Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The kind of thing that a dying post-America concerns itself with

Your tax dollars at work:

Detention staff should consider transgender detainees’ preferences when making decisions about housing and clothing and what pronouns should be used, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in new guidelines for the treatment of transgender detainees.
The agency will start tracking data for transgender detainees, train detention staff and draft individual detention plans for transgender detainees to deal with issues ranging from hormone therapy to safety, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, ICE’s deputy assistant director of custody programs.
“ICE will allow for the placement of a transgender woman consistent with their gender identity, meaning that a transgender woman could be with biological females,” said Lorenzen-Strait, who was also appointed as a national coordinator for issues related to gay, lesbian and transgender detainees.
As is always the case with the jackboots, this move is not enough:

The move did little to quell criticism from advocates who have urged the agency to release more transgender immigration detainees, citing their increased risk of sexual assault in detention. Last week, a heckler interrupted President Barack Obama’s remarks at a gay pride event in Washington to protest the detention and deportation of gay, lesbian and transgender immigrants.
“This is all interesting on paper, to say the least, but we need to see how this actually plays out,” said Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, a policy adviser for the National Center for Transgender Equality. “We don’t think these folks should be in detention centers, period.”
Has the thought of jihadists pretending to be transgendered occurred to these morons?
 

David Brooks gets paid big bucks to make no sense at all

Take his latest NYT column.

He spends the first several paragraphs giving Christians and "social conservatives" backhanded compliments, gushing about how much he admires them.

Then he tells them they have to face a hard truth:

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

Then he implores them to wage "a different kind of culture war":

We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.
Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society. They already subscribe to a faith built on selfless love. They can serve as examples of commitment. They are equipped with a vocabulary to distinguish right from wrong, what dignifies and what demeans. They already, but in private, tithe to the poor and nurture the lonely.

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.
This culture war is more Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy Day than Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham; more Salvation Army than Moral Majority. It’s doing purposefully in public what social conservatives already do in private.

I guess poor David is utterly unable to make the syllogistic connection between strained bonds, social structures and commitments and the damn sexual revolution that he proclaims is here to stay.  No sir, no way to prove that a chaotic society logically follows from a view of sex in which immediate gratification of self is its primary purpose.

Sorry, Dave, we're not taking the bait. Especially when you think Dorothy Day has more to offer post-America at this evil juncture than Franklin Graham.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Why atheist conservatives are ultimately worthless in the defense of freedom and human dignity and nobility

Here's my message to the Left regarding S.E. Cupp: You can have this worthless chunk of dog vomit.  She is of no use to the struggle to see truth prevail.

The point will be to impose government redistribution (along, of course, with trying to destroy Christianity)

Have you thought much about the tax-exempt-status-for-churches fallout aspect of the SCOTUS ruling on homosexual "marriage?"

I've heard rumblings for some time, predating the ruling, that that status was outmoded, or even based on a faulty premise.

Simcha Fisher at I Have To Sit Down explains just how that line of thinking works:

If we Catholics are clear on what marriage is, how much will it affect us when the rest of the country is all mixed up? I don’t believe that priests and ministers will be prosecuted – jailed, fined, or strung up in the public square – for refusing to officiate at gay marriages. But I do believe that churches are in immediate danger of losing their tax exempt status if they are found to discriminate against people in gay (and other non monogamous, non hetero) unions. 
If you read the bottom of Huffington Post or any typical American combox, you’ll get the impression that churches are exempt from paying taxes because, in the bad old days, religion was in control and the poor taxpayers didn’t know any better than to fork over their hard earned dollars to a bunch of corrupt prelates who spent it on fancy robes, wine, and cages in which to imprison women and the occasional altar boy (and if we’re talking about Los Angeles, this was more or less true. It’s getting better!). 
But now we know better, says the bottom of the internet, So tax ‘em, but good! Seem fair, especially if you’ve been taught that religion is mainly a giant oppression machine. 
But the real reason has to do with making voluntary charity possible, so that there is an alternative to thinking of government as a provider of services to particular segments of society in need:

But the truth is, churches are tax exempt because they are good for the community. They serve the people, and the revenue they take in shouldn’t be taxed by the government because it’s used to do the work that government isn’t able to do on its own. Even if you think there is no God, you have to admit that churches do good for the community even while teaching and believing things that the community isn’t always happy to hear. This has always been the case. 
In my state of New Hampshire, nearly every charitable organization is run by Catholic Charities. Food, shelter, counselling, services for homeless people, abused women, and immigrants — Catholic Charities does it all. They run under names like “NH Food Bank,” but it’s all Catholic Charities; and Catholic Charities is, of course, inseparable from the Catholic Church. 

