Thursday roundup

Ben Shapiro has a horrifying piece on just how far post-American society has deteriorated:

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a piece by Jack Turban, a research fellow at the Yale School of Medicine. Turban says that doctors should begin applying puberty blockers to children who identify as transgender as early as possible. That's because, according to him, "it has become clear that if we support these children in their transgender identities instead of trying to change them, they thrive instead of struggling with anxiety and depression."

Turban uses as his example one 14-year-old girl named Hannah who was born a boy named Jonah. Turban glows: "Hannah is using a puberty-blocking implant and getting ready to embark on the path of developing a female body by starting estrogen. Ten years ago most doctors would have called this malpractice. New data has now made it the protocol for thousands of American children."

Ten years ago, doctors weren't embracing politically correct insanity as medicine.

By now you probably know about the 21,600-pound GBU-43 bomb - the most powerful in the US arsenal after our nuclear arsenal - that was dropped on an ISIS tunnel system in Afghanistan.

Good piece in Commentary by Noah Rothman entitled "Don't Call Trump's Pivot 'Centrist.'" He's made several moves that have confounded his water-carriers lately, but the more noteworthy development is how the Bannon camp-vs-Kushner camp dynamic is playing out:

Increasingly, Trump’s agenda is being defined as beholden to “centrists” Jared and Ivanka. Kushner leads an influential group of “centrist financiers,” according to the Washington Post. He heads a “centrist faction” that has emerged ascendant, Axios reported. Kushner exerted his influence at the paper he owned, the New York Observer, to ensure “centrist” editorial coverage, the New Yorker averred.

This is a misleading descriptor. Only in political media could you describe two gentry urban liberals as “centrist” and get away with it.

If Trump desires positive reinforcement from the press, elites, and Beltway fixers with whom he is surrounded, ordering uncostly military strikes on a genocidal dictator isn’t the only way to go about it. There is no surer pathway to a “legacy achievement” than the pursuit of big-ticket legislation. And Trump’s new closest advisors are just the couple to guide the president’s evolution in this more liberal direction.

Kushner has been described as a typical Manhattan Democrat by friends and has even hosted fundraisers for prominent Democratic politicians. Leaks in the press regarding their influence over this president have routinely highlighted their ability to convince Trump to pursue liberal agenda items, like reserving his judgment on the Paris climate agreement. Ivanka Trump has proposed a new entitlement in the form of a $500 billion maternity leave program that amounts to an expansion of unemployment benefits to new mothers—a program that would induce businesses to abandon their own maternity programs and offload that burden onto the federal government. If this is what we call “centrist” now, we are in the midst of a crisis of linguistic imprecision.

The threat to conservatism posed by the nationalist populism of Steve Bannon was that, by assuming control of the GOP, he could transform the philosophy of small government into an ideological muddle that endorses big spending and government interventionism with a hefty dose of ethnic anxiety. The same threat exists if Trump becomes a conduit through which his daughter and son-in-law can exert their influence over presidential policy. Trump’s support for a $1 trillion infrastructure program purchased entirely on credit is no more conservative than the creation of a new entitlement program. The principled right is bound by ideology to confront and oppose both initiatives, even if that’s an exhausting proposition. Conservatives thus need to gird themselves for the struggle to preserve the definition of conservatism once again, albeit from a new threat.

We could have had Ted.

Interesting piece at PJ Media on a survey taken in the UK that shows that a significant percentage of "Christians" don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus or in life after death. Author Daniel J. Phillips sets things straight:

 . . . one has the perilous liberty of insisting that Christ did not bodily rise from the grave, or one can admit that Christ did. Anyone may do either.

However, if one chooses the first option, he must let go of any claim to be a Christian. And if he claims to be a Christian, he must let go of the first option. How can I say that? Because I’ve read 1 Corinthians 15 and taken it seriously. Affirming the bodily resurrection of Jesus is definitional for Christian faith.

Why do people pretend otherwise? I’ve never seen the appeal in claiming to be something you aren’t. I wasn’t a Christian for the first part of my life. I knew it, and I didn’t want anyone to be mistaken. Now that I am a Christian, I don’t want anyone to believe that I’m an atheist, or a Mormon, or a Roman Catholic, or a Hindu. I’m not going to try to say, “Well, I’m really an atheist, but I believe in God and everything the Bible says.” Or “I’m really a Roman Catholic, but I look to Jesus alone for salvation, by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, as I learn from Scripture alone.” And so on. Why pretend to be what you aren’t?

There are literally no real benefits to a false claim to Christian faith. A false claim not only does not erase sins, it adds to them. It provides no reason to hope for Heaven, or God’s acceptance or love. In fact, it inoculates one to the real saving message of the Gospel, since one imagines he’s already checked that box – which he hasn’t. All such a person has to look forward to is hearing the words Jesus warns us He’ll say to “many” in the last day: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:23). They are all certain they’re “in” – saved, OK with God – and they’re all wrong.

So why do people who in major ways do not sync with the Biblical description of a Christian become so emotional when anyone suggests that they drop the label, as they have already dropped the beliefs and/or practices inherent in the label?

The facts are simple enough: atheists do not believe in God, Muslims do not eat pork, and Christians admit that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead.

Otherwise, we might as well eliminate the words hypocrite, delusion and deception also. 

The jackboot-snowflakes at Notre Dame say they'll feel "unsafe," doncha know, if Vice President Mike Pence comes to give the commencement address next month.