Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.
As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences.
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Whether disarmament has in fact led to peace, more often than military deterrence has, is something that could be argued on the basis of the facts of history — but it seldom is.
Liberals almost never talk about disarmament in terms of evidence of its consequences, whether they are discussing gun control at home or international disarmament agreements.
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Gun control advocates seldom, if ever, present hard evidence that gun crimes in general, or murder rates in particular, go down after gun control laws are passed or tightened.
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If the hard facts show that gun control laws actually reduce the murder rate, we can repeal the Second Amendment, as other Amendments have been repealed.
If in fact tighter gun control laws reduced the murder rate, that would be the liberals' ace of trumps. Why then do the liberals not play their ace of trumps, by showing us such hard facts? Because they don't have any such hard facts. So they give us lofty rhetoric and outraged indignation instead.
Liberals don't talk — or perhaps even think — in terms of the actual consequences of their policies, when it is so much more pleasant to think in terms of wonderful goals and lofty rhetoric.
Meteorology has many facts and many scientific principles but, at this stage of its development, weather forecasts just a week ahead are still iffy. Why then should we let ourselves be stampeded into crippling the American economy with unending restrictions created by bureaucrats who pay no price for being wrong?
Certainly neither China nor India will do that, and the amount of greenhouse gasses they put into the air will overwhelm any reductions we might achieve, even with draconian restrictions at astronomical costs.
It is staggering that there are sane adults who can vote for someone to be President of the United States as if they are in school, just voting for "most popular boy" or "most popular girl" — or, worse yet, voting for someone who will give them free stuff.
Whoever holds that office makes decisions involving the life and death of Americans and — especially if Iran gets a nuclear arsenal — the life and death of this nation. It took just two nuclear bombs — neither of them as powerful as those available today — to get a very tough nation like Japan to surrender.
Anyone familiar with World War II battles in the Pacific knows that it was not unusual for 90 percent of the Japanese troops defending Iwo Jima or other islands to fight to the death, even after it was clear that American troops had them beaten.
When people like that surrender after two nuclear bombs, do not imagine that today's soft Americans — led by the likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton — will fight on after New York and Chicago have been reduced to radioactive ashes.
Meanwhile, ISIS and other terrorists are giving us a free demonstration of what surrender would mean. But perhaps we can kick the can down the road, and leave that as a legacy to our children and grandchildren, along with the national debt.
An election is not a popularity contest, or an award for showmanship. If you want to fulfill your duty as a citizen, then you need to become an informed voter. And if you are not informed, then the most patriotic thing you can do on election day is stay home. Otherwise your vote, based on whims or emotions, is playing Russian roulette with the fate of this nation.
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The ultimate danger lies in the voting public themselves. All too many signs point to an electorate including many people who are grossly uninformed or, worse yet, misinformed.
The very fact that the voting age was lowered to 18 shows the triumph of the vision of elections as participatory rituals, rather than times for fateful choices. If anything, the age might have been raised to 30, since today millions of people in their 20s have never even had the responsibility of being self-supporting, to give them some sense of reality.
We can only hope that the months still remaining before the first primary elections next year will allow voters to get over their emotional responses and concentrate on the life and death implications of choosing the next President of the United States.
Comomenting on the way the pope blames everyone / thing for the poverty the poor. Very interesting comment "Poverty is automatic"
Any serious look at the history of human beings over the millennia shows that the species began in poverty. It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining. Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things — none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society.
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As distinguished economic historian David S. Landes put it, "The world has never been a level playing field." But which has a better track record of helping the less fortunate — fighting for a bigger slice of the economic pie, or producing a bigger pie?
Not only was the poverty rate going down, so was the rate of dependence on government to stay out of poverty. Teenage pregnancy rates were falling, and so were rates of venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. Homicide rates among non-white males fell 22 percent in the 1950s.
In the wake of the massive expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s "war on poverty" program — with the repeatedly announced goal of enabling people to become self-supporting and end their dependence on government — in fact dependence on government increased and is today far higher than when the 1960s began.
The declining rates of teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases in the 1950s both reversed and rose sharply in the wake of the 1960s "sexual revolution" ideas, introduced into schools under the guise of "sex education," which claimed to be able to reduce teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases.
After the 1 october 2015 shooting in Oregon, Sowell here is referring to the all to common "automatic assertion that whoever engaged in a shooting rampage was a madman":
Yet these supposedly crazy shooters are usually rational enough to choose some "gun-free zone" for their murderous attacks. They seem more rational than gun control zealots who keep creating more "gun-free zones."
From march 2015, #4 in an article entitled "7 things becoming a parent taught me I was right about all along"...
