Archive for the 'Politics' Category

This is one reason Neocons hate Ted Cruz.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says the United States is safer if we leave Bashar Assad in power in Syria.

The GOP presidential hopeful told the Associated Press that while Assad is a “bad man” who has “murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens,” toppling him would be “materially worse for U.S. national security interests.”

He faulted the Obama administration as well as one of his Republican rivals, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, for wanting to get rid of the Syrian leader.

“If President Obama and Hillary Clinton and Sen. Rubio succeed in toppling Assad, the result will be the radical Islamic terrorist will take over Syria, that Syria will be controlled by ISIS, and that is materially worse for U.S. national security interests,” Cruz said.

Cruz, who has been gaining some ground in recent polls, also said the United States should not have supported the overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, or even former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

“If you topple a stable ruler, throw a Middle Eastern country into chaos and hand it over to radical Islamic terrorists, that hurts America,” he said.

Neocons foolishly believe in the export of liberty.  But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us again, some people don’t want liberty.  They love their enslavement, and Islam is a prime example of the kind of Fascism that comes to dominate a man’s heart, soul and culture.  It cannot coexist with anything.  Only by overthrowing Islam can a country embrace liberty, and so the so-called Green movement in Iraq would have gone to war with the Iranian establishment had the U.S. supported it.  Instead we relegated it to a failing and sidelined movement, destined to perish like every other ideology that met the Mullahs head on.

In the case of Libya and Syria, Cruz knows what the Neocons don’t.  The dictator we know is better than the one we know will come to power in his place, and without the destruction of Islamism in Iran, it’s better to leave well enough alone.  Meddling has produced bad results, and so the meddling should stop.

But Cruz is hated for that and other anti-Neocon positions.  I listened to Brit Hume tonight on Fox News O’Reilly (Hume misspelled Cruz’s name), and Brit was all somber and insistent about Cruz’s upcoming month being an opportunity for the good folks of Iowa to find out what his “real” positions are, and they may not like them.  Positions such as Cruz’s opposition to the NSA spying program, which according to Hume, people may find that they want in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings.

Really, Brit?  Conservatives want larger government programs that enable the Leviathan executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens?  Really?  Is this the great dagger in the heart of Cruz?  Look, we know that the best bet to ameliorate terrorism in America is to close the borders, which runs directly contrary to Rubio’s position.  You won’t have any success convincing us that it’s best to leave the borders open and try to fight them when they get here.  That’s weak tea.  As far as we conservatives are concerned, leave the *.us.gov out of it except to close the borders, and leave our guns alone.  We’ll be just fine.  We’re unimpressed, but I will make a note of the fact that it sounds like you got your talking points from Karl Rove before coming on the air with O’Reilly, who was too stupid to interrupt you and tell you to go back to the drawing board.

Next up is Max Boot, who waxes emotional about Regan’s demeanor.

Like many of his rivals for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz has embraced the mantle of Ronald Reagan. He regularly cites the Gipper as an inspiration, and last week gave a foreign policy address at the Heritage Foundation that was laced with tributes to him: “As Reagan knew well, the best way to project America’s leadership is by protecting and promoting America’s strength and this principle should always guide our actions.”

You have got to be kidding me?  In Boot’s alternate universe, McConnell is a “staunch” conservative, and Boehner, old yellowstain himself, is somehow worthy of anything but our most robust disapprobation and insults.  And yet these two quisling traitors are responsible for much of the socialism, crony capitalism, indebtedness, and unfunded liabilities with which our nation is plagued today.

This is rich.  Boot begins with apparently his strongest condemnation of Cruz, which is that Cruz condemns socialism, crony capitalism and debt.  And Boot thinks that this is somehow going to be effective with conservatives.  Again, this is just rich.  But it is telling that it sounds like Boot got his talking points from Karl Rove.

Message to Hume and Boot.  Don’t hang around with Karl Rove.  It’ll prove to be your undoing.  And don’t be persuaded that those outside the beltway think like you do.  We don’t.  You lead the insular life of the effete, inner city dwellers, out of touch with just about everyone except those with whom you dine and discuss.  You should get out a bit more.

Oh, and none of the things Rove has planned for Cruz will change a thing.  Rove is a putz, and you can tell him I said so over dinner.

