God and Covid-19 106

God, the three-in-one Lord and King of Christians, is becoming ever more unpopular in America.

Republicans of Earth most Americans have been, but at the same time Monarchists of the Universe. Now that is changing, at increasing speed.

America has continued to be God’s acreage for longer in post-Enlightenment times than any other Anglophone country. Now even here his sway is under threat.

Although there are religious optimists prophesying a church-going revival after the long period of social distancing during the Covid pandemic, others read statistics and reason that a further shrinking of God’s base is more probable.

David Gibson writes at Religion & Politics:

As a stir-crazy nation slowly emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic, debates about what our “new normal” will be like are intensifying. Will the shock of the lockdown bring a transformative moment of social solidarity? Or tear us apart in tribal strife? …

The future of our national religious life is also the subject of growing speculation, with the sunny-side-up view arguing that we are primed for a new “Great Awakening” of the sort that have periodically transformed American culture. …

To many, the prospect of a resurgence in religious observance is an enticing vision, because faith communities can be anchors of social solidarity, which has been steadily eroding for decades.

The data and history tell a different story, however, and, much like the economic outlook, the forecast for religion looks more like recession than resurrection.

The percentage of Americans who say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque is down 20 points over the previous two decades, sitting at an all-time low of 50 percent as of 2018, according to Gallup. Actual church attendance is even lower, while Americans who profess no religious affiliation—the so-called nones—have become the single largest “denomination” in the U.S., according to Pew Research surveys, numbering more than both Catholics and evangelicals.

American Christianity has not been drastically harmful to the nation. (Nor has Covid-19.) But generally, religion has been a destructive force throughout recorded history.

The retirement of God and all gods from the human mind would be a huge benefit, but not enough.

We also urgently need to see a mass abandonment, everywhere in the world, of the godless religion variously named Leftism, Socialism, Communism, Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Progressivism, Marxism, Black Lives Matter, Intersectionality, the Great Reset …

Posted under Christianity, communism, Leftism, Marxism, Progressivism, Religion general, Socialism, United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, April 11, 2021

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Cold comfort 19

… and validation for “catastrophic climate change deniers”:

Posted under Climate by Jillian Becker on Saturday, April 10, 2021

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It’s all nonsense 43

Thomas Sowell on “global warming”, its prophets and their profits:

Posted under Climate by Jillian Becker on Saturday, April 10, 2021

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Joe the joke 87

It’s a huge joke. A prank, a jest, a jape – one for the history books. America the Superpower picks a gibbering idiot to be its president.

The Western Journal reports and we abbreviate:

Tongue-tied President Joe Biden offered a word salad in lieu of a coherent statement [on his gun control plan].

He twice referred to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as the “AFT” rather than “ATF.”

He then uttered the following statement:

And I look out there and I see so many members of Congress who have led in this fight. So many of you who have never given up. So many of you who are in — absolutely determined, as Merfin and Ruthers are, to get this done.

He was not in the presence of anyone named “Merfin” or any person or group of individuals called “Ruthers”.

Merfin, for now, is a mystery character in the bad story that is the Biden administration’s first few months. The same goes for Ruthers.

Perhaps the Ruthers were an obscure band Biden came across at some point while lifeguarding in his younger years in Delaware. Maybe Biden’s old youth nemesis CornPop Jackson was their frontman.

Great laughs!

Did Monty Python’s Flying Circus team write the script for this phase of American history?

Or the geniuses who gave the world The Simpsons?

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, April 9, 2021

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Waiting for the new America 167

America is no longer the break-away child of Britain that it was. Although it decided against instating a monarch, it took its system of governance from its parent: the rule of law; the election of representatives; armed forces under civil control; the common law; the adversarial system of trial with an impartial bench, a jury of peers, habeas corpus, rules of evidence, assumption of innocence. The system that had evolved through centuries to protect every citizen’s personal freedom and property worked well on the whole in the mother country, and it worked well on the whole in the republic.

But all that is going now. Much of it – the rule of law under which all sane adults must be equally treated, impartial justice, the assumption of innocence – has already gone.

Political activists with far inferior notions of government – imported from the savage heart of Africa, the archaic Middle East, the gangster lands of the old Spanish Empire, satanic bloodsoaked Europe – are exerting their will and changing the republic.

To what?

Will the new America be like Europe (bad), a Latin American banana republic (worse), Soviet Russia (even worse), an Islamic caliphate (extremely bad), or sub-Saharan Africa (utterly appalling)?

It is unlikely to emulate Europe. Sure, the EU is not unattractive to the taste of America’s renovators, what with its baked-in socialism and garnish of Islam. But still, it is white. And the mainly white Democrat Party is implacably against whiteness.

What then?

We will soon know.

And China too is watching.