4) Women should be able to get abortions
After watching my wife gestate my son for nine months, I am 100 percent certain people who go into pregnancy with anti-abortion ethical priors come out of it with the strength of their convictions increased tenfold. I went into it with different priors and have come out with my own pro-choice convictions increased tenfold.
A beloved baby is a miraculous thing, but pregnancy is at times a truly agonizing and awful one. It's a small price to pay for something a woman truly wants, but an enormous amount to pay for other people's questionable metaphysical notions about personhood. In a decent society it would be both safe and convenient for women of all socioeconomic backgrounds to terminate an early stage pregnancy on demand without facing judgment and hassles.
ObamaCare is not just an issue about money or even an issue about something as important as medical care. ObamaCare represents a quantum leap in the power of the federal government over the private lives of individual Americans.
Democrats are constantly articulating their talking points. Less than 24 hours elapsed after the Congressional Budget Office reported that ObamaCare was likely to cause many workers to have their hours cut back, before Democrats were all talking about the "freedom" this would give workers to pursue other interests, rather than being "locked-in" to long hours on a full-time job.
Commenting on the Oregon bakery that has been fined $135,000 for refusing to make a cake for a "gay wedding".
This ruling is absurd and dangerous. It’s absurd to think that the complaining couple is entitled to six figures in emotional damages simply because a Christian couple refused to bake a cake for their “wedding.” In an ideologically, culturally, and religiously diverse country, the idea of encountering a person who disagrees with your life choices is hardly traumatic, and women who can’t handle a brief encounter with bakers who don’t want to help cater their wedding don’t need “damages,” they need counseling.
Is the irony of the name of this group lost on anyone?
Two street preachers were brutally beaten—punched and kicked—by a crowd at a gay pride festival in Seattle and the entire melee was captured on video.
The preachers were holding signs reading "Repent or Else" and "Jesus Saves From Sin." The video shows a group of people initially screaming and threatening the men during Pridefest at the Seattle Space Needle.
Television station KOMO reported that some of the attackers belonged to a group called NOH8.
This is a quite fascinating quote of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Thomas Sowell:
Another cliche that has come into vogue is that slavery is "America's original sin." The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for fifty years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking, even longer than that.
In my opinion, number one thinking stopping word or phrase: "racist"...
And from USA Today, a diesel shop owner by the name of Brian Klawiter, of Michigan, commented on his belief about homosexuality. The post has been removed, so here is the post as quoted by the newspaper:
I would not hesitate to refuse service to an openly gay person or persons. Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works.
Found this while cleaning out some email. Michael Horton comments on the question "Should You Pray for God to Save Your Loved Ones?":
Calvinists hear Arminian friends ask this question all the time. It’s usually intended as a rhetorical question. In other words, it’s really a statement: If you believe that your unbelieving friend is dead in sin until God unilaterally regenerates him or her, and that God has unconditionally chosen whom he will save, then what’s the point? Que sera, sera: Whatever will be, will be.
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For years now, I’ve reversed this rhetorical question, asking, Why would anyone pray for the conversation of their loved one if God were not sovereign in dispensing his grace? Arminians shouldn’t pray for God to save their loved ones, because God could reply, “Look, I’ve done my part; now the ball is in your court.” Yet, I note, Arminians are typically no less zealous in praying for the salvation of the lost than Calvinists. We’re at one on our knees.
I don't recall where I heard this comment about politcal correctness and the world we live in now. Things have flip flopped to a ridiculous point, although you could easily make a biblical case for what is going on. Isaiah 5:8 and following anyone? here is my paraphrase of the comment:
It used to be the youth who would do whatever they felt like to get a reaction and the parents would be conservative. In the current politcally correct world it has been reversed. Now the youth are the ones who are taught to be conservative via political corretcness, especially at the college level, and the parents are "cutting loose" of a sort.
- Unknown -
That didn't really come out very well but I think it gets the idea across...
As usual a great article from Thomas Sowell, but here is a good summation point:
Most people who want to redistribute wealth don't want to talk about how that wealth was produced in the first place. They just want "the rich" to pay their undefined "fair share" of taxes. This "fair share" must remain undefined because all it really means is "more."
Once you have defined it — whether at 30 percent, 60 percent or 90 percent — you wouldn't be able to come back for more.
Not only is America dying in that the federal government is ILLEGALLY telling the individual states how to run themselves, but now we have given widespread public approval to the sin of homosexuality via a supreme court decision in favor of "gay marriage".
The wrath of God cannot be far behind...
Here is an absolutely asinine statement from one of the supporting justices:
"No union is more profound than marriage," Kennedy wrote, joined by the court's four more liberal justices.