Reader and commenter Menckenlite concerning guns and mental health.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

Oftentimes my readers can say things better than can I.  The above quote is a perfect example.  Obama now wants guns from these 47,000 people.

Leaving the federal government in charge of anything is the surest way to screw it up.  I’m sure it is indeed a problem for the air marshals.  But the biggest issue for me isn’t related to errors and screwups, as prolific as they may be with the *.gov.  Another thing this conversation suffers from is confusion of the terrorist watch list with the no-fly list.  They are not at all the same thing.  Obama wants you to be confused, he revels in it, he will use it to his advantage.

If a terrorist is inside America, deport him.  If a terrorist is trying to get in, bar him.  Close the borders immediately and completely, and the issue of ne’er-do-wells perpetrating crimes and terror via our border will go away.  But since we won’t close the borders, we aren’t serious about this problem, at least not yet.

In the mean time, Obama doesn’t really want 47,000 people to turn in their guns.  He doesn’t care in the least about errors and screwups.  He wants so-called anti-government types on the list, or in other words, people who believe in God, people who believe in the constitution, people who believe in their right to bear arms, and people who think the *.gov is too intrusive and the executive branch too powerful.

And therein lies the problem.  Under Obama’s schema, the executive can put anyone on the list for literally any reason.  I sometimes disagree with Volokh, but in this case I think he nailed it.

… we don’t deny constitutional rights based just on suspicion? If you think you can prove someone is a terrorist, lock him up. If you have probable cause to think he’s a terrorist, and think you can develop proof beyond a reasonable doubt, arrest him. Even if you have only suspicion, follow him, ask people about him, and so on. But if you don’t have enough to prosecute or even arrest someone, you can’t take away his constitutional rights, even if you suspect he’s a terrorist (or if you suspect he’s a drug dealer or a gang member or whatever else).

This is the nexus between mental health and terrorism.  Unfortunately for those who suffer from mental health issues, they are misunderstood and badly characterized, in large measure because everything that occurs due to the existence of evil in the world is falsely ascribed to mental health.

The nexus has to do with the how the progressives treat them.  The commonality is an end run around due process, and the progressives no more regret that for believers in the constitution than they do for those who suffer from mental health maladies.  In fact, the progressives would likely see everyone cast into the same boat – those who suffer from mental health maladies, a category including all conservatives or libertarians.

Don’t fall for the rhetoric.  It’s a smoke screen, a ruse.  Obama and his ilk don’t really care about terrorism in the way you do.  They want to take your guns.  Isn’t it telling and ironic that while collectivists want to ban people from buying guns by executive fiat, Donald Trump is open to the idea.  Or was I being redundant by saying “collectivists” and Donald Trump?”

Los Angeles Times:

At first, Dorothy Vong assumed it was a drill — just like all the others at her work.

At the Inland Regional Center, where she’s a nurse, the staff works with clients and parents of clients who are sometimes angry. They have active-shooter drills every month or so.

“Drill started,” she texted her husband, Mark, around 11 a.m.

She walked to a window nearby and filmed a video as law enforcement sprinted toward the building.

“Oh, that is scary,” a voice says calmly in the background.

“They’re all geared up!” someone else says. “Rifles and everything!”

In the background, someone laughs — they still didn’t know.

Then the reality set in.

She texted her husband again: “Well it’s real.”

And then a few minutes later, another message: “We’re in a locked office.”

Mark Vong said he told his wife to stay calm and not to panic.

“They train for this,” he said, standing outside a police barricade Wednesday afternoon. “They know it’s going to happen.”

Stay calm and trust the police.  They will save you.  Except we all know now how many people perished in the attack.

I don’t know if I have any liberal readers or if any will stumble upon this post, but let me make an observation you know is true, but simply haven’t faced with all of your gun control.

Active shooter drills are stupid, as is active shooter training in general.  Oh, I’ve been through it because my own employer forbids weapons on site.  Hide under desks, lock doors, throw potted plants at the shooter (no, I’m not kidding), and all manner of ridiculous, inane, juvenile content and recommendations drowns the participant in this training like so much objectionable vomit.

