’t been tried properly.” Leftist fellow travelers rush to embrace every Marxist experiment, champion the system and agitate for it to be copied in their own country. …and then walk away when it inevitably fails; searching once again for the next soon to fail utopia. Communism has been tried over 40 times in the last 100 years and has produced egregious results in every iteration. This video shows every application and deep dives into half a dozen examples, comparing before and after Communism was tried as well as comparing examples directly with free and mixed market neighbors.(Via VOTE NIXON)
And one should note that ALL of the above have a current application to what we are seeing the Democrats implementing. Socialized Medicine. And who better to explain this to us that the Gipper himself:
Walter Williams makes this real for us in a way that should perk the interest of those who love and cherish freedom:
…Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, “Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.
Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.
Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.
The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn’t happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.”…
Social Justice. This social justice always leads to repression, from the NAACP asking the rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask to be investigated, to, Dr. Benjamin Carson being audited after his prayer breakfast speech by the IRS. These are murmurings of the greater end that always ends in violent repression. From pro-lifers being threatened on university campuses, to suppression of free speech, to… eventualy, the outgrowth — naturally — to violent repression. The difference between Marxism, Socialism, Communism, and Fascism, is a matter of degrees, only:
✯ A Marxist will scream at you, argue and fist-fight you down the road to his dream, as he carries your belongings and says, “They belong to the collective”.
✯ A Socialist will grab you by the hand or the hair, and beat you on the head with a stick and drag you along, as they make you carry your own belongings and tell you they, “Belong to the collective”.
✯ A Communist will get behind you and make you carry your own belongings to his dream, as he points a gun to the back of your head, and kicks you in the back and screams at you, “They belong to the State”… as in the collective.
✯ A Fascist will will have your neighbor carry your belongings, and shoot you if you do not agree with his dream of “Centralized Authority, and it all belongs to the State”,… the collective”.
…a matter of degrees.
(I cry every time I watch the beginning of this.) This footage is a great example of how Democrats are joined at the hip with radicals. The example comes by way of the two radical Democrat women making my point:
Question is, which is our temperature to stop this from going further in our country?
And any person should acknowledge why someone should “fear” government more than business. In fact, I made this point on my FB outgrowth of this blog in talking to my liberal friend:
…the point was to show how the Obama admin is stacking the books with GM. You see, when the government chooses winners-and-losers instead of getting contracts with private companies (like Ford, GM, etc.), they are invested to [i.e., forced to] only choose a government run business and stock their fish (so-to-speak) with GM fleets… leaving the non-government company to flounder.
This next audio deals with the differences of the Koch brothers, in comparison to the Left’s version of them, Soros. There are many areas that one can discuss about the two… but let us focus in on the main/foundational difference. One wants a large government that is able to legislate more than just what kind of light-bulbs one can use in the privacy of their own home. Soros wants large government able to control a large portion of the economy (see link to chart below), and he has been very vocal on this goal. The other party always mentioned are the Koch brothers. These rich conservatives want a weak government. A government that cannot effect our daily lives nearly as much (personal, business, etc) as the Soros enterprise wants. And really, if you think about it, what business can really “harm” you, when people come to my door with pistols on their hip… are they a) more likely to be from GM, or, b) from the IRS?
The possibility of them being from the IRS is even more possible with the passing of Obama-Care [i.e., larger government]. So the “fear” (audio in next comment) I think the Left has of “Big-Business” is unfounded, and the problem comes when big-business gets in bed with big-government. Here I am thinking of (like with the penalties that were found to be Constitutional in the recent SCOTUS decision) a government that can penalize you if you do not buy a Chevy Volt, or some other green car in order to save the planet. When this happens, guys coming to my door because of unpaid (hypothetical… but historical examples abound of the tax history of our nation) “fines” are likely to be IRS agents because of a personal choice made in the “free-market.”
Appendix: If the above example didn’t inspire any liberal fear (forced to go green or be penalized), maybe this one will?
…First, the government needs to issue a mandate that all households must own at least one firearm. We will need a federal agency to ensure that people aren’t just buying cheap BB guns or .22 pistols, even though that may be all they need or want. It has to be 9mm or above, with .44 magnums getting a one-time tax credit on their own. Let’s pick an agency known for its aptitude on firearms and home protection to issue required annual certifications each year, without which the government will have to levy hefty fines. Which agency would do the best job? Hmmmm … I know! How about TSA? With their track record of excellence, we should have no problems implementing this mandate.
