God is good. Remind yourself daily of His redemptive plan in your life.
At a Saturday meetup with some guys at Starbucks, the discussion of Steven J. Lawson has come up a couple of times in the past month. He has been preaching down in the valley from us at Grace Community Church and one of the guys in the group is going over a book from Dr. Lawson. So he has been on my radar in a positive way.
Steven J. Lawson is founder and president of OnePassion Ministries, a ministry designed to bring about a new reformation in the church. He is a teaching fellow for Ligonier Ministries, director of the Doctor of Ministry program at The Master’s Seminary, and a visiting professor in the Doctor of Ministry program at the Ligonier Academy of Biblical and Theological Studies. He has written two dozen books, including The Passionate Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Evangelistic Zeal of George Whitefield, and John Knox: Fearless Faith.
Here is the reason for this post. A friend of this Saturday group, who now resides in another state, sent this to me 1:30 AM this morning — 3:30 his time. He had no idea that Dr. Lawson was part of conversation in the group.
This is NOT to point an accusing finger at Dr. Lawson in a spiteful or mean way, but as a call for men to watch their six, in all aspects of their lives.
A Dallas pastor has been removed indefinitely from the church he has served at since 2018 due to him having an “inappropriate relationship” with a woman, according to the church’s leadership.
Trinity Bible Church announced the removal of Steven J. Lawson on its website after its elders became aware of his relationship “several days ago.” The church did not detail the nature of the relationship or identify the woman.
“The elders have met with Steve and will continue to come alongside him and pray for him with the ultimate goal of his personal repentance,” the church said. “Steve will no longer be compensated by Trinity Bible Church of Dallas.”
Lawson, 73, has served as a pastor for over 40 years in Arkansas and Alabama before he became the lead preacher at Trinity Bible Church of Dallas, according to his profile on OnePassion Ministries, a ministry he founded and is president of.
“In light of this, may we be reminded that we are ALL sinners, and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners – and Christ remains Head of His Church, which is bigger than any fallen man,” according to Trinity Bible Church. “In fact, Jesus Christ will continue to lead His Church, including Trinity Bible Church here in Dallas, just like He has from the start of this work on Jan. 5, 2018.” …
Even though I am a bibliophile, I was not too aware of Dr. Lawson.
Someone I WAS intimately knowledgeable of and have read most of his works was Ravi Zacharias, who fell…
A more egregious fall, so to speak, probably not redeemed in any meaningful way under those whom he should have placed himself [– but probably did not –] under, for accountability and guidance.
But even though Dr. Lawson may be redeemed in his walk and marriage, which is what I pray for, he has ruined a career that could have grown in influencing generations to come, in a more meaningful way. He has – I assume, if the allegations are true, removed himself from the pulpit for the remainder of his career.
Not only that, but he has also stained the blouse of the larger body politic of the Church.
Instead, he stunted God’s larger plans for his life influencing generations to come.
Obviously, God deals with us in a corporate sense as a “Church Universal,” but also on an individual plane. So, God’s plans of redemption are still in full affect in Dr. Lawson’s life. Which in an individual sense is, coming to the foot of Calvary when we fail.
And, in this way his voluminous writings can still help guide us in learning about God, as Ravi’s resources can still do, but the *asterisk exists in the bio of these men that the world can use in a Satanic [accusatory] way against the Church Universal.
Dr. Lawson is reminded once again that he need a Savior and that pride damages that daily realization and bold walk in our faith as we seek ways to rout God and replace Him with desire.
Which has me thinking about the last two Monday men’s groups at my church, and, as I see it, the two issues that have been at the center of this men’s Bible study sessions.
SEXUAL SIN AND UNCONTROLLED ~ SINFUL ~ ANGER.
Mind you, righteous anger in a stand against evil; and harm to innocence is needed. Psalm 97:10 starts with, “O you who love the Lord, hate evil!”, but here we are talking about anger being part of the problem. Not a Godly solution.
Dennis Prager, a radio personality I have listened to for over two decades, notes often that in the battle against self, men’s two main pillars to fight in their lives are anger and lust. These are typically the two biggies in a man’s life. I was more on the anger spectrum than the lust, but I have a few friends from the “olden days” who are on the “lust” spectrum of the scale.
Last Monday our church group of guys studied a bit of Samson’s life. And I saw a connection between two verses that are so miniscule, in that they are literally two sentences spanning 20-years, that I shared it with my table.
(Table Eleven Rules!)
And wrote a text to my sons to help them benefit from the Biblical warnings to us via the real lives of those who have struggled in their walk. So, we don’t have to. Or that is the plan…
Hopefully and prayerfully.
If you have children, you see that ideal rejected often. FYI, we are God’s children, and He sees this same thing in His relationship with us, His adoptive son’s and daughter’s lives.
Here is that note to them [my sons] to encourage learning from those who are giants in our faith. That these two sentences may open a meaningful study of God’s Word and the impact of two sentences often glossed over:
Added to just a tad for this post
A note to my boys:
We studied the life of Samson in Judges at our last men’s group at church. And I noticed something… 2 sentences. Chapter 15:20, and 16:1. No one at my table had seen it either. But in a group of men – a few of us with long marriages, and one married 10 years, and one getting married in a week – it led to great discussion and is an example of the simplicity of Scripture guiding men in their walk.
Judges 15:20 — Samson judged Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.
Samson was not a good guy. He has an*asterisk in his bio… a few of them. Yes, he is in the Heroes Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11, but he is included as a wretched man who pushed God’s plans away most of his life.
Everyone is redeemable.
That is the point.
But in this simple one sentence, it seems the Bible is hinting that he got his act together to be a judge over Israel. For 20 years, he built a reputation. 20 years.
And much like Reagan warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” The same goes for our actions…
Judges 16:1 — One day, Samson went to Gaza and saw a prostitute there. He went in to spend the night with her.
Our life’s goals and aspirations in our walk in the Lord can be overthrown by one egregious action, or, habitual chipping away at what God wants for us.
[I know this well, as, I am a 54 year old man just entering the “Dave Ramsey” portion of life.]
Marriage is the most fundamental covenant God wants us to be enjoined in. And keeping your and my reputation intact — put God in front of your plans. No matter how small or large. Rebuff desire for fruitfulness.
Love you boys.
After texting with a few guys on the topic, one of them sent some additional information to push the idea of of how important it is to treat our walk with the Lord in our actions towards one’s we love – trustworthy. A discussion of “trust in marriage being treated like fine china” is excerpted below from a book by Paul Tripp, Marriage: 6 Gospel Commitments Every Couple Needs to Make. My friend noted that trust could mean the same as “reputation” in my text to my son’s.
“We will work together to build a sturdy bond of trust. Trusting and entrusting, we will build a strong foundation. We simply cannot have a healthy, God-honoring, mutually satisfying marriage without trust.
In a fallen world, trust is the fine china of a relationship. It is beautiful when it is there, but it is surely delicate and breakable. When trust is broken, it can be very hard to repair. It is trust that allows a husband and wife to face all the internal and external threats to their unity, love, and understanding. It is trust that allows couples to weather the differences and discouragements that every marriage faces. It is trust that allows couples to talk with honesty and hope about the most personal and difficult things.
There are two sides to trust. First, you must do everything you can to prove yourself trustworthy. Second, you must make the decision to entrust yourself into your spouse’s care. What does it look like to engender a marriage where trust thrives? What does it look like to rebuild trust when it has been shattered? What are the characteristics of a relationship where trust is the glue?”
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, April 2021), 71-72
Good stuff. Another commentary was noted as well in that conversation before church this morning. It comes by way of Don Green via his FACEBOOK. (See more at Pastor Don’s TRUTH COMMUNITY CHURCH on YOUTUBE):
My (lengthy) thoughts on Steve Lawson.
To the best of my memory, I have never spoken with Steve Lawson nor had my picture taken with him. I very rarely was in an audience when he was the speaker. It has been several years, even, since I consulted any of his work in the course of my ministry.
So yesterday’s news about his dismissal from Trinity Bible Church of Dallas due to “an inappropriate relationship” with a woman did not hit me personally in the way that it did many of you.
I briefly debated whether to make this post, but since I think it may help the people of God process the news, I now proceed.
The primary question for which I want to give some perspective is: “How does a prominent Bible teacher DO that? How could he preach the Word, by outward appearances with power, in the midst of such sin and compromise?”
It is a difficult question and one that is not easy to answer to the satisfaction of those who feel betrayed and hurt.
Without much expansion, let me offer you five principles to consider.
1. Exercising a Spiritual Gift is Not the Same as Growing in Sanctification
I’ll stipulate, for the purpose of this discussion anyway, that SL has been a gifted Bible teacher. He wouldn’t have reached the prominence in so many Christian teaching ministries otherwise. But my dear friends, Scripture plainly teaches us not to confuse gifting with sanctification from sin.
You need look no further than the church of Corinth in 1 Corinthians 12-14. They had spiritual gifts, including speaking gifts, but Paul had to correct them for the carnal and ungodly way that they exercised them.
2. Exercising a Spiritual Gift Is Not the Same as Fearing God
Yes, this one hurts. But in my opinion the fear of God is largely lost on the modern church with devastating consequences. Scripture plainly says:
“By the fear of the LORD one keeps away from evil.” (Proverbs 16:6)
Do you see a man—any man—who is walking in sin? No matter the outward appearance, somewhere in his life he has forsaken the fear of the Lord.
3. You Can Fool All of the People Some of the Time
This worldly maxim has a biblical counterpart. Judas was a traitor and a thief in the inner circle of Jesus, but none of the eleven suspected him. When Jesus said, “One of you will betray me,” they didn’t all look at Judas as the culprit. With broken hearts they entertained the possibility, “Lord, is it I?
Only in retrospect did they see Judas for who he was. He had fooled them all.
So I do not fault those who were close to Steve Lawson for not seeing this sooner. Their trust was broken. Rather, I commend them for taking public action when it became known to them.
4. Scripture Must Be Joined with Faith and Obedience
Now I turn from Steve Lawson to the outwardly professing church of God. Rather than speculate about how a man could do this, the biblical perspective is to turn humbly to self-examination:
12 Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. 13 But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. (Hebrews 3:12-13)
Satan, sin, and even our very selves are deceptive and subject to deception. A man thinks he will never fall, or that he will not be exposed when he does, or that the thrill is worth it. Whatever. Lies, every one of them.
It’s not without reason that Scripture says:
For this reason we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it. (Hebrews 2:1)
Do you see a fallen leader? Okay. Next question. What unconfessed sin is in your life? There’s your focus going forward.
5. Let the Mockers Be Warned
The usual suspects will chortle over the news. Sinners will be emboldened to dismiss the gospel; others are already smearing other prominent Christians by their association with Steve Lawson. Such is inevitable, but still I must warn them: let you enemies of the truth hold your tongues:
17 Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; 18 Or the LORD will see it and be displeased, and turn His anger away from him. (Proverbs 24:17).
It is a true wretch who can gloat over this news when it greatly hurts and hinders so many lives, families, churches, and institutions. Indeed, I’m not unmindful that the mud splashes onto all biblical pastors by casting unfounded suspicion on them.
The Lord sees it all, and it kindles His wrath when you boast over a fallen one.
Conclusion
This is a time of chastening for the church, but not a time for despair. Christ, the Head of the Church, still reigns and will never forsake us. His Word tells us enough to have perspective to go forward in the battle.
I am sad, frustrated, and even angry at this news. Many innocent people are harmed and betrayed. The dear gospel of Christ is exposed to ridicule due to the sin of one who was supposedly one of its champions.
That’s not okay.
But as for me and my house, our faith and hope are in Christ, and were never in any man—certainly not this man. So I plan to keep walking forward with confidence in the risen Lord and make my path to the celestial city to come.
I invite you to do the same.
Amen. Well put and another example of iron sharpening iron.
Here is a 2014 Google FLASHBACKwhere sanity prevailed a bit — note, I will end with it as well:
We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
[….]
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies – Finally! (RPT)
POWERLINE!
I will add an older post below this excellent POWERLINE blogpost:
Liberals tell us that we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. The reality is that no such transition is taking place, nor will it. This video by Professor Simon Michaux, who doesn’t take issue with global warming hype, explains one of several reasons why this is true: the mineral requirements of a wind- and solar-based energy system can’t possibly be met.
This description accompanies the YouTube video:
The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels, is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls.
Before the video, here are a few screenshots from it. This one shows the principal metals needed for a wind and solar energy system, and compares those requirements with actual production of those commodities as of 2019, the last “normal” pre-covid year. Note that 189 years worth of copper production, 400 years of nickel production, 9,921 years of lithium production, 1,733 years of cobalt production, 29,113 years of germanium production, and so on, would be needed for the first 20 years of wind and solar installations. Then we would have to do it all over again. Talk about a lack of sustainability!