It’ll never work.  None of it ever works.  It’s all concocted by the anti-gunners who want people to feel better about coming to work every day, like they can actually do anything about active shooters in the absence of a weapon to stop the shooter.

Your polices and your stupid training are culpable.  You hear me?  You’re culpable for deaths that have occurred and many more that will occur.  Get used to seeing the bloody night time news reports.  They’re going to get worse.

Matt Bracken has written a very important essay, but before I get to that, I wanted to preface his essay with a few remarks.

Matt deals with a number of very important things, spending much of his effort in the where, what and wherefore of the vice set up for peaceable men and women across the globe.  We are under increasing pressure from many sides, and Matt explores that in his essay with his focus on (1) Islam, (2) International Socialism, and (3) Nationalism.  His essay is a treatise in history, and one which is largely unparalleled in my opinion.

But Matt’s audience isn’t necessarily theologically committed, nor is it his purpose to address the ideological underpinnings of these three nefarious movements and their common moral malfunction.  In other words, the “why” was not explored in this essay, and that I think was purposeful.  Furthermore, Matt’s exploration into the “why” of things might differ from my own.

My own views are clear to regular readers.  I am a committed Christian, specifically a Calvinist.  I do not apologize one iota for my system of doctrine.  Islam is a devilish political religion concocted by a syphilitic pedophile for the purpose of keeping a band of warlords and murderers together.  Statism in all of its forms is evil, pernicious, and a foul odor in the nostrils of God.  There is only one God, and one true religion, and our way to reconciliation with Him is through His son, Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man.  He (Jesus) demands fealty, He sits in the heavens and mocks the rulers of this age, and He will judge them in both time and eternity.

Jews didn’t cause our problem.  Bankers – for all of their evil with fractional reserve banking – are a sign of the times and have the same cause as all of the other evils I am discussing.  Statists are the same as Islamists, who are the same as the banking cabal, who is the same as the current administration and most previous ones, and (here is the hard part for readers) who is the same as the voting electorate who put them in place.  They are all servants of the evil one.

Bankers wouldn’t have power if politicians didn’t grant it to them and men avoided debt, and the politicians wouldn’t be in power if the voters hadn’t voted themselves more largesse.  The root cause of all of this is a rejection of the Son of man, the God-man Christ Jesus, and his demands for our lives, and His holy law for the governance of men.  But contrary to the demands of the false God Allah, His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.  He is a God of love and light, not of darkness and death as is the false god of Allah, or the false god of mammon.

Finally, the men who forged this nation (Samuel Rutherford, John Adams, etc.) split with the English over much less than what we face.  We are a pitiful men, worthy of everything we are suffering now.  God grant us the strength to stand when it matters, and the wisdom to know how and when.

As for Matt’s essay, he is published at WRSA and Gates of Vienna.  Here is a teaser in case you haven’t already read his essay.

Right now, approximately a million new Muslim migrants are engaged in a struggle to find a warm place to sleep in a continent with nothing approaching the capacity to adequately house them. At least 75% of the migrant invaders are Muslim men of fighting age. Native-born ethnic Germans, Swedes and others are being thrown onto the street to provide emergency housing for Muslim “refugees.” Tens of thousands of migrants are currently living in tents, and in temporary shelters like school gymnasiums and underused warehouses.

There will be no means of finding or creating permanent quarters for them before the Central European blizzards come. When the snow is deep in Germany and across Europe, these men are going to enter local houses, demanding to be taken in as boarders—or else. Where it is useful, small migrant children will be held up in front as human shields for their emotional blackmail value; elsewise, they will be discarded. One way or the other, Muslim migrants will be attempting to move inside of German homes and apartments seeking heat and food, and the young Muslim men will be seeking undefended infidel or kafir women to slake their lust (which is their right, under Islamic Sharia law).

In disarmed Europe, any group of a dozen or more cold, hungry and angry Muslim men armed with clubs and knives will be able to enter any German house or business that they like. Worse, there are now reports of vast quantities of firearms being smuggled into Europe by the muhajirs, with cowed European authorities afraid to search the migrants or their baggage, lest they provoke riots. And weapons are not only smuggled in “refugee” baggage: eight hundred assault-style shotguns were just seized in a single truck in northern Italy, bound from Turkey to Belgium. How many truckloads of weapons and explosives have not been stopped?

