Monday roundup

 It's November now, and it's off to a glorious start where I live. I'm taking pictures of the trees like crazy. We haven't had this kind of splendor, certainly not this late, for several years. It's one thing that's going right in a world that is tainted in so many ways.

Several entries in today's roundup have to do with the global climate.

Stanley Young of the Heartland Institute has filed suit against the federal government for dismissing all seven members of the Clean Air Advisory Committee.

The desires of the climate alarmists notwithstanding, coal is still vital to the energy mix:

Although the COP26 virtuous don’t want you to know it, rebounding economies and the ongoing global energy crisis have vaulted much-maligned coal to the top of the energy food chain, once again.

President Biden’s energy-climate policies have apparently been more friendly to coal than those of President Trump. 

New federal data has U.S. coal-fired power generation leaping 22% in 2021 to 945 terawatt-hours - the first annual increase for coal since 2014. 

Coal will generate nearly a quarter of U.S. electricity this year, with competitor natural gas prices doubling since June to over $6.00. 

The demand boom has U.S. coal companies now offering miners six-figure salaries. 

Not too shabby for a commodity that the media has loved to leave for dead for well over a decade now. 

“Coal’s burnout,” The Washington Post declared on January 2, 2011. 

Personal politics permeating “journalism” continues to leave us energy-climate stupid. 

And with President Xi Jinping not expected to attend the upcoming COP26 climate summit, the world’s top consumer is hardly “getting off coal.

Even Europe is starting to see that its goofy skittishness about normal-people forms of energy is becoming prohibitively costly.

Good old coal is still great stuff:

Only ~20% of global coal usage is internationally traded, making coal a largely domestic resource with huge energy security advantages for consumers.  

By comparison, ~33% of gas and ~75% of oil are swapped from country to country. 

Coal is a foundational resource in all-important Asia, so demand typically grows as the population and economy expand. 

Globally, coal is still easily the main source of electricity at 37-40% of all generation. 

Coal accounts for 60-65% of the electricity generation in China and 68-73% in India – the two most significant incremental energy users that hold ~35% of humanity.

Vijay Jayaraj of the Heartland Institute takes offense at a tweet from a woman whose Twitter profile lists as her creds "trying to save the planet, got good green ideas, just need someone to help me . . . get them done," and understandably so:

n this age of green craze, the most likely response to legitimate concerns about the lack of access to energy for the world’s poor is advocacy for so-called renewable technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels.

As embarrassing as that suggestion should be to the advocate of such unreliable and impractical energy sources, there are sometimes even more cringe-worthy replies that verge on the inhumane.  A recent tweet of mine prompted one such response.

The tweet was directed to attendees of COP26, a United Nations climate conference that gets underway this month at Glasgow.  The annual conference seldom addresses third-world energy poverty, which deprives billions of people of basic needs like clean water, lights, and modern medical care.  Many of these people are subjected to indoor pollution from cooking and heating with wood and animal dung while bureaucrats and politicians preach the banning of the very fossil fuels necessary to alleviate their suffering.

When I questioned in a tweet the evident lack of empathy for poor people in developing parts of the world, a person responded that India has too many people.

“I want COP26 attendees to ask themselves a simple question,” my tweet stated.  “What are they going to do about those in the third world who still do not have access to affordable & reliable energy — both for cooking and for electricity? We need gas, oil, and coal. Do not enforce energy apartheid on us.”

The response tweet said, “India is seriously overpopulated, they need to breed less.”

Breed less?  How can an Indian like myself not be insulted by such an anti-human suggestion?  Are the 1.3 billion people of India lab rats with no right to procreate as we see fit?

Hoover Institution senior fellow and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster gives a great interview to Deseret News. A taste:

Deseret: In foreign policy, are you a realist or an idealist? 

McMaster: Those labels aren’t that useful. That polarization is rooted in what I call strategic narcissism, defining the world only in relation to us, and assuming that what we do or choose not to do is decisive in determining the outcome. On what might be called the self-loathing far left, many believe that America is the problem and therefore disengagement is good. And on the far right you have neo-isolationism, driven by a mild form of bigotry. But what they both fail to recognize is that others also have agency and authorship over the future, including our adversaries, rivals and enemies. As G.K. Chesterton observed, the best way to settle differences is to ensure they’re not settled for you.

Deseret: But should the United States be trying to export democracy and engage in nation building?

McMaster: I don’t believe we were trying to turn Afghanistan into Denmark. It just needed to be Afghanistan. That country needed a government consistent with their traditions, with their culture, with their decentralized nature. At the same time, we needed to establish a political order that was hostile to jihadist terrorists. And that’s what we had developed, and that’s what we gave up. Their society had been transformed since 2001, but not into a Jeffersonian democracy. We wasted a lot of effort based on unrealistic assumptions about Afghanistan. 

I watched Dave Chapelle's The Closer yesterday, and when I read this, I found myself resonating with its take:

Dave Chappelle is right about transgender ideology. He’s right about the disproportionate control that gender ideologues wield over pop culture and public discourse. And he’s also right that most of the people greatly upset by his jokes are white liberals who are more than happy to drop their racial consciousness at the sign of any conflict between minorities and LGBTQ activism. 