This chart looks at known global reserves of key minerals, as a percentage of what would be needed to replace fossil fuels. Note, for example, that known lithium reserves amount to less than 3% of what would be needed to replace fossil fuels with wind, solar and batteries, for the first 20 years. Known cobalt reserves amount to less than 4% of what would be needed for the first generation, and so on. Keep in mind, too, that mining projects typically take something like 20 years to come on line. Longer, if the environmentalists get their way.
[….]
Another point that is often overlooked is that mining companies exploit the lowest-cost minerals first–those that are most plentiful and easiest to extract. If demand increases exponentially, then much more expensive sources will be brought into play. This means that the cost of basic minerals like copper, nickel, cobalt and so on will skyrocket as demand increases, perhaps by orders of magnitude. I don’t think anyone has even attempted to assess the full cost of a “green” energy system when those price increases are taken into account.
In an excellent post linking to a German documentary (30-minutes) and study showing the devastation to Chili of lithium mining, we find the following:
German ZDF public television recently broadcast a reportshowing how electric cars are a far cry from being what they are all cracked up to be by green activists.
The report titled: “Batteries in twilight – The dark side of e-mobility” [now not available] shows how the mining of raw materials needed for producing the massive automobile batteries is highly destructive to the environment. For example, two thirds of the cobalt currently comes from the Congo, where the mining rights have been acquired by China. Other materials needed include manganese, lithium and graphite.
Every electric car battery needs about 20 – 30 kg of lithium.
The mining of the raw materials often takes place in third world countries where workers are forced to work under horrendous conditions and no regard is given to protecting the environment. When it comes to “going green”, it seems everything flies out the window….
The production of lithium through evaporation ponds uses a lot of water – around 21 million litres per day. Approximately 2.2 million litres of water is needed to produce one ton of lithium. (EURO NEWS)
AGAIN… here is a Facebookpost of the same thing regarding Lithium Fields:
This is a Lithium leach field.
This is what your Electric Car batteries are made of.
It is so neuro-toxic that a bird landing on this stuff dies in minutes.
Take a guess what it does to your nervous system?
Pat yourself on the back for saving the environment.
Chile, 2nd largest lithium producer, is having water-scarcity problems as this technology takes so much water to produce battery-grade lithium. 2000 tons: 1 ton.
And the current version of the “inflation reduction act” wants 100% of EV battery components produced in the US.
Lead, nickel, lithium, cadmium, alkaline, mercury and nickel metal hydride.
Batteries are a collection of things that are extremely deadly.
Alternative fuels/energy is a DIRTY BUSINESS… but the left who live in the seclusion of the New York Times and MSNBC would never know this. I can show a graph showing skyrocketing carbon emissions worldwide for the past decade and that the temperature has dropped during this time by a small amount, and it is like showing them instructions to build an IKEA bookcase with instructions written in Gaelic!
“Giga Factories” vs. Fossil Fuels | Mark Mills
Our nations Utility batteries and car batteries can only store two hours worth of our nations electricity needs. We have an estimated 1 million electric cars in use in the United States. But what goes into building an electric vehicle. How much fossil fuel is needed, and how much environmental damage is done, extracting the rare earth minerals needed to power an electric vehicle? The answer will surprise you. And prove the Electric car is not the savior for our energy woes.
MINING FOR MINERALS/METALS
What about the impact and supply of the materials needed to produce batteries? TreeHugger has a good post that mentions some of these environmental pitfalls. These issues involve many devices we use daily (cell phones, lap-top computers, rechargeable batteries, etc.), but add to this burden a mandated or subsidized car industry:
…lithium batteries take a tremendous amount of copper and aluminum to work properly. These metals are needed for the production of the anode & the cathode, cables and battery management systems. Copper and aluminum have to be mined, processes and manufacturing which takes lots of energy, chemicals and water which add to their environmental burden.
[….]
First of all, this study emphasizes that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market. It also states the fact that some of the largest concentrations of Lithium in the world are found in some of the most beautiful and ecologically fragile places, such as The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The authors note:
“It would be irresponsible to despoil these regions for a material which can only ever be produced in sufficient quantities to serve a niche market of luxury vehicles for the top end of the market. We live in an age of Environmental Responsibility where the folly of the last two hundred years of despoilment of the Earth’s resources are clear to see. We cannot have “Green Cars” that have been produced at the expense of some of the world’s last unspoiled and irreplaceable wilderness. We have a responsibility to rectify our errors and not fall into the same traps as in the past.”
[….]
The report estimates that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market, as demand is rising for competing markets, such as cellular telephones and other electronic devices. At the same time, due to a great concentration of Lithium found in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina (70% of the world’s deposits), the United States and other developed countries needing the material will be subject to geopolitical forces similar to those they have already encountered from the member countries of OPEC…
Click HERE to go to larger file (use mouse wheel to zoom in)
In an excellent article we see the projected demands on other metals involved in the battery and transit goals:
….Regarding the demand for the different minerals, in the case of aluminum, according to our results, the demand for minerals from the rest of the economy would stand out, with the requirement for batteries having little influence. Copper would have a high demand from the rest of the economy, but it would also have a significant demand from vehicles, infrastructure and batteries. Cobalt would be in high demand because of the manufacture of batteries with the exception of the LFP battery that does not have this mineral, in the case of its demand from the rest of the economy it can be stated that it would be important but less influential than the demand for batteries. Lithium would have very high requirements from all the batteries and with a reduced demand from the rest of the economy. Manganese would have an important but contained demand coming from LMO and NMC batteries, since the requirements for this mineral would stand out in the rest of the economy. Finally, nickel would have a high demand from NMC and NCA batteries, but its main demand would come from the rest of the economy.
The batteries that would require the least materials are the NCA and LFP batteries. The NMC battery has been surpassed in performance and mineral usage by the NCA. The LiMnO2 battery has a very poor performance, so it has been doomed to disuse in electric vehicles. In addition, the LFP battery, the only one that does not use critical materials in the cathode (other than lithium), also has poor performance, requiring very large batteries (in size and weight) to match the capacity and power of batteries using cobalt.
Charging infrastructure, rail and copper used in electrified vehicles could add up to more than 17% of the copper reserve requirement in the most unfavourable scenario (high EV) and 7% in the most favourable (degrowth), so these are elements that must be taken into account…..
Are Electric Vehicles really clean? | They run on dirty energy and blood of children as young as 6. | Electric cars drive human rights abuse and child labour. | China is one of the villains in this story. | Are electric carmakers equally guilty too? | Palki Sharma Upadhyay tells you.
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE….
…. lithium is also not the only battery ingredient with a dark side. Perhaps the darkest of all is cobalt, which is commonly used, alongside lithium, in the batteries of many electric vehicles.
Worse still, UNICEF estimates 40,000 of the workers in these mines are children under the age of 18, with some as young as 7 years old. Cobalt mining also comes with serious health risks. Chronic exposure to dust containing cobalt can cause the potentially fatal lung disease “hard metal lung disease.” Many fatal accidents have also been caused by mines not being constructed or managed safely.
Clearly then, in the face of such widespread environmental damage and human rights abuses, the ethics of electric vehicles is far more complicated than the expensive car adverts and glowing newspaper headlines would have us believe…..
You Dig Up 500,000 Pounds of the Earth’s Crust for One EV Auto Battery! And each of these half a million pounds of earth are dug up with a diesel engine. A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. To manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for one battery.” (NATIONAL REVIEW – AUSTRALIA)
LAND NEEDED
“the plausible path to decarbonization, modeled by researchers at Princeton, sees wind and solar using up to 590,000 square kilometers — which is roughly equal to the land mass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee put together. The footprint is big.” — Ezra Klein in the New York Times.
Why were federal tax subsidies extended for wind and solar by Congress? Again. For the umpteenth time! We are against subsidies because they distort markets. Those politicians who support these market-distorting policies should at least be forced to answer the question: “How much is enough?” Taxpayers have been subsidizing wind and solar corporations for more than 40 years! These companies have gotten fat and happy on your money, and Congress keeps giving them more of it. This video is based on a Texas Public Policy Foundation report that explains why it’s long past time to stop wind and solar from stuffing their bank accounts with your tax dollars.
To give you a sense of scale, to replace the energy from one average natural gas well, which sits on about four acres of land, would require 2,500 acres of wind turbines. That is a massive amount of land. You would have to cover this entire nation with wind turbines in an attempt to replace the electricity that we generate from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, and even that would not get the job done. (CFACT)
At his international climate summit in April, President Joe Biden vowed to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The goal will require sweeping changes in the power generation, transportation and manufacturing sectors. It will also require a lot of land.
Wind farms, solar installations and other forms of clean power tend to take up more space on a per-watt basis than their fossil-fuel-burning brethren. A 200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 13 square miles (36 square kilometres). A natural-gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.
Achieving Biden’s goal will require aggressively building more wind and solar farms, in many cases combined with giant batteries. To fulfill his vision of an emission-free grid by 2035, the U.S. needs to increase its carbon-free capacity by at least 150%. Expanding wind and solar by 10% annually until 2030 would require a chunk of land equal to the state of South Dakota, according to Princeton University estimates and an analysis by Bloomberg News. By 2050, when Biden wants the entire economy to be carbon free, the U.S. would need up to four additional South Dakotas to develop enough clean power to run all the electric vehicles, factories and more.
WRECKING OUR PLANET TO SAVE IT
Earth Day 2021 is April 22nd. Therefore, eco-activist groups will be preaching the gospel of wind & solar power and the importance of biodiversity. What those trying to “save the planet” fail to understand (or more likely ignore) is that these two priorities are in direct conflict. Wind & solar require far more land than nuclear, natural gas and coal power. They are also far more destructive to regions of high biodiversity as well as large birds, bats and endangered species. As we celebrate Earth Day, let’s consider the significant environmental consequences of attempting to provide electricity through low density, unreliable sunshine and breezes.
Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.
What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)
FLASHBACK
What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)
So it seems that these more left leaning environmentalists think it is okay to spend billions of tax-payer money and regulate businesses on ideas that do not work anywhere but in Utopian dreams. Let’s end with WUWT quoting these Google Ph.D.s and then segue out with commentary:
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
Apple as well is struggling with it’s Utopian — only works on paper — dreams.
POWERLINEnotes that “yesterday’s Wall Street Journalstory about the production difficulties of the Arizona supplier that Apple selected to make sapphire screens for the iPhone 6 was fascinating in its own right, but there was one little detail in the story that zipped by too quickly.” Continuing they quote the WSJ:
Mr. Squiller, the GT operations chief, told the bankruptcy court that GT lost three months of production to power outages and delays building the facility.
Whoa, slow down there a moment: what’s this about power outages? I’d sure like to know more of the full story here. Was this simply bad engineering on site, or was there a problem with the local grid or the energy sources supplying the grid in that area? Grid stability is going to be a more serious issue going forward as we compel more and more “renewable” (meaning “less stable”) energy as part of the EPA’s mania to restructure the electricity sector through the Clean Air Act.
I think the below is applicable to many things. Like masks, mandatory vaccines for colds. etc. But I can also see how the below will be used to counter life and the freedom the Founding Documents of this nation afford. This is to say I like the quote, but can see it being misused as well.
That is the reason for the post — just to counter what I can see others using it for.
So, how does this play out with the Left? [Or, strict Libertarians.] Below I will use some personal experience as well as some legal interpretation and thought experiments – with a dash of religious philosophy to get us started.
WORLDVIEWS IN THE MIX
Before we begin, many who know the site know that I speak with informed knowledge in my Judeo-Christian [theistic] worldview to those of other adopted worldviews [known or unknown] to change hearts and minds. Often people do not know what a worldview is or if they hold one, or that knowing of it even has purpose. Nor do they know that higher education just a couple generations ago thought it educations purpose to instill it. A quote I came across in seminary that I kept discusses this:
Alexander W. Astin dissected a longitudinal study conducted by UCLA started in 1966 for the Review of Higher Education [journal] in which 290,000 students were surveyed from about 500 colleges. The main question was asked of students why study or learn? “Seeking to develop ‘a meaningful philosophy of life’” [to develop a meaningful worldview] was ranked “essential” by the majority of entering freshmen. In 1996 however, 80% of the college students barely recognized the need for “a meaningful philosophy of life” and ranked “being very well off financially” [e.g., to not necessarily develop a meaningful worldview] as paramount. [1 & 2]
[1] Alexander W. Astin, “The changing American college student: thirty year trends, 1966-1996,” Review of Higher Education, 21 (2) 1998, 115-135.