The plain acknowledgement of the statist motive for nixing the tax-exempt status shows up in at least one column today, by leftist pundit Mark Oppenheimer:

Defenders of tax exemptions and deductions argues that if we got rid of them charitable giving would drop. It surely would, although how much, we can’t say. But of course government revenue would go up, and that money could be used to, say, house the homeless and feed the hungry. We’d have fewer church soup kitchens — but countries that truly care about poverty don’t rely on churches to run soup kitchens.

Oh, and, of course, along with the state crowding out private charitable activity, the effort has as its motive the same thing as the push for homosexual "marriage": rendering Christian faith as marginal as possible in our society. (We're back to Fisher here.):

When Catholic organizations declined to place children with gay couples for adoption and foster care, they lost their contract with many states. They were unable to comply with a law that violated their faith, and so they were forced to shut down. This secular media portrayed this as “evil Catholics would rather abandon helpless children than make a loving couple’s dream come true” rather than “society would rather see children go without parents if it means that gay couples won’t be able to work with every agency in the state.” So we know that the Tolerance Inc. has no qualms about sacrificing the helpless if they think they can make Christians hurt; and we know that these injuries will be portrayed as self-inflicted.

So that's what the jackboots will be up to when the push gets underway in earnest.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

It's just fine with the Most Equal Comrade and Secretary Global-Test if we post-America's major cities get incinerated:

The P5+1 countries led by the United States under Barack Obama have caved in to Iranian demands and will not insist on inspections of nuclear installations as part of a deal on Iran;s nuclear weapons program, Channel 1 reported Sunday.
The channel's Arab affairs correspondent reported that the June 30 – Tuesday night – deadline for the talks has been set back to an unspecified date but that the negotiations are good natured and the feeling is that the deal is nearly done.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was expected to fly to Tehran Sunday night for consultations on a final bargaining position.

It will be interesting to see just what among the current threats breathing down our neck gets first dibs on completely doing us in.

This will blacken your day, but you must read it anyway

Rod Dreher, writing at Time, minces no words about where we are:

It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefelldecision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.
Discerning the meaning of the present moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in post-Christian America.
Here are the three specific points he says we must face unflinchingly:

For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.
For another, LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society. After today, all religious conservatives are Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who was chased out of that company for supporting California’s Proposition 8. 
Third, the Court majority wrote that gays and lesbians do not want to change the institution of marriage, but rather want to benefit from it. This is hard to believe, given more recent writing from gay activists like Dan Savage expressing a desire to loosen the strictures of monogamy in all marriages. Besides, if marriage can be redefined according to what we desire — that is, if there is no essential nature to marriage, or to gender — then there are no boundaries on marriage. Marriage inevitably loses its power.

Not quite candid enough for you? How about this?

 . . . orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution.  

Now go forth in courage.
 

They stop at nothing

Among the other deranged fictions - such as "gender fluidity" - that the overlords foist upon us is human-caused "climate change."

And the overlords miss no opportunity to insert it into every facet of life.  Witness this maneuver:

Americans trust their doctors, so the White House wants these medical professionals to be a mouthpiece for President Obama’s global warming agenda.
“We also need doctors, nurses and citizens, like all of you”President Obama said in a taped speech presented to medical professionals gathered at the White House, “to get to work to raise awareness and organize folks for real change.”
The Obama administration has been hard at work trying to draw a link between global warming and public health issues. The summit included the U.S. Surgeon General, top administration officials, and public health experts from around the country telling doctors, nurses and other conference goers how to talk about global warming with their patients.
The central message: doctors should warn their patients that global warming could make their health worse.


“I know we have people all around the country, in all of the regions, who are also listening to this conversation, and like all of you in the room, I hope will go out and continue to talk and educate,” echoed Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at the Health Department.
“We need to engage medical students themselves,” said Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, “to demand the curriculum change” to prepare them for a warmer future.
Speakers at the White House summit didn’t just tell doctors to go out and raise awareness about global warming, but to also promote the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
“We need people, proponents, to talk about it. Make sure that the public is informed,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. “Stand behind the EPA, because they’re attacked every day, all day by many committees.”
Rep. Johnson is referring to EPA rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants — a regulation that has come under fire from Republicans and industries for threatening to raise energy prices and cause job losses.


We get no relief from this totalitarian nightmare, not even in our doctors' offices.