The stories of the people asking for the right to marry "reveal that they seek not to denigrate marriage but rather to live their lives, or honor their spouses' memory, joined by its bond," Kennedy said.
The four dissenting justices each filed a separate opinion explaining his views, but they all agreed that states and their voters should have been left with the power to decide who can marry.
"This court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in dissent. Roberts read a summary of his dissent from the bench, the first time he has done so in nearly 10 years as chief justice.
"If you are among the many Americans - of whatever sexual orientation - who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today's decision," Roberts said. "But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it."
Justice Antonin Scalia said he was not concerned so much about same-sex marriage but about "this court's threat to American democracy." Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas also dissented.
Date / Time: 6-jun-2015 @ approximately 15:40
Location: I-5 northbound just past 41st street overpass
I momentarily looked down at my stereo and as I looked up realized I was closing in fast on a black late model Volvo sedan. I applied the brakes hard, resulting in them locking up, tires squealing. As soon as the squealing started I realized I was not going to stop in time. I braced for impact. When it happened it was very surreal. It was not neck snapping or anything, I would call it a heavy bump. The Volvo immediately put on the left turn signal and started moving left. I assumed she would want to pull over and trade information. As she started moving over into the fast lane there was a car approaching behind her. That driver had to apply heavy brake and steer left, a few feet onto the shoulder, and barely missed plowing the Volvo.
Still asuuming she wanted to trade information, I kept following her, but it became apparent she wasn't pulling over. I followed for a little over a mile. During this time she kep turning around, while driving, holding up what appeared to be a phone. I assumed she was trying to take a picture of my car / license plate. She probably did this at least 7 times. I kept wondering, "Do you want to pull over?" At some point I noticed the car had a temporary license plate. I thought "Great, it's a brand new car!" Eventally cars got between us and I lost track of her. Just before the Marine View Drive exit I saw her pulling over to the left side of I-5. I pulled in behind her as she was getting out of the car. She saw me stopping and, it appeared that she was surprised to see me there.
She immediately went to looking at the back of her car assessing for damage. I got out of the car and asked her "Are you OK?" It was like she didn't hear me. She just kept looking so, I looked figured I would look too. We both looked at the car for about a 30 seconds and I could see no obvious damage. I asked again if she was OK and this time she looked at me, long pause, "Uh, yeah". She then asked me if I had insurance. I said yes and went to get my card. She came up to me and said "Is that it? Just let me take a picture of it." She did. Then she said "(unintelligable) paint job (unintelligable) so you don't get in trouble." I apologized and she immediately went back to her car and took off.
At some point, while we were on the side of I-5 she said "I just bought this car." I replied that I had noticed that, trying to let her know that I was sorry about it but it seemed to trail off and there was no response. The noise of the traffic was also quite loud making it hard to hear. We asked each other to repeat something at least a couple times.
She never seemed angry or anything, just in a big hurry. I didn't think to ask her if SHE had insurance and later I wondered if she didn't, or maybe something untoward was going on, and that might have something to do with "so you don't get in trouble"...
It seemed the whole time that she didn't want to pull over. While I get it, who wants to pull over because they got hit, it seemed like she had an above average desire not to pull over, especially in the situation.
The whole incident was quite surreal and unfortuntely I didn't get her insurance information and I didn't think to memorize her license plate until later. Just out of the ordinary, I guess, and I'm no fast thinker in that kind of situation.
I didn't bother looking at my car until I got home. The only obvious damage was the top of the license plate holder 4/5 of the way across, from right to left, had a tapering rounded edge to it instead of a sharp 90-degree corner edge as the left 1/5 still does. Also, you can see the slightest impression of the top edge and the corners of the license plate holder in the tape striping behind it.
This is a more expanded version and one I can't verify to be Rosenbladt, other than this quote I found on a blog post from 2012, but it sounds like Rosenbladt to me...
Instead of some sort of penance, we're called to confess our sin as best we can (though it will always be lousy) and appeal to God's mercy on the basis of what Christ did for us, not on the basis of "I really mean it", or "I really promise to", or "I vow this or vow that". That's all out the window. You're utterly without excuse and without the energy to promise anything. You appeal to nothing but God's mercy in Jesus. That's it. That's the only thing you can plead. It's like the old seminary professor once said, "adverbs are the great enemy of the gospel". We hear things like "I deeply repent" or "I am heartily sorry". Bah! We repent in a half-assed way at best. We're only sort of sorry. Even our confession sucks. And yet the gracious God in Jesus Christ says to us, "Be of good cheer son, your sins are forgiven."
It seems now-a-days people who call themselves "Christian" like to slander the Bible, which is quite odd since it happens to be the basis of the Christianity they claim. Here is a quote from Rob Bell doing so, speaking of homosexuality:
...the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2000 years ago as their best defense...