In Germany, even before the winter snows, the migrants are flash mobbing and looting shops and stores. Seeking to forestall a social eruption, police do not respond until the mobs have safely departed. For now, the German government is paying these store owners for their lost merchandise, but this cannot continue forever. Businesses are closing and Germans are retreating in fear, as the muhajirs learn that they can invade private property and rob Germans without repercussions, convincing them even further of the docile passivity of their hosts, and the inevitability of their ultimate hijra invasion success.

As attacks mount, the German police will nearly always fall out on the side of the traitor-elite politicians who pay their salaries, and they will not come to the rescue of besieged ethnic Germans. At least, not under official orders, or in uniform. This calculated disregard by the international socialist elites for the safety and welfare of ordinary German citizens will in time lead to vigilantism and death squad actions by “off-duty” German military and police personnel. They will be acting against their “hands off the Muslims” orders, which are ultimately emanating from Brussels. And in time, enough firearms will find their way from the military, police and black markets into the hands of ordinary European nationalists for them to mount an armed resistance.

Things are going to get dicey.  Never give up your guns.  You will need them.

Redflagnews.com:

Sweden is in shock: A 34 year old immigrant from Somalia was arrested for savagely attacking a woman next to the parking garage of a Sheraton hotel in Sweden. The woman died while being raped. Police say the perpetrator continued to rape the woman’s corpse well after she had died. The Somalian was apprehended by police while still in the act of raping the murdered woman. Sweden and Norway are in the middle of a massive epidemic of violent rapes. Crime statistics show that rapes in both countries are overwhelmingly perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.

As surely as the sun rises, a religion of peace.  So we are told.

Chicago cops stand behind one of their own.

The main Chicago police union is standing behind the white officer who was charged this week with first-degree murder for gunning down a black teenager. It is facing a backlash from leaders of the city’s black community as a result.

On its website, the Chicago lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), has posted a bail fund appeal for the officer, Jason Van Dyke, who is accused of shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times just six seconds after emerging from his patrol car on a street in Chicago on Oct. 20, 2014.

Why doesn’t this surprise me?

Obama issues threats to states blocking immigration.  The states won’t do anything about it, and they’ll all cave.  There are other options as I’ve pointed out, but their too cowardly to avail themselves of those options.

Mike Vanderboegh poses the following question: How many of you are willing to kill a Muslim infant because his or her parents are Muslim?  He adds, “I am not arguing about the validity of their faith. I am a Christian, but I also understand that absent the burden of protecting the innocent — ALL innocents — from attack by collectivists of any ilk, including Muslim religious collectivists, it is not up to me to execute God’s judgment upon someone simply because of their faith, however mistaken it is.”

Well, this poses a complex set of issues that isn’t fertile ground for talking points or rapid fire exchange.  This is a thinking man’s territory.  He later links (but does not comment on) Ralph Peters and his view that “The generals who won World War II would start by leveling Raqqa, the ISIS caliphate’s capital. Civilians would die, but those remaining in Raqqa have embraced ISIS, as Germans did Hitler. The jihadis must be crushed. Start with their “Berlin.” Kill ten thousand, save a million.”

This is enough to keep us busy for a while.  Reader and commenter BluesStringer1955 also links Mike’s piece, and with absolutely no basis whatsoever charged me with wanting to kill all Muslims around me (this wasn’t even the point of the article), and continues that Mike and David make a mistake to link to anything I write.  Mike and David will have to decide if it’s a mistake for them to link to anything I write, and I never said anything about killing all Muslims.  I think BluesStringer1995 was having a bad day.

But I did assert that making the decision to kill ISIS fighters should be an easy ethical decision for us.  I would sleep well if I flew an A-10 and got the chance to blow a convoy of ISIS fighters into oblivion (but this would only happen in my dreams – flying the A-10, that is).  So let’s fill in the blanks a bit.  For BlueStringer1955, I don’t take you by the hand and lead you to simplistic conclusions.  My goal is to force you to ponder, to make you think.  Even if you end the process disagreeing with me, that’s okay if you have spent time pondering the hard issues we will all face.

