The militarization of law enforcement

From Salon:

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. 

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team. 

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart. 

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?” 

In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on sports was a crime punishable by execution. 

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery.

Maybe it's just me, but I really don't like trust our government much anymore. There are of course, many brave and honest and good cops (I have a beloved nephew who is a cop), and many fine folks working in government. But bad stuff is happening.

Juvenal asked: who will guard the guardians?

This explains a lot about Chicago

Instapundit:

GANG VIOLENCE, TERRORISM, AND GUN CONTROL: I suspect, though, that the reason Chicago gangs aren’t targeted is that they’ve got a political accommodation with the Chicago machine. Law enforcement knows how to put a crimp in gang activity when it wants to, without engaging in the extreme measures here. If it doesn’t do that, the presumption is that it doesn’t really want to. 

UPDATE: Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance. “Most alarming, both law enforcement and gang sources say, is that some politicians ignore the gangs’ criminal activities. Some go so far as to protect gangs from the police, tipping them off to impending raids or to surveillance activities—in effect, creating safe havens in their political districts. And often they chafe at backing tough measures to stem gang activities, advocating instead for superficial solutions that may garner good press but have little impact.”

Big surprise. The Chicago Democrat machine is in bed with the Chicago gangs. Tom Wolfe explained it well in one of his best essays-- Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers-- available on Kindle!

Big city Democrat politicians buy off local thugs with government grants, easing off on law enforcement, etc. in exchange for political support and favors. It became quite a game in the 60's and 70's, and persists to this day. 

Business as usual, you might say. But some things are beyond the pale. There is no excuse whatsoever for cutting deals with thugs like that-- cutting deals with amoral men who reduce neighborhoods to war zones and waste lives and grasp power by inciting fear and hate and by laundering money taken from their neighbors at gunpoint. In their reckless avarice these men leave a trail of devastation and ruined lives. 

It's a disgrace to be in bed with evil on that scale. 

The gangs should be ashamed of themselves. 

The oceans ate their global warming

The AGW comedy skit continues:

Has global warming stopped? No - it’s just on pause, insist scientists, and it's down to the oceans

Huge amounts of heat – equivalent to the power of 150 billion electric kettles – are being continuously absorbed by the deep ocean, which could explain why global warming has “paused” over the past 10 to 15 years, scientists have concluded in a series of reports to explain why the Earth’s rate of warming has slowed down.

Global average temperatures are higher now than they have ever been since modern records began. However, after a period of rapid temperature increases during the 1980s and 1990s there has been a significant slow-down since the turn of the century, leading some sceptics to claim that global warming has stopped. 

A scientific assessment of the planet’s heat balance has found that the most likely explanation for the recent hiatus in global warming is the continual absorption of thermal energy by the huge “heat sink” of the deep ocean many hundreds of metres below the sea surface, according to scientists from the Met Office. 

Senior climate scientists said that they had always expected periods when the rate of increase in temperatures would level off for a few years and emphasised that the last decade was still warmer than any previous decade, with 12 of the 14 hottest years on record occurring since 2000. 

Professor Rowan Sutton, a climate scientist at Reading University, said the temperatures have levelled off in the past, the latest example being in the 1940s and 1950s when sulphate pollutants from the post-war boom in industrial production may have acted as a shield against incoming solar radiation. 

“Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause. The global average surface temperature has not increased substantially over the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said. 

“Climate scientists absolutely expect variations in the rate at which surface temperature will rise….but that is not to say we understand all the details of the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said. 

The problem for the Met Office is to explain why the rate of increase in global temperatures has declined in recent years while concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have continued to accelerate. Sceptics claim that this shows there is not a strong link between the two...

Heh.

None of this was predicted by the models, on which warmists demanded we base the restructuring of global economics and government. Global warming "scientists" are now telling us that global warming isn't happening because hot water sinks.

At least the quality of the science hasn't changed.

Again:

“Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause."

Some people call it fraud.  

The Western academic origins of China's One Child Policy

A great essay on the academic origin of China's One Child Policy:

In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “Misadventures in Baby-Making,” we describe an academic paper by a Dutch mathematics professor that might have been one of the inspirations of the controversial One Child Policy in China. 

Here’s the story: in the early 1970s, Geert Jan Olsder co-authored the paper “Population Planning; a Distributed Time Optimal Control Problem.” He saw population as a mathematical constraint problem, where an optimal birth rate could be found: 

“Given a certain initial age profile the population must be “steered” as quickly as possible to another, prescribed, final age profile by means of a suitable chosen birth rate.” 

The model considered the natural birth rate and mortality rate, an economic constraint, and time. And like any good empirical scientist, Olsder makes this warning in his paper: 

“This paper is not concerned with the social and political problems involved in establishing the best mechanism for a program of population management….The optimal birth rate may unbalance the age distribution during the time interval concerned, which could give rise to economic and social problems.” 

He meets Song Jian, a visitor from China with a Ph.D. in engineering from Moscow University. According to Olsder, they went out for beers and talked about population planning. Olsder thought nothing of it. 

Song was a ballistics missiles specialist, but by the end of the 1980s he had established a theory of population control in Chinese political and science circles. Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the One Child Policy who served 10 years at the Population Council, notes in her book that Song formed his theory largely based on ideas from the Club of Rome publication The Limits of Growth — a 1972 Malthusian work that hinted at catastrophe if resources and population were not balanced. It applied straight forward equations to economic outlooks without data, an approach that economists have since dismissed. 

Armed with The Limits of Growth, along with computations and models that called for drastic policy change, Song took his hard science approach to powerful party leaders in Beijing. Here’s Song’s bio from the China Daily website: 

“With his knowledge of cybernetics, Song worked out a theory of a bidirectional limit to the total fertility rate. This helped the Chinese leader to formulate the state family planning policy, particularly the “one couple, one child” policy.” 

The rest is history. Three decades later, the policy has led to severe gender imbalances in some parts of China, which is also facing a potential demographic disaster due to its aging population. Ironically, China might have the opposite population problem now: too low a birth rate. 

For more on Song Jian and the One Child Policy, check out Mara Hvistendahl‘s piece inScience.

Western population control junk science is the foundation for China's One Child Policy.

