Author: Papa Giorgio

The Crusades vs. The Three Caliphates (Moral Equivalence)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted September 2014

Other posts on similar topics:

As an aside, a great post to include in these studies is over at WINTERY KNIGHT and responds to these four myths:

  • Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
  • Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
  • Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
  • Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

There was nothing wrong, in principle, with the Crusades. They were an appropriate (if belated and badly managed) response to the conquest of the Holy Land by Islam. Did marauding 11th century armies inevitably commit outrages? They certainly did. In fact, that still happens today. But the most unfortunate thing about the Crusades is that they failed. (Powerline)

CHRISTIANITY (Crusades)

  • 9 Total Crusades from 1095-1272 A.D;
  • The crusades lasted about 177 years;
  • About 1-million deaths – this includes: disease, the selling into slavery, and died en-route to the Holy land;
  • About 5,650 deaths a year.

ATHEISM (Stalin)

  • His rise to power in 1927 lasted until his death in 1953;
  • Stalin’s reign was 26-years;
  • Middle road estimates of deaths are 40-to-50-million;
  • That clocks in at about 1,923,076 deaths a year.

(Some put the death toll per-week by Stalin at 40,000 every week — even during “peacetime”)

ISLAM (killing Hindus)

  • 80-million killed;
  • 500-year war;
  • 160,000 a year.

(As an aside… about 5.714 [to be clear, that is: five-point-seven one four people] people were killed a year by the Spanish Inquisition if you take the highest number over its 350-year long stretch if you use the leading historian on the topic.)

I have some maps to help make my case… and we know that conversion in these days was due to duress, like it is today. This first map puts a time-table to the 3-caliphates:

Around this same time (and you mentioned this in the convo I viewed) this was going on:

Defensive

…the Crusades were a defensive war, not an aggressive grab for land and loot. In fact, crusading was an expensive and costly endeavor. After the success of the First Crusade nearly all the Crusaders went home. Virtually none of them recovered the cost of crusading. If one wanted to get rich, crusading was definitely not the best route to make it happen. Many atrocities occurred in the Crusades.

Understandably, war can bring out the worst in people. Even during World War II some American soldiers committed atrocities, but this does not mean the war was conducted so soldiers could commit crimes. [me: nor does this mean the whole of the meta-good of the conflict is undone] (Sean McDowell)

[Like the video says: Islamic jihad was enslaving Kafirs, the Crusaders were freeing them — key distinction.]

▼ The Third Crusade (1188-1192). This crusade was proclaimed by Pope Gregory VIII in the wake of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem and destruction of the Crusader forces of Hattin in 1187. This venture failed to retake Jerusalem, but it did strengthen Outremer, the crusader state that stretched along the coast of the Levant. (The Politically incorrect guide to Islam-and the Crusades, by Robert Spencer, pp. 147-148.)

The almost Political Correct myth is that the crusades were an unprovoked attack by Europe against the Islamic world are dealt with in part:

▼ The conquest of Jerusalem in 638 stood as the beginning of centuries of Muslim aggression, and Christians in the Holy Land faced an escalating spiral of persecution. A few examples: Early in the eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies – except for a small number who converted to Islam; and Muslims demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of the Resurrection if they didn’t pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the anti-religious tax (jizya) that Christians had to pay and forbade Christians to engage in religious instruction to others, even their own children. Brutal subordinations and violence became the rules of the day for Christians in the Holy Land. In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered the hands of Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be stamped with a distinctive symbol. Conversions to Christianity were dealt with particularly harshly. In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered the Bethlehem monastery of Saint Theodosius, killing many more monks. Other monasteries in the region suffered the same fate. Early in the ninth century, the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers of Christians fled to Constantinople and other Christians cities. More persecutions in 923 saw additional churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went on a Palm Sunday rampage in Jerusalem, plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection. (The Politically incorrect guide to Islam-and the Crusades, by Robert Spencer, pp. 122-123.)

One person (my pastor at the time) said to paint a picture of the crusaders in a single year in history is like showing photo’s and video of Hitler hugging children and giving flowers to them and then showing photo’s and video of the Allies attacking the German army. It completely forgets what Hitler and Germany had done prior.

Well-known academic and go-to source for U.S. intelligence and military agencies, Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University, insists that nothing bad was happening during the “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” between Muslims and Christians prior to the First Crusade, which was launched by cynical and evil Europeans, forever turning Islam against the West. (PJ-MEDIA)

This second map show there were raids, violence, and rape that reached close to Paris itself:

So far, the Crusades being an “out-of-the-blue” event is not historical at all.

Rather, it was people in the West stopping the Muslim horde.

Literally!