There isn’t another writer who has covered more about rules of engagement than have I, from news reports, to AR 15-6 investigations, to private communications from deployed NCOs and others on the situations they are facing.  I won’t rehearse the quotes I am using or the examples I cite.  There isn’t enough time to find the many references I supply in my rules of engagement category, and it would break the flow of what I want to say.  So bear with me, and if you want proof, please visit my prior posts.

I’m willing to listen to just about any argument you wish to make, and I’ll respect your opinion if it’s well researched and well reasoned, and that last point bears repeating.  Well reasoned.  If you cannot bear to face the logical conclusions of your own views, I might show pity, but I won’t be persuaded in the least by emotion, accusations, shouting or hurt feelings.

There are things to which you should stipulate as you ponder these hard issues in order to have the respect of your colleagues and family.  They will listen with a critical ear and they know when you are being irrational.  If you claim that the U.S. shouldn’t have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan to end WWII, then you must stipulate either that (a) it was acceptable to lose half a million Americans in a land invasion of Japan, or that (b) the U.S. should have just stopped, potentially leaving WWII to continue ad infinitum.  If you claim that Marcus Luttrell and his team should have done what they did and leave those goat herders alone, then you must stipulate that it’s acceptable to you for Americans to perish by leaving enemy spotters alive since they weren’t armed at the time.

If you assert that no one can be ethically killed who isn’t armed, they you must stipulate, along with one American general in Afghanistan who wanted to charge two Army snipers with murder for killing an unarmed known Taliban leader with a long distance shot, that many if not most American sniper kills were unethical.  Furthermore, most sniper shots can never be taken under such a rule, or at least, you must stipulate to that.

If you claim that under no circumstances can non-combatant casualties be tolerated, then you must stipulate that when Hezbollah ensconced their artillery among the citizen homes in Lebanon, the Israeli military cannot target those same installation in return.

There are many more examples in my rules of engagement category, but you can see that the issues begin to be complicated.  Only moral and thinking men need apply for the job.  As for me, while I won’t bore you with the details of my own responses to all of the above, I will try as best as I can to answer Mike’s question.

First of all, I am a Calvinist, and there is no one who is innocent.  We are all guilty by virtue of being born of the seed of Adam and equally deserving of damnation, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, or gender.  Those of us who believe were saved because of God’s sovereign choice, by His grace, and through faith alone.  You may disagree, and I’m okay with that.  But I won’t apologize for my beliefs.  They are incorrigible and there will never be a time when I don’t believe those things.

I prefer to speak of non-combatants rather than “the innocent.”  In the entire history of warfare, notwithstanding whether non-combatants were targeted, no war has ever been fought without non-combatant casualties.  The question is whether they should be targeted.  I understand the decision made by the generals in WWII, who knew that Germany wouldn’t be defeated as long as its war machine was supplied by its industry.  I didn’t say I would have made the same decision, and I didn’t say I wouldn’t have.  I said I understand it.  But that’s quite a bit different than killing a Muslim infant simply because his parents are Muslim.

As the choice stands, my answer is no, not just for being children of Muslims, and not at all if I don’t have to.  Let’s use Ralph Peters’ approach to Raqqa to illustrate.  I will no more assert that we should turn Raqqa into a sea of glass that I will assert that we shouldn’t be allowed to shoot Iraqi insurgents who are throwing cinder blocks off of bridges into American convoys.  The goal is to “stay between the ditches” in our decisions.

Turning Raqqa into a sea of glass is a profoundly bad idea for a number of reasons, none of which have to do with there being Muslim infants there.  First of all, al Baghdadi might be away and avoid death, thereby adding to his mystique.  This would be a terrible outcome.  Furthermore, bombing Raqqa would be likely to create more haters of America than it killed.  Again, this would be a terrible outcome.

As to there being infants there, God is the only sovereign and decisions of life and death are His alone if we don’t have to make that choice.  And herein lies the crux of the issue.  Ralph is playing the devil’s game.  He wants to bomb Raqqa into dust, but that wouldn’t solve the problem and we don’t have to make that choice.  The administration doesn’t want to solve the problem, which is open borders.