Don’t want to own a gun? Hey, no worries. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says citizens have the right to refuse to comply with mandates. The government will just seize some of your cash in fines, that’s all. Isn’t choice great? Those fines will go toward federal credits that will fund firearm purchases for the less well off, so that they can protect their homes as adequately as those who can afford guns on their own. Since they generally live in neighborhoods where police response is appreciably worse than their higher-earning fellow Americans, they need them more anyway. Besides — gun ownership is actually mentioned in the Constitution, unlike health care, which isn’t. Obviously, that means that the federal government should be funding gun ownership….
The Pilgrims could have benefited from sound theology which would have dissuaded their (and should ours) experiment with “communal” activities:
Many Americans believe socialism to be a form of social kindness by the government. But true socialism isn’t a social safety net. It is when the government controls most prices, businesses, property, and other aspects of economic life. The historical record of socialism has been wrecked or stagnating economies and flagrant human rights violations. The truth borne of a hundred years of hard experience is that people do not prosper in socialist countries.
A. PRIVATE PROPERTY
According to the teachings of the Bible, government should both document and protect the ownership of private property in a nation.
The Bible regularly assumes and reinforces a system in which property belongs to individuals, not to the government or to society as a whole.
We see this implied in the Ten Commandments, for example, because the eighth commandment, “You shall not steal” (Exod. 20:15), assumes that human beings will own property that belongs to them individually and not to other people. I should not steal my neighbor’s ox or donkey because it belongs to my neighbor, not to me and not to anyone else.
The tenth commandment makes this more explicit when it prohibits not just stealing but also desiring to steal what belongs to my neighbor:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exod. 20:17).
The reason I should not “covet” my neighbor’s house or anything else is that these things belong to my neighbor, not to me and not to the community or the nation.
This assumption of private ownership of property, found in this fundamental moral code of the Bible, puts the Bible in direct opposition to the communist system advocated by Karl Marx. Marx said:
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.
One reason why communism is so incredibly dehumanizing is that when private property is abolished, government controls all economic activity. And when government controls all economic activity, it controls what you can buy, where you will live, and what job you will have (and therefore what job you are allowed to train for, and where you go to school), and how much you will earn. It essentially controls all of life, and human liberty is destroyed. Communism enslaves people and destroys human freedom of choice. The entire nation becomes one huge prison. For this reason, it seems to me that communism is the most dehumanizing economic system ever invented by man.
Other passages of Scripture also support the idea that property should belong to individuals, not to “society” or to the government (except for certain property required for proper government purposes, such as government offices, military bases, and streets and highways). The Bible contains many laws concerning punishments for stealing and appropriate restitution for damage of another person’s farm animals or agricultural fields (for example, see Exod. 21:28-36; 22:1-15; Deut. 22:1-4; 23:24-25). Another commandment guaranteed that property boundaries would be protected: “You shall not move your neighbor’s landmark, which the men of old have set, in the inheritance that you will hold in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess” (Deut. 19:14). To move the landmark was to move the boundaries of the land and thus to steal land that belonged to one’s neighbor (compare Prov. 22:28; 23:10).
Another guarantee of the ownership of private property was the fact that, even if property was sold to someone else, in the Year of Jubilee it had to return to the family that originally owned it:
It shall be a Jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan (Lev. 25:10).
This is why the land could not be sold forever: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev. 25:23).
This last verse emphasizes the fact that private property is never viewed in the Bible as an absolute right, because all that people have is ultimately given to them by God, and people are viewed as God’s “stewards” to manage what he has entrusted to their care.
The earth is the LORD’S and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein (Ps. 24:1; compare Ps. 50:10-12; Hag. 2:8).
Yet the fact remains that, under the overall sovereign lordship of God himself, property is regularly said to belong to individuals, not to the government and not to “society” or the nation as a whole.
When Samuel warned the people about the evils that would be imposed upon them by a king, he emphasized the fact that the monarch, with so much government power, would “take” and “take” and “take” from the people and confiscate things for his own use:
So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day” (1 Sam. 8:10-18).
This prediction was tragically fulfilled in the story of the theft of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite by Ahab the wicked king and Jezebel, his even more wicked queen (see 1 Kings 21:1-29). The regular tendency of human governments is to seek to take control of more and more of the property of a nation that God intends to be owned and controlled by private individuals.
(Hat-tip to THE RENEGADE INSTITUTE FOR LIBERTY) When Hong Kong’s basic freedoms come under attack, newspaper publisher and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai finds himself in the crosshairs of the state and must choose between defending Hong Kong’s long-standing liberties, or his own freedom.