Here is a 35-minute interview with Professor Clay Jones on the Crusades:

As well as a 6-minute section where Michael Medved was interviewing Robert Spencer. About half way through a call is taken… your typical “party-line”

Below is a comparison I used for a class at church comparing Muhammad and Jesus:

See my JESUS vs. Muhammad Post (Download my PDF Sunday school handout)

Not only that, but to say that the Crusades were immoral IS to borrow from the Judeo-Christian ethic. I make this point in a recent question/challenge sent to me by an atheist which I posted on here.

There is nothing in the pantheist worldview (Buddhism, Hinduism, Janism, Taoism, etc) which can account for people saying, “you [or ‘the church’] ought not have done that.” In fact, when I updated my chapter to reflect a recent event, I said this:

It is laughable that some defend this doctrine tooth and nail. However, if really believed, they would come to realize there is no real good or evil! The Inquisitions, the Mumbai terror killings at the hands of Muslims, as examples, were merely the outgrowth of the victim’s previous karmic lives. Therefore, when those here defend karmic destiny in other posts speak of the horrible atrocities committed by religion, they are not consistently living out their philosophy of life and death, which are illusory. The innocent victims of the Inquisitions, terror attacks, tsunamis, or Crusades then are merely being paid back for something they themselves did in a previous life. It is the actions said people did prior that creates much of the evil upon them now. So in the future when people who are believers in reincarnation say that Christianity isn’t what it purports to be because of the evil it has committed in the past, you should remind them that evil is merely an illusion (maya – Hinduism; sunyata – Buddhism) to be overcome, as karmic reincarnation demands.

(Reincarnation vs. the Laws of Logic)

And there is nothing in evolutionary naturalism either to denote an action being immoral. As the first of the links above clearly show. Only if you have the Judeo-Christian God in play do you have such a case to make. In other words you have to assume that which you wish to show false.

One last note on this differing direction of the convo. The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name.

It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [Christians] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana), and the church is liable for the unjustified murder of about (taking the high number here) 300,000-women over about a 300 year period. A blight on Christianity? Certainly. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course.

Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no evolutionary/naturalistic natural law is being violated in other words (as non-theists reduce everything to natural law — materialism). However, and this is key, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law. (A condensing of Gregory Koukl’s, “The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?“)

In fact, A recent comprehensive compilation of the history of human warfare, Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict. So, what atheists have considered to be ‘most’ really amounts to less than 7% of all wars. It is interesting to note that 66 of these wars (more than 50%) involved Islam, which did not even exist as a religion for the first 3,000 years of recorded human warfare. Even the Seven Years’ War, widely recognized to be “religious” in motivation, noting that the warring factions were not necessarily split along confessional lines as much as along secular interests.

The above paragraph is an adaptation of sorts from these two sources:

  • Alan Axelrod & Charles Phillips, Encyclopedia of Wars, Facts on File, November 2004
  • John Entick, The General History of the Later War, Volume 3, 1763, p. 110.

John Quincy Adams is worth reading at greater length on the topic, as he provides some insight into what has been going on in Iraq now that Obama has prematurely removed our troops:

▼ In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, […..] Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST. – TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant … While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.

Winston Churchill deserves a longer hearing too:

▼ “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

Islam has not changed over the centuries. All that has changed is that never before have we been ruled by people who take Islam’s side against us. That is why the Marines were created in fact… the Barbary Wars. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (ECC 1:9). While other religions has entered modernity and rejected claims by men to get closer to their founding doctrine. Like what Jesus ACTUALLY teaches versus the guy in the pulpit… which was why it was illegal to own a Bible in parts of Italy all the way to 1870. Those in charge didn’t want the words of their Founder to be read.

People like Luther and Calvin read it, and read it well.

Price Gouging During Emergencies | Are There Benefits?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Updated Today, originally posted March of 2020

Reposting for recent story.

FIRST, here is the article Larry Elder referenced in the audio above regarding the Chicago fire: “Lessons from the Chicago Fire.” WALTER WILLIAMS gives an excellent example of the benefits of price “gouging” (supply and demand) in helping families:

…Here’s a which-is-better question for you. Suppose a hotel room rented for $79 a night prior to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Based on that price, an evacuating family of four might rent two adjoining rooms. When they arrive at the hotel, they find the rooms rent for $200; they decide to make do with one room. In my book, that’s wonderful. The family voluntarily opted to make a room available for another family who had to evacuate or whose home was destroyed. Demagogues will call this price-gouging, but I ask you, which is preferable: a room available at $200 or a room unavailable at $79? Rising prices get people to voluntarily economize on goods and services rendered scarcer by the disaster.