The frauds and misanthropes who peddle this totalitarian trash bear a direct responsibility for China's brutal policy, which is one of the worst crimes against humanity in history.  

"... and on these faces there is no smile."

Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc on modern paganism and atheism:

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers .... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true...

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

We are in a spiritual war. We of course always have been, but this century brings this war to a cusp. Our barbarians rule our entertainment and our arts and our science and much of our industry and too much of our government. Sometimes they're plainly menacing, sometimes exasperating, sometimes even entertaining. But Belloc is right. Awful faces are watching, and not smiling.  

Hitler finds out about the roll-out of Obamacare

Inevitable, but funny still:

Gee. When law-abiding people buy guns, crime goes down. Who would'a guessed?

Mystery: Virginia gun violence falls as gun sales soar

Excerpt:

“It’s quite possible that you can sell a whole lot more guns and crime is still going down,” [gun control lobbyist] Goddard said. “But is the crime going down because more people are buying guns, or is the crime going down because the crime is going down?” 

Goddard said he would not have expected a rise in crime from a rise in legal gun sales, because legal gun buyers are not usually criminals – otherwise they would not pass a background check to get them. “Predicting the actions of criminals by analyzing the behavior of legal gun buyers is not likely to be productive,” he said.

Gun control is worthless. It's a typical fact-and-logic-free liberal cause that ultimately causes far more harm than good. The only effective strategy against crime is criminal control, which greater gun ownership by law-abiding citizens can help foster. 

'Thank you, but I won't be attending the re-education camp this semester'

Vox Day posts a great public e-mail from a grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has had it with mandatory re-education camps:

Dear Graduate Director Prof. Kantrowitz, 

Please forgive this sudden e-mail. I am writing to you today about the “diversity” training that new teaching assistants (TAs) are required to undergo. In keeping with the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, I am also blind-copying on this e-mail several journalistic outlets and state government officials, because the taxpayers who support this university deserve to know how their money is being spent. 

As you are probably aware, all new TAs in the History Department are required to attend one orientation session, two TA training sessions, and two diversity sessions. Yesterday (Friday, September 20th), we new TAs attended the first of the diversity sessions. To be quite blunt, I was appalled. What we were given, under the rubric of “diversity,” was an avalanche of insinuations, outright accusations, and suffocating political indoctrination (or, as some of the worksheets revealingly put it, “re-education”) entirely unbecoming a university of our stature. 

Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and students at probably every other public institution of higher education in this country, have long since grown accustomed to incessant leftism. It is in the very air that we breathe. Bascom Hill, for example, is roped off and the university is shut down so that Barack Obama (D), Mark Pocan (D), and Tammy Baldwin (D) can deliver campaign speeches before election day. (The university kindly helped direct student traffic to these campaign events by sending out a mass e-mail encouraging the student body to go to the Barack Obama for President website and click “I’m In for Barack!” in order to attend.) Marxist diatribes denouncing Christianity, Christians, the United States, and conservatives (I am happy to provide as many examples of this as might be required) are assigned as serious scholarship in seminars. The Teaching Assistants Association (TAA)–which sent out mass e-mails, using History Department list-servs, during the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker, accusing Gov. Walker of, among other things, being “Nero”–is allowed to address TA and graduate student sessions as a “non-partisan organization”. The History Department sponsors a leftist political rally, along with the Socialist Party of Wisconsin, and advertises for the rally via a departmental e-mail (sent, one presumes, using state computers by employees drawing salaries from a state institution). In short, this university finds it convenient to pretend that it is an apolitical entity, but one need not be particularly astute to perceive that the Madison campus is little more than a think tank for the hard left. Even those who wholeheartedly support this political agenda might in all candor admit that the contours of the leftism here are somewhat less than subtle. 

At the “diversity” training yesterday, though, even this fig leaf of apoliticism was discarded. In an utterly unprofessional way, the overriding presumption of the session was that the people whom the History Department has chosen to employ as teaching assistants are probably racists. In true “diversity” style, the language in which the presentation was couched was marbled with words like “inclusive”, “respect”, and “justice”. But the tone was unmistakably accusatory and radical. Our facilitator spoke openly of politicizing her classrooms in order to right (take revenge for?) past wrongs. We opened the session with chapter-and-verse quotes from diversity theorists who rehearsed the same tired “power and privilege” cant that so dominates seminar readings and official university hand-wringing over unmet race quotas. Indeed, one mild-mannered Korean woman yesterday felt compelled to insist that she wasn’t a racist. I never imagined that she was, but the atmosphere of the meeting had been so poisoned that even we traditional quarries of the diversity Furies were forced to share our collective guilt with those from continents far across the wine-dark sea. 

It is hardly surprising that any of us hectorees would feel thusly. For example, in one of the handouts that our facilitator asked us to read (“Detour-Spotting: for white anti-racists,” by joan olsson [sic]), we learned things like, “As white infants we were fed a pabulum of racist propaganda,” “…there was no escaping the daily racist propaganda,” and, perhaps most even-handed of all, “Racism continues in the name of all white people.” Perhaps the Korean woman did not read carefully enough to realize that only white people (all of them, in fact) are racist. Nevertheless, in a manner stunningly redolent of “self-criticism” during the Cultural Revolution in communist China, the implication of the entire session was that everyone was suspect, and everyone had some explaining to do. 

You have always been very kind to me, Prof. Kantrowitz, so it pains me to ask you this, but is this really what the History Department thinks of me? Is this what you think of me? I am not sure who selected the readings or crafted the itinerary for the diversity session, but, as they must have done so with the full sanction of the History Department, one can only conclude that the Department agrees with such wild accusations, and supports them. Am I to understand that this is how the white people who work in this Department are viewed? If so, I cannot help but wonder why in the world the Department hired any of us in the first place. Would not anyone be better? 

There is one further issue. At the end of yesterday’s diversity “re-education,” we were told that our next session would include a presentation on “Trans Students”. At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students ‘choose their own pronouns’, how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer (“I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?”). Also on the agenda for next week are “important trans struggles, as well as those of the intersexed and other gender-variant communities,” “stand[ing] up to the rules of gender,” and a very helpful glossary of related terms and acronyms, to wit: “Trans”: for those who “identify along the gender-variant spectrum,” and “Genderqueer”: “for those who consider their gender outside the binary gender system”. I hasten to reiterate that I am quoting from diversity handouts; I am not making any of this up. 