[2] Some of what is here is adapted and with thanks to Dr. Stephen Whatley, Professor of Apologetics & Worldviews at Faith International University… as, they are in his notes from one of his classes.
I wish to highlight the “a meaningful philosophy of life.” This is known as a worldview, or, tools to dissect life and define reality. So the question becomes, what then is a worldview? Why do we need a coherent one?
WORLDVIEW:People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently based on these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By “presuppositions” we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. “As a man thinketh, so he is,” is profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room” — that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1976), 19-20.
So, even if one isn’t necessarily aware they have a worldview, they operate as if they do — borrowing from what they perceive as truths but are often a patchwork of interpretations that if questioned on, the self-refuting nature of these personally held beliefs are easy to dissect and show the person is living incoherently. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “worldview” this way:
1) The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world; 2) A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group.”
What are these self-refuting aspects people find themselves moving in-between? What are the worldviews? Here are some listed, and really, that first list of seven is it. That is as broad as one can expand the worldview list:
theism
atheism
deism
finite godism
pantheism
panentheism
polytheism[1]
Others still reduce it further: Idealism, naturalism, and theism.[2] C.S Lewis dealt with religious worldviews much the same way, comparing: philosophical naturalism (atheism), pantheism, and theism.[3]
[1]Doug Powell, The Holman Quick Source Guide to Christian Apologetics (Nashville, TN: Holman Publishers, 2006); and Norman L. Geisler and William D. Watkins, Worlds Apart: A Handbook on World Views (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers);
[2] L. Russ Bush, A Handbook for Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1991).
[3]Mere Christianity (New York, NY: Macmillan Inc, 1943).
Knowing what “rose-colored-glasses” you are wearing and if you are being internally coherent in your dissecting of reality is important because of the cacophony of what is being offered:
Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics (Newburgh, IN: Trinity Press, 1978), 152-153.
Joseph R. Farinaccio, author of “Faith with Reason: Why Christianity is True,” starts out his excellent book pointing a way to this truth that a well-informed public should know some of:
This is a book about worldviews. Everybody has one, but most individuals never really pay much attention to their own personal philosophy of life. This is a tragedy because there is no state of awareness so fundamental to living life. — (Pennsville, NJ: BookSpecs Publishing, 2002), 10 (emphasis added).
“A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our well being.” — James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 122 (emphasis added).
Is this part of the reason so many today, especially young people, do not have “well-being”?
I bet many reading this will have used the phrases or ideas below without realizing it was incoherent at best. I link to my chapter above, but here is an excerpt from it to better explain why a person’s worldview should be internally sound:
The law of non-contradiction is one of the most important laws of logical thought, in fact, one textbook author goes so far as to say that this law “is considered the foundation of logical reasoning.”[1] Another professor of philosophy at University College London says that “a theory in which this law fails…is an inconsistent theory.”[2] A great example of this inconsistency can be found in the wonderful book Philosophy for Dummies that fully expresses the crux of the point made throughout this work:
Statement: There is no such thing as absolute truth.[3]
By applying the law of non-contradiction to this statement, one will be able to tell if this statement is coherent enough to even consider thinking about. Are you ready? The first question should be, “is this an absolute statement?” Is the statement making an ultimate, absolute claim about the nature of truth? If so, it is actually asserting what it is trying to deny, and so is self-deleting – more simply, it is logically incoherent as a comprehensible position[4] as it is in violation of the law of non-contradiction. Some other examples are as follows, for clarity’s sake:
“All truth is relative!” (Is that a relative truth?); “There are no absolutes!” (Are you absolutely sure?); “It’s true for you but not for me!” (Is that statement true just for you or is it for everyone?)[5] In short, contrary beliefs are possible, but contrary truths are not possible.[6]
Many will try to reject logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs; often times religious pluralism[7]is the topic with which many try to suppress these universal laws in separating religious claims that are mutually exclusive. Professor Roy Clouser puts into perspective persons that try to minimize differences by throwing logical rules to the wayside:
The program of rejecting logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs is not, however, just a harmless, whimsical hope that somehow logically incompatible beliefs can both be true… it results in nothing less than the destruction of any and every concept we could possess. Even the concept of rejecting the law of non-contradiction depends on assuming and using that law, since without it the concept of rejecting it could neither be thought nor stated.[8]
Dr. Clouser then goes on to show how a position of psychologist Erich Fromm is “self-assumptively incoherent.”[9] What professor Clouser is saying is that this is not a game. Dr. Alister McGrath responds to the religious pluralism of theologian John Hick by showing just how self-defeating this position is:
The belief that all religions are ultimately expressions of the same transcendent reality is at best illusory and at worst oppressive – illusory because it lacks any substantiating basis and oppressive because it involves the systematic imposition of the agenda of those in positions of intellectual power on the religions and those who adhere to them. The illiberal imposition of this pluralistic metanarrative[10] on religions is ultimately a claim to mastery – both in the sense of having a Nietzschean authority and power to mold material according to one’s will, and in the sense of being able to relativize all the religions by having access to a privileged standpoint.[11]
As professor McGrath points out above, John Hick is applying an absolute religious claim while at the same time saying there are no absolute religious claims to religious reality. It is self-assumptively incoherent. Anthropologist William Sumner argues against the logical position when he says that “every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is delusion.”[12] Authors Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl respond to this self-defeating claim by showing that Sumner is making a strong claim here about knowledge:
He says that all claims to know objective moral truth are false because we are all imprisoned in our own cultural and are incapable of seeing beyond the limits of our own biases. He concludes, therefore, that moral truth is relative to culture and that no objective standard exists. Sumner’s analysis falls victim to the same error committed by religious pluralists who see all religions as equally valid.[13]
The authors continue:
Sumner’s view, however, is self-refuting. In order for him to conclude that all moral claims are an illusion, he must first escape the illusion himself. He must have a full and accurate view of the entire picture…. Such a privileged view is precisely what Sumner denies. Objective assessments are illusions, he claims, but then he offers his own “objective” assessment. It is as if he were saying, “We’re all blind,” and then adds, “but I’ll tell you what the world really looks like.” This is clearly contradictory.[14]
Philosopher Roger Scruton drives this point home when he says, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely negative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”[15]
[1]Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with Readings (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), p. 51.
[2] Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (New York, NY: Oxford Univ Press, 1995), p. 625.
[3]Tom Morris, Philosophy for Dummies, 46.
[4]Ibid.
[5] Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2004), 40.
[6]Ibid., 38.
[7]Religious Pluralism – “the belief that every religion is true. Each religion provides a genuine encounter with the Ultimate.” Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 598.
[8]Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2005), 178 (emphasis added).
[9] A small snippet for clarity’s sake:
Fromm’s position is also an example of this same dogmatic selectivity. He presents his view as though there are reasons for rejecting the law of non-contradiction, and then argues that his view of the divine (he calls it “ultimate reality”) logically follows from that rejection. He ignores the fact that to make any logical inference — to see that one belief “logically follows from” another — means that the belief which is said to “follow” is required on pain of contradicting oneself. Having denied all basis for any inference, Fromm nevertheless proceeds to infer that reality itself must be an all-encompassing mystical unity which harmonizes all the contradictions which logical thought takes to be real. He then further infers that since human thought cannot help but be contradictory, ultimate reality cannot be known by thought. He gives a summary of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist expressions of this same view, and again infers that accepting their view of the divine requires him to reject the biblical idea of God as a knowable, individual, personal Creator. He then offers still another logical inference when he insists that:
Opposition is a category of man’s mind, not itself an element of reality…. Inasmuch as God represents the ultimate reality, and inasmuch as the human mind perceives reality in contradictions, no positive statement can be made about God.
In this way Fromm ends by adding self-referential incoherency to the contradictions and self-assumptive incoherency already asserted by his theory. For he makes the positive statement about God that no positive statements about God are possible.
Ibid., 178-179. In this excellent work Dr. Clouser shows elsewhere the impact of logic on some major positions of thought:
As an example of the strong sense of this incoherency, take the claim sometimes made by Taoists that “Nothing can be said of the Tao.” Taken without qualification (which is not the way it is intended), this is self-referentially incoherent since to say “Nothing can be said of the Tao” is to say something of the Tao. Thus, when taken in reference to itself, the statement cancels its own truth. As an example of the weak version of self-referential incoherency, take the claim once made by Freud that every belief is a product of the believer’s unconscious emotional needs. If this claim were true, it would have to be true of itself since it is a belief of Freud’s. It therefore requires itself to be nothing more than the product of Freud’s unconscious emotional needs. This would not necessarily make the claim false, but it would mean that even if it were true neither Freud nor anyone else could ever know that it is. The most it would allow anyone to say is that he or she couldn’t help but believe it. The next criterion says that a theory must not be incompatible with any belief we have to assume for the theory to be true. I will call a theory that violates this rule “self-assumptively incoherent.” As an example of this incoherence, consider the claim made by some philosophers that all things are exclusively physical [atheistic-naturalism]. This has been explained by its advocates to mean that nothing has any property or is governed by any law that is not a physical property or a physical law. But the very sentence expressing this claim, the sentence “All things are exclusively physical,” must be assumed to possess a linguistic meaning. This is not a physical property, but unless the sentence had it, it would not be a sentence; it would be nothing but physical sounds or marks that would not) linguistically signify any meaning whatever and thus could not express any claim — just as a group of pebbles, or clouds, or leaves, fails to signify any meaning or express any claim. Moreover, to assert this exclusivist materialism is the same as claiming it is true, which is another nonphysical property; and the claim that it is true further assumes that its denial would have to be false, which is a relation guaranteed by logical, not physical, laws. (Indeed, any theory which denies the existence of logical laws is instantly and irredeemably self-assumptively incoherent since that very denial is proposed as true in a way that logically excludes its being false.) What this shows is that the claim “All things are exclusively physical” must itself be assumed to have nonphysical properties and be governed by nonphysical laws or it could neither be understood nor be true. Thus, no matter how clever the supporting arguments for this claim may seem, the claim itself is incompatible with assumptions that are required for it to be true. It is therefore self-assumptively incoherent in the strong sense.
Ibid., 84-85 (emphasis added).
[10]Metanarratives, or, Grand Narratives – “big stories, stories of mythic proportions – that claim to be able to account for, explain and subordinate all lesser, little, local, narratives.” Jim Powell, Postmodernism for Beginners (New York, NY: Writers and Readers, 1998), 29.
[11] Alister E. McGrath, Passion for Truth: the Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1996), 239.
[12]William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Chicago, IL: Ginn and Company, 1906), in Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted firmly in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998), 46-47.
[13]Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998), 47.
[14]Ibid., 48
[15]Modern Philosophy (New York, NY: Penguin, 1996), 6. Found in: John Blanchard, Does God Believe in Atheists? (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000), 172.
Okay, that should get us all prepped for the next section…
….which is slightly more historical.
THEISM & AMERICA’S FOUNDING
Theism was the basis for our Founding Documents that undergirded our nations birth. For instance the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, “Law of Nature and Nature’s God.”AMERICAN HERITAGE EDUCATION FOUNDATION discusses this phrase a bit, of which I excerpta portion of:
The Declaration of Independence of 1776 tells much about the founding philosophy of the United States of America. One philosophical principle that the American Founders asserted in the Declaration was the “Law of Nature and Nature’s God.” This universal moral law served as their moral and legal basis for creating a new, self-governing nation. One apparent aspect of this law is that it was understood in Western thought and by early Americans to be revealed by God in two ways—in nature and in the Bible—and thus evidences the Bible’s influence in America’s founding document.
The “Law of Nature” is the moral or common sense embedded in man’s heart or conscience (as confirmed in Romans 2:14-15). It tells one to live honestly, hurt no one, and render to everyone his due. The law of “Nature’s God” as written in the Bible and spoken by Jesus Christ consists of two great commandments—to love God and love others (as found in Deuteronomy 6:5, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 7:12, Matthew 22:36-40, Mark 12:28-31, and Luke 10:25-28). The first commandment, first found in Deuteronomy 6:5, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength.” The second commandment, often referred to as the Golden Rule and first found in Leviticus 19:18, is to “love your neighbor as yourself” or, as expressed by Jesus in Matthew 7:12, to “do to others as you would have them do to you.” Thus the content for both the natural and written laws is the same.