After Hurricane Katrina struck, gasoline prices shot up almost a dollar nearly overnight. Some people have been quick to call this price-gouging, particularly since wholesalers and retailers were charging the higher price for gasoline already purchased and in their tanks prior to the hurricane. The fact of business is that what a seller paid for something doesn’t necessarily determine its selling price. Put in a bit more sophisticated way: Historical costs have nothing to do with selling price. For example, suppose you maintained a 10-pound inventory of coffee in your cupboard. When I ran out, you’d occasionally sell me a pound for $2. Suppose there’s a freeze in Brazil destroying much of the coffee crop, driving coffee prices to $5 a pound. Then I come around to purchase coffee. Are you going to charge me $2 a pound, what you paid for it, or $5, what it’s going to cost you to restock your coffee inventory?

[….]

Politicians of both parties have rushed in to exploit public ignorance and emotion. Last week Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (Democrat) threatened to prosecute gas companies. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (Republican) is threatening legal action against what he called “unconscionable pricing” by hotels. Alabama Attorney General Troy King (Republican) promises to vigorously prosecute businesses that significantly increase prices during the state of emergency. The Bush administration has called for the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to look for evidence of price-gouging, and Congress plans to hold hearings on oil company “price-gouging.”

There’s an important downside to these political attacks on producers. What about the next disaster? How much sense does it make for producers to make the extra effort to provide goods and services if they know they risk prosecution for charging what might be seen as “unconscionable prices”? Politicians would serve us better by focusing their energies on tax-gouging.

Economist Walter E Williams explains how what can appear as price gouging is actually the free market working to meet the needs of those in distress.

Larry Elder Eulogizes the Fruits of a Peanut Farmer

Published by Papa Giorgio

A devastating look at the fruit of the “peanut tree” via Larry Elder

Here are my “eulogy” posts on Carter (most are flashbacks):

Jim Jones and His Utopian Goals (+ Jimmy Carter)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(UPDATED 2020 and today [2025] – first posted late 2010)

Jim Jones was a hard-core atheist/socialist. It wasn’t a “religious cult,” rather, it was a cult in Marxian ideology. Here is one example from a sermon of his:

Remember, as NATIONAL REVIEW makes the point, “Willie Brown, Walter Mondale, and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter ranked high among his [Jim Jones] supporters.” Continuing with the line of historical connections between “Leftism” and Jim Jones, NR also clearly reports that the media still gets their biased views mixed up with reality:

…But the first draft of history depicted the political fanatics as Christian fanatics, despite the group’s explicit atheism and distribution of Bibles in Jonestown for bathroom use. The words “fundamentalist Christianity” were used in a New York Times article to describe Jones’s preaching. The Associated Press called the dead “religious zealots.” Specials on CBS and NBC at the time neglected to mention the Marxism that animated Peoples Temple.

Beyond the ideology that inspired Peoples Temple’s demise, the media whitewashed the politicians who aided and abetted them.

Learning that San Francisco mayor George Moscone appointed Jim Jones to the city’s Housing Authority Commission, a body of which he quickly became chairman, piqued my curiosity, which led to my writing Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. This revelation, particularly shocking in light of the fate of his tenants in Jonestown, led me to come across this: Willie Brown, who would become the speaker of the California State Assembly and then mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Harvey Milk described Jonestown as “a beautiful retirement community” helping to “alleviating the world food crisis.” California lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally actually made a pilgrimage to Jonestown that led to a gushing reaction typical of ideological tourists.

The politically inspired delusions of San Francisco Democrats proved contagious. Jimmy Carter’s running mate, Walter Mondale, met with Jim Jones in San Francisco in 1976. Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, found Jones so impressive that she campaigned with him, ate with him, allowed him to introduce her during a campaign speech, telephoned him, and put him in touch with her sister-in-law, Ruth Carter Stapleton. Friends in high places suppressed investigations in the United States, misled officials in Guyana into dismissing allegations against the lunatic in their midst, and biased State Department hands into siding with Jones in his fight with outraged relatives of the captives in his concentration camp….

THE CITY JOURNAL has a short review of Daniel Flynn’s book, “Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.”

17th Century American Genocide | Iroquois

Published by Papa Giorgio

“If anyone in seventeenth-century America can be consid­ered genocidal,
it should be the Iroquois, rather than the French or English.”
~ Jeff Fynn-Paul ~

The Brutality of Ancient American Tribe – The Iroquois and what tactics did they employ? This video explores the historical Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee, and their formidable strategies in warfare and diplomacy. Join us as we delve into the brutal and sophisticated methods used by the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes, along with the later addition of the Tuscarora.

Thomas Sowell discusses the Iroquois Confederacy.

I did some reading on vacation and wanted to excerpt a very small portion of what I read:

In North America, the history of Indian tribes shows a similar pattern of warfare with little evident “moderation.” On the contrary, victorious tribes often found it expedient to extermi­nate enemy tribes altogether, so as to avoid the problem of retributive attacks. Women and children of defeated tribes were carted off and enslaved to en­sure no continuation of enemy bloodlines and traditions.