Please allow me to be quite frank. My job, which I love, is to teach students Japanese history. This week, for example, I have been busy explaining the intricacies of the Genpei War (1180-1185), during which time Japan underwent a transition from an earlier, imperial-rule system under regents and cloistered emperors to a medieval, feudal system run by warriors and estate managers. It is an honor and a great joy to teach students the history of Japan. I take my job very seriously, and I look forward to coming to work each day. 

It is most certainly not my job, though, to cheer along anyone, student or otherwise, in their psychological confusion. I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation, nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing. To all and sundry alike I explicate, as best I can, such things as the clash between the Taira and the Minamoto, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, and the decline of the imperial house in twelfth-century Japan. Everyone is welcome in my classroom, but, whether directly or indirectly, I will not implicate myself in my students’ fetishes, whatever those might be. What they do on their own time is their business; I will not be a party to it. I am exercising my right here to say, “Enough is enough.” One grows used to being thought a snarling racist–after all, others’ opinions are not my affair–but one draws the line at assisting students in their private proclivities. That is a bridge too far, and one that I, at least, will not cross. 

I regret that this leaves us in an awkward situation. After having been accused of virulent racism and, now, assured that I will next learn how to parse the taxonomy of “Genderqueers”, I am afraid that I will disappoint those who expect me to attend any further diversity sessions. When a Virginia-based research firm came to campus a couple of years ago to present findings from their study of campus diversity, then-Diversity Officer Damon Williams sent a gaggle of shouting, sign-waving undergraduates to the meeting, disrupting the proceedings so badly that the meeting was cancelled. In a final break with such so-called “diversity”, I will not be storming your office or shouting into a megaphone outside your window. Instead, I respectfully inform you hereby that I am disinclined to join in any more mandatory radicalism. I have, thank God, many more important things to do. I also request that diversity training be made optional for all TAs, effective immediately. In my humble opinion, neither the Department nor the university has any right to subject anyone to such intellectual tyranny. 

Thank you for your patience in reading this long e-mail. 

Sincerely, 

Jason Morgan

The guy has balls. The history profession at the college level is a far-left coven, and he's painted a target on his back.

If enough people spoke out against leftist filth like this guy with his eloquence and courage, the little Eichmanns who run these reeducation camps would scatter like roaches.

It's easy for a senior guy like me in a secure professional position in a university to speak out against the leftist-atheist-Darwinist apparatchiks. It takes another level of courage entirely for a history grad student to do so.

God bless him. I hope there are senior faculty who aren't to the left of Trotsky who can have his back. 

Heh

From the Onion:

New, improved Obamacare program released on 35 floppy disks

Responding to widespread criticism regarding its health care website, the federal government today unveiled its new, improved Obamacare program, which allows Americans to purchase health insurance after installing a software bundle contained on 35 floppy disks. “I have heard the complaints about the existing website, and I can assure you that with this revised system, finding the right health care option for you and your family is as easy as loading 35 floppy disks sequentially into your disk drive and following the onscreen prompts,” President Obama told reporters this morning, explaining that the nearly three dozen 3.5-inch diskettes contain all the data needed for individuals to enroll in the Health Insurance Marketplace, while noting that the updated Obamacare software is mouse-compatible and requires a 386 Pentium processor with at least 8 MB of system RAM to function properly.

Rise of the pagans

Vox Day:

[The decline in numbers of Christians in Britain] is a bad thing, but for the UK, not for Christianity. It is the cultural Christians who are on the decline. No religion that grew from eleven frightened men to over a billion adherents has anything to fear from the vicissitudes of history. The idea that there would be a great apostasy is hardly a surprise to any premillennial Christian. 

What is a surprise, however, is the speed with which the secular humanists are being pushed aside by the pagans.

Day is right. The decline in cultural Christianity is bad for the cultural Christians themselves and for the culture left behind, but it is not bad for Christianity. A smaller and more vital Church may be just what we need. The church of Laodicea is more an albatross than an asset to the work of the Gospel.

What interests me is Day's observation that paganism, not secular humanism, is the heir to modern apostasy. Secular humanism-- atheism without power--  has no lasting appeal to the human heart. It will motivate bullies and fools for a few more centuries, but it is bookless-- it has no coherent story to tell, no joy, no inspiration to anything but fatalism and indulgence.

Paganism is vibrant, and has survived since the dawn of man. Worship of nature, of false gods, of self is natural to fallen man, and it will be the religion of the post-Christian West. Moloch and Gaia are back in business, with a vengeance.

Fascism-- the worship of the state-- is the natural political structure of paganism. Pagan fascism will struggle with Islam, just like it struggled with atheism in the 20th century. The fascist-on-pagan violence emulates its predecessor in Europe-- fascist-on-atheist violence-- with remarkable fidelity.

You can see it rising in Europe. The alliance between the Nazis and the Islamists during WWII mirrors the Hitler-Stalin pact. Gangsters embrace for convenience, then slaughter one another over the spoils.

De-Christianization is an blood affair.

The National Park Service, an enforcement organ of the Democratic party

Jonathan Last quotes a reader:

I'm a former NPS historian/supervisory interpretive park ranger from two parks (at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi and the Steamtown National Historic Site in Pennsylvania.). I’m now serving as a historian for another Federal agency. For years I've monitored NPS vacancies, just in case the opportunity arose to return to the NPS as a historian. No longer . . . 

I have never been more embarrassed to admit that I'm former National Park Service and I will never return. The Park Ranger has long served as an representative of good government, someone who the public looked up to and admired. Through this calculated, politically-driven hackery and thug tactics, the image of the ranger and the NPS with the American public has been broken, probably irrevocably. 

I’m inclined to agree, for the following reason. In some ways, the Park Service debacle resembles the IRS’s targeting of conservatives in the run-up to the 2012 election. But there’s a big difference: Whatever you want to say about Lois Lerner, at least she was only persecuting people and groups who she perceived to be enemies of the Obama administration. 

The National Park Service has every man, woman, and child in America on its enemies list. 

It’s a demonstrable case of a civil agency retaliating against the American public as a whole—on behalf of a single political party.