But this doesn’t, or shouldn’t, add up to conservative sympathy for him. Chappelle is not a hapless victim of a crushing ideological agenda; he’s not Barronelle Stutzman or James Eich. Chappelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robespierre of the very revolution that’s after him now. His fortune was made inside the same progressive sensibility that threatens him, and it is precisely Chappelle’s (and many other comedians) skill with which he dismissed any notion of the sacred that has taken root in the people who are walking out on his un-PC act.

Chappelle is a supremely talented comic. His timing is often sublime, and his blending of absurdism with biting observational humor is dazzling to watch. But Chappelle’s comedy, like so many others, depends critically on an “lol nothing matters” mentality. There’s an undercurrent of nihilism to his routine, a low-level hopelessness about daily life that comes through especially when he takes on those “edgy” topics like male rape or pedophilia. Chappelle has a point when he observes that nobody boycotted him for these jokes until he started saying that men are not women, but one major reason no one boycotted for those jokes was the delivery. Chappelle is a master at eliciting laughter in the face of meaninglessness.

Eric Boehm at Reason shows that Josh Hawley and his lame attempt at addressing the supply-chain dilemma is silly:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has a plan to address the current supply chain issues bedeviling the American economy.

He wants to make them permanent.

In an op-ed for The New York Times published Friday, Hawley uses the temporary supply chain problems as an excuse to push for a permanent expansion of federal power over the affairs of private businesses. We must "fundamentally restructure our country's trade policy," Hawley demands, and that means injecting both the Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucrats into companies' purchasing decisions. Under the terms of a bill that Hawley is proposing, any product determined to be "critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base" would have to have at least 50 percent of its value made in the United States.

Why is it necessary for the government to get significantly more involved in the system of global trade that's allowed Americans to enjoy unparalleled prosperity in recent years? Because "the global pandemic has exposed this system for what it is—a failure," Hawley writes.

One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.

A storm—or a pandemic—can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That's hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he's asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.

A piece at Spiked by Sean Collins entitled "Loudoun County and the Cruelty of Trans Ideology" asks where Scott Smith, the father of the girl raped in a school restroom by a dude wearing a girls' outfit, goes to get his reputation back. 

But then it's late in 2021 post-America and a school in Florida has taken students on a field trip to a gay bar.

 

From the I-probably-won't-vote-in-2022-or-even-2024 file: The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party adamantly insists here in November 2021 that the Very Stable Genius won the election a year ago. 

 

 

 

 

 

Demi Lovato is one ate-up wokester

 Man, she takes the whiny-victim thing to entirely new levels.

She can't deal with a yogurt shop offering sugar-free items:

Popstar Demi Lovato took aim at a small frozen yogurt shop for daring to offer sugar-free options to its customers. 

In an Instagram story post, Lovato attacked The Bigg Chill Frozen Yogurt shop in Los Angeles, California, for being alleged “diet vultures.” The store is known for its wide variety of low-fat, sugar-free frozen yogurts and treats. Lovato claims it was “triggering” for her to walk past the sugar-free cookies. 

“Finding it extremely hard to order froyo from [The Bigg Chill Frozen Yogurt] when you have to walk past tons of sugar free cookies/other diet foods before you get to the counter,” Lovato said. “Do better please. #DietCultureVultures.” 

The frozen yogurt vendor responded to Lovato’s story arguing that they are not diet vultures, they are merely serving the needs of customers who prefer sugar-free alternatives. The pop star posted the conversation to her Instagram story. 

“We are not diet vultures,” a spokesperson for The Bigg Chill Frozen Yogurt said. “We cater to all of our customers’ needs for the past 36 years. We are sorry you found this offensive.” 

She claims that offering these low-carb products "harms people with eating disorders." Um, isn't it upon such people to avoid The Bigg Chill?

She claims that in Los Angeles, "It's really hard to distinguish diet culture vs. health needs." I think she's spending way too much time inside her own head. If there is a "diet culture" problem in LA, maybe the underlying narcissism that's been rampant in that town for over a century is something to look at.

But her preoccupations go beyond yogurt shops. She's into distorting the basic design of human sexuality as far as she can:

Lovato has made headlines in recent weeks following the release of her new YouTube documentary. In an effort to promote her documentary, the pop star went on the Drew Barrymore show where she claimed that she cut her hair short to protest gender and sexuality norms in the Christian South. On the Joe Rogan podcast, Lovato announced that she is now “sexually fluid” and “pansexual,” meaning that she is attracted to “anything, really.” 

I've caught snippets of that syndicated morning show Drew Barrymore hosts when I'm at the gym, albeit with the sound turned down. At first, my thought was that Barrymore had found a nice little niche, where her perkiness could be displayed in endearing ways. I knew it had a girly-girl vibe, but that's morning television. But then I started seeing guests like Chelsea Handler and I thought, oh, for cryin' out loud, another lefty production.

Perfect for Lovato to indulge her bizarre brand of virtue signaling.  

 

 

Unplanned beating Captain Marvel at the box office

Glory to God:

The biopic — which details Planned Parenthood defector Abby Johnson's dramatic journey from abortion mouthpiece to pro-life crusader — has taken in an estimated $6,110,000 this weekend, expected to become the #5 movie at the box office.

The film was projected to bring in less than half of what it's generated thus far.

Notably, "Unplanned" ($6 million budget) racked up a cumulative per-screen average of $5,770 per screen, edging out big-budget flick "Captain Marvel" ($152 million budget).