It isn’t necessary to kill the enemy or his children thousands of miles away, when the answer is to seal the borders, completely and immediately.  It’s like the game my fifth grade teacher wanted the class to play.  We were supposedly all aboard a life boat, and there was only enough food and water for four of us, whereas there were five on board.  What do we do?

I refused to play the game, pissing her off but standing my ground.  There are worse things than death, one of which would be throwing someone overboard in order to stay alive.  Someone wanted Ralph to play this game, perhaps Ralph.  But what they don’t want to do is what is necessary to make the decision unnecessary in the first place.

Look folks, this example is a fairly easy one, but I honestly think that things aren’t going to go down so easy for us.  I think the answers are going to be much tougher, much more involved, and much murkier than this example.  Again with commenter BluesStringer1955, he believes that Muslims ought to be free to practice their religion in America.  I don’t think BluesStringer1955 understands what it means for Muslims to practice their religion.

No civilization in more than a millennia has been able to peaceably coexist with Islam.  BluesStringer1955 sees the world through Western eyes, not through the Islamic world view.  In order to assist here, I wanted to convey a little short story.

This is a story about a man we will call Mark, who lives in Boiling Springs, S.C.  He lived far enough from the center of urban problems that he didn’t figure that any of this would come his way.  But then resettlement of Syrians happened in Spartanburg, S.C., right down the road from him.

At first it was all benign.  But soon enough a few Muslim families moved into his neighborhood – on the government dime, and problems started.  They began to demand that the school system get Arabic translators, and his taxes were going up in order to pay for the translators.  Furthermore, it was said that there might be more days in school in the summer to make up for the Muslim holidays that they were demanding.  No, they weren’t demanding those holidays for themselves, but that everyone observe them as well.

Next, they demanded footwashing stations in the airports, malls and stores, and prayer rooms with arrows towards Mecca, complete with prayer rugs.  All of this was going to cost money, and while he thought that no one would give this kind of thing the time of day, state senator Larry Martin of Pickens, along with others from Greenville and the lower part of the state, were considering actual changes to the law to allow Sharia courts for the Muslims for certain things.

But there was a more immediate and personal concern for Mark.  One Muslim family near him had been eyeballing his dog, who had gotten lose and was playing with their younger children.  Not biting, but playing.  It happened only once, but now every time Mark goes out to walk the dog, the Muslims say something to him and the teenagers even make obscene gestures.  They hate dogs.  They consider them unclean.

Mark was weeping this particular day.  Mark has no fence, and while his dog did not leave the yard, while he wasn’t watching someone had apparently shot the dog’s eyes out with a pellet rifle, or so the vet thinks.  The dog, who had been with him for ten years, had begun to nip at anyone who came near in self defense because he was blind.  Understandable, but Mark couldn’t let that go on with his own children.  Mark was headed to the veterinarian to put his dog down.

As he was driving, he pondered what he was going to do?  The Muslim teenagers had been ogling his own daughter, and had even yelled that she was a whore and daughter of a whore since she isn’t Muslim, dressed unseemly and didn’t wear a hijab.  He wanted his wife and daughters to have weapons and carry them, but the government had cracked down on the purchase of guns since the advent of the heavier Muslim immigration to America.

America, Mark thought, wasn’t the same country in which he grew up.  And this wasn’t even Dearborn, Michigan.  It was Boiling Springs, S.C.

Now, as for the little short story, Mark is fictitious, but Mark’s saga is just beginning.  And if you haven’t pondered long and hard about the borders, Muslim immigration, Hispanic and Latino immigration, government intrusion, and what you will and won’t allow yourself to do, including the broader moral rules you will follow and down to the tactical level, then you need to.  Mike’s question is a good one, but folks, this is only the beginning.  You’d better seek for clarity of thought and a strong moral compass.

For the record, so-called just war theory was constructed for centuries old models for warfare with great armies lining up in fields of battle against other armies, fought in the daylight, with non-combatants left out of the mix, with hand-to-hand tactics using implements that didn’t act as standoff weapons.  Christian theologians, as I have pointed out many times, have let us down.  You don’t see papers written in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society on modern warfare and its ethical exigencies.  They haven’t updated their theory of warfare for modernity, with weapons that kill large numbers of people, and with non-combatants being brought into the mix (along with or against their will).  Much less have Christian theologians pondered fourth or fifth generation warfare and its implications for mankind.  We have been let down, abandoned, and ignored.  Perhaps because of ignorance, perhaps because of cowardice, but abandoned nonetheless.  As you ponder these issues, you are on your own, you and your conscience and your copy of the word of God.