A copy of The Road To Serfdom was given to Mr. Lai. He — tearfully — said in this film, “it changed my life”
Jimmy Lai personifies Hong Kong’s entrepreneurial spirit. This spirit, coupled with an embrace of freedom, unleashed economic prosperity for Hong Kongers and made Jimmy a billionaire. Jimmy’s native China underwent a similar prosperity by undertaking an experiment with personal and economic freedoms, lifting an astounding 800 million Chinese out of poverty. Today, it’s a different story—and the stakes couldn’t be higher for Jimmy Lai, the citizens of Hong Kong, and the people of China.
Jimmy fled Maoist revolutionaries as a 12 year old and began a new life as a simple textile laborer in Hong Kong. Within 30 years he started a fashion house and built Giordano into an enormously successful clothing retail business with thousands of stores worldwide. In reaction to China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Jimmy launched Next Media and published Hong Kong’s most successful newspaper, Apple Daily. As guardian of freedom of speech and the press, Apple Daily provided an independent voice for Hong Kong following its 1997 transition from British rule to Chinese control.
Reassured by Beijing’s “one nation, two systems” approach, much of Hong Kong’s prosperity and freedom continued—until a palpable shift occurred under the leadership of Chinese president Xi Jinping. As China retreated from its “one nation, two systems” policy and began installing pro-Beijing leaders in Hong Kong, Jimmy became a leading voice against repressive policies. Jimmy could have fled but he chose to stay, marching alongside millions of his fellow Hong Kongers in defense of freedom and democracy. He was soon arrested and jailed. International banks froze his assets. Apple Daily was raided and key executives arrested. In June 2021, Apple Daily printed its final edition and shut its doors.
Today Jimmy perseveres in a Hong Kong prison cell awaiting trial. Featuring Lord Christopher Patten, Rev. Robert Sirico, Mary Kissel, Victoria Hui, Joey Siu, William McGurn, Lord David Alton and others, The Hong Konger chronicles Jimmy’s story of heroic sacrifice and symbol of the freedom movement. From his own testimony as well as through exclusive interviews with diplomats, citizen activists, scholars, and friends from across the globe, one thing becomes clear: Jimmy’s fate is in our hands. His cause must not die in a prison cell—for freedom is not merely his cause, but the cause of all Hong Kongers, the Chinese people, and indeed all humanity.
Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917–June 5, 2001) served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. Colonel Fletcher Prouty explains how oil was falsely classified a ”fossil fuel” in 1892 and how that deception was advanced further in the 70’s by Kissinger and Rockefeller.
This is a story for all the Liberal Environmentalists that said we were going to run out of oil by the 80’s… the Earth always will produce it, it is an unquenchable source. When the earth stops producing it, the planet will be dead, and man will be long gone (speaking in secular terms).
New Evidence to Support the abiotic nature of oil rather than its fossil fuel history.
In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth’s surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth’s rotation.
Saturn’s moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to a team of Johns Hopkins University scientists, adding to evidence that oil is not biological in origin.
The scientists at the Laurel, Md., institution were reporting this week on data collected from NASA’s Cassini probe.
“Several hundred lakes or seas have been discovered, of which dozens are estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than the entire known oil and gas reserves on Earth,” wrote lead scientist Ralph Lorenz of the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory in the Jan. 29 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters.
Lorenz also reported dark dunes running along the equator cover 20 percent of Titan’s surface, comprising a volume of hydrocarbon material several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves.
“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material – it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” Lorenz wrote.
Lorenz used the term “organic chemicals” in the sense that hydrocarbons are traditionally included within the study of “organic chemistry,” not to imply any of the hydrocarbons discovered on Titan are of biological origin.
Commenting on the research findings, the European Space Agency said, “Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 thousand million tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting.”
WND previously reported NASA conclusions that the methane found on Titan is not of biological origin.
[….]
WND also reported scientists examining the liquid hydrocarbons exuding from vents in the Lost City hydrothermal field along the Mid-Atlantic Range at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean are abiotic in origin.
That is an old article… here are some links to a site I have enjoyed throughout the years, WATTS UP WITH THAT? They are a little newer:
As a summation to the below, this comment wraps up the general idea well:
Now for the bad news:
Coal Find Could Fuel UK For Centuries: Vast Deposits Totalling Up To 23Trillion Tonnes Found Under The North Sea (DAILY MAIL)
In the sea bed between Britain and Holland alone there is up to 23 trillion ton worth of coal (which could be burned ‘on location’, leaving the coal were it is).
Up until 2009 merely 0.1 trillion ton of crude oil have been consumed so far in the entire history.