"Unplanned" has also dominated in audience reviews, scoring a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and earning an A+ rating from CinemaScore.

The pro-life film, unsurprisingly, has been thrown one obstacle after another due to its exposure of Planned Parenthood and the reality of abortion. "Unplanned" was hit with a controversial R rating from the MPAA and TV networks refused the film’s ads. On Saturday, Twitter inexplicably suspended the official account for the movie, however, after swift backlash, the "error" was fixed and the account was restored.

And all those viewers liked what they saw:

"Unplanned" has also dominated in audience reviews, scoring a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and earning an A+ rating from CinemaScore.

Perhaps post-America is waking up to the fact that abortion is not "reproductive health care." It's popping a hole in somebody's skull and vacuuming her brains out.

 

Taylor Swift guzzles the social-justice Kool-Aid and lies and talking points come spraying out of her nose

So much for the wholesome-fresh-faced-country-pop-icon-who-steers-clear-of-divisive-political-positions persona. She's come out squarely against Marsha Blackburn in the Tennessee Senate race, for reasons that are completely untrue:

1. Equal pay.

Indeed, Blackburn voted against the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a bill that would have made it easier for women to file wage discrimination lawsuits against employers. This does not mean she "voted against equal pay," however. The congresswoman has vocally defended the concept of equal pay, she just does not want Washington, D.C., to decide what that means.

"You know, I've always said that I didn't want to be given a job because I was a female, I wanted it because I was the most well-qualified for the job," the congresswoman said in 2013. "And making certain that companies are going to move forward in that vein, that is what women want."

"They don't want the decisions made in Washington. They want to be able to have the power and the control and the ability to make those decisions for themselves," Blackburn declared.

Whatever you think about the gender pay gap, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is a bad idea, because it would eliminate the limitations period on legal claims. Limitations periods block lawsuits where defensive evidence is likely to be stale or expired and prevent a gaming of the system, the Heritage Foundation's Andrew Grossman explained.

"Perversely, it could actually put women, minorities, and workers who are vocal about their rights at a disadvantage if employers attempt to reduce risk by hiring fewer individuals likely to file suit against them," he noted.
The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel denounced it as "a trial lawyer pay-out."

Blackburn emphatically wants equal pay for equal work, but she sees through the rhetoric and refuses to support a bad bill. 

2. "Discrimination against gay couples."
Taylor Swift declared, "I 2 believe in the fight for LGBTQ rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender [identity] is WRONG." She ten claimed that Blackburn would "not be willing to fight for dignity" for LGBT Americans.

The singer revealed the crux of the issue against Blackburn later on in her statement, however. "She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples," Taylor Swift wrote.

This is false, and a smear that obscures the important issues at stake. Many LGBT activists claim that religious business owners who refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings are in fact discriminating against people on the basis of sexual orientation.

This is false, as illustrated by the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018). In that case, baker Jack Phillips refused to craft a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding. But in the very same breath, he offered to sell the homosexual couple any cake he sells to anyone else.

Phillips and so many others like him are choosing not to endorse same-sex weddings because they believe marriage is between one man and one woman. Bakers, florists, photographers, and others will gladly serve LGBT people, they just won't endorse an LGBT event by providing special cakes, floral arrangements, or other artistic efforts to celebrate the event. (By the way, Jack Phillips is under fire again, and the media is lying about his case.)

When The Tennesseean asked Blackburn if businesses "should be allowed to withhold their services to same-sex couples," the congresswoman pledged to protect religious freedom.

"People of faith should be free to practice their beliefs as guaranteed by our Constitution," she said. "They should never be punished for their beliefs based on conscience and their understanding of Scripture. In the Senate, I will continue to work to ensure our religious beliefs are protected."

This defense of religious freedom echoed the acts of Jack Phillips and others — who gladly serve same-sex couples but refuse to create art celebrating a same-sex wedding as a wedding. The issue is not about discrimination, but about forcing religious people to celebrate something they disagree with.

3. The Violence Against Women Act.
Taylor Swift attacked Marsha Blackburn for voting against the reauthorization fo the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), "which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape." This attack suggested that Blackburn's vote shows that she opposes legislation to protect women in these horrific situations.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

"As a mother and grandmother, it is extremely important to me that VAWA is reauthorized in order to ensure that victims of violence have access to the care they need and the justice they deserve. Many of the women in Congress, like me, have worked in their own states to establish domestic violence and child advocacy centers," Blackburn declared in a statement in 2012, supporting a reauthorization of VAWA.

Blackburn only opposed the reauthorization of VAWA in 2013, when the bill was expanded to include special clauses for LGBT people, Native Americans, and illegal immigrants.

"When you start to make this about other things it becomes an 'against violence act,' and not a targeted focus act," Blackburn explained. "I didn't like the way it was expanded to include other different groups."

"What you need is something that is focused specifically to help the shelters and to help out law enforcement, who is trying to work with the crimes that have been committed against women and helping them to stand up," the congresswoman added.

In other words, Blackburn supports the Violence Against Women Act. Indeed, she voted to reauthorize it — before it became expanded beyond recognition. (By the way, the newer version counts as "women" men who identify as women. Lesbians have increasingly argued that this transgender movement involves "erasing" women, because it opens women's spaces to biological men, arguably fostering violence against women. Last year, a 5-year-old boy allegedly abused a 5-year-old girl in a girl's restroom, taking advantage of a transgender policy.) 