Iroquois history begins with the tale of Hiawatha, a semi-mythical leader who was re­markable insofar as he was a peacemaker—the implication being that most other tribal leaders were not. The archae­ology of the period before Hiawatha has revealed many warrior skeletons riddled with arrows and/or hacked into pieces, indicating that violent warfare was normative in these regions before contact with Europeans.

The seventeenth century, the first for which we have written records, shows the Iroquois Confederacy maintaining an uneasy truce among its own membership, but only insofar as this enabled them to intensify warfare against their traditional enemies the Huron and the Al­gonquin. These so-called Beaver Wars lasted for many decades; they witnessed the destruction of the Wendat people, the Neu­tral Indians, the fabled Mohi­cans, and many other tribes.

Faced with the threat of what the modern Left should acknowledge as genocidal warfare, many of the Iroquois’ enemies were forced to flee to French, Dutch, and English settlements for protection, where their descendants eventually took up farming, converted to Christianity, or otherwise assimilated into the dominant culture. They gave up their vaunted “traditional” lifestyle because they preferred a peaceful life as a farmer to the omnipresent threat of death by tomahawk. Later in the eighteenth century, a few thousand Iroquois were to visit similar grisly fates on dozens of other neighbors, until only a handful of Native Americans remained in the entire territory circling the Great Lakes.

[….]

The same process occurred farther west in the Great Lakes region, where the Five Nations territory proved to be continu­ously in flux. The Five Nations group is thought to have been formed only a generation or two before French explorers contacted them, and the early years of French settlement in the region witnessed a number of horrific (dare I say “genoci­dal”) encounters. In 1649, the Iroquois took advantage of the weakened position of the Huron people to practically wipe them off the North American map.

“About twelve hundred Iroquois came,” a Huron remembered. “They took their anger out on the Fathers: they stripped them naked; they tore their fingernails off. They rained blows on their shoulders with sticks, on their kidneys and stomach and legs and face, and no part of their body was spared this torment.”

In the process of the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois “stole” land from the Hurons and other tribes equal in size to their orig­inal territory in New York State. Later on, the Iroquois continued their imperialist campaigns, ranging far to the south and west of their original territories. They destroyed the Erie Indians and the famed Mohicans, and conquered several other tribes. In the years around 1700, they ousted the Sioux Indians from West Virginia and Kentucky, who were forced by Iroquois aggression to vacate the land forever and to settle farther west on more marginal ground. The Iroquois thereafter claimed the Sioux hunting grounds for their own.

By 1780, the Iroquois Nation had stolen the equivalent of at least six times their original territory, all from neighboring tribes. From their original base in New York State, they had emptied much of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and much of southern Ontario of its former inhabitants. Whether or not one ascribes the Iroquois success to the presence of European firearms, the fact is the Iroquois, when given enough power, proved more than willing to permanently ex­tinguish every Indian tribe they could get their hands on—this despite the efforts of the French and English to protect many of the Iroquois’ victims.

If anyone in seventeenth-century America can be consid­ered genocidal, it should be the Iroquois, rather than the French or English. It is believed that the intra-Indian wars of attrition, which resulted in the expulsion of many tribes from the Great Lakes region, so fatally weak­ened Native populations in the area, that they had little choice but to abandon most of this land to American settler expansion in subsequent decades.

Farther west, groups such as the Apache are famous for displacing and dispossessing dozens of tribes from their ancestral lands within living memory of the whites’ arrival. The Apache are thought by ar­chaeologists to have originated in Alaska and then rampaged southwards. Conquering and intimidating as they went, like a group of New World Huns or Vandals, the Apache finally reached the region of Texas by the time the first Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century. From the Spanish, the Apaches received horses and guns, which enticed them to give up their semi-agricultural lifestyles and start hunting buffalo full. The irony is that many of these Indians only began hunting riding horses and buffalo because contact with Europeans enabled them to do so.

Meanwhile, shortly after 1700, a push by the Comanches dis­placed many Apache Indians, who in turn put pressure on the Pueblo Indians, raiding them and despoiling them of their own food supplies. The fierce Comanche went on to displace, assimilate, and/or an­nihilate dozens of other tribes and smaller groups in a series of well-documented attacks. Neighboring tribes feared them as a merciless scourge, and rightly so: like most other Native American tribes they routinely killed babies, tor­tured men, raped women, and enslaved children as they conquered.

Jeff Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (Nashville, TN: Bombardier Books, 2023), 141-142, 186-188.

The following video is pretty good. He falters a bit in some history, but the presentation and humor are worth it:

Join me on a journey to uncover the untold story of “The Beaver Wars” in this captivating historical exploration. Together, we’ll delve deep into the tumultuous period of North American history, revealing the causes, consequences, and lasting impacts of this little-known conflict.