Please read the whole thing.

The politically-motivated thuggery of the National Park Service is a shock and a disgrace. Public access to public land is intentionally blocked, by armed goons on the public payroll.

This is a country I don't recognize anymore. 

Pope Francis and conservatives

Christopher Orlet has a fine essay about conservative criticisms of Pope Francis.

As you may have noticed, I'm a pretty conservative guy, in matters religious as well as political and cultural.

But I think that the conservative panic over the Holy Father is misguided. Nothing the Holy Father has said is a deviation from the Magisterium; his statements are right out of the Catechism. And his history in Argentina is certainly not one of a liberalizing loose cannon. The lefties and socialists there hated him, and the more left-leaning members of the Jesuit order distrusted him. There was plenty of leftie calumny spread about him on the occasion of his election. He was and is orthodox like his namesake, St. Francis. St. Francis, like Pope Francis, realized that our Lord shocked the entrenched power-brokers of His time. Any reader of the New Testament is struck by this fact: the Lord excoriated the Pharisees, the elites of His day, and had a beautiful tenderness for the more base sinners-- the prostitutes and tax-collectors.

I love the parable of the two sons in Matthew 21, in reply to the chief priests and elders who asked Him questions to lay a trap for Him:

The Parable of the Two Sons 

“There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ 

“‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. 

“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go. 

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?” 

“The first,” they answered. 

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.

The Holy Father is reminding us that the Christian life is a radical life. It is humility before God-- true repentance-- which is central to salvation. It is often the poor in spirit and the meek and baser sinners who understand their sin and understand their need for God, more so then the powerful and comfortable.

There's an anecdote about St. Francis that describes what Pope Francis is up to. From Walter Russel Mead:

G.K. Chesterton tells the story of the time that St. Francis of Assisi visited Rome and the pope of the day proudly showed him all the wondrous treasures of the Vatican. Referring to a story in the Biblical Book of Acts in which St. Peter spoke with a beggar in Jerusalem and told him he had no money, the pope pointed to the treasures around him and said, “Peter can no longer say ‘Silver and gold have I none.’” 

St. Francis’ response: “Neither can he say, ‘Rise up and walk.’” 

Pope Francis, at the movement of the Holy Spirit, is setting the Church on fire, like the fire at Pentecost. All of the traditional conservative passions are included in this fire-- love for holiness, love for the unborn and the handicapped, love for the Church and Her magnificent tradition. But Pope Francis' fire, like St. Francis' fire, is a call to spiritual renewal as well. 

I pray that my fellow conservatives in the Church do not react to Pope Francis like the liberals in the Church reacted to John Paul II and Benedict, with calumny and spite. Our Holy Father is, I think, a blessing. He is reminding us of our Lord's mercy and love for the humble and for the suffering.

Pope Francis is a gift of spiritual fire to us and to our Holy Church. 

Democrats

From The People's Cube.

Heather Mac Donald on blacks and the criminal justice system

Heather Mac Donald:

The idea that the criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks — and that this bias explains blacks’ disproportionate presence in custody — is a staple of civil-rights activism and of the academic Left. Every effort to prove it empirically, however, has come up short.  

A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Alfred Blumstein has found that blacks are underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their arrest rates. A meta-analysis of charging and sentencing studies showed that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms, according to criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen. 

Criminal-law professors across the political spectrum agree that the Zimmerman verdict resulted from prosecutorial overkill, not juror bias. . . . Close on the heels of the “biased justice system” conceit, however, is the preposterous implication that the primary homicide threat faced by young black males comes from honorary whites such as George Zimmerman. “Our children are targeted. Our community is targeted,” Martin Luther King III told the NAACP national convention on Wednesday. Protesters at the Orlando, Fla., courthouse this week held signs proclaiming “Endangered species: young black men and boys.” The New York Times ran an article today about the “painful talks” black parents are having with their children about how not to get gunned down by whites. A nurse’s assistant in Missouri told the Times: The whole situation ‘“would just make me skeptical about what crowd of white people I put [my son] around.’” 

In fact, if a black parent wants to radically reduce his son’s chance of getting shot, he should live in a white neighborhood.

The greatest scandal of the past half-century in the United States is the systematic destruction of black culture and the black community. It is a horrendous act, unprecedented in American history. A large segment of our fellow citizens, who were in the past victims of vile racism and even slavery, survived that hell with their families and communities and dignity intact.

But beginning in the 1960's, black families and communities began to disintegrate. The fundamental reason is clear: a host of government programs were enacted with one basic purpose-- to make blacks dependent on government, in exchange for their votes.

President Lyndon Johnson, author of the Great Society programs that destroyed black life in America and a Southern Democrat with a long history of bitter opposition to civil rights (he opposed Truman's efforts to end segregation and he even voted against laws to prevent lynching), explained it quite clearly:

“I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

RINO blather from Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat:

But there is still something well-nigh-unprecedented about how Republicans have conducted themselves of late. It’s not the scale of their mistake, or the kind of damage that it’s caused, but the fact that their strategy was such self-evident folly, so transparently devoid of any method whatsoever. 

Every sensible person, most Republican politicians included, could recognize that the shutdown fever would blow up in the party’s face. Even the shutdown’s ardent champions never advanced a remotely compelling story for how it would deliver its objectives. And everything that’s transpired since, from the party’s polling nose dive to the frantic efforts to save face, was entirely predictable in advance. 

The methodless madness distinguishes this shutdown from prior Congressional Republican defeats (the Gingrich shutdown, the Clinton impeachment), when you could at least see what the politicians involved were thinking. And it distinguishes it, too, from many of history’s marches of folly as well. 

You could compare the behavior of current House Republicans to the diplomatic sleepwalking that led to World War I, but at least, in that case, the various powers had reasonable theories of how they would actually win the ensuing war. 

Or you could compare it to Paraguay’s decision in the 1860s to declare war on both Brazil and Argentina at once, but at least Paraguay’s armed forces managed to win some victories before being ground into defeat. 