 

Not that her foray into identity-politics jackbootery is having an appreciable impact:

While I’m still not 100 percent convinced that at least some effect won’t take place, it would appear that Blackburn is enjoying a hefty lead over Democratic challenger, former Governor Phil Bredesen thanks to the momentum generated by the successful confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

According to the Washington Examiner, Blackburn is experiencing a growth in support after the Kavanaugh circus concluded:

Blackburn cruised past Bredesen in two public opinion polls conducted at the apex of the Kavanaugh controversy. The fresh data suggests the episode has nationalized the Tennessee contest and led Republicans open to voting for the Democrat to retreat to their partisan bunkers. In one survey, Blackburn topped Bredesen by 8 percentage points; in another, she was in front by 5 points.

Keep in mind that this is significant, given the fact that Blackburn doesn’t have the same name recognition in Tennessee as Bredesen, who has been serving in Tennesee’s political circles for years.

It is saddening to see her feel like she needs to step into post-America's sociocultural mud-wrestling pit, though.

 

Leftists hate America - today's edition

Get ready to need a shower and a change of clothes, because the following is sure to induce a good puke:

The upcoming Neil Armstrong biopic "First Man," from "Whiplash" and "La La Land" director Damien Chazelle, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday to rave reviews and early Oscar buzz. But the movie doesn't include a key scene in Armstrong's mission to the moon and an integral moment in American history. 

The movie omits the American flag being planted on the moon, and the movie's star Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, defended the decision when asked about it at Venice (via The Telegraph). 

Gosling, who is Canadian, argued that the first voyage to the moon was a "human achievement" that didn't just represent an American accomplishment, and that's how Armstrong viewed it. 

"I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement [and] that's how we chose to view it," Gosling. "I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible."

Gosling added, "He was reminding everyone that he was just the tip of the iceberg — and that's not just to be humble, that's also true. So I don't think that Neil viewed himself as an American hero. From my interviews with his family and people that knew him, it was quite the opposite. And we wanted the film to reflect Neil." 

Gosling also joked that he's Canadian, so he "might have cognitive bias." 

"First Man" arrives in theaters October 12 and also stars "The Crown" star Claire Foy as Armstrong's wife, Janet. It currently has a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

"I don't think that Neil viewed himself as an American hero. " Are you getting this dog vomit from something he said that would leave no other possible conclusion to be drawn? Some quote from an interview, or memoirs? If not, you're being damn presumptive, you vomit-inducing little punk.

The historical fact is that Armstrong planted the flag of the United States of America.

Man, I hope this gets a lot of discussion, at opinion sites, on social media, on radio and television.

Don't see this movie, people. It was made by morally crippled weirdos.

UPDATE: Gotta include Ben Shapiro's spot-on take on this:

 it’s telling that the Left seems to attribute every universal sin to America, and every specific victory to humanity as a whole. Slavery: uniquely American. Racism: uniquely American. Sexism: uniquely American. Homophobia: uniquely American. Putting a man on the moon: an achievement of humanity.

All of this is in keeping with a general perspective that sees America as a nefarious force in the world. This is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States view: that America’s birth represented the creation of a terrible totalitarian regime, but that Maoist China is the “closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control”; that Castro’s Cuba had “no bloody record of suppression,” but that the US responded to the “horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan.”

In reality, however, America remains the single greatest force for human freedom and progress in the history of the world. And landing a man on the moon was part of that uniquely American legacy.  

Don't go see this movie, and get your kids out of government schools, where they use Zinn's book as a history textbook.

This is what we mean by the Left wing war on Western civilization.

This is exactly why it's proper to call our nation post-America

The movie industry has traditionally reflected the width of the spectrum of American public tastes. From its beginning, in any genre, there was a sliding scale of output, from works genuinely qualifying as art to garbage designed to deliver the most base and immediate gratification. In the 1920s through the 40s, there was a collection of "poverty row" studios putting out grade-B and below fare. In the 1950s, the "grind house" studios such as American International emerged to participate in the shaping of popular culture.

Any fantasy that the lower-end houses - or even the major studios, for that matter - put out was understood to be just that: fantasy.

Of course, as we know, Hollywood has gotten increasingly causey over the past several decades. But could someone in, say, 1990, have envisioned that those leading the charge would, by 2018, insist that any and all cinematic depictions of anything whatsoever conform to an utter fantasy about matters of basic biology?

The Political Correctness Police, starting with the perpetually victimized GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and a group called 50/50 by 2020, are trying to impose quotas on everything Hollywood does.

Leftist fascism is not on the march. It is galloping.

They are part of an open letter signed by titans of the Hollywood left that demands an "unprecedented cultural moment." They demand the entertainment elite "use its power to improve the lives of trans people by changing America's understanding about who trans people are." GLAAD claims there were no transgender characters in 109 movies released by major studios in 2017, and that there were only 17 recurring and regular TV characters out of 901. Hollywood is always lagging behind its idea of diversity.

Both major Hollywood trade publications -- first the Hollywood Reporter and now Variety -- have run major cover-story packages in the last month stacking up bleeding-heart anecdotes of the terrible injustice done to "trans actors," starting with the idea that "cisgender" actress Scarlett Johansson was going to play a transgender woman in the movie "Rub & Tug." The outrage caused the movie star to withdraw.