"Insane" is a woefully inadequate description

Seeing a lot of use of the phrase "rapidly changing society" lately.

I guess that's one way to consider this development:

Aiming to curb gender bias and harassment in New York City, officials are readying a plan that would require businesses to convert one-person restrooms into gender-neutral facilities. 
Legislation is being introduced that would require publicly available, single-occupancy restrooms in both public and private buildings to be designated as gender-neutral. 
It would also amend the language of some city laws, including the plumbing code, which requires separate lavatories for men and women. 
“We must look to help trans-gender individuals who quite frankly, have fears,” New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer told WCBS 880’s Ginny Kosola.
“This is a very important issue,” said New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, whose office is releasing a report Friday recommending the changes. “It’s time to help individuals who identify as transgender to use the bathroom without fear of consequence.”
Guess I'm all done relieving myself in public accommodations when I'm in New York.

And, along with the obvious issue of the obliteration of natural sex differences, there's that word "require."   Our goose-stepping overlords love to "require" things.

Saturday, June 27, 2015

The next step

That SCOTUS ruling on homosexual "marriage" has certainly empowered the cultural jackboots.

Here's the new policy of a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania newspaper:

The editorial board of PennLive/The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. is taking a hardcore stance against those who disagree with the Supreme Court ruling to legalize gay marriage.
“As a result of Friday’s ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage,” they declared. 
After receiving strong pushback, the newspaper’s editorial board, which is overseen by Editorial Page Editor John Micek, quickly revised its policy. Freedom of speech will be allowed — but only for a “limited” period of time.
Micek explained on Twitter: “Clarification: We will not foreclose discussion of the high court’s decision, but arguments that gay marriage is wrong/unnatural are out.”
Before that, there was this: “From the edit: ‘PL/PN will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.’ …This is not hard: We would not print racist, sexist or anti-Semitc letters. To that, we add homophobic ones. Pretty simple.”

So now, expressing the understanding of the definition of marriage that was universally acknowledged until less than a decade ago is a type of bigotry.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Her optimism is refreshing

Kimberly Strassel at the WSJ has the first glass-half-full take on the SCOTUS King v Burwell decision that I've seen:

The one fun part of this week’s Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare is that it has given the country a new way to evaluate everything Democrats say. Take Barack Obama’s pronouncement Thursday that the court’s ruling in King v. Burwell means “the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.”
Those words are pretty clear. Mr. Obama surely meant them. Yet all we have to do is give them the old Roberts High Court treatment, and—voilà!—we discover the exact opposite meaning. Far from putting this debate behind us, the ruling has freed Washington to take it up. Now that the long months of waiting silently and expectantly for the court’s decision are over, debate on ObamaCare is about to explode in a way not witnessed since 2010. 
The reason rests in another of Mr. Obama’s statements Thursday: “there can be no doubt this law is working.” Apply those Roberts Rules of Plain Textual Interpretation, and we find that what the president means is that families are still losing their doctors, still getting hit with double-digit premium hikes. What he means is that the law remains as unpopular as ever.
The Republican presidential candidates know this, and the court’s ruling has made their job easier politically. Few had issued their own health-care proposals. The rest were waiting to see the state of the terrain after King v. Burwell. Many also privately fretted that if the court struck down ObamaCare subsidies, Republicans would fail to coalesce around a response, and the GOP would then take the blame for the turmoil that followed. 
That risk is gone, and the GOP candidates now have a clear field to present the presidential race as another referendum on ObamaCare.  

She says that Hillionaire, her allusions to applying minor tweaks to Freedom-Hater-care notwithstanding, will be forced to defend the actual law as it is playing out in the lives of post-Americans.  Pubs will be able to muster the votes needed to put repeal on the Most Equal Comrade's desk. Plans for incremental dismantling, beginning with getting rid of the medical device tax, will flourish.

Sounds great.  We just need to remember how determined, indeed tyrannical, the enemy is, and how we are saddled with a judicial branch that has its back.

In other words, it won't be a piece of cake.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Lois Lerner draws a pension rather than rotting in prison - and you know why

A major official in the government agency that exercises the most naked form of coercive power over the citizen is up to her eyeballs in the clear attempt to intimidate conservative groups and cover her tracks.