The law of Nature and God can be traced through the history and writings of Western Civilization. This principle is found, for example, in medieval European thought. In his 1265-1274 Summa Theologica, published in 1485, Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas acknowledged a “two-fold” moral law that is both general and specific:
The natural law directs man by way of certain general precepts, common to both the perfect [faithful] and the imperfect [non-faithful]: wherefore it is one and the same for all. But the Divine law directs man also in certain particular matters…. Hence the necessity for the Divine law to be twofold.[1]
Aquinas explained that the written law in the Bible was given by God due to the fallibility of human judgment and the perversion of the natural law in the hearts of many. In the 1300s, medieval Bible scholars referred to the “Law of Nature and God” as a simple way to describe God’s natural and written law, its two expressions. The phrase presented this law in the same order and timing in which God revealed it to mankind in history—first in creation and then in Holy Scripture.
During the Reformation period, French religious reformer John Calvin affirmed this two-fold moral law in his 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion, observing, “It is certain that the law of God, which we call the moral law, is no other than a declaration of natural law, and of that conscience which has been engraven by God on the minds of men.”[2] He further explains, “The very things contained in the two tables [or commandments in the Bible] are…dictated to us by that internal law which…is…written and stamped on every heart.”[3] Incidentally, Puritan leader John Winthrop, who led a large migration of Calvinist Puritans from England to the American colonies, identified God’s two-fold moral law in his well-known 1630 sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, delivered to the Puritans as they sailed to America. He taught,
There is likewise a double law by which we are regulated in our conversation one towards another: …the law of nature and the law of grace, or the moral law and the law of the Gospel…. By the first of these laws, man…is commanded to love his neighbor as himself. Upon this ground stands all the precepts of the moral law which concerns our dealings with men.[4]
During the Enlightenment period, British philosopher John Locke, who was influential to the Founders, wrote of the “law of God and nature” in his 1689 First Treatise of Civil Government.[5] This law, he further notes in his 1696 Reasonableness of Christianity, “being everywhere the same, the Eternal Rule of Right, obliges Christians and all men everywhere, and is to all men the standing Law of Works.”[6] English legal theorist William Blackstone, another oft-cited thinker of the American founding era, recognized the two-fold moral law in his influential 1765-1769 Commentaries on the Laws of England. This law, he believed, could be known partially by man’s imperfect natural reason and completely by the Bible. Due to man’s imperfect reason, Blackstone like Aquinas observed, the Bible’s written revelation is necessary:
If our reason were always, as in our first ancestor [Adam] before his transgression, clear and perfect, unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task [of discerning God’s law and will] would be pleasant and easy. We should need no other guide but this [reason]. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience, that his reason is corrupt and his understanding is full of ignorance and error.
This [corruption] has given manifold occasion for the benign interposition of divine providence which, in compassion to the frailty, imperfection, and blindness of human reason, has been pleased, at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures.[7]
[1] Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, pt 2/Q 91, Article 5, trans Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros., 1947) in Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org <https://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html>.
[2] John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 3, bk. 4, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia, PA: Philip H. Nicklin, 1816), 534-535.
[3] John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion: A New Translation, vol. 1, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh, Scotland: Printed for Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 430.
[4] John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, 1630, in Puritan Political Ideas, 1558-1794, ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2003), 75-93.
[5] John Locke, First Treatise of Civil Government, in Two Treatises on Government, bk. 1 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1884), 142, 157, 164.
[6] John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as delivered in the Scriptures, Second Edition (London: Printed for Awnsham and John Churchil, 1696), 21-22.
[7]William Blackstone, Blackstone’s Commentaries in Five Volumes, ed. George Tucker (Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 1996, 2008), 41.
I also wish to commend to you an article by James N. Anderson (Professor of Theology and Philosophy, at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte) in the Reformed Faith & Practice Journal (Volume 4 Issue 1, May 2019).
Abraham Williams preached a sermon where he drilled down on the idea at an “election day sermon” in Boston Massachusetts’s, New-England, May 26. 1762.
“The law of nature (or those rules of behavior which the Nature God has given men, … fit and necessary to the welfare of mankind) is the law and will of the God of nature, which all men are obliged to obey…. The law of nature, which is the Constitution of the God of nature, is universally obliging. It varies not with men’s humors or interests, but is immutable as the relations of things.”
Amen pastor.
A good resource for resources on this topic is my bibliography in a paper for my class on Reformation Church History in seminary — and I steered the topic to the Reformations influence on America. The paper is titled, “REFORMING AMERICA“(PDF), the bibliography is from pages 16-19. I commend to the serious reader Mark Noll’s book, “America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.“
Moving on from the “do you even worldview bro?” section to the application process.
One area I see the Left saying YES!to Zuby is on Same-Sex Marriage (SSM).
SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
SSM, I argue, flouts Natural Law in many respects, and becomes an utennable special right.
The “potentials” in the male-female union becoming a separate organism is not found in the male-male or female-female sexual union. Nor is this non-potentiality able to be the foundation [pre-exist] for society (“Is Marriage Hetero?”). The ideal environment – whether from Nature or Nature’s God – to rear children, sorry Hillary. Etc. Or religious: “No Religious or Ethical Leader in History Supported SSM” (does wisdom from the past matter?). [I would add until very, very recently.] Even gay men and women oppose SSM being normalized LIKE hetero-marriage: “Another Gay Man That Opposes Same-Sex Marriage #SSM”.
Another Example via Personal Experience.
Many Gays Reject Court Forced Same-Sex Marriage
For some time, a few years back, I and about 10-20 gay men and women… and at times their extended family would meet monthly. All were lovers of the Constitution — what brought us together was the website GAY PATRIOT (gaypatriot[dot]net – now defunct, sadly) and admiration of what Bruce Carroll and other gay writers boldly forged in countering current cultural trends.
Some of these people I met with and have communicated with over the years [friends] held the position that same-sex marriage should not be placed on the same level in society as heterosexual marriage, as, the family pre-dates and is the foundation for society. All, however, held that what is not clearly enumerated in the Constitution for the federal government to do should be left for the states. And thus, they would say each state has the right to define marriage themselves. Speaking out against high-court interference – as they all did about Roe v. Wade. (All were pro-life.)
As an aside, we met once-a-month at either the Sizzler in Hollywood or the Outback in Burbank, exclusively on Mondays. (All coordinated by “GayPatriotWest” – Daniel Blatt). Why? Those two CEOs gave to Mitt Romney’s campaign. And on Mondays because the L.A. City Council asked people not to eat meat on Mondays to help the planet.
A joint hetero [me]/gay [them] “thumb in LA City Councils eye.” Lol.
What I respect are men and women (gay or not) who protect freedom of thought/speech. Like these two-freedom loving lesbian women I post about on my site.
“…. Imagine a homosexual videographer being forced to video a speech that a conservative makes against homosexual behavior and same sex marriage. Should homosexual videographers be forced to do so? Of course not! Then why Elane Photography?”
Now, here is a gay “Conservatarian” site, Gay Patriot’s, input (in a post, “New Mexico Gets It Wrong” – now gone in the ether of the WWW):
“… it’s a bad law, a law that violates natural human rights to freedom of association and to freely chosen work. It is not good for gays; picture a gay photographer being required by law to serve the wedding of some social conservative whom he or she despises.”
However, I also live in a Constitutional Republic — even if by a thread. So, items not clearly enumerated in the Constitution are reverted to the States to hash out. So, I get an opportunity to vote on items or influence state legislatures to come down on, say, marriage being between a man and a woman. So, as a Conservatarian, what I call a “paleo-liberal,” I get to force my morals on others for lack of a better term. (See my “Where Do Ethics Come From? Atheist Convo | Bonus Material” | and Norman Geisler and Frank Turek’s book, “Legislating Morality: Is It Wise? Is It Legal? Is It Possible?”)
What those freedom loving gay men and women and I have in common is the rejection of Judicial Activism. We all agreed that in California, the H8 bill passed by a slight majority of Californians should have been law defining marriage as between male and female. Why? Because this is what the Constitution in the 10th Amendment clearly stated:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
And that like Roe v. Wade, the courts interfering with the body politic hashing these things out on the state level. This Court interference created more division and lawfare down the road. As well as bad law. Some examples of this rather than just my statement:
Roe v. Wade — which ruled that the U.S. Constitution effectively mandates a nationwide policy of abortion on demand — is one of the most widely criticized Supreme Court decisions in America history.
As Villanova law professor Joseph W. Dellapenna writes,
“The opinion [in Roe] is replete with irrelevancies, non-sequiturs, and unsubstantiated assertions. The Court decides matters it disavows any intention of deciding—thereby avoiding any need to defend its conclusion. In the process the opinion simply fails to convince.”
Even many scholars sympathetic to the results of Roe have issued harsh criticisms of its legal reasoning. In the Yale Law Journal, eminent legal scholar John Hart Ely, a supporter of legal abortion, complained that Roe is “bad constitutional law, or rather … it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” He wrote:
“What is unusual about Roe is that the liberty involved is accorded … a protection more stringent, I think it is fair to say, than that the present Court accords the freedom of the press explicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-a-vis the interests that legislatively prevailed over it. And that, I believe … is a charge that can responsibly be leveled at no other decision of the past twenty years. At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking.”
Below are criticisms of Roe from other supporters of legal abortion.
“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” — Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard law professor
“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose. … Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the … years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.” — Edward Lazarus, former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun
“The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations. … Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.” — Archibald Cox, Harvard law professor, former U.S. Solicitor General
“[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As a constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether.” — Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania law professor
“Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the Court. … Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
“In the Court’s first confrontation with the abortion issue, it laid down a set of rules for legislatures to follow. The Court decided too many issues too quickly. The Court should have allowed the democratic processes of the states to adapt and to generate sensible solutions that might not occur to a set of judges.” — Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law professor
“Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy). … [C]lear governing constitutional principles … are not present [in Roe].” — Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor
“[O]verturning [Roe] would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary. … Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself.” — Jeffrey Rosen, legal commentator, George Washington University law professor
“Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference.” — William Saletan, Slate columnist, writing in Legal Affairs
“In the years since the decision an enormous body of academic literature has tried to put the right to an abortion on firmer legal ground. But thousands of pages of scholarship notwithstanding, the right to abortion remains constitutionally shaky. … [Roe] is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” — Benjamin Wittes, Brookings Institution fellow
“Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching.” — Michael Kinsley, columnist, writing in the Washington Post.
Abortion and Gays… Why Manny Are Pro-Life
Some gay men and women oppose abortion for religious reasons. Other view this as a life issue. Here is an example of what I am thinking of:
“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?”
— Dale A. Berryhill, The Liberal Contradiction: How Contemporary Liberalism Violates Its Own Principles and Endangers Its Own Goals (Lafayette, LA: Vital Issues Press, 1994), 172.
THE BLAZE has a flashback of Ann Coulter saying pretty much the same thing: “The gays have got to be pro-life. As soon as they find the gay gene, guess who the liberal yuppies are gonna start aborting” — yep
Ann Coulter has a penchant for making controversial statements that often lead to snickers, jeers and plenty of other reactionary responses. In an upcoming episode of Logo’s “A List: Dallas,” the well-known conservative pundit told Taylor Garrett, a gay Republican and a cast member on the show, some things about liberals and abortion that will surely get people talking.
The general premise of her words: Gays and lesbians should become pro-life, because liberals may start aborting their unborn gay children once a homosexual gene is discovered.
“The gays have got to be pro-life. As soon as they find the gay gene, guess who the liberal yuppies are gonna start aborting,” she said. Watch her comments, below: ….
“All Gays Should Be Republican” | Ann Coulter Flashback
The rule of nature in this situation would be to always promote and protect innocent life. Once you start deviating from that rule that is the foundation of our Constitution found in the Declaration:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
You start to create “special rights,” and these “special rights” are then put under the jurisdiction of politicians and special interest groups. And we all know what happens to the integrity of an issue or topic when that happens. Here is one example:
Feminists, Gays, Abortion and Gendercide | Ezra Levant Flashback
So as much as the quote by Zuby at the outset is a good one in a universe governed by reason and natural law and Nature’s God…. the progressive Left will always destroy what it touches… life and family being two issues exemplified above. So to adopt a quote wrongly is on the easier side of the Left ruining an idea.
From the Boy Scouts to literature, from the arts to universities: the left ruins everything it touches. Dennis Prager explains.
…. Take the Boy Scouts. For generations, the Boy Scouts, founded and preserved by Americans of all political as well as ethnic backgrounds, has helped millions of American boys become good, productive men. The left throughout America — its politicians, its media, its stars, its academics — have ganged up to deprive the Boy Scouts of oxygen. Everywhere possible, the Boy Scouts are vilified and deprived of places to meet.