Stop for just a second. No one gives a damn about this except them.
"Transparent" series creator Jill Soloway, who identifies as "nonbinary" and prefers the personal pronouns "they" and "them," is now horrified that she cast Jeffrey Tambor to star in her transgender show. That decision "was born out of my ignorance," Soloway lamented. "I had to have my education in public."

On the other coast, well south of the Acela Corridor, a traditional stronghold of a much different set of values is casting off its defining institutional bond:

South Carolina churches are shedding thousands of members a year, even as the state’s population grows by tens of thousands.

In the place we call the Bible Belt, where generations have hung their hats on their church-going nature and faithful traditions, an increasing trend of shrinking church attendance — and increasing church closings — signals a fundamental culture shift in South Carolina.

At least 97 Protestant churches across South Carolina have closed since 2011, according to data from the Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Methodist and Southern Baptist denominations. An untold number of other closings, certainly, are not captured by these statistics.

Many churches are dying slow deaths, stuck in stagnation if not decline. And if they don’t do something, anything, in their near future, they’ll share the fate of Cedar Creek United Methodist, a 274-year-old Richland County congregation that dissolved last year; Resurrection Lutheran, a church near downtown Columbia that will hold its last service on Sept. 2; and the dozens of churches that sit shuttered and empty around the state.

Read more here: https://www.thestate.com/news/local/article215014375.html#storylink=cpy

As we know, this is a civilization-wide trend that is just finally coming to that state:

The South is slowly catching up to national and European trends shifting toward what many call a “post-Christian” culture — that is, a society with characteristics no longer dominantly rooted in Christianity.

Studies and surveys have documented the decline of self-identified Christians and the rise of “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated, across the United States for years.

The Pew Research Center describes the United States as in the midst of “significant religious change. ”The share of Americans who identify with Christianity is declining, while those who say they have no religion is growing rapidly.

Now, the argument can be made that the movie industry is similarly in decline. Box-office receipts certainly indicate that. And surely the heavy-handedness of the presumptive overlords is a factor. To the extent that people do still go to movie theaters, it's not to see the finger-wagging didacticism that the Oscar nominators insist we pay attention to.

But Hollywood is still influencing the culture more than Christianity. The social-justice offices in the nation's high schools are concerned about making sure the kids who resent the DNA they were born with don't get picked on, but Christians? They're pretty much on their own.

GLAAD thinks it's some kind of outrage that trans people aren't represented in the output of TV and movie studios in higher numbers, completely ignoring the fact that statistically speaking, people who resent the DNA they were born with are such a small percentage of the population as to be negligible. And outside of Christine Jorgensen an a couple of other high-profile instances of freak-show surgical mutilations, no one was talking about this ten years ago, not even people who had already decided that two people of the same gender could be married.

One of the last sticking points for me as I drew closer to genuine faith was this notion of a devil. I'd spent so many years as a secular agnostic (which resulted from my trying to find an ultimate answer in some kind of broadly defined "eastern thought") that the notion of a real force, a real being with a real intention, sort of a mirror opposite of God, struck me as - well, fantasy. Fantasy of the sort best suited to middle-or-low-brow works of cinematic entertainment.

But I saw trends like the two cited here and realized that as a civilization we were staring directly into the face of Satan.


Now, given that both the movie industry and Christianity are losing followers, what are people occupying themselves with?

Well, look around you. Take a quick scroll of your Facebook feed. People are obsessed with tribalism. Pushing for ascendancy of their own sets of confirmation bias and the trampling of any other.

Don't people still amuse themselves with sports, you might ask. Or music? Well, those arenas are likewise experiencing dwindling interest. And what's left of them is rotten with ginned-up outrage and self-congratulation. NFL stadium-attendance numbers declined at the same time as the take-a-knee phenomenon went mainstream.

As I noted in a post the other day,

I doubt that the Jessica Prois / Sarah Jeong / Ta-Nehisi Coates / Linda Sarsour / Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez types have a clear view of just what happens when the dog actually catches up to the car - that is, when the white, straight, Christian male is resolutely quashed and transgendered amputees of color hold a majority in Congress - but we can safely say that it has nothing to do with God being glorified.

They want society to become increasingly freaky, ever further removed from the obvious natural parameters to the way humankind - indeed, the whole animal kingdom; indeed, the whole world - is designed. That's not their concern. Their concern is being in control of whatever grotesque arrangement society is going to morph into.

In short, this is about power.  In fact, it becomes easier for the overlords to wield power if a sizable swath of the cattle-masses have been neutered or turned into monstrosities. The cattle-masses then have no frame of reference for what normal human existence is supposed to look like.

And what is raw power-lust except the illusion that one can assume God-like status?

And where does that notion come from?

Ultimately, though, the mockery will not- cannot - stand. Things will be set aright.

We can heed the prodding from the Father of Lies, but in the end, he doesn't win.

One will want to be on high ground on the day of reckoning, far above the destruction that will wipe the slate clean.

This is about as serious as it gets.

It's not even about Mike Pence; it's about Christian faith, and eradicating it

In the roundup below, I link to an overall look at Jimmy Kimmel's fetid stew of ugliness, smugness and banality at last night's Oscars awards show.