Boy, has she ever covered her tracks:

This used to be called obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence. 
According to new information from the House Oversight Committee, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration [TIGTA] Russell George and Deputy Inspector General for Investigations Tim Camus, the IRS deleted hundreds of backup tapes containing thousands of emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the conservative targeting scandal. The tapes were destroyed nine months after a congressional subpoena was issued to the agency demanding they be preserved and turned over. 
"As Ms. Lerner’s hard drive could not be recovered and the 422 tapes most likely to have contained Ms. Lerner’s e-mails from 2010 and 2011 were erased in March 2014, we were unable to recover all of the missing e-mails. Comparing the IRS e-mail transaction logs to the IRS production to the Congress revealed there could be as many as 23,000 to 24,000 additional missing e-mails. As a result of the investigative process, TIGTA was successful in recovering over 1,000 e-mails that the IRS did not produce to the Congress, DOJ,or TIGTA. The investigation also revealed that prior to our investigation and our efforts to recover Ms. Lerner’s missing emails; the IRS did not search for, review or examine the two separate sources of backup tapes, the server hard drives, or the loaner laptops that ultimately produced new, previously undisclosed emails," George said during congressional testimony Thursday.
Surely there's some explanation for this that doesn't involve foul intent, isn't there?

"When asked about the possible cause of the hard drive failure, the HP technician opined that heat-related failures are not seen often, and based on the information provided to him, the hard drive more than likely crashed due to an impact of some sort. However, because the HP technician did not examine the hard drive as part of his work on the laptop, it could not be determined why it crashed," George said. 
The definition of a principled member of the post-American Congress ought to include an unstinting zeal for getting this Stalinist in as much trouble as possible.
 

SCOTUS's twofer fatal blow to the rule of law

And there will sure be more tomorrow, as more decisions are expected.

So brace yourself for more of that slugged-in-the-gut feeling.

The decision in the disparate-impact case, Texas Housing v Inclusive Communities,  renders not just the housing industry but the mortgage-lending industry as vulnerable as a mouse is to a python in lawsuits where discrimination is alleged.  Identity-politics hustlers will now have a much easier time making accusations of unfair economic practices stick, and winning big monetary awards in post-America's courts.

Can you not see this empowering those pushing to withhold block grants from communities with an "insufficient" mix of income levels in various types of communities?

So much for colorblind justice.

And then there's King v Burwell.  Let Roberts' concession that Freedom-Hater-care overall "contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting," his employment of an observation that "Congress passed [Freedom-Hater-care] to improve health insurance markets, not destroy them" to inject his concern that judicial-branch decisions could have disruptive societal consequences  - when that is completely inconsequential to the damn duty of that branch - and his acknowledgement that he and the majority on the bench had to perform contortions in order to avoid "a more natural reading" of the letter of the provision in question fully sink in.

He has publicly, and for history's record, proclaimed that there are, as far as he's concerned, matters more important than a literal reading of edicts passed by America's bicameral legislature under which we the citizenry are expected to live.

We are now in a post-Constitutional society.

If that doesn't make you afraid, the conversion process being performed upon you by the overlords is already complete.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Post-America is the world's leader - at playing patty-cake with bad guys

Secretary Global-Test takes the demonstration of just how unfit he is for his job to new depths:

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer told viewers Tuesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier” that the Obama administration has reacted with “passivity” and “flaccidity” in the wake of a massive cyberattack suspected to have been perpetrated by the Chinese.
Krauthammer’s comments came as U.S. government officials met in Washington Tuesday with members of the Chinese government. Vice President Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, among others, indicated their willingness to have a dialogue with the Chinese over areas of concern.
“The idea that we’re going to have a frank discussion is almost amusing. The vice president said responsible countries adhere to international law… The Chinese are laughing at him,” Krauthammer said, “The Chinese have about as much respect for international law as the communists and the Nazis, the fascists did in the last century.”
Krauthammer also said the administration has “given away the game” by choosing dialogue over confrontation, and is giving China the upper hand.
“Who is the dominant superpower here and who is the supplicant? The weakness of this response is simply astonishing,” Krauthammer said.
That's not the only front on which these clowns are supplicating:

The United States and its allies are willing to offer Iran state-of-the-art nuclear equipment if Tehran agrees to pare down its atomic weapons program as part of a final nuclear agreement, a draft document has revealed.
The confidential paper, obtained by the Associated Press, has dozens of bracketed text where disagreements remain. Technical cooperation is the least controversial issue at the talks, and the number of brackets suggest the sides have a ways to go, not only on that topic but also more contentious disputes, with less than a week until the June 30 deadline for a deal.
However, the scope of the help now being offered in the draft may displease U.S. congressional critics who already argue that Washington has offered too many concessions at the negotiations.
The draft, titled "Civil Nuclear Cooperation," promises to supply Iran with light-water nuclear reactors instead of its nearly completed heavy-water facility at Arak, which would produce enough plutonium for several bombs a year if completed as planned.