Realclimatescience.com:

Gavin and Tom delivered their fraud right on schedule ahead of Paris, just as I predicted they would. They claim that October had the highest temperature anomaly ever recorded for any month …

Somehow, they managed to calculate Earth’s temperature within 0.01 degrees – even though they had no temperature data for about half of the land surface, including none in Greenland and very little in Africa or Antarctica.

This kind of mind-blowing malfeasance would get them fired and probably escorted out of the building by security at many engineering companies.

This is fascinating.  This writer is saying what I have essentially said about AGW and the need for a different human research and ethical paradigm when it comes to global warming.

But it’s important to be able to discern science from pseudo- or non-science or bad science.  I work in science and engineering every day.  I have for 33 years of my career.  I am a registered professional engineer.  An example of bad science might be AGW (anthropogenic global warming).  The notion that a “researcher” can prove anything about trends by claiming 1 degree C change over a half a millennia is ludicrous on its face.  Furthermore, trusting tree ring data is only valuable if your thesis doesn’t suffer from falsification of data (i.e., the “hockey stick” lie).  But even if tree rings could be a trusted source of information when we have no recorded data, the information is statistically insignificant.  No one with whom I work, engineer or scientist, not one of the hundreds I know, would actually put his or her name on such a calculation or thesis, especially if it involved affixing a PE seal to the work.  AGW is bad science.

Now to what is actual science.  If I use a computer model of a system (which involves physical and engineering calculations) and generate a curve of results from input that has been perturbed, or in other words, a sensitivity study, and I generate a curve fit with TableCurve-2D, and then put that polynomial into MathCad and integrate to a solution (because for some reason I wanted the results from integration), that is science and engineering.

Or say that I use the Bernoulli equation and information on pipes from the Crane Flow of Fluids Technical Paper No. 410, or Cameron Hydraulic Data, to build a piping network, that is science and engineering.  Or say I want to evaluate the performance of a projectile and I use Newtonian physics and ignore aerodynamic drag for simplicity, or say that I do not ignore drag and I account for it, that is science and engineering.  Or finally, let’s say that I use Henry’s law to ascertain how much of a gas is dissolved in the liquid in a system, that is science and engineering.

Note well.  I asserted that AGW, as it was being practiced, isn’t science or engineering.  So what would it take to be persuasive to me?

If you want me to give a report on science or engineering the time of day, get a registered professional engineer to prepare the calculations, seal the work with his PE seal, and send it to me for review.  Otherwise you’re just wasting my time.

As I’ve said before, give me an engineering report on the field measurements, and instrumentation used, calibration data sheets, and a data mean, prove to me that you meet the central limit theorem with the ten or so statistical tests used for Monte Carlo calculations, get it peer reviewed, and most of all, have it all done by a registered PE who can be taken to court and lose everything (including his livelihood) if he’s wrong, and then maybe I’ll take it seriously.

Otherwise, the AGW advocates are just wasting my time.  But they won’t do that, because they want to write papers in the echo chamber that is AGW “science.”  I think that’s what this author is saying too.

Several Governors have gone on record opposing the immigration of Syrians to their states.  Let me focus on just one.

THEREFORE, I, BOBBY JINDAL, Governor of the State of Louisiana, by virtue of the authority vested by the Constitution and laws of the State of Louisiana, do hereby order and direct as follows:

SECTION 1: All departments, budget units, agencies, offices, entities, and officers of the executive branch of the State of Louisiana are authorized and directed to utilize all lawful means to prevent the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the State of Louisiana while this Order is in effect.

SECTION 2: The Louisiana State Police, upon receiving information of a Syrian refugee already relocated within the State of Louisiana, are authorized and directed to utilize all lawful means to monitor and avert threats within the State of Louisiana.

SECTION 3: All departments, budget units, agencies, offices, entities, and officers of the executive branch of the State of Louisiana are authorized and directed to cooperate in the implementation of the provisions of this Order.