One particular remark of Kimmel's has stuck with me throughout the day, namely, this:

"We don't make films like 'Call Me By Your Name' for money. We make them to upset Mike Pence," Kimmel said.

 This utterance demonstrates how thoroughly secularized Kimmel, his audience and his industry are. It's not as if some kind of personal preference of Pence's has been slighted by the making of such a movie. Mike Pence's views on the subject on the subject at hand - homosexuality - aren't a matter of finding it distasteful. He probably does - and would be spot-on for doing so - regard such a film as a cultural threat, but not because those who have cinematically disseminated its message deserve hate or ostracism. It's because of something that the likes of Kimmel would never have the occasion to discuss: sin.

This is the truly grotesque core of the lie being put forth by those who see themselves as our cultural betters: that actual Christians hate those with unorthodox sex lives. They don't. But you have to hand it to the arbiters of what's acceptable in 2018 post-America. They put Christians in the position that white Americans in the 1950s who were, with considerable awkwardness, emerging into an acceptance of racial integration were in. "Why, just last week, we had some of them over for dinner" went the refrain.

Occasionally I see Christians take the bait on this, but they need not. It's an entirely different set of circumstances. For that matter, black Christians are some of the most vocal defenders of the importance of making sin central to conversations about homosexuality.

I have no idea whether Mike Pence has any homosexual friends or professional associates, but I have met the man and know some of his family, and they are not anything like the caricature that has been his shadow since the 2013 religious-freedom dustup in Indiana.

St. Paul did not subject himself to stoning and shipwrecks for the sake of tepid abstract speculation. He had one of the most profound conversion experiences in history, and approached his spread of the Gospel and the building of the Church with an urgency that he sustained over decades. For that matter, what he had to say on what real love and fellowship look like are quoted by a wide spectrum of people and organizations.

But he did say these things about same-gender intimate relations:

"For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error" (Rom. 1:26–27).

"Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 6:9–10).

"Now we know that the law is good, if any one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine" (1 Tim. 1:8–10).

It has to be squarely faced.

The last two passages in particular speak of who will not inherit the kingdom and who is in violation of the law.

But Paul also writes prolifically about what supersedes the law: the grace of Lord Jesus, which is available to anybody and everybody.

Now, in a sociocultural climate such as we have descended into in 2018 post-America, it's understandable that a great many homosexuals are going to respond with, "Save that crap for somebody else. I don't need any forgiveness for the way I live out my sex life."

Fine, but you can't stop Mike Pence or any other Christian from praying for you.

And, by the way, they pray for themselves and all the rest of us, too. Sin takes many forms, and we all have a few.

But the idea that protecting the freedom of Christian business owners who want to conduct commerce based on the principles St. Paul clearly espouses somehow constitutes hate is ludicrous.

But you can get a big hardee-har-har out of a roomful of self-appointed cultural overlords who have deluded themselves into thinking that it does.

Sunday roundup

Michael Walsh at PJ Media asserts that the pending purchase of most assets of the Murdoch empire related to the movie business - that would be 20th Century Fox - by Disney confirms the death of the American cinema industry as we have known it since the 1890s. I don't always align with Walsh's positions 100 percent, but he's a fine writer, having honed his chops at Time magazine as a classical-music critic and foreign correspondent. And those chops are on full display here as he takes his time to build his case.

There's this:

The death of the motion-picture business as founded has been on the horizon since the Industry learned all the wrong lessons from the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws back in 1975. Whereas theaters had once touted air-conditioning as the prime means of putting fannies in the seats when the weather outside was steamy, the "summer blockbuster" now enticed them with chills and thrills. When Jaws begat Star Wars and the customers were shelling out record sums of money to watch what used to be called "B" movies, the moguls were quick to respond.

[A word to our younger readers: once upon a time in a galaxy not far away at all, there were "A" movies and "B" movies, so called because they were two halves of something called a "double bill," in which for the price of a single ticket you got two movies: a big-budget picture (in color!) with famous stars, and a cheaper film, usually in black-and-white, plus a couple of short subjects and maybe a cartoon or two. Similarly, 78-rpm records had an "A" side -- the song you wanted to hear -- and a "B" side, which you got more or less for free. You could look it up.]

In due course, the summer blockbusters morphed into "tentpole" movies -- mega-productions around which the studios would hang their entire yearly schedules, until at last the tentpoles became  the schedules, with a few voguish pictures chucked into theaters just before Christmas in order to qualify for "awards season" Oscars. Civil-rights dramas, coming-of-age movies (by which read: first sexual experience), and gay coming-of-age movies -- this is how a movie that nobody you know actually saw, Moonlight, won Best Picture last year.

And so it has come to pass that, at what's left of the multiplexes in what's left of shopping malls, you can see just about any kind of movie you want as long as it's a "franchise" movie -- in other words, a sequel or a remake of something you've already seen -- or a superhero movie -- in other words, based on a comic book; you know, the kind of thing you gave up reading when you were 14 years old. Just about every other genre -- westerns, dramas, thrillers, action-adventures, romantic comedies, slapstick comedies -- has been subsumed into the maw of the Things That Ate Hollywood. 

He goes on to discuss how the old studio system gave way to hot dogs from just about any old industry getting in on the game.