Let's ask Alan Kuperman, coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Project at the University of Texas - Austin if he thinks this is wise:


PRESIDENT OBAMA’S main pitch for the pending nuclear deal with Iran is that it would extend the “breakout time” necessary for Iran to produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. In a recent interview with NPR, he said that the current breakout time is “about two to three months by our intelligence estimates.” By contrast, he claimed, the pending deal would shrink Iran’s nuclear program, so that if Iran later “decided to break the deal, kick out all the inspectors, break the seals and go for a bomb, we’d have over a year to respond.”
Unfortunately, that claim is false, as can be demonstrated with basic science and math. By my calculations, Iran’s actual breakout time under the deal would be approximately three months — not over a year. Thus, the deal would be unlikely to improve the world’s ability to react to a sudden effort by Iran to build a bomb.
Breakout time is determined by three primary factors: the number and type of centrifuges; the enrichment of the starting material; and the amount of enriched uranium required for a nuclear weapon. Mr. Obama seems to make rosy assumptions about all three.
Most important, in the event of an overt attempt by Iran to build a bomb, Mr. Obama’s argument assumes that Iran would employ only the 5,060 centrifuges that the deal would allow for uranium enrichment, not the roughly 14,000 additional centrifuges that Iran would be permitted to keep mainly for spare parts. Such an assumption is laughable. In a real-world breakout, Iran would race, not crawl, to the bomb.
These additional centrifuges would need to be connected, brought up to speed and equilibrated with the already operating ones. But at that point, Iran’s enrichment capacity could exceed three times what Mr. Obama assumes. This flaw could be addressed by amending the deal to require Iran to destroy or export the additional centrifuges, but Iran refuses.
Second, since the deal would permit Iran to keep only a small amount of enriched uranium in the gaseous form used in centrifuges, Mr. Obama assumes that a dash for the bomb would start mainly from unenriched uranium, thereby lengthening the breakout time. But the deal would appear to also permit Iran to keep large amounts of enriched uranium in solid form (as opposed to gas), which could be reconverted to gas within weeks, thus providing a substantial head-start to producing weapons-grade uranium.
Third, Mr. Obama’s argument assumes that Iran would require 59 pounds of weapons-grade uranium to make an atomic bomb. In reality, nuclear weapons can be made from much smaller amounts of uranium (as experts assume North Korea does in its rudimentary arsenal). A 1995 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that even a “low technical capability” nuclear weapon could produce an explosion with a force approaching that of the Hiroshima bomb — using just 29 pounds of weapons-grade uranium. 
Now, consider how hard you work for the tax dollars that go to pay these idiots' salaries and buy their jet fuel.
 

How deep is the rot in the Most Equal Comrade's White House?

This ought to chill your bones:

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.
Jarrett’s dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.
According to Bowman’s government file the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line” and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington D.C. and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists. JW also obtained documents on Bowman from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) showing that the FBI was brought into investigate him for his membership in a group that “follows the communist party line.” The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.
Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family’s Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would “disseminate the Communist Party line among…the middle class.”

There is nobody more inner-circle than Jarrett. She is the real chief of staff, the gatekeeper, of the regime.

How much more evidence do we need that we are ruled by a cabal that plays for the other team?

How deep is the rot in the papal encyclical on the climate?


Two names you must know to understand why it turned out as it did: Hans Schellnhuber and Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. Schellnhuber is director of the Potsdam Institure for Climate Impact Reasearch, and Sanchez Sorondo heads up the Pontifical Academies of Science.


The Gaia Principle, first advanced by chemist James Lovelock (who has lately had second thoughts) and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, says that all life interacts with the Earth, and the Earth with all life, to form a giant self-regulating, living system.
This goes far beyond the fact that the Earth’s climate system has feedbacks, which are at the very center of the debate over climate change. In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him.
This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God.
What’s this have to do with Schellnhuber? In the 1999 Nature paper “‘Earth system’ analysis and the second Copernican revolution,” he said:
Ecosphere science is therefore coming of age, lending respectability to its romantic companion, Gaia theory, as pioneered by Lovelock and Margulis. This hotly debated ‘geophysiological’ approach to Earth-system analysis argues that the biosphere contributes in an almost cognizant way to self-regulating feedback mechanisms that have kept the Earth’s surface environment stable and habitable for life.
Geo-physiological, in case you missed it. Cognizant, in black and white. So dedicated is Schellnhuber to this belief that he says “the Gaia approach may even include the influence of biospheric activities on the Earth’s plate-tectonic processes.”  Not the other way around, mind you, where continental drift and earthquakes effects life, but where life effects earthquakes.
He elaborates:

Although effects such as the glaciations may still be interpreted as over-reactions to small disturbances — a kind of cathartic geophysiological fever — the main events, resulting in accelerated maturation by shock treatment, indicate that Gaia faces a powerful antagonist. Rampino has proposed personifying this opposition as Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
Mother Earth gets the flu and instead of white blood cells and a rise in temperature to fend off the infection, it sends white ice and a decrease in temperatures. How? Geophysiologically! I remind the reader that our author, writing in one of the world’s most prominent science journals, does not use these propositions metaphorically. He proposes them as actual mechanisms.
Schellnhuber echoes the theme of a cognizant, i.e. self-aware, planet in another (co-authored) 2004 paper in Nature 2004, “Climbing the co-evolution ladder,” suggesting again that mankind is an infection, saying that mankind “perturbs … the global ‘metabolism'” of the planet. 

This guy is a real jackboot:

Der Spiegel asks: “Do you feel that the government’s abrupt change of course in relation to its energy policy is adequate?” Schellnhuber replies:
No. It can only be the beginning of a deep-seated shift. The German Advisory Council on Global Change, which I chair, will soon unveil a master plan for a transformation of society. Precisely because of Fukushima, we believe that a new basis of our coexistence is needed.”

Sanchez Sorondo was quite clearly agenda-driven in his determination of who would participate in the confab leading to the encyclical - and who would be turned away:

Confirmation bias happens when a scientist manipulates an experiment so that he gets the outcome he hoped he would get. When Schellnhuber invites only believers in tipping-points-of-doom to characterize their guesses of this doom, his view that the doom is real will be confirmed. And when he publishes a paper that says, “Scientists say world is doomed” the public and politicians believe it. Scientists skeptical of the doom are dismissed because they are skeptics. This isn’t good science. It’s really bad religion, and a pagan one at that.
Global warming research is characterized by an insider’s club. If you believe, you’re in. If you doubt, you’re out. This is also so at the Pontifical Academies of Science where Schellnhuber was appointed by Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. The bishop locked scientists with contrary views out of the process, scientists he has repeatedly dismissed as “funded by the oil industry.” Given this, how likely is it that the Holy Father was fully aware of the views of the chief scientist who advised him? 
The Presbyterians started fooling around with that Gaia stuff years ago.  I guess the Catholics are headed down the same path.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Meanwhile, as an utterly unserious post-America obsesses on everything except the house going up in flames . . .

Take in this:

In case you missed it over the weekend, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes warned on CBS's Face The Nation that the United States is facing the biggest threat in the history of the country, stemming from a number of different regions around the world.
"We face the highest threat level we have ever faced in this country, today," Nunes said. "Even after 9/11."
It's important to highlight that this statement is coming from the intelligence committee, whose members see an enormous amount of information that the media, general public and even other members of Congress do not.
And this:


The US commander in charge of most of America’s nuclear missiles has warned that too much power is concentrated in the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and drawn parallels between Russia’s recent behaviour and that of Nazi Germany.
Lieutenant General Stephen Wilson, commander of US Global Air Strike Command, said: “I don’t think we’ve ever seen so much power put in one person in Russia, and some of the things happening there are troubling and concerning for everybody.”
He added: “[They’ve] annexed a country, changing international borders, raising rhetoric unlike we’ve heard since the cold war times, and so lots of people are trying to figure out what is the strategic intent of Russia.
Some of the actions by Russia recently we haven’t seen since the 1930s, when whole countries were annexed and borders were changed by decree.” 

And let us not forget the Chinese cyberattack on the OPM.

Or  the Iranian refusal to let the "international community" inspect its military sites at which nuclear activity is suspected.

Or the ongoing unspeakable cruelty of ISIS and the consolidation of its caliphate.

Will someone, anyone, explain to me why the sum total of this is not the primary subject of remarks by any presidential candidate, Pub or Freedom-Hater, any talk-show host, any think-piece magazine writer, or social-media message-pusher?

No, we turn yet another local crime story into an opportunity for the narrative-spinners and demography hustlers to get us to focus on distracting narratives like the Confederate flag. We continue to confer legitimacy on hustlers of the "privilege" narrative.  We get in the weeds over a bundle of trade bills that does not in any way, shape or form foster actual free-market economics.