In other words, there is more than enough to fry us all thousand times over….
In other words, (a) we won’t run out of oil n gas n coal anytime soon, and (b) we will always create workable tech to help power society… minus the threat from the eco-fascists.
* ….Setting aside the extensive evidence correlating Pleistocene, Pliocene and Miocene reservoir “rocks” in the Gulf of Mexico to deeper Lower Tertiary, Cretaceous and Jurassic source rocks in and around the Gulf (Hood et al., 2002), what if those weren’t the source rocks? What if the oil was actually migrating up from the lower crust or mantle?
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels (whom, most likely never uttered those words)
Just take TWITTER FILES 20 as one example of how it was “vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent”.
However, there is wrinkle in this “all Fed” theory… I would say many Fed infiltrated group…. and it is this: remember when they 1st showed up in that U-Haul truck a while back? 31 members were arrested. Faces and names were made public:
“[N]either U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham wrote in the report.
“I think it reveals that Americans are right to distrust the government—even civil servants people in the government,” Dershowitz toldTHE EPOCH TIMES
Imagine someone told you that in the run-up to a U.S. presidential election, the FBI tried to undermine a candidate at the behest of the opposing campaign by cooking up a false narrative of collusion with Moscow.
And let’s say this conspiracy implicated not just the FBI but also the White House, Justice Department, and CIA — and that nearly the entire corporate press went along with it, gleefully spreading the false narrative that this candidate was a Russian agent, running story after story of fabricated nonsense in a coordinated effort to ensure the opposing candidate won.
In normal times, you’d scoff at such an outlandish story, dismiss it as the plot of some half-baked Tom Clancy novel. That could never happen in America, you’d say, where we have free and fair elections, the rule of law, and so on. And anyway, the media would never allow it to happen. They’d be too invested in exposing the conspiracy and claiming, rightly, a Watergate-type story of their very own.
But you’d be wrong. All of that really happened in 2016, recounted in all its jaw-dropping detail in Special Counsel John Durham’s 306-page report, released Monday after nearly four years in the making. The big takeaway from the report is that the Obama-era FBI launched a full investigation of the Trump campaign, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, in the summer of 2016 despite having zero evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia.
Not only that, but officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including President Obama, knew that the entire false narrative that Trump was colluding with Moscow was completely made up by the Clinton campaign in an effort to weaponize the federal government against Trump and distract from Hillary Clinton’s own email server scandal.
The Durham report recounts how in August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and other senior administration officials on what the report calls the “Clinton Plan intelligence,” a scheme Clinton approved in July 2016 “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
In other words, all of these senior officials, some of the most powerful people in the federal government, knew as early as the summer of 2016 that the Clinton campaign had a plan to whip up a scandal by falsely alleging collusion between Trump and Moscow. But all of them ignored this important fact when the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane around the same time on the basis of far-fetched claims that Trump was a Russian agent — claims that were made in the Steele dossier, a slapdash piece of oppo-research the Clinton campaign itself had paid for.
The FBI knew all of this, as did Brennan, yet they ignored it to keep Crossfire Hurricane alive, along with the narrative that Trump was in bed with Russia. That fall, the FBI used the baseless dossier to acquire FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. All of this was eventually leaked to a compliant and incurious new media, and voila! Clinton’s Trump-Russia scandal was born — without a shred of evidence, and indeed despite significant evidence to the contrary.
My colleagues at The Federalist have detailed the shocking contents of the Durham report (here, here, here, and here), but taking a step back from the dizzying array of details, every American needs to understand that what made all of this possible was the stupefying level of corruption and partisan malevolence deep inside our federal government.
The Russia-collusion hoax was concocted and brought to life only because the most powerful people in the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community wanted an excuse to weaponize the federal government against Donald Trump. They didn’t want him to be president, simple as that. It didn’t matter to them what voters wanted; they thought they knew better. So they felt any abuse of power was justified in preventing Trump from winning the White House.
[….]
Beyond the shamelessness of the media and the corruption of government officials, the Durham report is a sobering reminder that we can’t sustain a self-governing republic under these conditions. When the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the federal government can be used as a weapon to undermine an outsider candidate for high office, it means our republic is in grave danger.
It means, too, that it would be better if we had no FBI at all than the corrupt agency we have now, which sees fit to traffic in actual disinformation, spread conspiracy theories, and throttle the democratic process whenever a candidate comes along who threatens the status quo. That’s the real lesson of the Durham report, and we ignore it at our peril.