But while the left works to destroy the Boy Scouts — unless the Boy Scouts adopt the left’s views on openly gay scouts and scout leaders — the left has created nothing comparable to the Boy Scouts. The left tries to destroy one of the greatest institutions ever made for boys, but it has built nothing for boys. There is no ACLU version of the Boy Scouts; there is only the ACLU versus the Boy Scouts.
The same holds true for the greatest character-building institution in American life: Judeo-Christian religions. Once again, the left knows how to destroy. Everywhere possible the left works to inhibit religious institutions and values — from substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” to removing the tiny cross from the Los Angeles County Seal to arguing that religious people must not bring their values into the political arena.
And, then there is education. Until the left took over American public education in the second half of the 20th century, it was generally excellent — look at the high level of eighth-grade exams from early in the 20th century and you will weep. The more money the left has gotten for education — America now spends more per student than any country in the world — the worse the academic results. And the left has removed God and dress codes from schools — with socially disastrous results.
Of course, it is not entirely accurate to say that the left builds nothing. It has built vast government bureaucracies, MTV, and post-1960s Hollywood, for example. But these are, to say the least, not positive achievements.
In his column this week, Thomas Friedman describes General Motors Corp., as “a giant wealth-destruction machine.” That perfectly describes the left many times over. It is both a wealth-destruction machine and an ennobling-institution destruction machine.
A family member mentioned I should put the recent MRI of my shoulder examination into ChatGPT… Here is the original report:
TECHNIQUE:
Multiplanar, multi sequential MIRI performed) Standard sequences obtained
FINDINGS:
Rotator cuff: Fluid signal extending from the bursal to articular surface of the distal anterior insertion of the supraspinatus tendon consistent with a pinhole full-thickness tear. There is no significant retraction. There Is no muscle atrophy or edema. There Is associated diffuse tendinopathy of the supraspinatus tendon. The infraspinatus tendon is intact There is partial thickness tearing of the subscapularis tendon. The teres minor tendon is intact. There is no significant muscle atrophy or edema. Biceps tendon and labrum: Extensive tendinopathy of the intra-articular portion of the biceps tendon with short segment of longitudinal split tear. Abnormal signal of the superior labrum extending to the biceps anchor most suggestive for SLAP tear. Osseous structures and bone marrow: Cystic changes seen in the superior glenoid. Loss of glenohumeral joint and thinning of the articular cartilage. Moderate AC joint degenerative change, There is no acute fracture, contusion or AVN. No os acromiale or Hill-Sachs fracture. Joint spaces and soft tissues: There is a small joint effusion. There is no significant fluid in the subacromial subdeltoid bursa.
IMPRESSION:
Pinhole full-thickness tear of the distal anterior Insertion of the supraspinatus tendon without significant retraction 2. Partial tearing of the infraspinatus tendon B. Tendinopathy with longitudinal split tear of the biceps tendon 4. Abnormal signal of the superior labrum most suggestive for SLAP tear 5. Osteoarthrosis bf the glenohumeral joint with cystic changes in the superior glenoid G. Moderate AC Joint degenerative change 7. Small joint effusion
Here is how ChatGPT worded it (I add the pics):
Based on the provided findings, the impression of the MRI examination is as follows:
Pinhole full-thickness tear of the distal anterior insertion of the supraspinatus tendon without significant retraction: This indicates a small tear in the supraspinatus tendon, which is one of the rotator cuff tendons located in the shoulder. The tear extends from the bursal (outer) to the articular (inner) surface of the tendon.
Partial tearing of the infraspinatus tendon: The infraspinatus tendon, another rotator cuff tendon, appears to have a partial tear. The extent of the tear is not specified.
Tendinopathy with longitudinal split tear of the biceps tendon: The biceps tendon, which runs along the front of the upper arm, shows signs of tendinopathy (tendon damage) and a longitudinal split tear. This tear refers to a tear that runs along the length of the tendon.
Abnormal signal of the superior labrum most suggestive for SLAP tear: The superior labrum, also known as the “top” or “upper” labrum, shows abnormal signal intensity. This finding is most suggestive of a SLAP (Superior Labrum Anterior to Posterior) tear. SLAP tears involve the superior part of the labrum and are commonly associated with biceps tendon issues.
Osteoarthrosis of the glenohumeral joint with cystic changes in the superior glenoid: The glenohumeral joint, which is the main joint of the shoulder, shows signs of osteoarthrosis, which is a degenerative joint disease. Cystic changes are seen in the superior (upper) part of the glenoid, which is the socket of the shoulder joint.
Moderate AC Joint degenerative change: The AC (acromioclavicular) joint, which is located at the top of the shoulder, shows moderate degenerative changes. This indicates wear and tear or arthritis in the AC joint.
Small joint effusion: There is a small amount of fluid within the joint, which could be a sign of inflammation or injury.
Please note that the information provided is based on the findings described and does not constitute a medical diagnosis. It is important to consult with a qualified healthcare professional or a specialist, such as an orthopedic surgeon or a radiologist, for an accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment options based on your specific condition.
So the lack of cartoonish humor on social media is upsetting. So much so I am going to do a “fact-check” on a “fact-check.”
Yes, it is true with the original cartoon I posted on Facebook that 5-year-old’s do not get hormone therapy to prepare for sex-transitions, yet, very young children do in fact get hormone blockers and surgery.
Did I mention VERY YOUNG?
So, I decided to make a cartoon of my own with the current FACTSI know of.
I am curious if I will get “fact-checked” when I upload this to my SSM Facebook page.
Here is what I will post with the cartoon… and a larger version will be available when you click the below cartoon for better reading:
NEW FB POST
The “fact-checks” are missing the humor of the original cartoon I posted. Both Reuters and PolitiFact would probably say the same if I changed this to an 11-year-old. However, we know that,
A brief report from four doctors at Vanderbilt University, “Gender-Affirming Chest Reconstruction Among Transgender and Gender-Diverse Adolescents in the US From 2016 to 2019” appeared in JAMA Pediatrics earlier this week. It is “the largest investigation to date of gender-affirming chest reconstruction in a pediatric population” to date. [….]An estimated 1,130 “top jobs” were performed during those four years on girls as young as 12. [….] According to the data, based on the Nationwide Ambulatory Surgery Sample, the Vanderbilt doctors calculated that 5.5 percent of the children were under 14, 21.5 percent under 15, and 56 percent under 16. I assume if a double mastectomy is done at 12 or 13, a penectomy would be done as well to that age-group? [I assume a penectomy has more health consequences for this age-group, so this may be a later stage surgery.] (See more at RPT)
Typically, hormone therapies/puberty blockers are required a year before surgery, so it is reasonable to assume girls [and boys] as young a 11-years-old have had these “therapies” [child abuse] done to them. I say, “to them” because 11-year-olds cannot consent to such medical procedures and “therapies.”
MAGA want smaller government. Fascism demands a government so large that they can come in and tell social media companies to censor climate change challenges, to censor news stories about pay for play evidenced in emails from a family members laptop. So big as to audit and disallow conservative orgs from forming, to push companies and schools to hire based off ethnicity and sex rather than SAT scores or production and contribution to the company. So powerful they can shut down your business, force kids to be “vaccinated” in order to attend school. So large that your daughters have to be in a locker room with men, or that these girls get to the top of their game through many hard hours and extra coaching and training only to have a bottom tier male “athlete” set records by unbeatable margins for women and girls. So large as to force racist material and faux history in schools. Who have the power to legislate what lightbulb you buy to what kind of car you must purchase. Etc., Etc.
TO WIT… Thomas Sowell made clear distinctions he was seeing (as an economist and historian) in the Obama admin and terminology (via PATRIOT POST).
SOWELL:
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.
What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama’s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.
Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous – something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance companies.
The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely – and correctly – regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.
It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot – and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people – like themselves – need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.
The left’s vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, “We the People…”
That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution’s limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges’ new interpretations, based on notions of “a living Constitution” that will take decisions out of the hands of “We the People,” and transfer those decisions to our betters.
The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences…….
I posted a video showing a Federal Crime, and I get this retarded response:
First of all, that response did not address in any way the forensic evidence of a particular person deleting records that Federal Law says must be kept… but… Cyber Ninja’s [essentially] said no such thing. A normal — unbiased person sanely led by common sense and not a hook through the nose by the boob-tube news industry might ask as Kari Lake did (she is running for AZ Governor):
So, this post is for all the noobs like ROSS T.mentioned at the outset. I would say “enjoy,” but what is below is a crime that changed the outcome of an election. KEEP IN MIND… ALL THIS IS ONE COUNTY IN ARIZONA. ONE.
In the 2020 presidential election, the margin of victory was only 10,457 votes, a small fraction of the 57,734 ballots with known issues. Again, this is almost 6 times the margin of victory in the Presidential race and is multiples of the margin of victory in other races. Based on these factual findings, the election should not be certified, and the reported results are not reliable. (“CYBER NINJAS” — see executive summary HERE)
THE BIGGIES IN MY MIND:
Maricopa County did not preserve the digital security logs for the 2020 election for 22 months in accordance with FEDERAL LAW.
Shared passwords and the same passwords across the entire election system.
Mail in ballots were cast under voter registration IDs for people that may not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved, and no one with the same last name remained at the address.
Nearly half of the votes flagged as suspicious — 23,344 — fell into a category called “ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election.” They included 15,035 who moved within the county before the registration deadline, 6,591 who moved to another state before the registration deadline and 1,718 who moved to a different county before the registration deadline.
Found 34,448 votes from those who voted more than once in Arizona in the 2020 election. 17,000 votes that NEVER should have been included in the audit!
The day before the audit was to begin, nearly 1.1 million subpoenaed files were anonymously deleted. Doing this was criminal obstruction of justice. Arizona’s Attorney General, Mark Brnovic, must pursue these crimes.
NOQ REPORT has some of the cataloging of issues here (RPT adds in some media to this post from NOQ):
Here are the facts. The hand recount did what those of us who have been paying attention expected it to do. It confirmed that the original counts were not falsified without an accompanying ballot, whether collected before/during the election or manufactured following Election Day. I cannot stress this enough that contrary to what some on the right were saying, this was fully expected. Those who cheated were not dumb enough to fake the numbers. They produced the ballots necessary to match the so-called “victory” by the Biden-Harris ticket.
It’s conspicuous that a quarter of the questionable ballots came in AFTER Election Day even though the total ballots received late represented a minuscule overall percentage of the vote. They got sloppy as they rushed to make up the gap. Their initial cheating before the election was simply not enough to overcome the Trump landslide, so they rushed to recover.
The real juice in this audit was discovering how many ballots were manufactured in order to produce the desired outcome. That’s where it is crystal clear that the election was stolen. As we reported earlier, over 17K envelopes were duplicates. That’s more than enough to justify decertifying the election since the Biden-Harris ticket “won” by around 10K votes. If that was the only evidence of voter fraud that was found, then we could cry foul. But it wasn’t all that was found. Not by a longshot.
The official Arizona Senate election audit report is in – and Trump supporters are calling for the state’s 2020 election to be ‘decertified.’ The results showed “57,734 ballots with serious issues were identified.” If those ballots were not counted, that would be far beyond the margin of victory needed to overturn the results of the election. The independent auditors recommended that “the election should not be certified.”
In addition, there were more disturbing findings, according to Cyber Ninjas: A Dominion technician allegedly deleted all of the log files a day before the audit began, while other security lapses abounded. Trump supporters and election integrity advocates exploded at the findings on Twitter.
Twitter was loaded with perspectives, many of which highlighted some of the many key findings in the audit hearing. Propaganda Sniper noted, “Despite poor password management by Maricopa County officials, the forensic audit team was able to identify the individual who erased the digital paper trails… but they will only release that name (or names) to the authorities.”
….That’s Maricopa officials DELETING logs to cover their tracks. (RIGHT SCOOP)
“Suzy” said, “Clear intentional overwriting of security logs from EMS account. 2/11/ 21- 463 entries overwritten. 3/3/21 – 37,686 entries overwritten. 4/12/21 – 330 entries overwritten. They have identified the individual not disclosed at this time!”
Liz Harrington observed, “Maricopa County fraudulently ‘verified and approved’ mail-in ballots that had NO signature THEN multiple ballots were approved with the same exact name and address, matching signatures, but DIFFERENT voter IDs.”
They stamped Verified and Approved on mail-in ballots that WERE BLANK except for the VOTE (RIGHT SCOOP)
…To make certain that what the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors did to ensure Biden’s victory would never be discovered, the day before the audit was to begin, nearly 1.1 million subpoenaed files were anonymously deleted. Doing this was criminal obstruction of justice. Arizona’s Attorney General, Mark Brnovic, must pursue these crimes.