He doesn't say anything about the visionary - Walter Elias Disney, a failed advertising-graphics artist from Kansas City with a fondness for anthropomorphically imbued common animals -  whose name will now be the emblem for an unprecedentedly influential media giant, but it's the natural leap to make from Walsh's piece. What would Walt and his brother Roy think?

The actual piece I'm linking to here - one at The Resurgent by Peter Heck on pornography - is a worthwhile read, but for me, its main value was making me aware of a magnificent witness to the redemptive power of the Lord: one Rosaria Butterfield. She started her professional life as an English professor, which position permitted her to also teach gender studies and queer studies. She also was living as a lesbian, and had a longstanding relationship and a nice house with her partner. In 1999, she discovered the Truth, became a Christian, ended that relationship and only lasted another three years as a professor, even though she'd earned tenure. She's now married to a Reformed Presbyterian minister, is a mother of three and a homeschooler. I've bookmarked her and intend to export further.

We know about alpha males and beta males. Derek Hunter at Townhall coins a useful term - the zeta male - to describe guys like the Harvard student who, while out at a pub with some buds one evening, participated in a discussion of who the hottest chicks were in some class they all had together, and the guilt then consumed him to the point of public self-flagellation:

“During Orientation Week in August of 2016, I was out late drinking in Harvard Square with two classmates. The topic switched to the women in our class. Over the drunken hum of the bar’s collective conversation, one guy proposed the ‘hottest’ girls in our class. The other did the same. They both then asked me to rank the girls in our cohort in the order I wanted to get with. My alarmed heart bolted blood to my cheeks. I crossed my arms, unable to speak. ‘Are we making you uncomfortable?’ one asked me. I cannot remember my exact response. But it was not: ‘Yes. Objectifying women, even though it seems harmless to you, demeans them and creates an environment that makes sexual assault more likely.’ Instead, I uncrossed my arms, I shook my head, and yes, I discussed which girls were hot.”

Look, we are in the midst of a painful societal eye-opening regarding the magnitude of the problem of powerful men acting like brutes, but, dude, if men and women do not acknowledge their attraction to each other, the whole business of more human beings coming along to keep society going comes to a screaming halt.

Jonathan Haidt at City Journal has a consideration-worthy take on why post-American society is so hobbled by raw tribalism.

Everybody likes to say, in. response to the pointing out of the hair-raisingly alarming state of the North Korean crisis, that China must play a key role in walking the world back from the brink. Ain't gonna happen, according to several prominent world-affairs scholars in China. The situation, they say, is too far gone, and it's time for their country to prepare for apocalyptic war.

 

Monday roundup

Will probably have a longer, more singularly focused post or two later today, but I've run across some stuff so far this morning that is definitely recommendation worthy.

Herewith:

Jay Cost at NRO has a piece on how Revolutionary War veterans fared as the years went by. Short answer: not well.

After the war, the national government did not have the cash to pay the troops, because it lacked the power to tax. It was dependent on requisitions from the states, which were not forthcoming. The soldiers were therefore paid in debt certificates, commonly known as Pierce Notes. The problem was that nobody really believed that the government would ever actually pay back the Pierce Notes in hard currency. Lacking a taxing power, how could it? So veterans, desperately in need of cash, began selling their certificates in 1784.

This created a glut of certificates, which drove the value down to less than 20 cents on the dollar, and the certificates tended to migrate into the hands of a relatively small number of eastern speculators. Fast forward to 1790. The new Constitution was established, the government had implemented a national tax, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was ready to make provisions for repayment of the national debt. Who was to benefit? Not the soldiers who had sold their certificates, at least not under Hamilton’s scheme. Instead, most of the bounty went to the speculators who had bought the certificates and now stood to reap a windfall profit.

Once the Constitution became the law of the land and the government gave itself the power to tax, the question of how to make this situation right arose. That moment marked a significant rift between Hamilton and my main man, James Madison. With Hamilton at the helm of the Treasury, there was still a dearth of a plan to compensate these men.

Madison, who had not served in combat, was outraged by this. It was the first moment he and Hamilton really broke on an important matter of public policy. He proposed to split the repayment equally between the speculators and the veterans. Unfortunately, this was totally impractical — the government lacked the resources to figure out who should be paid what. Moreover, imposing such a massive haircut on public creditors would have had extremely bad effects on the economy. Madison’s proposal went down to a lopsided defeat, and rightly so. But the fact remains that the Revolutionary War veterans never got the support they deserved. Forget about the Veterans Affairs Administration — that did not exist. Forget about the kinds of pensions that the Civil War veterans enjoyed — they reaped no such bounty. In fact, the Revolutionary War veterans did not even get paid the salary they were promised. Granted, some of them were taken care of by their states, including with generous options on land in the West. But compared with today’s veterans, Revolutionary War veterans were simply taken for granted. 

Italy may be the seat of Christianity's institutional power, but something is deeply wrong with its culture. Silvio Berlusconi, a sybarite that at least rivals any of the Americans recently so confirmed, is still the most powerful figure in the Forza Italia party, and has considerable backing for a return to active political participation.

Jed Babbin, writing at The American Spectator, says there are three festering wounds that 2016 inflicted on America: the "Russian dossier," the Uranium One scandal, and the Hillary Clinton-Huma Abedin mishandling of classified information. He says the common factor to all three is James Comey. As LITD has said before, Comey is one heck of an enigmatic figure. It looks like he's not only been vulnerable to moral compromise, but that he's succumbed. But it's incongruous with his demeanor. He comes across as an earnest, mild-mannered career prosecutor trying to do the right thing. Babbin's piece seems to confirm for me the LITD thesis: that one or more players in these three developments has leaned on him, hard.