Prosecutor John Durham has finally concluded his report and the FBI’s probe into alleged Trump ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign season. And the findings are HUGE — despite what some in the mainstream media may say. In this clip, Glenn explains exactly what the Durham Report says, what it means for the FBI, and why Glenn wouldn’t be happy until ‘people GO TO JAIL.’
MORE:
Democrats PANIC As Durham Report PROVES Soft Coup Against Trump, Media Tries To COVER IT UP (TIM CAST)
Sen. Josh Hawley on Durham Report: Hillary Needs to be Prosecuted – FBI Needs to Be Disbanded (GATEWAY PUNDIT)
BREAKING: Nunes reacts to release of Durham report (RED PILL PATRIOTS)
This is a long “Preface” before the other main parts of reading lying ahead of the patient coffee drinkers/readers. And it comes via the indomitable Thomas Sowell:
When I first saw a book with the title, “White Girl Bleed A Lot” by Colin Flaherty, I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author.
That is because I had encountered that phrase before, while doing research for the four new chapters on intellectuals and race that I added to the revised edition of my own book, “Intellectuals and Society,” published this year.
That phrase was spoken by a member of a mob of young blacks who attacked whites at random at a Fourth of July celebration in Milwaukee last year. What I was appalled to learn, in the course of my research, was that such race riots have occurred in other cities across the United States in recent years — and that the national mainstream media usually ignore these riots.
Where the violence is too widespread and too widely known locally to be ignored, both the local media and public officials often describe what happened as unspecified “young people” attacking unspecified victims for unspecified reasons. But videos of the attacks often reveal both the racial nature of these attacks and the racial hostility expressed by the attackers.
Are race riots not news?
Ignoring racial violence only guarantees that it will get worse. The Chicago Tribune has publicly rationalized its filtering out of any racial identification of attackers and their victims, even though the media do not hesitate to mention race when decrying statistical disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates.
Such mob attacks have become so frequent in Chicago that officials promoting conventions there have recently complained to the mayor that the city is going to lose business if such widespread violence is not brought under control.
But neither these officials nor the mayor nor most of the media use that four-letter word, “race.” It would not be politically correct or politically convenient in an election year.
Reading Colin Flaherty’s book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is even greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities across America.
Flaherty’s previous writings have won him praise and awards, but this book has been met largely with silence or abuse. However much ignoring the ugly realities that his book reveals may serve the interests of the media or politicians, a cover-up is a huge disservice to everyone else — whether black, white or whatever.
Even the young hoodlums who launch these mass attacks on strangers would be better off to be stopped now, rather than continue on a path of escalating violence that can lead to a lifetime behind bars or to the execution chamber.
The dangers to the nation as a whole are an even bigger problem. The truth has a way of eventually coming out, in spite of media silence and politicians’ spin. If the truth becomes widely known, and a white backlash follows, turning one-way race riots into two-way race riots, then a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge can spiral out of control, as has already happened in too many other countries around the world.
Most blacks and most whites in the United States today get along with each other. But what is chilling is how often in history racial or ethnic groups that co-existed peacefully for generations — often as neighbors — have suddenly turned on each other with lethal violence.
In the middle of the 20th century, Sri Lanka had a level of mutual respect and even friendship between its majority and minority communities that was rightly held up to the world as a model. Yet this situation degenerated over the years into polarization and violence that escalated into a civil war that lasted for decades, with unspeakable atrocities on both sides.
All it took were clever demagogues and gullible followers. We already have both. What it will take to nip in the bud the small but widely spreading race riots will be some serious leadership in many quarters and that rarest of all things in politics, honesty.
Race hustlers and mob inciters like Al Sharpton represent such polarizing forces in America today. Yet Sharpton has become a White House adviser, and Attorney General Eric Holder has been photographed literally embracing him.
I read the below NATIONAL REVIEW article because of ACE OF SPADES this morning. He noted this in his “morning post”. I will excerpt the entire NA article as well as a large portion of ACE’s post. Strap in, this is a reading post:
Good morning, kids. Over 50 years ago, a little known leftist who, given the right circumstances could have risen to take his place in the hall of infamy among the world’s bloodiest leftists was, fortunately for us, stopped cold after he and his followers only got to slaughter a handful of people. His heroes, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and second tier thugs like the Castros, Ceaucescu, Honecker, Pol Pot, Mugabe and others collectively consigned well over 100 million lives to mass graves and crematoria over the course of 100 years. And their heirs are still going.