Now, admittedly, just because the Republican strategy has been irrational doesn’t make it inexplicable. The trends that brought us to this point are clear enough: the discrediting of the Republican establishment during the Bush era; the rise of a populist right that often sees opposition as an end unto itself; the willingness of too many media figures, activists and politicians to stoke that wing’s worst impulses; and the current Republican leadership’s desire both to prevent an intraparty civil war and avoid a true national disaster like default.
Given this underlying landscape, it may be that John Boehner chose a kind of rational irrationality these last two weeks — accepting the Kurtzian shutdown “strategy” in order to demonstrate its senselessness and persuade his members to behave slightly more sensibly in the future. 

But even if Boehner’s decision-making ends up looking like a least-bad approach under the circumstances, he’ll only have won a temporary reprieve. Kurtz Republicanism isn’t likely to go away until somebody else within the party — someone with more movement credibility than the speaker, and more subtlety and vision than Ted Cruz — figures out how to take the energy driving the shutdown and redirect it to more constructive ends. 

It’s clear, right now, that the populists can’t be trusted not to drive their party into a ditch.

Douthat has to pay the lib tithe to keep his job at the NYT, and writing fatuous anti-Republican blather about the shutdown is his latest payment.

The shutdown is the consequence of a singular act of courage by a core of Republicans-- led conspicuously by Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and a few others. Republicans have voted to fund every aspect of government except Obamacare, which, in their obviously correct judgement, is a catastrophe for the country. 

Democrats have shut the government down by insisting on linking funding of the rest of the government (or 20% of it, actually) to the Obamacare vote. With the leftie media, tithe-paying RINO commentators like Douthat, compliant goons in the National Park service willing to put on a show to make Americans notice the shutdown (nobody would notice or care otherwise), and the brain-dead-freebie-loving-Obama-re-electing-American electorate in the Democrats' pocket (pants actually), this singular act of integrity by the Republicans should be celebrated. A few politicians are standing on principle, for goodness sake. Call the Guinness Book of World Records. 

Will the shutdown hurt the Republicans? Of course not. Angelo Codevilla described the dynamic well. Democrats represent their own interest, which is the State and the parasites feeding off of it. They have a bevy of loyal hungry followers. But the parasites-- the elites and the bought-off voters-- are only about a third of the country. The country class-- the people who actually keep this country working-- are about two-thirds of the population, but they have no one representing them. The Republican politician class is an alloy of honest decent types and the State-and-perks loving types. Republican politicians inspire little loyalty, because, unlike the Democrats, they aren't wholly thieves stealing for thieves. 

The Republicans will succeed only to the extent that working Americans-- the non-parasite class-- sees Republicans fighting the good fight and representing honest working people. Undoubtedly the Repubs should have played it smarter-- Republican lawmakers personally going to the Mall and dismantling the barricades around the people's monuments and labeling the barricades the Obamacades (or Barrycades, but most Americans wouldn't get the pun), would have been a good idea. The good guys don't have such a flair for marketing, but they could learn. 

Republicans in the House and Senate need a hundred more Cruzes and Lees and Pauls-- men of integrity and competence. Only then do they have a realistic chance of governing our degenerating nation, and, perhaps, saving it from the elites and government-fed barnacles who are taking it down. 

"free... regardless of pre-existing conditions..."

Commentor troy, who hails from Holland, lays out his ideal healthcare system:

Health care should be free, IMO, in the sense that (1) it is free at the point of use, and (2) regardless of pre-existing conditions and personal wealth or lack thereof.

One should not forget that babies in Holland with spina bifida, which is most certainly a "pre-existing condition", are routinely euthanized.

[A] 1997 study revealed that 45% of Dutch neonatologists and 31% of pediatricians had killed infants. In fact, according to the study, 8% of the infants who died in the Netherlands were actually killed … by doctors.

"Free... regardless of pre-existing conditions". A moral exhortation from a citizen of a country in which 8% of "pre-existing condition" babies who die are killed deliberately by their doctors.

What a precis of liberal moral preening: 'We euthanize children with pre-existing conditions, but it's free.'

And government-regulated healthcare is a reality in many nations in Europe, where euthanasia is, unsurprisingly, increasingly the norm.

What do you think happens to people with preexisting conditions, when the same State that enforces laws on homicide also has to pay exorbitant costs of caring for handicapped people?

Holland is the answer to that question.

I just thought of a new name for electronic voting

An Obama-orgy, from KSLA in Lousiana:

Walmart shelves in Springhill, Mansfield, cleared in EBT glitch
MANSFIELD, LA (KSLA) - 

Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.

The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.

Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd confirms they were called in to help the employees at Walmart because there were so many people clearing off the shelves. He says Walmart was so packed, "It was worse than any black Friday" that he's ever seen. 

Lynd explained the cards weren't showing limits and they called corporate Walmart, whose spokesman said to let the people use the cards anyway. From 7 to 9 p.m., people were loading up their carts, but when the cards began showing limits again around 9, one woman was detained because she rang up a bill of $700.00 and only had .49 on her card. She was held by police until corporate Walmart said they wouldn't press charges if she left the food.

Lynd says at 9 p.m., when the cards came back online and it was announced over the loud speaker, people just left their carts full of food in the aisles and left. 

"Just about everything is gone, I've never seen it in that condition," said Mansfield Walmart customer Anthony Fuller.

Word gets out that the EBT cards have no limit, and within minutes America's "we are the change we have been waiting for" crowd are clearing the shelves into their shopping carts. 

EBT, in case you were wondering, stands for Electronic Benefits Transfer. A tekkie name for welfare.

There's an irony here. The Obamavoters in the Walmart orgy were themselves purchased, using working people's money, to secure votes for our Democrat elites. Now the purchased Obamavoters are purchasing, using working people's money, as payment for their only work, which is voting for Democrats every couple of years.  

Maybe we should call our new electronic voting system an EBT.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

BTW, Happy Thanksgiving to our readers in Canada!

We Americans have a lot to be thankful for, especially for our friends up north!

"America was not shut down properly"

Jerry Coyne posts this graphic, with the title "If only..."

Wouldn't you love it if you pushed "Y", and the next screen said:

                                       WELCOME TO NORTH KOREA

Pope Francis, communism, and taking back the streets

Paul Kengor gives his take on Pope Francis', and communism, and advocacy for the poor:

After decades of slandering, attacking, denigrating, and even trying to kill various popes in the Roman Catholic Church — from Pope Pius XII to Pope John Paul II — communists are suddenly embracing a pope. It is Pope Francis. Imagine my shock, as a Catholic convert drawn to the Church initially in large part because of its stalwart anti-communism across centuries, when I did my regular perusal of People’s World and found not one but two pieces exalting the Bishop of Rome. 