For those who have maintained the election was fair and honest, these deletions are proof positive that it wasn’t. The Cyber Ninjas demonstrated that it wasn’t.
Only fools, those who have a vested interest in perpetuating the darkness, and the willfully obtuse can dispute the results of this audit. Arizona was stolen, plain and simple…..
YEP.
Only fools — or — ROSS T.
Of note as well is what Dominion said was impossible:
On Friday the Senate auditors revealed they have proof of Maricopa County officials DELETING data from the Dminion voting machines.
This was a HUGE announcement.
Audit investigator Ben Cotton also told the Senators present that the Dominion machines that were analyzed included data not from Maricopa County. They were able to identify data from South Carolina and Washington State.
What the hell is this??
More from CYBER NINJAS regarding….
Massive Duplicate Ballot Discrepancies Revealed In Audit Report
Extensive Cyber Security Issues Found During AZ Audit
FIXING THE ISSUE:
“Law enforcement needs to be involved”
Sen. Petersen says “the numbers don’t reconcile”
“It appears they broke the law with duplicate ballots”
I must first say that I differ very little with Dr. Jonathan Sarfati on most of our views on the world, science, and the Bible. I have purchased most of his books he has authored and co-authored. So this is not coming from a place of disrespect — at all. Disagreement is healthy and good, dictatorial mandates, however, are not. And some governments are basing their decisions on the same mistakes I see made in an article about Dr. Sarfati’s position on THESE vaccines, titled, “Leading Creationist Endorses Vaccine: COVID Is ‘1,000 Times More Dangerous’ Than the Vaccine.”
What I do differ with however, is the idea that the death “because of” Covid is just accepted as “golden” by Dr. Sarfati. Let me explain, and this is in response to both the title of the article as well as ideas expressed within it. This is via a conversation a few weeks back on my Facebook, noted in a post of mine, after detailing the struggles of many hospitals to deal with expanding emergency areas due to increased patients (tents to expand sick wards, and the like) I noted the idea of comparing “emergencies” properly:
(OP – Original Post) Good presentation. This rant is not related to the video, but I was thinking about this today. Whenever there is a bad flu year, we always deal with the variants in years to come, and, typically they aren’t as deadly. Like Delta. So deaths, and hospitalization are typically lower than the Alpha strain. So tent triages and the like were set up for the 2017-2018 flu season — (the CDC estimates that between 46,000 and 95,000 Americans died due to influenza during the 2017-18 flu season. This resulted in an estimated 959,000 hospitalizations and a middle-ground of 61,099 deaths) and the subsequent variants were less deadly, but they are still floating around. But this seasons Delta Variant is less of a bugger than 2017-18, maybe even the 2012-2013 flu season — (56,000 deaths is the CDC estimate. 571,000 influenza-related hospitalizations). But people still want to live in fear, rather than live. Its sad.
(KRIS W. — a thoughtfully minded conservative) This doctor was great! I hope you are right about the numbers. I refuse to live in fear.
(ME)Kris W., So, the Alpha Covid strain was here in September of 2019. So the Covid season “A” was 2019-2020. We are now in a 2020-2021 season. The numbers from this season need to be separated from the previous. I bet we are closer to bad seasons from previous years. And next year will be better. But like other flu strains, we will have Covid with us forever. (Flu shots are a hodgepodge mixture of various strains, and people who get it hope one of the many strains in the shot get close to the actual, and so lessons the symptoms if they get the flu. Same here. These Covid strains may be in a cocktail mix in the future.)
Likewise, I have yet to see a good study of applying the CDC changing how hospitals and physicians were told to write up deaths associated with Covid-19 to other “outbreaks.” So — for instance — if you catalogued the 2017-2018 flu season with the new definitions per the CDC (April of 2020), that flu season would have tripled to quadrupled in deaths attributed to it [I believe].
In 1969 the population was 207,659,263, and 100,000 Americans died from the Hong Kong Flu (H3N2)… but what if the changed definitions of attribution to Covid (dying WITHthe Hong Kong Flu or FROMthe Hong Kong Flu) were applied then? Similarly, in 1957 the U.S. population was 177,751,476, and 116,000 people died from that outbreak.
To me, this is partially a shell game where many who have died would have died from their ailments.
And the whole “Hospitals will be overrun with Covid patients” thing was largely myth, for example:
After unprecedented preparations—including filling the Long Beach Arena with cots and welcoming a 1,000-bed floating medical center off the coast—Long Beach hospitals have yet to experience the patient surge anticipated in the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis.
In fact, local hospital officials say they are now making every effort to avoid laying off or furloughing staff, and hospitals statewide are estimating losses of up to $14 billion after they delayed elective surgeries to make room for an expected crush of emergency patients….
So when Doc Sarfati says “[t]he virus is at least 1,000 times more dangerous than the vaccine,” I look at that as an unfounded statement. In reality at least.
Why? Because his “known” factors are not REALLY KNOWN.
Now, do I think this is a bad outbreak?
Yes I do.
Worse than most in our history?
Yep.
This virus is highly tuned to attack [especially] weak respiratory systems.
Do I think this demands forced masking and vaccinations?
The fact is no conservative American politician is a likely dictator because one of the fundamental goals of American conservatives is to shrink the power of the government. A dictatorship in America is far more likely to come from the left, which seeks to massively increase government power. For example, as reported in Politico on Aug. 21, 2020, Biden has already pledged, “I would shut it down,” referring to the American economy and Americans’ freedom of movement to combat the COVID-19 virus.
…ring true. Leftists are using this BAD or INCOMPLETE DATA to control the masses in a way that destroys private wealth, and increases the governments power over handing out “manufactured” wealth [i.e., control].
Australia and France are among those already feeling the burn of government overreach. But the excuse of Covid to lock people [and I believe to use it as an excuse to hit the underground church] down in many countries such a China and places as obscure as Burma is an excuse to kill or jail rival political party leaders and Christians.
Many governments “weaponized” the coronavirus pandemic during the last year to further repress citizens’ rights, global rights group Amnesty International said in its annual report, released Wednesday. The report also says the virus disproportionately hit ethnic minorities, refugees and women. (AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL)
David Curry, the CEO of the Christian charity Open Doors, warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of China is arresting Christians using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to intensify its persecution of the Christian community, even punishing believers who attend online church ceremonies. (VISION TIMES)
There are reports that authorities used the COVID-19 pandemic to keep churches closed, even after it was no longer necessary for health reasons. (OPEN DOORS)
Examples from Canada as well can be found HERE, HERE, and HERE.
Etc.
What fuels this? Lies, ignorance, elitism, or plain ignorance about the above challenges regarding the deadliness of the 2019-2020 Covid outbreak, or the later [predominately] Delta Variant. Even NPR thinks comparing it to Chicken Pox was an overreach. So does Doc Victory:
CONTINUING….
When Doc Sarfati says
“So the virus is far more fearful than the vaccine could possibly be,” he added. “Otherwise, we’re living in a magic universe if somehow a vaccine is more dangerous than a fast-multiplying virus.”
If the vaccine was “as bad” as conspiratorial websites say it is, he said, “we should be seeing millions of people dropping like flies, but we don’t even see the thousands of people.”
I am not a “conspiratorial website,” to be clear. And in fact, I often rant against conspiracies. And I agree, I do not think they are as bad as some say… however, I also do not think they are as safe as Doc Sarfati makes them out to be either. (For reasons already stated and to be stated, below.)
The people who have died from blood clots, heart attacks, and the like, after a 1st or 2nd dose have not had the proper medical evaluations to justify such “matter of fact” statements.
In reality, we do not know the REAL RATES of deadly side-effects so to examine the topic fully.
AGAIN,
In short, Dr. Schirmacher performed autopsies on 40 people who had died within two weeks of receiving a Covid jab. Of those, 30%-40% could be directly attributed to the “vaccines.” He is calling for more autopsies of those who die shortly after getting injected to see if his numbers pan out. But Germany has thus far been reluctant to act. Meanwhile, the report of this highly respected pathologist and pro-vaccine doctor is being suppressed. (NOQ REPORT)
I don’t think this is a big conspiracy. In fact, the reasons why autopsies are not done that often is a combination of (a) the acceptance en masse of the change in death certificates by the CDC in April of last year as well as (b) a financial interest:
Unfortunately, autopsy rates have fallen from 25% to less than 5% over the past four decades. It never was a revenue producer for anyone except malpractice attorneys (WND).
Related as well to the already noted article about hospitals postponing elective surgeries via the Long Beach Business Journal is this detailed article by way of Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (Penn LDI)
Hospitals lost more than $20 billion in revenue when the pandemic led to an unprecedented nationwide shutdown in elective surgical procedures from March to May 2020.
ALL THAT BEING SAID, statements about the health of the vaccines compared to other categories in any meaningful way is still out of reach of “firm statements.” One anecdotal example seems to be a good fit here:
A Minnesota woman who contracted COVID-19 after getting vaccinated had to have both of her legs amputated, and will soon have her hands amputated as well.
Jummai Nache, a medical assistant from Minneapolis, received the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on February 1.
A few days later on February 6, her husband, Philip, took her to urgent care after she felt chest pains.
A day later, she tested positive for COVID-19, and her condition quickly deteriorated, leading to hospitalization and eventual amputation.
[….]
He said that his wife suffered from an arterial blood clot, respiratory disease, cardiomyopathy (heart muscle disease), anemia, ischemia and multiple inflammatory syndrome (MIS) – a condition where multiple organs in the body become inflamed….
Again, these blood clots have been an issue for many of these vaccines. The “experts” say it is rare, but as I have pointed out, they cannot make statements like “4 in 1 million people experience cerebral venous thrombosis after getting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, versus 5 in 1 million people for the AstraZeneca vaccine” (source) — because people who have died have not been properly examined. Again, when properly examined….
Dr. Schirmacher performed autopsies on 40 people who had died within two weeks of receiving a Covid jab. Of those, 30%-40% could be directly attributed to the “vaccines.”
… the rates may be higher.
A site doing a decent job in cataloging the detrimental impact of these vaccines on people’s lives can be found at 1000 COVID STORIES. Here is one example from the site:
These will not make it into Doc Sarfati’s “hopper,” because like that Daily Mail story noted: “The agency [the CDC] could not determine whether the vaccine played a role in her condition.” And so… many cases are rejected or not even determined/found. So when people state as “fact” the following:
“And the death toll for fully vaccinated people is only one in a million, compared to ~20,000 deaths per million C19 cases,”
OR,
If the vaccine was “as bad” as conspiratorial websites say it is, he said, “we should be seeing millions of people dropping like flies, but we don’t even see the thousands of people.”
OR,
“The virus is at least 1,000 times more dangerous than the vaccine,”
These statements [in my estimation] cannot be said with the built in ASSURITYthat they seem to posses.
Another example from the article is when he states: “When individuals are fully vaccinated, he wrote, ‘people are 94% less likely’ to have COVID-19.” Early in July Israel dropped the effectiveness of the Pfzier Vaccine from the mid-ninety-percent effectiveness to 64%. Then 2-weeks later they dropped it to 40%…
Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine is just 39% effective in Israel where the delta variant is the dominant strain, according to a new report from the country’s Health Ministry.(CNBC)
All this may or may not be true… what I do know is that since March of 2020, I have noticed an acceptance without question of numbers and stats that I find incredible. Or if questioned, relegated to conspiracies or wackiness, connecting those who question THESE vaccines as “anti-vaxxers,” whichImost assuredly am not!
DR. SARFATI RESPONDS:
Not very good, That 1000 times factor was based on the burst size of the virus. Since March and millions of people vaccinated, the data show that it’s in the right ball park. E.g. compare the worst estimates of vacine deaths with the most optimistic for Rona survival, and the factor is several hundred at least.
This is something I saw pop up on my FB in slow traffic yesterday and I thought it worthy of a “quick” retort.
A couple things going on here. First, no one I listen to or have read (other than the kooky “Alex Jones fringe,” has said it’s “not dangerous.” For instance, I myself argue it is as dangerous as the 1957-1958 and the 1968-1969 outbreaks — when the numbers are tampered down with the CDC’s change to how death certificates are written:
SOME EXAMPLES TO SUPPORT THE CONTENTION
Last month Alameda County, Calif., reduced its Covid death toll by 25% after state public-health officials insisted that deaths be attributed to Covid only if the virus was a direct or contributing factor. — Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health and Carey Business School. (Wall Street Journal)
Alameda County has changed the way it calculates deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a 25% drop this weekend. The official total fell from 1,634 to 1,223 on Friday after the county changed its methodology to align with narrower guidelines used by California and U.S. health agencies. According to a news release from the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency, the new number includes only people who “died as a direct result of COVID-19, or had the virus as a contributing cause of death as well as people for whom COVID-19 could not be ruled out as a cause of death.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
(FLASHBACK VIA RPT)And as states are going over death certificates, they are dropping by at least 25% in deaths by Covid-19. And some independent groups are helping “catch” the inflated number, like Pennsylvania’s “Wolf administration was caught this week adding up to 269 fake deaths to the state totals on Tuesday” (CITADELPOLITICS). Or this short example (PJ-MEDIA)
On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) confirmed a report by the Freedom Foundation that they have included those who tested positive for COVID-19 but died of other causes, including gunshot injuries, in their coronavirus death totals. This calls into serious question the state’s calculations of residents who have actually died of the CCP pandemic.