The determination of Spain's central government seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of the Catalonia independence push.

Joanna Weiss at Politico examines why it is that network television sitcoms and dramas rarely feature non-rich, or at least economically comfortable, people.

Monday roundup

According to a report by Harvard's Kennedy School's Belfer Center, North Korea has biological weapons, stuff like anthrax and and smallpox.

And the US is preparing to put nuclear bombers back on 24-hour alert for the first time since 1991.

Rev. Robert Jeffress is one of those religious leaders who badly compromised his status as a champion of integrity by getting on the Trump train. Erick Erickson at The Resurgent reports on the latest development in that sad situation. Jeffress got into a Twitter snit with Senator Ben Sasse (who ranks high on LITD's list of contemporary good guys) and accused him of doing nothing to advance the 20-week abortion ban bill. Sasse is a cosponsor of it.

I quit availing myself of most contemporary "entertainment" years ago. I rarely listen to music in any genre that was made after about 1980. I have darkened the door of a movie theater maybe once a year for the last couple of decades. I'm not the most intuitive person in the world, but I just sensed an odor wafting off Hollywood that indicated a rot that went beyond the ideology one hears prattled about at awards shows. Now that the cat is out of the bag about what a putrid industry movie-making is, it appears many post-Amercans are drawing a similar conclusion. Or maybe it's just a matter of growing weary of special-effects dazzle-dazzle, milking of franchises, sequels and remakes way beyond their shelf life, and the hard, mean feel of most Tinseltown fare. In any event, it's experiencing a box-office nightmare.

Speaking of the public eschewing morally rotten forms of entertainment, NFL stadiums had seats going begging this past weekend.

Turkey's Erdogan is using Diyanet, a government agency set up  by Ataturk in the early days of modern Turkey to see to religious affairs, to turn his country into an Islamist police state.

University of Oregon president Michael Schill, who got his first taste of campus jackbootery after mere weeks in office back in 2015, when he couldn't finish his state-of-the-school address because hard-left thugs shouted him down, has proven himself to be a pathetic wimp.

Daren Jonescu offers a fresh way of arguing a point that we stress here at LITD repeatedly. He puts it thusly: "free men without virtue will also be the undoing of freedom."

Well, well . . .

Check out this nugget from Jimmy Kimmel's portfolio of work as  one of America's beloved entertainers:

Twitter user Austen Fletcher shared an old clip of Jimmy Kimmel (from The Man Show) playing a game with women on the street where they had to guess what’s in his pants using their hands.

It’s worth noting that the women in the clip voluntarily played this game for a comedy bit, and is not equatable with Weinstein’s actions (despite what some social media have insinuated).

He suggested one woman “use two hands” and jokingly said “maybe it’d be easier if you put your mouth on it.”

Kimmel asked another woman how old she was, which she said 18.
“Are you sure?” Kimmel replied. “Because Uncle Jimmy doesn’t need to do time.”

When one of his contestants was aggressively feeling around his pants, he told her “You’re gonna make a fine wife.”
In the end, he revealed what he had in his pants: a zucchini with a rubber band on it.

Kimmel has gotten a lot of attention lately for weighing in on the health care debate and pushing for gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre. 

Now, as this report on it from Mediaite says, the participants volunteered and, in general,  it was lighthearted and devoid of the creepy lechery of what has been garnering notoriety for Weinstein. In fact, I had to ask myself before beginning this post, are you sure you're not skirting the edges of excessive prudery?

But how much daylight is there between what Kimmel is up to here and truly creepy behavior? If he hadn't been a celebrity of at least some degree, and had the volunteers not been assured that it was all in good fun and would go so far in stoking the sexual energy with which the gag was charged and no further, would it not have been truly creepy?

This clip establishes where Kimmel stands on the intersection of sexual energy and dignity.

It comes from a period in his career when he was on a cable show with a rather specialized audience called The Man Show. Now, years later, he is host of a network late-night talk show.

So ask yourself this: Is anything like this in the pre-late-night-talk-show-host archives of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson or Jay Leno?

And further ask, did any of the above go on to engage in moral preening about issues of their day from a position that advocated government intrusion into the rights of individuals the way Kimmel has with health care and gun control?

The way this ties together is that Kimmel, in the above clip, shows himself to be a moral relativist, taking the tee-hee factor with which sex is inextricably bound to a level at which hard and fast codes about sexual conduct are sneered at. And then, many years later, he assumes the role of moral arbiter, asking us to get all teary-eyed about infants needing surgical procedures as well as mass-shooting victims, and overtly demanding that government curb everyone's rights to address these particular situations.

It's sanctimony of the most nauseating sort.

Neither this old clip nor his recent diatribes about socialist health care or gun control exhibit the slightest bit of humility born of recognition of an absolute moral code.

It's all about letting the human sexual impulse run free while the brute force of the state is brought to bear on any other form of individual autonomy.

For a moment, I asked myself if there was any point to the discovery of this old clip, but then this became apparent to me.

We get Jimmy Kimmel as a rich and influential figure in our culture when we set ourselves up as own gods.