The first, published September 27, 2013, was tellingly titled, “Welcome Pope Francis, campaigner against corporate greed!” It began excitedly: “The campaign against corporate criminals and their gluttonous greed just added a new speaker with a very loud voice, Pope Francis I.”...

In short, it’s no exaggeration to say that communists, like secular progressives, are excited about this new pope, and not because they’re suddenly thinking about becoming Catholic. No, they believe he’s more like them. They like him because they think he agrees withthem. They like him because they think he agrees with them not just on “social justice” and economics and the environment, but because they like what they perceive is his de-emphasis on crucial aspects of the Catholic faith that they heartily reject.

I know that some readers (faithful Catholics especially) will not like what I’m reporting here. They’ll insist that this pope is doing a good thing; he’s reaching out to and impacting secularists, agnostics, atheists, progressives, liberals, and even communists. He is indeed doing just that. I appreciate it. In the spirit of Saint Francis, he’s bringing the Gospel to the unconverted in a rapidly secularizing world. I understand. I get it.

In fact, there’s no question that Pope Francis is doing some really good things. His leadership on Syria was superb, and genuinely produced much fruit. He’s preaching forgiveness, mercy, humility, redemption, helping the poor, the Gospel. He is unquestionably pro-life and has made some solid pro-life moves. He evenexcommunicated a dissident liberal priest who supported gay marriage and female ordination. I’m on his side. We’re on the same team.

But, in all due respect and deference, this man needs to be extremely careful about what he’s saying and how he’s saying it, because every imprecise statement is ripe for severe misinterpretation, exploitation, and abuse by enthusiasts and activists on the left.

His statement on abortion, contraception, and gay marriage was utterly butchered and completely misrepresented, most notably by the predictably awful but extremely influential New York Times. Other troubling statements, however, have not been misrepresented at all. A recent one, highlighted at The American Spectator by George Neumayr, was this remark, made to a prominent Italian atheist interviewer: “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.” Interrupted by the amazed interviewer, Francis doubled down: “And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”

That statement is a jaw-dropper. I’m saddened and sorry to say that I cannot, by any stretch, defend that statement. As a Catholic convert regularly called upon to defend my faith and various papal statements, that’s one I will not be able to explain away. Let’s be honest: That remark is a disaster. I’m stunned to hear it from a pope. It is a major, major problem. All I can do is plea for a clarification or correction, which I’ve yet to hear.

Again, this man needs to be extremely careful about what he’s saying and how it will be received.

And so, back to my original point:

One manifestation of that is this: Communists, of all people, finally believe they have a pope who agrees with them, that they like, that they can embrace, that they can encourage. I knew that Francis’ controversial interview on abortion, contraception, and gay marriage had thrilled liberals, liberal Catholics, dissident Catholics, secular progressives, agnostics, atheists, and socialists. You can read their websites. They love this guy. But communists?

It seems to me that this is not the kind of praise that the pope should want. Unless he takes steps to clarify and be clearer, much of the confusion will be his own fault.

No, no, no, and no.

Francis is the communists' worst nightmare, although some commies may not get it yet. If I were a commie, I'd put Pope Francis' picture on my dart board and spend each waking hour trying to stop him. He is a mortal threat to leftism-- the greatest threat since Blessed (soon Saint!) John Paul II, who took European communism apart like a cheap toy.

Francis is collecting the toy parts, and grinding them to dust.

'How?', you ask.

First, there is no reason to suspect Francis of any personal communist sympathies: he is a fiercely loyal son of communism's worst enemy. No institution on earth has fought communism and various strains of leftism with the tenacity the Church has shown. From Revolutionary France to post-war Poland to communist China in the 21st century, the Church as worked with unmatched fervor and diligence to lay low this murderous atheist heresy.

In Argentina, Archbishop Bergoglio was an incessant thorn in the side of the leftist government. They despised him, not the least for his expropriation of the leftist solicitude for the poor. Presidents Kirchner (husband and wife) treated Bergoglio with transparent contempt:

In 2006, Bergoglio publicly opposed an attempt by the Argentine government to legalize some cases of abortion. In 2007, after the government intervened to allow an abortion for a mentally handicapped woman who had been raped, Bergoglio said that "in Argentina we have the death penalty. A child conceived by the rape of a mentally ill or retarded woman can be condemned to death." Kirchner said in response that "the diagnosis of the Church in relation to social problems in Argentina is correct, but to mix that with abortion and euthanasia is at least a clear example of ideological malfeasance."

Lefties who actually know Bergolio hate the guy. Argentine leftists understand, correctly, that Bergoglio's  very  public message-- that there is an intimate link between protection of the poor and oppressed and protection of the unborn and vulnerable-- is a catastrophe for leftism.

Leftism and communism thrives rhetorically when it has a monopoly on the high ground-- when it is perceived as the only hope for the oppressed and the poor. It is a jealous lie. It is of course a lie-- nothing has cursed and murdered the poor more than the hammer and sickle in power and the leftist abattoirs of the abortion clinics. Ask the Ukrainians and the Cambodians and 50 million American children.

The Holy Father understands that. The real hope for the poor and the oppressed is God and His Church. Pope Francis is proclaiming that truth, and the communists are fools to think that he works to the same ends as they do. He is telling the truth about communism. It is a sick and paltry heresy. He intends to push it aside, and replace the lie with the truth, which is the Lord. 

And he tells the truth about capitalism. There is much evil in capitalism, because capitalism is, basically, the unfettered economics of the human heart. Capitalism is less evil than communism-- much less evil-- but evil, in may ways. That is not to say that the evil in capitalism should be eradicated by the empowerment of the state, and the Church has always taught the principle of subsidiarity, which Bergoglio has long embraced. Social assistance for our brothers must take place on as personal and local scale as prudence permits. The leviathan state is an implacable enemy of the Church. There are situations where stronger laws and state action is needed, but there are many places where the state is the problem and needs to shrink, and what is always needed-- the primary need-- is a change of heart, and a move toward God.