During the 17th century, rival indigenous nations clashed in a struggle for control over the lucrative fur trade, igniting what would become known as “The Beaver Wars.” We’ll unravel the socio-political dynamics at play, the strategic alliances formed, and the consequences across the region.

From the initial skirmishes to the full-scale warfare that engulfed the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions, we’ll explore the complex web of alliances, betrayals, and shifting power dynamics that characterized this pivotal era.

Together, we’ll shed light on this often overlooked chapter of history, exploring the cultural, economic, and environmental ramifications of “The Beaver Wars.” Gain insight into the legacy of this conflict and its enduring impact on North America.

Don’t miss out on this enlightening journey through history. I encourage you to like, comment, and subscribe to my channel for more fascinating insights into the past. Your support helps me continue to bring these stories to life.

BLACK HILLS

Activists suggest that all “colonized” land should be returned to the previous owners. Is it really that simple? Michael Knowles has thoughts.

Here is a quick blurb by Dinesh D’Souza discussing the American Indian battles over territory (land). Gruesome warfare, rape, pillaging, etc., were all part of these “land-grabs.”

 

Biblical Scholar Wes Huff Politely Nukes Billy Carson

Published by Papa Giorgio

Joe Rogan Hosts Biblical Scholar Wes Huff After Billy Carson Debate

The debate between Wes Huff and Billy Carson that took place on Oct. 18th 2024 on ‪the Mark Minard Channel. Both Billy and Wes were notified 24hours before that we were scheduled to talk with each other, that it would be in a debate-style discussion format, and that we would be talking about Christianity and the Bible. The topic of discussion that was disclosed to all individuals involved the fact that we would be discussing Billy’s public and widely dispersed criticisms and critiques regarding the Bible and Historic Christianity. This recording is the unedited and unaltered raw footage from that interaction.

Now Billy Carson is suing people involved in this debate!? Crazy!

BTW, some crazy stuff happened behind the scenes after the debate. Wowza! New Age cult “stars” lose horribly when they are exposed.

  • This journey has been intense, and I [Mark Minard] chose to stay silent due to legal advice and to avoid unnecessary drama/conflict—especially since we’re neighbors and our families know each other. Your support for me and my family means the world during this challenging time. I am not a perfect Christian nor profess to be. But i do trust that God’s hand is at work, and the truth always comes to light. (YOUTUBE)

Here is my Billy Carson rabbit hole:

Jimmy Carter’s Failed Presidency and After

Published by Papa Giorgio

RELATED:

The below is with a hat-tip to NEWSBUSTERS. A must read article by NATIONAL REVIEW, titled, “Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President,” can be found HERE. As I saw it when I heard the news, is, we need to deal with Carter Presidency issues.

Which are:

  1. The giving over the Panama Canal to the Chinese.
  2. The Department of Education.
  3. And the mess in Iran.

Those are Carter’s legacies Trump will hopefully address well.

Jimmy Carter Dissected on CNN by Scott Jennings

Here is one topic excerpted from the NR article. Iraq War:

…. In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s post–White House career, The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley gave a startling account of Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict.

Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some — to try to thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He wrote op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks as an alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.

But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary level. Carter wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N. Security Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted, making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam Hussein before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations should not act like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s inflammatory ‘line in the sand rhetoric.’”

As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just five days before a deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter wrote to key Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S., undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.

It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than they were to legitimate peace activism.

Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. ….

Here is an example of Jimmy Carter’s personal life and that of his professional:

Trump’s Beatitudes (Jimmy Carter Comparison): We Don’t Elect Pastors

A must read article as well can be found at RELIGION NEWS NETWORK. The JERUSALEM POST has an excellent piece on Jimmy:

[….]

Dark obsession with Israel

From a mere misreading of 242, Carter descended into a dark obsession with Israel, casting it as the source of all Middle Eastern instability and a world-leading violator of human rights. His 2004 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, though based on half-truths and outright lies, effectively legitimized Israel’s delegitimization.

Yet, while reviewing the book for the Wall Street Journal, what shocked me so profoundly was Carter’s not-so-subtle antisemitism. He lambastes secular Israelis for abandoning Jewish law and condemns National-Religious Jews for fulfilling it. Whether Right or Left, Jews can do no right by Jimmy Carter. The one-time peanut farmer from Georgia who spent a lifetime repenting for his earlier racism against Blacks, conveniently forgot that the KKK also murdered Jews.

CARTER WASN’T satisfied with merely libeling Israel. His final decades were devoted to whitewashing Hamas and presenting it as an organization opposed to terror and dedicated to peace.

