Batman

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“

Tea Party at Fault for Batman Shooting! Did the Shooting Imitated a Scene in 1986 Comic? ~ Plus Rotten Tomatoes Story

Published by Papa Giorgio

From Beltway Confidential, the Examiner:

The horrific shooting at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado late last night bears eerie similarities to a scene in the 1986 comic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In the comic, a crazed, gun-toting loner walks into a movie theater and begins shooting it up, killing three in the process. The passage concludes with the media blaming Batman for inspiring the shooting, though he is not involved in the incident at all.

The 1986 comic, written and drawn by Frank Miller, was a key inspiration for the Chris Nolan Batman films. It helped to reimagine the character away from his Saturday morning cartoon image and into a dark, grim avenger. The point of this particular scene in the comic was to show just how far Gotham has fallen since Batman had retired….

…read more…

I didn’t post on this (almost did when the story hit — July 18th), but this story makes me chronicle this violent trend with batman fans… really just a commentary on “just how far Gotham has fallen.”

CNN:

Ratings for “The Dark Knight Rises” have dipped a bit on movie review aggregation site RottenTomatoes.com, sitting at 86 percent fresh after a series of written standing ovations arrived earlier this week.

Clearly, a rating like that means the majority of critics were pretty pleased with Christopher Nolan’s final Batman film, but as far as those who weren’t? Extreme commenter backlash.

On Monday, Rotten Tomatoes had to shut down its comments on “The Dark Knight Rises” reviews because fans who disagreed with the few negative opinions were rabidly expressing their distaste.

[….]

“I really did not expect this level of response,” Fine said. “I knew it would probably be controversial just because I was the first negative one, and the first person to bust the 100 percent always comes in for some negative response,  but it was like a tsunami.” (A tsunami that also crashed his website for a time.)

The second fire-starting critique, written by the AP’s Christy Lemire, led to “several hours” of Atchity and his team “removing comments with misogynistic or threatening remarks” from the review, and the eventual disabling of comments.

Atchity ended up updating his open letter to state that comments on “The Dark Knight Rises” reviews would be down for a couple of days, and he told the New York Times Tuesday that he expects them to be up and running again Thursday or Friday, once more reviews are posted and more people have seen the film to be able to have a fruitful discussion.

His advice to commenters in the meantime was to “Just take a deep breath, step away from the computer, and maybe go for a walk. Have a smoke if you need one. There are plenty of other things to get angry about, like war, famine, poverty and crime. But not movie reviews.”

…read more…

Progressive Ideology Warps Judgment from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.

Of course Republicans and their policies are already being blamed, as Gateway Pundit points out:

The Colorado Shooter is a possible registered Democrat.

Despite this: Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party and guns have already been blamed for the massacre.

The University of Colorado Medical School says shooting suspect was student there but withdrew last month. Suspect James Holmes described himself on a rental application as a ‘quiet and easygoing’ medical student.

There is an email account listed at the University of Colorado for Doctoral Student James Holmes.

Here are the Good Morning America crew (thanks TownHall!):

Stephanolpoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant. 

Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado. 

Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.

Brian Ross now admits that he had it wrong, but I doubt yo will ever here the registered party affiliation if the shooter is not a Republican!