This is why this blog is titled as it is.

One day - and I don't know how soon or distant it's going to be - we are going to awaken to a set of circumstances that made us react much as we did on that otherwise delightfully sunny September morning in 2001. And we will react as we did then: mouth agape, incredulous, too stunned to cry or roar, afraid of the possibility that more is coming.

When that day comes, let us not look back on days like these and wonder why we didm;t do what we needed to do.

The damn time to ask that question is right now.

Monday, June 22, 2015

The kinship that was relevant was that of being fellows in the body of Christ

Just now writing about the Emmanuel AME shooting.

Mainly because I could see right away that it was going to be way too easy to get any kind of "larger national significance" wrong, if indeed there was any.

Roof was one of those statistical inevitabilities floating around this universe, a confluence of loner behavior, rapacious drug imbibing, bigotry and raw evil seeking the perfect opportunity to make his darkly narcissistic statement.

He's in custody now, and he deserves the worst punishment the law can administer.

Even should he get it, as is just, he's still been offered a choice, because the necessary justice of an orderly society is not the end of the matter.

This wasn't about gun policy or the Confederate flag.  It says nothing about general race relations one way of another.

But the aftermath tells us one thing very clearly: In such circumstances, Christians not only find collective solace in praying with brothers and sisters in faith, but also find the strength to forgive that which, without grace, is too dark for mercy:

South Carolina law allows for victim impact statements at a bail hearing, not merely before sentencing, and the extraordinary statements by DSR’s victims (he shall not be named again in this column) showed Americans a side of the black community that the mainstream media would like to pretend doesn’t exist, and even now is uncomfortable about showing.
Instead of what we have come to expect from such hearings—e.g., victims focusing on their pain and telling the perpetrator what an evil person he is and that they hope he never gets out—the families of the dead expressed the love of Jesus and a message of forgiveness to the racist monster who murdered their loved ones.

Those directly affected left extraneous considerations out of it and offered this wretched devil the possibility of love - even though it took Calvary-level pain for them to do so.

That's the only lesson of this episode.

Pope Francis has lost his marbles

Of course, there was the encyclical on "climate change."

Now comes this doozy:

Speaking to a group of young people in Turin, he departed from his script and launched into a rambling denunciation of, among others, arms manufacturers:
“It makes me think of … people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.
He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today … they say one thing and do another.”
We are a long way from “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” Pope Francis then went on a tour of world history that included this gem:
“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”
With what? Oh yeah, that would be bombs. Dropped out of bombers. Manufactured by…whom?
Just what the world most definitely does not need: A silly person representing Christians on the world stage.

File under "you can't make this stuff up"


This is on the level of Cuba and Iran being in the UN Human Rights Council.

Stephanie "Space to Destroy" Rawlings-Blake has been named the new head of the US Conference of Mayors.

She wants to use the position to "advocate" for "systemic issues" like "food access, education, poverty [and] neighborhood investment."

Come on, now, stop your snickering.

After all, she comes by her position as chief exec of Baltimore, that magnet of neighborhood investment, through a route of stellar accomplishment:

Let’s remember that Rawlings-Blake started out on the City Council and only became president of that august body by default when the previous president, Sheila Dixon, became mayor. The two have had their political fortunes tied together quite a bit, because due to Baltimore’s rather odd election laws, the City Council President automatically steps up to become mayor if the current office holder steps down. That’s how Rawlings-Blake originally became mayor when her friend Sheila Dixon resigned after being convicted of embezzlement.

Just when you thought post-America couldn't get any wackier.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Then why the hell are we still playing nuclear patty-cake with this regime?

Secretary Global-Test, I demand, as a taxpayer footing the bill for your jaunts to Geneva, that you get your tail end back here and cease and desist talking to Zarif et al.

This bunch you want to bring into the "international community" is as evil as ever:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Iran's support for international terrorist groups remained undiminished last year and even expanded in some respects, the Obama administration said Friday, less than two weeks before the deadline for completing a nuclear deal that could provide Tehran with billions of dollars in relief from economic sanctions.
The assessment offered a worrying sign of even worse terror-related violence to come after a year in which extremists in the Middle East, Africa and Asia committed 35 percent more terrorist acts, killed nearly twice as many people and almost tripled the number of kidnappings worldwide. Statistics released by the State Department on Friday also pointed to a tenfold surge in the most lethal kinds of attacks.
Yet even as the Islamic State and the Taliban were blamed for most of the death and destruction in 2014, the department's annual terrorism report underscored the ongoing threat posed by Iran and its proxies across the Islamic world and beyond.