That was the message he conveyed on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and in public appearances worldwide. While shunning meetings with Israeli leaders, he embraced Khaled Mashaal, Ismail Haniyeh, and other terror chiefs.

He supported the Goldstone Report that condemned Israel for committing war crimes during the 2008-09 conflict with Gaza and accused Israel of systematically starving Gaza’s civilian population. The terrorists’ attempts to bore under Israel’s border were, in Carter’s telling, “defensive tunnel[s] being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.”

Sanctimonious and prideful, Carter was never popular among his successors, Democratic and Republican alike, who generally shunned him. A story told me by an Israeli official who participated in the Camp David talks summed up the reasons for this aversion.

Visiting Israel in the ’80s, well after Begin’s resignation and physical decline, Carter asked this official to arrange a phone call. The conversation lasted a few minutes, at most, the ex-official told me, during which Carter talked endlessly and Begin said nothing.

That did not prevent Carter from immediately going to the press and reporting on how he and Begin discussed the peace process and other Middle East affairs. “It was a total lie,” the official told me. “A fiction.”

A tarnished legacy

That, unfortunately, is how many Israelis will remember Jimmy Carter, a person for whom the truth, especially about Israel, was easily discounted. A person who expressed not the slightest gratitude for the Israeli medical technology that successfully treated his melanoma or for the Israeli prime minister who assured him, inaccurately, “that you’ve inscribed your name forever in the history of… the people of Israel.”

Not a Cyrus nor a Truman, in the end, Jimmy Carter, but a Nebuchadnezzar who befriended Haman.

Equating Religious Faith To Government Confiscation and Redistribution

Published by Papa Giorgio

Some Carter Flashbacks: Originally posted November 18, 2013
— Some Updated Material at the end —

This is a posted pic from FaceBook, and here is my response to this all too often used mantra:

My (or others smarter than myself) two cents.

Programs initiated as part of the War on Poverty account for roughly 70 percent of all public assistance programs today. Estimates of the total cost of the War on Poverty over fifty years range between $15 trillion and $19.8 trillion in today’s dollars. This substantial investment appears to have yielded minimal benefits for poverty reduction. On the day Johnson introduced the war on poverty, the poverty rate in the US stood at roughly 14 percent. It is now approximately 16 percent and has never fallen below 11 percent. (Cornell University)

Also, this from a very old post of mine back when my blog was on a free site instead of my current .com

If you can remember back to the 2000 election here in the U. S. and the blue state, red state scenario of which voted for Gore and which voted for Bush, I’m sure you do, even if another country. Once in a while stats are done to see which part of the country (which states in fact) give more to charity per-capita than other states. Do you know which of the top twenty states gives the most to charity? You got it, Bush country! Every single one of the red states in that top-twenty are the middle-income fly-over states. Guess how many red-states got the lower twenty of giving? Two. Eighteen States that were in the lowest giving ratio to charity were Gore states. This is even more interesting with a few recent poles. Just under 66-percent republicans go to church one-to-two times a week. Just fewer than 66-percent democrats do not even go to church once a week. DRAT those nasty/greedy religious/conservatives!

So the question becomes this for the ineffable — damn near anti-Semitic — person pictured above… what does he consider Christian? 90% of one’s income to go to the government for redistribution? 80%? 70%? When does one stop being a Christian? Kinda a sliding scale (income giving) for those who define what being a Christian is… I mean, what is “is”?

And a civics 101 lesson, our government was set up to grind to a halt… the whole “checks and balances thingy.” I would hate for the parties to get along.

An after thought.

Keep in mind as well that every dollar given to, say, the Salvation Army, about 82-cents gets to the person in need. The exact opposite it true for government. About 30-cents of every dollar spent makes it to the needy individual.

So, would reducing the charitable giving write-off from 39.6% to what Obama would like to see (28%):

a) hurt the poor,
or b) help the poor?

Using Carter’s formula, then, would you be more of a Christian if you wanted to keep the status-quo, or, less of a Christian if you wanted to drop it to twenty-eight percent?

SOME UPDATES

Was Jesus a Socialist? | 5 Minute Video

Did Jesus support socialism? Do the teachings of Jesus Christ condemn the accumulation of wealth while pushing for the equal distribution of resources? Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, explains the misconceptions surrounding one of history’s greatest figures. (Read his eBook titled, “Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus A Socialist?” — for free)

FEE notes this in an article

  • Jesus did not even suggest a distribution. Instead, he warned against greed while declining to play the busybody.

Some Myths About the Rich and Taxes | Medved

(FLASAHBACK) A caller challenged Michael Medved on the “system” backing the rich… to which Michael responded with some counter-points. The conversation turned to taxes, and I learned a bit about the flat-tax and the “graduated” aspect of even it. Great call and great learning curve of a response.