That is what Francis is up to. He's taking back the streets from the left. It is a communist's worst nightmare. 

What low-information voters really think...

Ever wonder what low-information voters really think?

From the People's Cube:

• How do I sign a check on the front? 

• Why stop at Gun Free Zones? We should also create Crime Free Zones! 

• I voted for Change, so how come things are still the same? 

• The National Socialist Party had nothing to do with Socialism, right? 

• We have weekends off, thanks to unions. If enough people join unions, we can get the other five days off. 

• My body is my business, but so is what other people earn. 

• Why read the Constitution when you can watch the Daily Show? 

• Voting "D" = free stuff. Voting "R"= bummer, I'll have to work. 

• We keep voting democrat, but we're STILL poor. 

• The First lady is like Kim Kardashian, except with other people's money. 

• Someday I'll live in my OWN basement.

How liberals used the Kennedy assassination

George Will has a fascinating essay on the transformation of liberalism following the assassination of JFK.

George F. Will: When liberals became scolds

A must read. Will points out that liberals bizarrely used the assassination to beat up conservatives and ordinary Americans, introducing the trope that it was conservative America's penchant for violence that killed JFK.

An odd assertion, given that JFK was murdered by a leftist who hated America.

As a kid I remember the frequent assertions in the media that the JFK assassination was an indictment of ordinary Americans (read: conservatives) and their violent ways. Even then I though it odd: wasn't Kennedy killed by a communist, exactly the sort of person ordinary conservative Americans disdained and liberals incessantly excused or even defended?

A few years ago, I visited The Sixth Floor Museum while on a trip to Dallas with my youngest daughter. I was surprised, and annoyed, by the frequent displays in the museum about anti-Kennedy statements by conservative groups in the lead-up to the assassination. The fact is that none of these conservative protesters had anything whatsoever to do with the assassination, and it was a communist-- just the kind of guy who these protesters detested-- who killed Kennedy. Why weren't there displays about the Left's solicitude for communism, which allowed a traitor like Oswald to return to the U.S. from the Soviet Union and to act with impunity when he returned, hawking political viewpoints (e.g. support for Castro) that were fashionable in all the liberal salons?

One hallmark of the Left was expressed nicely in an aphorism by Rahm Emmanuel, the murderously incompetent Democratic mayor of Chicago. When he was Obama's chief of staff, he said, referring to the political uses of the economic meltdown, "never let a good crisis go to waste".

Even the murder of a president by a leftist is useful to the Left, as Will points out. 

There's too much money in politics. Your tax money, specifically.

A hilarious op-ed at the Los Angeles Times, with my commentary.

A liberal nightmare at the Supreme Court?

Three key high court cases that could dramatically shift U.S. constitutional law to the right are likely to hinge on the vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. 

By Eric J. Segall 

The Supreme Court will hear three cases during the 2013-14 term that might dramatically alter the landscape of constitutional law. Campaign finance reform, abortion and the separation of church and state are all on the agenda. When the dust settles, if the conservative justices hold sway, Americans could find themselves living in a different country. As has been the case in recent years, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's votes will likely be decisive in each case.

The irony is that the "different country" Segall refers to is the country Americans would have if they determined these matters by popular vote, rather than by what Justice Kennedy's mood is on a particular day.  

First on the docket is campaign finance. In Buckley vs. Valeo, the court in 1976 held that the dangers of corruption justify significant government regulation of direct campaign donations by groups and individuals.

When you give money to a candidate you like, it's "corruption".  When a politician gets elected and uses taxpayer money to buy off corporations and voting blocks, it's "liberal government".

But it did not allow the government as much leeway to regulate independent expenditures by those groups and individuals to advance the interests of a candidate or campaign. After Congress tried to place some limitations on the political expenditures of corporations and unions, the court, in 2008 in Citizens United vs. FEC, granted corporations and unions the same rights as private individuals to make independent political expenditures.

The Court found, to the astonishment of progressives, that corporations and unions were comprised of private citizens. After all, didn't the Constitution say specifically that none of the First Amendment protections apply to citizens acting in groups? Yea it did. Right next to the right to abortion.

The Citizens United decision, however, did not address the important distinction made in Buckley between groups or individuals giving money directly to a candidate or campaign versus the independent expenditures.

I feel so much better knowing that GS-15 Lois Lerners are parsing my contributions to make sure I'm not corrupting the political process.

All of that may change. In McCutcheon vs. FEC, to be argued Tuesday, the court will hear a case brought by a Republican donor from Alabama and the Republican National Committee challenging limitations on aggregate contribution limits to political parties and candidates. Although this case does not directly challenge the distinction made in Buckley between contributions and expenditures, conservative amicus briefs are urging the court to abolish that distinction and invoke the 1st Amendment to prohibit the regulation of campaign contributions 

Given Kennedy's long-standing antipathy toward campaign finance reform (he wrote the Citizens United opinion), as well as the other conservative justices' belief that money equals speech, this case could be the knockout punch that limits legislative efforts to reduce the corrosive effects of money on political campaigns.

Let's talk about corrosive effects of money on political campaigns.

First, there's the "corrosive" effect of individuals acting alone and in groups who contribute to help the candidate they support get his message to the voters. We need, of course, laws against citizen participation in politics, if we are to protect our democracy from corruption.

Second, there's the corrosive effect of trillions of dollars expropriated from taxpayers at gunpoint and trillions of dollars borrowed from China (to make up the gap when the working stones annually run short of blood) to purchase and suborn and bribe massive blocks of government-pre-ordered voters  (buy now, while supplies last!) to keep the North Pole district in Washington churning out the free checks in the mail, payoffs to compliant corporations, pork, free food, free cellphones, etc.

Your $40 contribution to your favorite pol skirts "corruption". The government's $40,000 annual contribution to their favorite voter, multiplied by scores of millions of voters,  or $500,000,000 contribution to their favorite corporation, to secure the re-election of... the government? Well, that's hope and change.

Not surprisingly, a host of public interest groups and law professors are lining up on the other side. Justice Elena Kagan is on record as being vehemently opposed to using the 1st Amendment as a blunt tool to stifle campaign finance reform.