The whole world sees our cluelessness.  Our enemies, our adversaries and our allies.

We are so hosed.

Friday, June 19, 2015

The criminality of The Most Equal Comrade's style of presiding

In his zeal to erode our nation's sovereignty, the law is no obstacle:

[NRO writer Mark Krikorian's] colleague Jessica Vaughan has uncovered data showing a collapse in worksite enforcement. In effect, as the Washington Times headline put it, “Obama gives free pass to businesses that hire illegals.” From 2013 to 2015, the number of ICE audits of employer records (to check the work eligibility of employees) dropped 86 percent; arrests of crooked employers dropped 73 percent; and fines collected dropped 51 percent. It seems that once it became clear that Sen. Rubio’s amnesty/immigration-surge bill was not going to reach his desk, Obama called a halt to the (limited) show of worksite enforcement he had ordered up to persuade skeptical Republican House members that he could be trusted to enforce the provisions of Rubio’s amnesty/immigration-surge bill. The fact that he cut back so drastically on enforcement when it was no longer politically useful is proof that such skepticism was warranted.

And finally, as evidence of this administration’s true priorities, USCIS is broadcasting “DACA Renewal Tips” out of a concern that some recipients of Obama’s lawless version of the DREAM Act amnesty may not renew their two-year work permits (presumably to avoid paying the fee, since they that there won’t be any enforcement consequences from reverting to illegal status).
But the cattle-masses who are motivated by their feelings for the plight of these people living in the shadows will not give a microsecond's consideration to the blatant illegality of this.

Your can't provide actual insurance without making a profit

So play-like entities called co-operatives running on your tax dollars and not the least bit concerned with showing a plus number on the bottom line inevitably go the way of the Edsel and New Coke:

Ominous signs are proliferating among 22 Obamacare health insurance co-ops of imminent financial collapses that could leave more than a million Americans without coverage, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group analysis.
What do you think?

All but one of the federally funded co-ops are experiencing accelerating net losses. President Obama’s signature health care reform program established the co-ops to provide non-profit competition to private sector health insurance providers.
What do you think?

Many of the 22 co-ops could soon follow an Obamacare co-op that defaulted earlier this year, suffering $163 million in operating losses in a single year. That collapse left 120,000 customers without coverage on Christmas Eve.

This is Greece-level running on fumes:

New figures compiled by Miller and Marie-Grace Turner, president of the Galen Institute, show that net losses for the co-ops reached a record $614 million in 2014. Both AEI and Galen are Obamacare critics.
What do you think?

The figure is nearly three times the $234 million in losses suffered through the first three quarters of 2014 as reported by Standards & Poor’s in a February 2015  report. It means that the burn rate for the experimental Obamacare co-ops is quickening.
What do you think?

“All but one of the co-ops,” S&P noted, “reported negative net income through the first three quarters of 2014.”
What do you think?

Insurance ratings firm A.M. Best also warned in January that as of September 30, 2014, “the ratio of surplus notes outstanding to capital and surplus exceeded 100% for all of the co-ops.”
What do you think?

Arizona’s Meritus Mutual Health Partners co-op has long-term loans that are nearly 1,000 percent of the value of its capital and surplus, according to A.M. Best.

Just wow.

This is what always happens when you try some cutesy alternative to normal-people economic activity.

You have to charge enough for your product to cover cost.  There is no alternative.  The money has to come from somewhere. 


Co-Opportunity slashed prices and offered very low, below-market premiums to attract new customers.
What do you think?

The low premiums came at a cost. Co-Opportunity’s ratio of costs to premiums was 140 percent. That meant that for every dollar it collected in premiums, it had to pay out $1.40 in medical claims.
What do you think?

The ratio is not much better among the other remaining co-ops.  According to Scott E. Harrington of the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard David Institute of Health Economics, “The ratios for the first three quarters of 2014 produced “a total ratio of costs-to-premiums of 116 percent.
What do you think?

“Most co-ops’ weak operating performance is a result of high medical claims,” concluded S&P, adding, that the medical costs were “hopelessly high” for many of the co-ops.

Memo to Pubs preparing for a King v Burwell decision that reads the law as written: Don't propose anything that distorts the market value of a policy.  That goes double for anything they're crafting to fil the void should they ever be able to repeal the entire monstrosity.