This individual, perhaps some of you might have guessed was Charles Manson. Poor Charlie. He was 50 years ahead of his time. Sick and whacked out as he was, given the nature of today’s Democrat Party, the media and academia, and the state of our society, culture and government, had he caught a break like Billy “free as a bird, guilty as sin” Ayers, he might very well be near the top of the heap today.
Doubt me? Look at what is happening both in terms of what this party is doing with the erasure of our border, the de-criminalization of crime and the persecution of that segment of society that has become, to put it mildly, politically disfavored, and worse, those who actively fight back. Manson’s idea was to go on a killing spree and leave clues that pointed to the Black Panthers, and when the dust settled after their ultimate victory in the ensuing race war, blacks would be too stupid to govern themselves and so he and his ilk would emerge from the Southern California desert to rule them.
[So-called quote-unquote “president”] Joe Biden told black graduates at Howard University on Saturday that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy,” adding that he was not just saying that because they were black.
Biden made his remarks, ironically, during a passage about national unity (via White House transcript):
But on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to st- — to stand up for the best in us. To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat. To stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did in my Inaugural Address — to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. (Applause.)
And I’m not saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say it wherever I go.
To stand up for truth over lies — lies told for power and profit.
Biden also repeated the “fine people hoax,” repeating — almost verbatim — his false claim, recycled constantly since his campaign launch in 2019 — the lie that then-President Donald Trump praised neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.”
MEDIA BREAK
This is my shortest version of this “blood libel” — rightly called:
Host Jonathan Capehart asked, Today marks one year since white supremacists opened fire in a black neighborhood at the Top Supermarket in Buffalo. The president, yesterday at his commencement address for Howard University graduates, called white supremacy the major domestic terrorist threat in this country. Is that correct? ”
Mayorkas said, “It tragically is. And the terrorism context, domestic violent extremism is our greatest threat right now. Individuals are driven to violence because of ideologies of hate, anti-government sentiment, false narratives, personal grievances. Regrettably, we have seen a rise in white supremacy. The principal under lying our work is that when one community is targeted, Jonathan, when one community is targeted, we as a country are targeted.”
Jordan Neely was living his life by a narrative that facilitated violence and human decay. Living on the street, begging and threatening those who didn’t give, taking drugs, hurting, rather than contributing to society, were all acceptable plot points in that narrative. Those who give money to homeless panhandlers subsidize this narrative. Leftists who denigrate America and despise those of us who “work hard and play by the rules” advance this narrative.
Neely was not the only New Yorker living with trauma. On January 15, 2022, Michelle Go, an Asian-American woman “who did everything right,” was pushed in front of a subway train by an assailant sharing significant demographic details with Neely. Martial Simon was a homeless black man and said to be mentally ill. The subway murder of a good woman, Michelle Go, received a fraction of the attention allotted to Neely.
In April, 2022, Frank James mounted a terror attack in a subway car. He shot ten people. James was also black. On April 11, 2023, a teenager was shot dead on the subway; authorities say his death is most likely related to gang violence in a largely black housing project. On or before December 10, 2022, a man was stabbed to death on the subway. On October 23, 2022, video was released showing a black man shoving a man onto a subway track.
The New York City subway system is a deadly place. Crimes are disproportionately committed by black men. Passengers take that information with them when they enter the subway. When Neely, as reports indicate, began shouting in an irrational and threatening manner, passengers went into “fight or flight” mode. The three men who restrained Neely worked to keep him immobilized until police arrived.
The New York Times has been working hard at selling Neely as a Christ figure and cruel, cold, capitalist, white supremacist America as the assassin who did him in. In a surprise move, New York Times readers are having none of it.
“A Subway Killing Stuns and Divides New Yorkers,” the Times reported, on May 4, 2023. Neely’s death, some say, “was a heinous act of public violence to be swiftly prosecuted, and represented a failure by the city to care for people with serious mental illness.” The short article referenced “mental illness” five times and “emotional illness” one time. Clearly, “mental illness” is the new euphemism for “violent, anti-social criminality.”
Times readers, in the comments section, voiced a very different narrative from that of the Times itself. The following excerpts are from the nine comments voted “most popular” by Times readers. . .
. . . “Everyone who rides the subway and everyone outside of a few far left and/or craving attention and/or virtue signaling people agree: it’s a tragedy but the responsibility lies with the city because people should not be threatened or harassed or scared on the subways. No one has a ‘right’ to do that. The ex-Marine was attempting to protect others from someone who was violating and threatening others. It’s a tragedy, but the Marine did nothing wrong.”
“no mention that he had … punched a 67 year old woman in the face.”
“Contrary to progressive doctrine, law abiding people do not have to pretend that drug addicts are victims or that violent mentally ill folks pose no threat.”