Justice Kagan, who is "vehemently opposed to using the First Amendment as a blunt tool to stifle campaign finance reform", was a loyal employee of the Clinton and Obama administrations, where 90% of administration employees were employed to direct tax-payer monies expropriated at gun-point for delivery to appropriate and grateful corporations and voting blocks. Do you think the scrupulous future Justice spoke up about that at Cabinet meetings?


We have too much money in politics. Too much of your tax money, that is. 

Killing unarmed black people is ok when it's the elites doing the killing and there's nothing to be gained politically by objecting

Ester Goldberg makes a point I had been thinking about. Why is there no outrage about the killing of Miriam Carey, the unarmed mentally troubled woman who was gunned down by police in Washington D.C. after she crashed her car into a security barrier near the White House?

Did they have to shoot her? She was stopped in her car, unarmed, with a baby in the back seat. She was shot so many times that her family was only allowed to see photographs to identify her.

Why kill her?

And why has there been no media outcry from the Trayvon Martin lobby?

The reason is obvious. There was no political hay to make from her death, so they don't give a shit.

N.B. As Gateway Pundit at the second link notes, they filled this unarmed woman with holes, but the same folks called off a tactical team that was ready to stop the Navy Yard mass shooting.

'Serve and Protect', sort of. 

"Of course, I want people to have health care, I just didn't realize I would be the one to pay for it personally."

This is hilarious. Who did this moron think was going to pay for it?

Lib-dem-Obama-loving morons are getting sticker-shock when they realize that they have to foot the bill for their idiot moral preening.

They thought it was just going to be the rest of us who had to pay for wrecking the healthcare system in the U.S.. 

Obama shuts down Amber Alert for missing kids; reminds them to exercise.

Hope and change.

Global warming activist rendered speechless by... facts

Pitiful.

Marc Morano of Climate Depot reduces Australian Youth Climate Coalition "spokesperson" Anna Rose to silence. She starts with the usual ad hominem tripe, and then when Marc provides the facts, she can't even debate him.

These global warming loons run from debate. They're are such frauds.



HT: The Right Scoop.

Tearing down the Barrycades

WWII vets take it back. 

Obama closes the ocean

Feds close parts of the ocean due to shutdown

Impressive. First he stopped the rise of the sea, then he closes the oceans altogether. 

Obama Chronicles: government shutdown update

Police prevent drivers from pulling over and viewing Mt. Rushmore

:-/

I guess this is an answer to the question: "how do you 'close' huge outdoor public monuments?"

An interview with Pope Francis

An interview with Pope Francis by Eugenio Scalfari, an atheist.

Fascinating. 

Government shutdown taking toll on Democrats

KKK Rally At Gettysburg Canceled Because Of Government Shutdown

Next round with Coyne

I've replied to Coyne again on free will at ENV. 

Sign up for Obamacare: call 1-800-FUCKYO

The national hotline for for signing up for Obamacare is 1-800-318-2596.

Jerry Coyne on free will

Jerry Coyne, looking determined. 

Jerry Coyne has replied to my post on free will at ENV. 

Oops

I'm such a sucker. My post from a couple of days ago about the KKK lawsuit was based on a satire, which I didn't realize.

Thanks to commentor Hoo for pointing it out.

The satire does raise interesting moral and legal questions, though.

"They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase."

In a note to Climate Depot, M.I.T. climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen:

I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase. 

Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans. However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability. Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified. 

Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about. It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.

The warming stops, and global warming "certainty" goes up.

There are some honest climate scientists out there. Lindzen, it should be noted, is emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meterology at M.I.T.

Emeritus.

That means he's retired, and no longer depends on grants to feed his family. The warming thugs have no way to destroy him, so he can speak out without fear.

KKK and Gay-Gay-Gay share a tactic

KKK wins lawsuit against bakery for discrimination 

A Georgia court has ruled in favor of Marshall Saxby, the Grand Wizard of a local KKK chapter, in a lawsuit stemming from two years ago when a local bakery denied him service. 

The three judge panel concluded unanimously that the bakery had violated civil rights laws by discriminating against Saxby when they refused to sell him a cake for his organization’s annual birthday party. 

Elaine Bailey, who owns Bailey Bakeries, refused to bake a cake for the ceremony because it violated her religious beliefs. 

Saxby filed the lawsuit claiming that Bailey’s refusal of service was discriminatory against his religious beliefs. 

The case is similar to the recent decision in New Mexico where a court has ruled that a photographer discriminated against a gay couple for refusing to provide them service. 

Bailey said in a prepared statement, “it’s a sad day when bigots have to be treated equally before the law. If they can discriminate against people, then surely I cannot be forced to support their beliefs by providing them services against my will.” 

Saxby was very happy with the outcome, stating “the law says that it’s wrong to discriminate against people if you run a business, and that means she was wrong in discriminating against our organization by refusing us service.” 

People on both sides of the issue have had varying remarks. 

One man stated “I am against anti-discrimination laws. Freedom means people are able to do what they wish with their lives and property. Society can punish bad behaviors in a market, but the power to take away from someones life as if it did not belong to them is frightening. 

Another person familiar with the case responded “This is not the same as denying service to someone based on the color of their skin or sexual preference. This was a choice by the owner of the bakery to not serve someone based on their bigoted lifestyle, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” 

Many wonder that if she had simply lied about her reasoning, would this have even been an issue. That leaves the question to the public, do they want discrimination to happen out in the open where people can pinpoint it, or do they want it to operate a cloaked manner where it happens but it’s hard to tell who is doing it?

The KKK tactic and the Gay-Gay-Gay tactic are, unsurprisingly, the same. Intimidate ordinary citizens who, out of religious or moral beliefs, don't want to play a part in ceremonies such as a gay wedding or a Klan rally. To hell with the right of conscience, or the right to Free Exercise of Religion, or to simple respect for other people's beliefs.

Civil Rights laws are being used to deny people their civil rights. It's a very effective tactic, and it's going to be used extensively against Christians. Your moral beliefs, or your business. Choose one.

One fellow's view:

“I am against anti-discrimination laws. Freedom means people are able to do what they wish with their lives and property. Society can punish bad behaviors in a market, but the power to take away from someones life as if it did not belong to them is frightening."

Fool. What does he think this is, America?