“The Party of the Rich” (The GOP) | Prager

(FLAHBACK) This is an old audio*. Dennis Prager deals squarely with a mantra you often hear from the left. Enjoy. 

  • *My Vimeo account was terminated, this is a recovered audio from them. To wit, what is nice is that Vimeo — while noting I did not meet their clear marks of content — did send a list of videos with links to download them. With over 1,200 videos though… it will be a task (many are already on YouTube… so I just need to weed through them). But I still think that was VERY NICE of Vimeo. I would still recommend them for church’s who are looking for places to upload sermons and other original content.

Do the Rich Pay Their Fair Share? | 5 Minute Video

Do the rich pay their fair share of taxes? It’s not a simple question. First of all, what do you mean by rich? And how much is fair? What are the rich, whoever they are, paying now? Is there any tax rate that would be unfair? UCLA Professor of Economics, Lee Ohanian, has some fascinating and unexpected answers.

See my: “The “Evil” Rich Hide Their Money ~ Mantra“

Jimmy Carter Lies About His “Tea Bagging” (Flashback)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Some Carter Flashbacks: Originally posted December 2, 2010

NewsBusters has a story about a recent interview on NPR (11-30-2010) where Jimmy Carter said he never criticized the Tea Party:

REHM: Last question, very briefly, what do you think of the Tea Party movement?

CARTER: You know, I never have criticized the Tea Party movement because, strangely enough, I capitalized on the same kind of situation politically that has made the Tea Party successful — that is, an extreme dissatisfaction with what was going on in Washington. Because I came along right after Watergate and right after the Vietnam lost and right after the assassination of the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and so I capitalized on that, and I was elected over some very wonderful people who were U.S. senators and immersed in the Washington scene.

…(read more)…

In case you didn’t catch it, the interview/video at the top refutes this NPR interview.

So what about those signs that Brian Williams mentions? Not a lot of people realize this, but most of the signs with connections of Obama to Hitler are actually from what I term as a political cult. It just so happens this cult is a Democratic one. For instance, as a reminder, remember this exchange?

So, since most of these sign wielding nuts are actually Democrats, where does that leave Carter’s critique?

In 1979, LaRouche formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC). LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times, beginning in 1980….

Read more at newer links: My Updated Post | Slate

 

What are all those signs about? Is there some sort of study of them done to find out if there is a percentage of them that are racially tinged?

UCLA study: Most tea party signs not racist

A study conducted by a UCLA grad student at the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington contains some bad news for one of the mainstream media’s favorite narratives: the old ‘racist teabaggers’ meme.

Conversely, quantitative observation showed that the alleged racism was not prominent at the rally, at least not as far as signage is concerned. And to think Obamacrats wasted all those race cards for nothin’.

[….]

The investigation showed only 25% of signs expressing antagonism towards the President himself, only 5% touching on the President’s ethnicity or faith, and a piddly 1% promoting ‘Birtherism’.

I presume the 1% was newly anointed ‘birther’ Jake Tapper, respected journalist of ABC News – or once respected until he had the temerity to mention the President’s long form birth certificate the other day.

The teabag obsessed Obama apologists at MSNBC and the New York Times will no doubt be bitterly disappointed to learn that despite the breathless hype, racism no more typifies the tea party movement than honest unslanted analysis typifies their political coverage.

This study didn’t stop the questionable signs and ask if they were Lyndon LaRouche followers. Here is another story — old news, but needed for this recent news:

NEWSBUSTERS H/T:

NewsBusters reported Thursday, a UCLA graduate student has published a study debunking the myth that the Tea Party is racist.

On Monday, Gretchen Carlson invited the study’s author on “Fox & Friends” to do what every news outlet ought to, namely, tell the truth about what the movement that is radically changing the political landscape is really all about.

[….]

Isn’t it interesting how easily this study was done?

As Carlson asked Ekins, why haven’t any news outlets, apart from Fox News and conservative websites, done any investigation into the allegations of racism within this movement to see if they were at all true?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question, for media have been trying to either dismiss or demonize the Tea Party since its inception.

THE VIDEO IS GONE, BUT THE TRANSCRIPT IS BELOW:

GRETCHEN CARLSON, HOST: Well, Brian, speaking of the Tea Party, the movement has been under attack since it started. Liberal members of the media and politicians have come out calling it racist.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JANEANE GAROFALO: They have no idea what the Boston tea party was about.

KEITH OLBERMANN: That’s right.

GAROFALO: They don’t know the history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. 

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And you see folks waving tea bags around. 

HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Carrying swastikas, symbols like that to a town hall meeting on healthcare.

FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man. 