“AOC is a member of Congress, and knows nothing about this case other than what she’s read or heard, just like the rest of us. That she feels comfortable pre-judging the case speaks volumes. And remember that Al Sharpton also called for the district attorney to be charged in the Twana Brawley case. . . ”
. . . There are thousands more upvotes awarded to hundreds of more comments on this and other Times articles. The overwhelming vox populi agree: Daniel Penny was a Good Samaritan. Jordan Neely was a threat. His death was a tragedy, but larger forces ended his life, and Penny cannot be held responsible for those larger forces. I identify those larger forces as the narratives by which people choose to live, and teach their children to live.
When it comes to Neely, both the Left and the Right claim that they want to live in a society with more Good Samaritans. Only one side is telling the truth. The Left is lying. Here’s why. Good Samaritans, to do their work, require a society where members share and act on the same narrative, and that has to be a narrative that supports Good Samaritan actions. If you want to take from society, you have to give to society. Neely took, but he gave back violence, self-indulgence, self-destruction, and hate.
Leftists support the narratives that killed Neely even more surely than the Marine’s restraint. Broken families, no standards for behavior, a complete rejection of personal responsibility for anti-social acts, drug use, living on the street, panhandling, refusing needed mental health treatment, insistence that America is an unjust place and cultivating despair, are all championed by the Left.
MSNBC host Symone Sanders gave a dire warning to her followers on Saturday, claiming that the Supreme Court was poised to make a series of radical decisions — ranging from outlawing Black History to allowing daycares to refuse Jewish children.
Sanders, who served as a prominent member of Joe Biden’s campaign before becoming the chief spokeswoman for [spurious] Vice President Kamala Harris, argued that it was “not hyperbole” to suggest that the current court might use the cases before it to do these things and worse. . .
. . . “Given the track record of this court, you all, this is not hyperbole. Dr. Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time,” she concluded. “We have seen the damage that this conservative Supreme Court majority can do, so brace yourselves, folks, the decisions are coming.”
That right there would be comedy gold, considering everything we have experienced since the coming of Obama. Except, everything this cheap shit-whore is bitching about is exactly what Americans – real ones without the hyphenations and pronouns – have been enduring in schools and the workplace with growing and alarming frequency. And now in the courts, as Daniel Penny and Donald Trump to name but a few are about to discover.
Somewhere in hell, ol’ Charlie Manson is shaking his head, and rubbing his hands in glee.
This made me hunt down an article I remember reading when Manson died. It is at THE NATIONAL REVIEW (November 20, 2017) and is worth reading through. IMHO:
The history of the postwar period is the history of the struggle against Communism. What’s sometimes forgotten — conveniently forgotten — is that our victory in that struggle was far from assured, and that a substantial swath of the Western intelligentsia and much of its celebrity culture was on the other side. It wasn’t just Jane Fonda and Noam Chomsky, Walter Duranty and Lincoln Steffens. (“I have been to the future,” Steffens wrote after a visit to the Soviet Union, “and it works.”) Eventually, 100 million people would die under Communism as part of the longest and widest campaign of mass murder in recorded human history. As a phenomenon of specifically nuclear terror, the Cold War lasted from 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb thanks to the help of the American leftists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, until 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.
Precisely in the middle of that period came the strange career of Charles Milles Manson, who has just died in a California hospital at the age of 83.
Manson’s death, like his life, was wrapped up in the radical politics of the 1960s. He died of natural causes, his execution having been set aside as part of the temporarily successful progressive campaign against the death penalty in the 1970s.
Just as it is easy to forget how pro-Soviet the American Left was at times, it is easy to forget how pro-Manson American radicals were. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” That was the assessment of Bernardine Dohrn, the champagne radical who, with her husband, Bill Ayers, participated in a campaign of domestic terrorism, including bombings, and later became cozy with Barack Obama, hosting events for the aspiring politician in her home. The “pigs” she referred to included Sharon Tate, an actress who was eight months pregnant at the time. She was murdered and mutilated. The word “PIG” was scrawled on the wall in her blood, and the father of her child, filmmaker Roman Polanski (to this day still on the run for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl), posed in front of that scene for a Life magazine photographer. Dohrn would later join a very prestigious Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin, and later worked as a professor of law at Northwestern University — remarkable accomplishments for a woman without a law license. She passed the bar, and Illinois was willing to overlook her criminal conviction, but she refused to apologize for her role in the terrorist campaign that resulted in several deaths. She and her husband became legal guardians of the child of two of their colleagues, who went to prison on murder charges for their role in a homicidal armored-car robbery carried out by the May the 19th Communist Organization, a clique of New York leftists who named their organization in honor of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday.