Last week, after it was reported that, like Washington, Colorado was counting deaths of all COVID-19 positive persons regardless of cause (which had resulted in the inclusion of deaths from alcohol poisoning), the Colorado Department of Health and Environment began to differentiate between deaths “among people with COVID-19” and “deaths due to COVID-19.”
Just one more of the many examples I could share is the New York Times getting 40% wrong of their “died from Covid-19 under 30-years old” front page news story. Mmmm, no, they didn’t die of Covid.
This Sunday morning, The New York Times has devoted their front page to the nearly 100,000 U.S. victims of COVID-19. The text-only cover lists 1,000 names and excerpts from the obituaries of people who have succumbed to the dreaded virus. The only problem with this lovely memorial is that at least one of the victims did not appear to have died from the coronavirus and his was only the sixth name on the list. [….] But others were quick to point out that Haynes was only the sixth name on the list. One replied, “He was one out of 5 under 30 on the list. Another in that group had a condition that doctors told him he would not live to 18. Did not test positive for COVID but still ruled a COVID death. That’s 40% of the under 30 age bracket.” (Red State)
[….]
APRIL 8TH (2020):
APRIL 19 (2020):
So, I am saying as an example, that a good portion of the deaths being attributed to Covid are not in fact Covid deaths.
The CDC has introduced a new ICD code, “to accurately capture mortality data for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) on death certificates.”
(Note: ICD stands for International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. It is a medical classification list by the World Health Organization (WHO).)
The new ICD code for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is U07.1. The CDC email says that the WHO has added a second code, U07.2, for instances “where a laboratory confirmation is inconclusive or not available. Because laboratory test results are not typically reported on death certificates in the U.S., National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is not planning to implement U07.2 for mortality statistics.”
The problem with the new codes is that it may result in an inflated number of coronavirus deaths….
And this is what I [for example] have argued. Do these changes made in April of 2020 impact previous outbreaks? Would this change also increase the 1957-1958 and the1968-1969 outbreaks? I think so.
A couple more examples to support the contention
(Story about a May 2020 death cert)
…. Jack Dake, an Oklahoma man who lived an admirable life as a veteran, a lifelong blue-collar worker and a loving dad, died on May 6 after contracting COVID-19.
There’s just one problem with his cause of death, his family says: Jack Dake did not die from the coronavirus.
The man barely had any symptoms, his family told The Oklahoman, and he died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
But, the family insists, that didn’t stop a coroner from labeling Dake as a coronavirus statistic on his death certificate on May 14.
Dake’s son, Jack Dake Jr., told the newspaper that his father’s death had absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic.
“Alzheimer’s was the cause of death, and COVID-19 was not even a contributing condition,” Dake Jr. told The Oklahoman. “Yet it’s recorded as the only cause of death.”
Dake apparently contracted the coronavirus at an Oklahoma City assisted living center and tested positive on April 17.
[….]
But the elder Dake was in one of the final stages of his battle with Alzheimer’s and had quit eating and drinking, which is common for end-stage sufferers of the degenerative brain disease.
Dake Jr. also said his father was never again tested for the coronavirus, but the family did request that he be put on hospice care, as he was not eating and was dehydrated.
Dake was listed as being terminal with COVID-19 by hospice workers, and when he died 20 days after testing positive, his death was recorded as one of the state’s coronavirus fatalities.
[….]
According to USA Today, a provision in the Coronavirus Aid, Relieve and Economic Securities Act provides a “20% premium or add on” to Medicare reimbursements to health care facilities. (More information about that provision from the American Hospital Association.)…
The Montezuma County Coroner’s Office is disputing the state’s claim of a third fatal case of the coronavirus in Cortez, saying the person died of alcohol poisoning. County Coroner George Deavers said the person tested positive for COVID-19, but an investigation by him and the pathologist determined the cause of death was ethanol toxicity. The person’s blood-alcohol content was 0.55, or almost seven times the legal driving limit of 0.08 in Colorado, Deavers said. A BAC of 0.3 is considered lethal. (DURANGO HERALD)
CBS 12 News examined medical examiner’s reports on COVID-19 deaths and found eight examples where a person was listed as a coronavirus death but had actually died from something else. This includes a 60-year-old man who died from a gunshot wound to the head, a 90-year-old who fell and broke a hip, and a 77-year-old who died of Parkinson’s disease. (CBS)
A woman is left with “no peace” after her father’s death certificate stated he died of the coronavirus despite previously testing negative and an MRI test showing he suffered multiple strokes. Jay Smith died on July 12 in San Antonio, Texas, after an MRI showed brain damage from enduring multiple strokes. Kayla Smith, however, said last week that her father’s death certificate listed him as a coronavirus victim. “They put him as COVID. He didn’t have COVID. He had a stroke,” she said. “The MRI showed that he had multiple strokes in the brain, and also he had a blood clot. Those multiple strokes caused so much damage in his brain that it caused damage in his body.” Jay Smith was first taken to the hospital on July 6, where he tested negative for the coronavirus and was transferred to a non-COVID floor on July 7, according to local outlet KATU. (WASHINGTON EXAMINER)
The other contention in the “meme” is that “no experts” agree with portions of the above. Just high-school dummies.
Here is an older post:
List of “Dummies”
Dennis Prager interviews the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Jay Bhattacharya. Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. Most recently, Bhattacharya has focused his research on the epidemiology of COVID-19 and evaluation of the various policy responses to the epidemic. He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document proposing a relaxation of social controls that delay the spread of COVID-19.
Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
Alexander Walker, principal at World Health Information Science Consultants, former Chair of Epidemiology, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, USA
Andrius Kavaliunas, epidemiologist and assistant professor at Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Angus Dalgleish, oncologist, infectious disease expert and professor, St. George’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, England
Anthony J Brookes, professor of genetics, University of Leicester, England
Annie Janvier, professor of pediatrics and clinical ethics, Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine University Medical Centre, Canada
Ariel Munitz, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Boris Kotchoubey, Institute for Medical Psychology, University of Tübingen, Germany
Cody Meissner, professor of pediatrics, expert on vaccine development, efficacy, and safety. Tufts University School of Medicine, USA
David Katz, physician and president, True Health Initiative, and founder of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, USA
David Livermore, microbiologist, infectious disease epidemiologist and professor, University of East Anglia, England
Eitan Friedman, professor of medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Ellen Townsend, professor of psychology, head of the Self-Harm Research Group, University of Nottingham, England
Eyal Shahar, physician, epidemiologist and professor (emeritus) of public health, University of Arizona, USA
Florian Limbourg, physician and hypertension researcher, professor at Hannover Medical School, Germany
Gabriela Gomes, mathematician studying infectious disease epidemiology, professor, University of Strathclyde, Scotland
Gerhard Krönke, physician and professor of translational immunology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Gesine Weckmann, professor of health education and prevention, Europäische Fachhochschule, Rostock, Germany
Günter Kampf, associate professor, Institute for Hygiene and Environmental Medicine, Greifswald University, Germany
Helen Colhoun, professor of medical informatics and epidemiology, and public health physician, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Jonas Ludvigsson, pediatrician, epidemiologist and professor at Karolinska Institute and senior physician at Örebro University Hospital, Sweden
Karol Sikora, physician, oncologist, and professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham, England
Laura Lazzeroni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of biomedical data science, Stanford University Medical School, USA
Lisa White, professor of modelling and epidemiology, Oxford University, England
Mario Recker, malaria researcher and associate professor, University of Exeter, England
Matthew Ratcliffe, professor of philosophy, specializing in philosophy of mental health, University of York, England
Matthew Strauss, critical care physician and assistant professor of medicine, Queen’s University, Canada
Michael Jackson, research fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Michael Levitt, biophysicist and professor of structural biology, Stanford University, USA.
Recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Mike Hulme, professor of human geography, University of Cambridge, England
Motti Gerlic, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Partha P. Majumder, professor and founder of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani, India
Paul McKeigue, physician, disease modeler and professor of epidemiology and public health, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Rajiv Bhatia, physician, epidemiologist and public policy expert at the Veterans Administration, USA
Rodney Sturdivant, infectious disease scientist and associate professor of biostatistics, Baylor University, USA
Salmaan Keshavjee, professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, USA
Simon Thornley, epidemiologist and biostatistician, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Simon Wood, biostatistician and professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Stephen Bremner,professor of medical statistics, University of Sussex, England
Sylvia Fogel, autism provider and psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, USA
Tom Nicholson, Associate in Research, Duke Center for International Development, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, USA
Udi Qimron, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Ulrike Kämmerer, professor and expert in virology, immunology and cell biology, University of Würzburg, Germany
Uri Gavish, biomedical consultant, Israel
Yaz Gulnur Muradoglu, professor of finance, director of the Behavioural Finance Working Group, Queen Mary University of London, England
…. In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer…..
How many unarmed blacks were killed by cops last year? 9.
How many unarmed whites were killed by cops last year? 19.
THEREFORE, COPS ARE RACIST!!
Ergo, cops are racist against whites considering black [mainly young men] commit about 50% of all homicides. In Los Angeles, blacks commit 44 percent of all violent crime but make up 9 percent of the population. In St. Louis, blacks are less than a third of the population but commit 90 percent of all homicides. In New York City, blacks commit about three quarters of all shootings although they’re 23 percent of the population.
Even if you allow the higher numbers — In 2020, the police fatally shot 18 allegedly unarmed blacks [24 whites] (unarmed being defined extremely loosely to include suspects grabbing an officer’s gun or fleeing in a car with a loaded pistol on the seat) — that represents 0.2 percent of all blacks who died of homicide in 2020, and an infinitesimal percentage of the 40 million blacks in the U.S. If the police ended all fatal shootings tomorrow, it would have a negligible effect on the black death-by-homicide rate, which is 13 times higher than the white death-by-homicide rate for decedents between the ages of ten and 43.
WANT MORE EVIDENCE THAT POLICE ARE RACIST TOWARDS WHITES?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, police killings of blacks declined almost 80% from the late ’60s through the 2010s, while police killings of whites have flatlined. A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.” Last year, according to The Washington Post, the police killed nine unarmed blacks. They killed 19 unarmed whites. In recent years, about 50 cops have been shot and killed annually in the line of duty. So, more cops are killed each year than are unarmed black suspects.
And yet they mow down white people!
NEED MORE EVIDENCE?
The youngest black professor ever to receive tenure at Harvard and recipient of an economics prize for “most promising American economist under 40” has just upended the conventional wisdom on police shootings.
There is no racial bias when officers fire on suspects, according to a new study by Prof. Roland Fryer – black suspects are actually less likely to be shot than other suspects.
The study looked at more than a thousand shootings in 10 major police departments, The New York Times reports. Fryer and student researchers spent 3,000 hours putting together data from police reports in Houston, Austin, Dallas and Los Angeles, as well as Orlando, Jacksonville and four other Florida counties.
Fifteen years of shootings (2000-2015) revealed these results:
In officer-involved shootings in these cities, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both of these results undercut the idea that the police wield lethal force with racial bias.
When Fryer looked at Houston individually – because its police gave them reports for arrests “when lethal force might have been justified” – he found that
in tense situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot a suspect if the suspect was black. This estimate was not very precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But, in a variety of models that controlled for different factors and used different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites.
The only statistically significant differences by race demonstrate that black officers are more likely to shoot unarmed whites, relative to white officers. (Roland Fryer)
(MEGAPHONE FX) They shoot whites more than blacks.
Using the Left’s logic?
Case closed.
Racists!
Obviously I do not think police are “racist” in any systematic way. But that isn’t the point in this post.
… so I drive for a living [essentially], and in heavy traffic — typically the 405 or 134 freeways — I get to pop in on FB. I also listen to Larry Elder and Dennis Prager (and Armstrong and Getty). At any rate, this was posted by a friend:
VOTER I.D.