HBO’s BILL MAHER: The Teabaggers, they’re not a movement. They’re a cult.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: But is the racist label accurate? A grad student at UCLA just completed a study on the Tea Party and the signs that are carried at the rallies and she came up with a much different conclusion. Joining me now to share her finding is Emily Ekins. Good morning to you, Emily

EMILY EKINS, UCLA GRADUATE STUDENT: Good to be with you. 

CARLSON: So, you went to a rally. You decided to take photographs of about 250 signs, and what did you find out? 

EKINS:Well, what I did is I tried to take a picture of every visible sign I could find and I found that over 50% of the signs were about limited government and lower spending. And only about 6% of the signs were controversial in nature. 

CARLSON: How tough was it for you to go and take these photos and come up with that conclusion? 

EKINS: You know, it was actually pretty straight forward. I’m surprised more people haven’t done this. I just went to the rally, I walked in a systemic fashion, you know, row by row, took a picture of every visible sign and then I categorized them. And I should say that I was very conscientious that any sign that, you know, could be construed as controversial, meaning they had undertones about immigration or race or Islam, you know, I was sure to include those into these controversial categories. But frankly, they just, there weren’t that many, and so it added up to six. 

CARLSON: Why do you think that your test results differ from the perception of the mainstream media and those clips that we just saw? 

EKINS: Well, honestly, I think it has everything to do with your method and your approach. I think what often happens is people go to these events, these rallies, and they’re either attracted or repelled by various signs. And if you just cover a couple of signs no matter how objective you try to be, you’re just, you can’t generalize everybody that’s there by a couple of signs. And so the method needs to be systematic that when we go to these events we need to look at all the signs. We need to say, we need to see what all the signs are telling us. And I think that method revealed something very different than a method that just looks at a few signs. 

CARLSON. Here was a quote from NAACP Ben Jealous on the Tea Parties. “We take issue with the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there’s no space for racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in their movement.” I mean, I guess he’s speaking to the 6% of the signs that you found that were questionable, but you still say that’s a tiny percentage in what the overall message was. 

EKINS: Yes, I mean overwhelmingly, the message is about limited government. At this particular rally that I, that I did conduct the analysis at. 

CARLSON: I know that you want to do further studies, and I find it actually amazing that nobody else has done what you chose to do. So hats off to you. But I’m interested in knowing, you’re at UCLA. What grade did you get? 

EKINS: Well, actually I’m a PhD student, so grades work differently there. This is my research for my dissertation, and actually my advisors, you know, they’re very encouraging and seeking academic truth. So they were, they were pleased with kind of the new approach and they’re very encouraging. 

CARLSON: Well, that’s very good to hear. Congratulations to you, Emily Ekins, she is a UCLA graduate student. She decided to go to that Tea Party movement and decide see what the signs are really all about. Thanks for sharing your findings with us, Emily. 

EKINS: Sure. Thank you. 

So, is this merely another nail in the “worst one’s” irrelevance coffin? I say yes, but I am sure there are NPR fans out there that disagree with me.

REASON.COM did a bang-up job in dealing with the issue:

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Tea Party movement is “struggling to overcome accusations of racism,” some of which has been perpetuated in its editorial pages. Yesterday’s New York Times, home to the most obsessively anti-Tea Party editorial page in America, was stunned to discover that “at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.”

Previously, The Times reported that Tea Partiers are, on average, people with a high levels of education and higher than average incomes. So it would seem that they aren’t, as some editorialists and pundits contend, simply a gang of subliterate militia men or, as actress Janeane Garofalo recently told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a subsection of the white power movement.

Wandering the recent Tax Day tea party in Washington DC with Reason.tv, we saw some stupid signs — though none that could be considered offensive or racist. We talked to some people that claimed President Obama was both a Czarist and Bolshevik. We spoke to a former star of Saturday Night Live who has previously claimed that president might, in fact, be the anti-Christ. Or a communist. Or both. There were those who fretted that the United States were morphing into a Stalinist state. And there were countless protesters concerned that the Obama administration was spending recklessly, interested in auditing the Federal Reserve, and seething about the General Motors bailout.

So did we find that the Tea Party was motivated by race, by the fact that we now have a black president? Did it seem as if their stated concerns about health care reform and a ballooning national debt simply a smokescreen, designed to concealing a racist agenda? Here is what we found.

 

Democrats Civil War | Larry O’Connor

Published by Papa Giorgio

Per usual, Democrats have fully telegraphed their plans to try and prevent Donald Trump from being inaugurated as President on the United States on January 20th. This opinion piece in “The Hill” just gave away their entire game plan.

The Unpopular Truth About Electric Vehicles | Mark P. Mills

Published by Papa Giorgio

It is often taken as a given that electric vehicles are friendlier for the environment and that we will all inevitably be driving them in the future. In this short video, Mark P. Mills of the National Center for Energy Analytics questions the government’s push towards EVs, and whether these “givens” are true.