Obviously "letters from 2000 years ago" 1. refers to the Bible and 2. is a derogatory dig because, you know, cleary those people could not have been nearly as enlightened as we progressives in the 21st century are...here you can see him making the statement while he was speaking with Oprah (ugh!) telling her the Bible is the "best defense" against homosexuality, again, clearly derogatory:
Cleaning up the email and found a bunch of miscellaneous junk...from the serious to the ludicrous, here goes:
One of our pastors quoted JI Packer, from his book "Knowing God", in March of 2014:
You sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.
For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. ‘Father’ is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.
In June of 2014 a story came down where a court actually used some brains and overturned the ridiculous soda ban in New York. The branch of government that jumped out at me:
In March, 2013 New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling invalidated the law and in June of that year the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene went to court to fight the ruling?
The department of WHAT?!??! ... maybe it's not that odd but it struck me as such.
Last september there was the story of Jessa Duggar who made what the professionally offeneded consider imflamatory remarks relating the holocaust to abortion
One response which was quoted in the linked article goes as follows (highlight added by crucifyd):
While over 24,000 people liked her post, a few of her followers opposed it. One follower wrote, "Do not use the Holocaust as an excuse to preach about your religion. Abortion has nothing to do with the slaughter of millions of people. You should be ashamed of yourself."
Uh ... what do you even say to that? Ignorant? Ludicrous? Does this person even know what abortion is?
In october I heard a quote by William Booth. First, here is a quick bio of Booth:
William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912) was a British Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878–1912). The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England to many parts of the world and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid.
It seems that Mr Booth was quite preciant in light of what the evangelical industrial complex, (BTW - a great way to put it, not mine) is producing these days, and here is the quote:
The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.
Also in October the professionally offeneded decided a microsoft executive made offensive comments about women. Notwithstanding his comments, I liked a couple posts made below the article. The first one I totally agree with and it goes along the same lines as the ridiculous PC world that says sports teams must interview / hire a certain number of minorities instead of just getting the guy they want / that will do the best job for them, irregardless of their race. The second comment I had never thought of and it makes perfect sense...
How about they diversify into "competence," and not worry about how more vaginas will improve their products...
Finally, from last november, the ever-brilliant Thomas Sowell:
Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other "leaders" that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed "legacy of slavery" found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.
The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals' law enforcement policies. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a "legacy of slavery" there.
Under the Obama administration, both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have been leaning on public schools around the country to reduce what they call the "disproportionate" numbers of black male students who are punished for various offenses in schools.
Under an implicit threat of losing their federal subsidies, the Minneapolis Public Schools have agreed to reduce the disparity in punishment of black students by 25 percent by the end of this school year, and then by 50 percent, 75 percent and finally 100 percent in each of the following years. In other words, there are now racial quota limits for punishment in the Minneapolis schools.
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Other schools in other cities, which have also caved under pressure from the federal government, and agreed to lighten up on black kids who misbehave, have reported an increase in misbehavior, including violence. Who would have thought otherwise?
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The people in the Obama administration who are pushing this counterproductive policy are not stupid. They are political, which is worse. They know what they are doing and they are willing to sacrifice young blacks to do it.
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Years ago, there was a study of a working class community where there were black, Hispanic and Italian kids, and where many of the cops were Italian. When a black or Hispanic kid broke the law, the police took him down to the station and booked him. But, if an Italian kid did the same thing, they reacted differently.
The Italian cop would take the Italian kid out into an alley and rough him up. Then he would take him home to his family, tell them what had happened and leave him there — where the kid could expect another beating, instead of the wrist-slap punishment of the law. Those cops understood the realities of life that politicians ignore. And they were doing a favor to their own.
That lead to me searching and finding this from www.rt.com (I'll get to the highlighted text later). the pope said:
"One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith,” Francis said, adding that every religion "has its dignity."
But then how are you supposed to defend your faith, or debate issues... it might be considered insulting someone else's faith. That is kind of the opposite of religious freedom, is it not?
- crucifyd's wife -
What she asked is a great question and the answer is "you're not supposed to be able to defend your faith"... certainly Jesus warned of persecution for the truly regenerate...
Now to key in on the highlighted text in the quote of the pope ..."every religion 'has its dignity.'"
If this is in fact true, and every religion has dignity, then that would mean all of them "go to God" and if all of them "go to God", that means all of them are right and if all of them are right then ... why have any religion at all?
In fact, they do not have dignity, because they do not "go to God" or, in other words, they do not provide a way of salvation...
In the context of Acts 4:12 the referent of "no other name" is clearly Jesus ... so obviously God is telling us that there is only one way to salvation:
And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