So I merely supported the OP by the following:
Voting with ID is not racist. In fact, to demean the intelligence of the Black community [they are too dumb or poor to get ID]IS more bigoted than asking for ID
The Obama administration gave tax payer $$ to South Africa for the purpose of insuring election integrity. How? By pushin for voter ID.
Is Obama Jim Eagle?
EDITED ADDITION: fleshing the idiotic Leftist thinking further…. was Obama’s white half using the top 1%’s taxes — you know, the greedy white supremacists that pay 40% of all income tax [how the Left looks at it] — to ensure the obfuscation/obstruction of the black vote in South Africa??
And Larry Elder has been playing some audio from Sen. Kennedy (John Neely Kennedy), here is the recent audio I heard:
And here is FOX’s Chris Wallace noting Sen. Kennedy’s humor:
For the life of me I was trying to place the voice… I was thinking Green Acres. Bingo! Time at Grandma’s being watched [plopped in front of the boob-tube]. As soon as I played his character from Green Acres — Mr. Hanly, my wife immediately said “he was the old hound dog in Fox and the Hound.” So here are some comparison videos [really listening to the similarity].
The Best of Mr. Haney
Pat Buttram tribute (Disney’s Robin Hood / Aristocats / Fox and the Hound / Roger Rabbit)
Trump released a video on social media in which he called for protesters to cease violence and “go home in peace.”
He said, “You have to go home now, we have to have peace. We have to have law and order.”
TWITTER PULLED THAT MESSAGE BTW:
Here were my first thoughts via the FB PAGE for this site:
Just some quick thoughts on the woman shot and killed today in the Capital. First and foremost, I am saddened for her family… her being: “Ashli Babbitt — a 14 year Air Force veteran, served four tours, was a high level security officer.” I suggest that every person who has not read Ann Coulter’s book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, read it. This “mob mentality” does not just exist on the Left, but when caught up in the energy of a large crowd, many will make a decision that alone, in a less stressful environment, wouldn’t make. We are human and are vulnerable at times to peer pressure.
Another thought is that I don’t care who you are — Antifa, Trump supporter, progressive, conservative, libertarian… whatever. If you storm the Capital you stand a high chance of being shot.
I also feel for the officer. I am sure he feels horrible. no one can shoot and kill someone who is unarmed and go home and tell their family, “oh yeah, today was a good day at work.”
Another thing I think that this situation has done is well stated by RED STATE:
….Unfortunately now in addition to people being hurt and this woman dying, they completely changed for the negative any attention that people maybe would have paid to the election concerns. Now some of the politicians are not going to object according to reports, because the left is trying to link the legitimate objections to the actions of the rioters.
Reportedly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to continue the count tonight so we’ll have to see if people who were going to object stick to their principles or they just give up on it all……
….Which leads me to the second point about which I am confident. Today has forever changed the trajectory of the Trump movement.
Donald Trump created a movement that brought tens of millions of people forgotten by politics into the system, which brought electoral victory to a Republican Party that had become used to losing to the Obama-coalition, which brought so much progress and accomplishments to the economy and foreign relations. He brought into the movement an unprecedented multiracial and multiethnic coalition united not by skin color but by love of country.
That movement was embodied in Trump, a unique figure, who had all the obvious personality perculiarities that allowed him to withstand a withering attempt to sabotage his administration and him personally. For four years Trump kept things under control, with Twitter as his vent — he didn’t start wars, didn’t sic the FBI and IRS on political opponents, didn’t do any of the truly repressive things his predecessors did. If not for the relentless attempts to undermine his presidency, his term may have been fairly boring.
Yet things have not been kept under control since election day, and particularly in the past 2-3 weeks. I think a lot of his supporters would acknowledge that.
I had no problem with litigating election disputes, even if some of those disputes were suspect. Let the court process run its course, I advocated. But once that process had run out, and not a single judge, not even Trump appointed judges, upheld any challenges, it was time to move onto more productive action. I advocated on December 14, moving towards building a resistance movement, not engaging in futile and stupid actions that had zero or close to zero chance of success, such as proposing alternative electoral votes.
But that’s not what happened, instead unreliable commentators picked up on the notion that Mike Pence could just reject electoral votes, something completely contrary to the plain wording of the Constitution. Neither Pence, nor even any of the Republican Senators willing to challenge the result through the congressional statutory process, took the position that Pence had such power. Yet that notion became an obsession, so much so that even today Trump in his rally speech was demanding Pence take such action.
Anyone who thinks today was just another negative news cycle is deluding themselves just as people were deluded into thinking grand conspiracy theories or Pence could act as kingmaker deluded themselves. Today was different.
The issue will be whether the Trump coalition can hold together, and who can hold it together. Should Trump choose to be that leader, he will retain his core base, there are a lot of Trump supporters — maybe even the majority — for whom it’s just become too much now. It can’t continue the way it was, there has to be some new way of making an American-economy-first, worker-first, capitalism-and-liberty-first coalition stay together. It may be that there is no one other than Trump who can hold the coalition together, but if that’s the case, then the coalition will break apart because the center cannot hold after today……
Patriots enlist and defend their country. They work hard, do their best, raise good families. They help their neighbors. They perform civic duties. They grit their teeth and pay their taxes. Then they show up and vote. They compete, they win, or lose, but they do both with grace. These are some of the things patriots do.
They do not storm their own Capitol over a lost election. They do not bum rush members of Congress. They do not assault strangers. They do not push and shove police officers and trash federal buildings. These are things criminals do, and criminals of any political stripe deserve one thing: rule of law…..
May I add that patriots do not remove a United States Flag and throw it on the ground (BREITBART). But to reiterate, Trump called for the protests to be peaceful:
This morning, President @realDonaldTrump explicitly called for demonstrations and protests to be peaceful.
He was far more explicit about his calls for peace than some of the BLM and left-wing rioters were this summer when we saw violence sweep across this nation. pic.twitter.com/Ef7gKwdY1K
However, unlike BLM members calling for the death of police, and then members of BLM ambushing police and killing them. Or, Antifa and BLM violence resulting in more dead black people in a few short months than all unarmed black perps were shot by police in a year…. and destruction in the havoc in the lives of hard working people,
For at least 8 years, Democrats have remained silent as both far-left groups have wreaked havoc in cities across America. (100% Fed-Up)
SIDE-NOTE FOR CLARITY
Just to be clear, I am not condoning (if Lefties cannot pick up what I am laying down) the actions at the Capital by referencing the violent actions OF THE LEFT, I agree with RED STATE when they say:
…Curiously, several people took to Twitter to attempt to justify the scandalous… no, terroristic behavior of those protestors. Most of the tweets look something like this, with lots of callbacks to the BLM/Antifa protests over the summer throughout the world of social media. The general idea appears to be that this protest is understandable, or even justifiable, because the BLM/Antifa protests over the summer were also chaotic and destructive.
Nothing that happened on Wednesday is understandable or justifiable. It was a damn shame, and it is not something we should condone.
A lot of this talk stems from the idea that because the Democrats allowed their side to get away with so much, and because the media refused to hold them accountable, that this is naturally what comes next – it is a continuation of the argument that we should be playing by their rules.
This is something that we should absolutely reject. It is an embarassment and a violation of the very spirit of what we are supposed to be.
We are supposed to be better than they are, not on the same level. We make our case to the public on not burning down American cities, on not violating the Constitution and its institutions. To stoop to their level hasn’t won us anything. At our best, we win elections and make gains in important battlegrounds. When we are at our most base, then we lose….
WE ARE NOT AOC! (source linked in graphic)
…CONTINUING
The media ignores those stories… and like the Accuser, the media “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Which is why the Bible’s warning to those of us saved (and good common sense advice is, “Be on Guard” — “Be watchful.” Here is 1 Peter 5:8-11 via a paraphrase Bible version:
Keep a cool head. Stay alert. The Devil is poised to pounce, and would like nothing better than to catch you napping. Keep your guard up. You’re not the only ones plunged into these hard times. It’s the same with Christians all over the world. So keep a firm grip on the faith. The suffering won’t last forever. It won’t be long before this generous God who has great plans for us in Christ—eternal and glorious plans they are!—will have you put together and on your feet for good. He gets the last word; yes, he does. (The Message)
Here are 2 commentaries on that verse 8 that the believer can simply insert “secular society” because the end result is the same in our fallen world (that is, the goals of it and the Devil):
[Notes on verse 8] On be self-controlled see 1:13 and 4:7. Alert is a striking reference to Jesus’ words to Peter (Mt. 26:41; Mk. 14:38). Enemy (Gk. antidikos) is a legal term, a translation of the Heb. śāṭān, used of the adversary of souls (e.g. Jb. 1:6). Here, as there, Satan can be seen as the one who stirs up suffering and persecution in order to test and, if possible, destroy the faith of God’s children. Peter was familiar with this behaviour (see Mt. 16:23; Lk. 22:31). Devil is a Greek word meaning ‘slanderer’. In his role of undermining faith the devil slanders God to men (Gn. 3:1, 4–5) and men to God (Jb. 1:9–11; 2:4–5). On prowls around see Jb. 1:7; 2:2. 9 Resist is the method recommended for dealing with the devil, as in Jas. 4:7 (cf. Eph. 6:11–17). It is the desires of the flesh that one has to flee (1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 2:22). The word firm describes the solidity of material objects. No superficial faith will do here, as it is the enemy’s desire to make apostates through persecution. Rev. 12:11 gives further advice for victory in such trials. Throughout the world contrasts with the group of churches in Asia Minor (1:1) to whom this letter was addressed. 10 The call to perseverance is matched by the doctrine of preservation. Since God has called us to share his eternal glory in Christ, we can ultimately rely on him to bring us safely through to it (see Phil. 1:6; 1 Thes. 5:24; Jude 24). The NIV will restore, is a more likely reading than the AV ‘make you perfect’: this is a promise and not a prayer. Restore describes ships being repaired after a battle or storm. Strong (Lk. 22:32) is used primarily of physical objects and may denote fixity of position, firm denotes firmness of purpose, while steadfast has the idea of giving foundations. 11 Power (Gk. kratos, from which the adjective mighty in v 6 is formed) is not the usual word but means God’s overruling might which is guaranteed to bring the Christian through.
David H. Wheaton, “1 Peter,” in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, ed. D. A. Carson et al., 4th ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1384.
5:8 Be of sober spirit. See notes on 1:13 and 4:7. be on the alert. Strong confidence in God’s sovereign care does not mean that the believer may live carelessly. The outside evil forces which come against the Christian demand that the Christian stay alert. Your adversary. Gr. for a legal opponent in a lawsuit. the devil … a roaring lion. The Gr. word for “devil” means “slanderer”; thus a malicious enemy who maligns believers. He and his forces are always active, looking for opportunities to overwhelm the believer with temptation, persecution, and discouragement (cf. Pss 22:13; 104:21; Eze 22:25). Satan sows discord, accuses God to men, men to God, and men to men. He will do what he can to drag the Christian out of fellowship with Christ and out of Christian service (cf. Job 1; Lk 22:3; Jn 13:27; 2Co 4:3, 4; Rev 12). And he constantly accuses believers before God’s throne, attempting to convince God to abandon them (Job 1:6–12; Rev 12:10).
John F. MacArthur Jr., The MacArthur Study Bible: New American Standard Bible. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2006), 1 Pe 5:8.
The people entering the Capital were not of sober mind, and the “roaring lion” aspect of the Left and MSM used it to their advantage.
Now, on to another thought. Yes, Antifa infiltrated the Trump rally. And? This is no excuse for Trumpeters being led by the nose. They are responsible for their own actions. Conservatives need to be on guard. Period. When racists infiltrated T.E.A. PARTY protests, they were identified and told to leave.
Just a historical jog through our Capitals history, PJ-MEDIA has an interesting article about the other times our Capital was “breached” (link to post in graphic below):
And yes, I still believe the election was stolen. There are too many issues to go ignored. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. The acts of some asses does not change the facts and eyewitness testimony.
BTW, as I type, the Democrats are already trying to have Trump removed. Lol. Even though he agreed to [after the electors were confirmed] to allow for the peaceful transition. And he has stood by his word… but that doesn’t matter to the MSM… they will use the unfortunate actions on Capital Hill to blame Trump.
NEW YORK TIMES (Nov 26th): Trump, Still Claiming Victory, Says He Will Leave if Electors Choose Biden
WASHINGTON POST (Nov 26th): Trump commits to stepping down if electoral college votes for Biden
RIGHT SCOOP (Jan 7th): “There will be an orderly transition on January 20th” – President Trump
But this doesn’t matter. The left will call him a tyrant, just like they called him a racist. When will we learn?