Dohrn wasn’t the only Manson admirer of her time. Other Weathermen hoisted a “Manson Power” banner in 1969 when they issued their declaration of war on the United States, and Rolling Stone’s coverage of the man and his crimes — it dedicated a special issue to him — was at times fawning. The magazine depicted him on its cover as the thing he’d always wanted to be: a rock star. A radical newspaper named him “Man of the Year.” Jerry Rubin, the celebrated anti-war activist, said: “I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV.” That cherub face later had a swastika carved into it. “His words and courage inspired us,” Rubin said.
Manson believed he was sent to inspire an apocalyptic race war. The radicals of the period wanted a race war, too, and they sometimes got a little bit of one: There were 159 race riots in 1967. In Detroit alone, 43 people died in those riots. Lyndon Johnson was so spooked he sent in the 82nd Airborne to put a lid on it.
Riots and snipers. Assassinations. Lyndon Johnson. Dohrn and Ayers and “Days of Rage.” Rubin and his anti-Vietnam marches. Rolling Stone’s batty insistence that Charles Manson was a principled social critic. Manson’s cult-messiah shtick. It was all of a piece: The 1960s were an almost entirely joyless period. Go back and look at those Woodstock pictures: Nobody was having any fun. What you see in those pictures is the desperation of people trying to convince themselves they are having a good time. Even the music was joyless, Jimi Hendrix letting his virtuosity go to rot while plonking out a honking flatted fifth, the ugliest chord in music (“diabolus in musica,” they call it) to open “Purple Haze,” the great anthem of the era, a song about confusion. “Nowadays people don’t want you to sing good,” Hendrix wrote in a letter to his father. “They want you to sing sloppy and have a good beat to your songs. That’s what angle I’m going to shoot for. That’s where the money is. So just in case about three or four months from now you might hear a record by me which sounds terrible, don’t feel ashamed, just wait until the money rolls in because every day people are singing worse and worse on purpose and the public buys more and more records.” The Sex Pistols were right about rock ’n’ roll being a swindle.
There were exceptions, of course. As the cities burned and the war raged and the trains to Siberia were packed full of dissidents, the Beach Boys released 20/20, an album in which they attempted to recapture some of their early magic. But it was hard going: Brian Wilson, the genius behind the group, was in a psychiatric hospital at the time. The first single was “Do It Again,” a surf-y revisitation of their early sound, followed by “Bluebirds Over the Mountain,” a pop song from the 1950s recorded by, among others, Ritchie Valens.
John Lennon, who ought to have known a cynical operator when he saw one, described Manson as a man who ‘took children in when nobody else would.’
The B-side to that single was “Never Learn Not to Love,” written by Charles Manson. He’d wormed his way into Brian Wilson’s social circle by organizing orgies for him. He wasn’t much of a songwriter, but his songs are still occasionally performed and recorded. The impeccably progressive Henry Rollins produced an album of songs performed by Manson, though it never was released. The two were pen pals for a while. Neil Young had pitched Manson’s music to Warner Bros. John Lennon, who ought to have known a cynical operator when he saw one, described Manson as a man who “took children in when nobody else would.” Not that he was a fan of publicity-stunt mass murders: “I just think a lot of the things he says are true.”
Of course they fell for it. The idealist con is one of the oldest and most lucrative hustles going. The idiot children of the 1960s talked up Charles Manson for the same reason Langston Hughes wrote paeans to Joseph Stalin, for the same reason American progressives still take the side of the Rosenbergs and still think Alger Hiss was framed. Langston Hughes wasn’t a “liberal in a hurry” — he signed a letter of support for Stalin’s purges. Noam Chomsky spent years denying the holocaust in Cambodia, insisting it was the invention of American propagandists. After Fidel Castro was done murdering and pillaging his way through Cuban history, Barack Obama could only find it in his heart to say: “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.”
Pass the crumpets, Bernardine.
Bernardine Dohrn recently gave a speech in Chicago in which she proposed turning the Cook County jail into a park as part of “a city — a world — without jails.” It didn’t quite have the poetry of her earlier work: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.” Of what possible use could a jail be in the world imagined by such a mind?
PIGS, she called the dead woman and her dead baby. The Weathermen dig it, and what’s another skeleton or two, or another 100 million, beneath the foundations of Utopia? Lenin had a few thoughts on how to go about making an omelet.
“These children that come at you with knives — you taught them,” Manson said. “I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”