SECTION 4: The Order is effective November 16, 2015 and shall remain in effect until amended, modified, terminated, or rescinded by the Governor, or terminated by operation of law.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have set my hand officially and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of Louisiana, at the Capitol, in the City of Baton Rouge, on this 16th day of November, 2015.

This is mighty weak tea.  Here is how this works.  The U.S. government takes the state of Louisiana to court and gets a federal judge to say that Louisiana cannot use any means to prevent this from happening.  Done.  Then it happens because Jindal is too weak to stop it, has no moral compass, and cannot stomach what it will take to keep the people of his state from having to let Syrians ensconce there.

What he could have done if he actually believed what he said is promise that any federal agent or other federal employee who enters the state to ensconce Syrians in Louisiana will be arrested and thrown in the state penitentiary, with Syrians put back on buses to Washington, D.C.

But he didn’t say that, he won’t do it, and this order is as toothless as any other governor’s order who tries to stop this without using the power and force of his office without regard to federal judges.

“Thou shalt not kill,” God to Moses to the world.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus Christ, Son of God, to the world, Matt 5:3.

“You shall not curse a deaf man, nor place a stumbling block before the blind …,” God to Moses to the world, Lev 19:14.

This is a picture of the Bataclan.  Look at it.  And look at it some more.

Take note of what one woman said about the attack.

Miss Wilson, 49, originally from New Orleans, also told how she witnessed the gunmen deliberately targeting concert-goers in wheelchairs. The gunmen hunted down disabled people who were sat in an area specially set aside for wheelchair users.

The mass killing of women and children, the most defenseless among us, in Iraq, isn’t an accident or incidental feature of militant Islam.  It’s who they are.  It’s what they do.  There is no mercy, there is no compassion, there is no love, there is no respect, there isn’t even honorable war.  There is only wretched evil, queued up straight from the pit of hell.

Self denial is all that is left in Europe.  It must be the Jews, since this band played in Tel Aviv recently (no more anti-Semitic ideology can be found anywhere than the American university – this is what they’re thinking, you know it is) .  Except that it’s not really the Jews.  ISIS has declared that the American blood is best, and we will taste it soon.  It must be American strikes in Iraq and Syria, except that ISIS attacked France.  Gun control laws work, except that the attackers all had guns.  Semi-automatic guns are the culprit, except that one of the attackers used a pump action shotgun.  The police will protect us, except more than 100 perished in Paris that awful night.

The world is a confusing place to the progressive mind at the present.  Don’t be confused with them.  Germany won’t close her borders, France will remain an open society, and not to be outdone, America failed its test on 9/11 more than a decade ago.  Our borders are still open, and we still invite disparate cultures from across the globe to ensconce here.

But no civilization in more than a millennia has been able to peaceably coexist with Islam.  Add to that the effects of Hispanic and Latino immigration, the financial pressure on the middle class from all of this additional baggage, and a government that increasingly wants to enslave its people, and a pressure cooker of historic proportions is being set up.

Everyone in the French government is shocked.  No thinking man is shocked.  This was the inevitable deliverance of a ruling class who hates us.  America is the product of Continental and Scottish Calvinism, unquestionably a Christian nation.  The current administration, along with ISIS, hates who we are.  This is coming to America – it is already in America – and it is our responsibility to be ready for it.

Journal of the American Revolution:

While it can be said that the British commanders, both Howe and Clinton, were certainly aware of the massive counterfeiting offensive, it seems that the actual execution of the plan was carried out on a “street” level. Using various methods of disseminating that counterfeit currency, some subtle, some very bold, they were able to put massive amounts of it into circulation. Once in circulation it had the effect of destabilizing what was already an unstable currency, leaving the American economy teetering and the people’s faith in Congress shaken. In most every way the planned economic offensive very nearly achieved its purpose of bringing an end to the rebellion.

This is an outstanding essay, and I highly commend it to your studies.  If you think there is no modern relevance, ask yourself why the federal government monitors all banking transactions greater than $5000?  Or why they want a cashless society?  Or why any of the sundry government controls (e.g., EPA ban on most wood-burning stoves) are in place?

Some of this is related to currency, some not, but it’s all related to the need to stay on the government tit and the inability to disconnect from her controls.