Joe Biden aids the human-traffickers 7

Last night (Tuesday April 7, 2021), Mark Steyn hosted Fox News Primetime. Fox reports:

“Under the laughably misnamed Department of Homeland Security there’s now an express check-in — Just get a human trafficker to throw you into the country,” [Mark Steyn] said, pointing to video of Mexican traffickers dropping toddlers off of a 14-foot section of border wall constructed under President Donald Trump.

“It’s time for your toddler to start crawling — through the desert,” he said.

Steyn said that for some reason, people on the left see a lax immigration system like the one being instituted as “compassionate”.

“[They] think the government being industrial-scale enablers of some of the most evil people on the planet is progressive and compassionate. It’s not,” he said.

“There is nothing kind about incentivizing human trafficking, which, by the way, is merely a synonym for slavery and the same people who want to tear down the statue if the guy’s family had a plantation 300 years ago are all cool with the global trade in human beings of the 21st century.”

“So, Joe Biden or whoever has got his hand waggling that moth-eaten sock-puppet is consciously enriching these cartels and ensuring that they can expand their operations including more fentanyl to kill Americans and some would-be jihadists now and then.”

Steyn said the U.S. is witnessing what is becoming a “lopsided business partnership between America and coyotes at a time of global pandemic — when almost every national border on the planet, including the northern U.S. Border is closed down”.

Posted under immigration, United States by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, April 7, 2021

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America bad, America good 94

Conrad Black, writing at American Greatness, sees much that is wrong and bad with the USA but also much that is right and good.

Not every aspect of the onslaught of self-hate that has broken over America, warped its media, and turned most of the academy—and even apparently, most of its elementary and secondary schools—into centers of reorientation designed to convince Americans their national past is loathsome hypocrisy, is bad.

There were wrongs in America’s past, he says, slavery being the worst of them.

And, he goes on to say, there are wrongs in America’s present that need to be righted – in particular, the justice system:

One of the most nauseatingly persistent American delusions is that the American justice system is one of the best in the world. … It is an appalling, disgraceful, terribly unjust 360-degree cartel for the avaricious legal profession, and on the criminal side, it has been so undermined by the corruption of the plea bargain system that it is essentially the right of prosecutors to suborn false inculpatory testimony with no danger of sanctions for their misconduct.

The result is that the United States has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as other comparable large prosperous democracies: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Its conviction rates are much higher than almost all of these countries and so are its crime rates. Millions of innocent people are convicted and millions of innocent people are over-sentenced and millions are ground to powder in the conveyor belt to the bloated and corrupt American prison system. Everyone who is acquainted with the facts is aware of this.

The Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, a grand jury as assurance against capricious prosecution, an impartial jury, no seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel of choice, prompt justice, and reasonable bail have been practically expunged.

That being said, he proceeds to condemn exaggerated criticism and unjustified hatred of America:

But with all that said, the flag-waving, anthem-singing, traditional pride in America was and remains substantially justified. All nations have somewhat delusional self-images and though the American star system elevates many who are not stars, the current eruption of Americophobia is vastly excessive, utterly despicable, cannot remotely be sustained, and is propagated, not just by the faddishly and aggressively ignorant, but also by disturbed and often wicked people.

We agree with him that “Americophobia” is excessive, despicable, ignorant, and propagated by wicked people, but we wonder why he believes that it “cannot remotely be sustained”.

He does not explain how it will fail or be made to fail.

He describes how America remains the mightiest power in the world:

The dictatorships of Latin America, the House of Saud, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Syngman Rhee’s South Korea and many other dubious claimants to the title of champions of freedom … became democracies and the world must never forget nor fail to be grateful for the fact that the United States is chiefly responsible for the spread of democracy and the free market. 

Never forget? What we hear, thanks to the academies and the anti-American media, is that those who remember it see it as a cause, not for gratitude and praise, but for blame and accusation.

Unjustly, of course. And sour hatred and envy of America by outsiders will not reduce America’s might  – or its virtues:

No nation in history has made the effort the United States has to eliminate racial discrimination and to assist minorities bootstrapping themselves up to parity. Whatever liberties may have been taken in national rhetorical puffery, there has never been anything remotely like America’s rise from a few million colonists in two long lifetimes after the Revolutionary War to, as Churchill said in his eulogy of President Roosevelt to a position of “might and glory . . . never attained by any nation in history.” 

But hatred of America by Americans is truly destructive:

The right of educators to teach falsely sourced self-hatred and of the media’s righteous replacement of reporting with subversive and defamatory advocacy is now proclaimed as a long-repressed virtue. It does not fall far short of treason and Joe Biden will pay for his endorsement of the false charge against his country of “systemic racism”. 

Well, it is consoling to be assured that Joe Biden will pay for his calumny. But when? And how?

The United States now has an official regime of lies, supported by an almost worthlessly dishonest media, and scores of millions of Americans have been brainwashed into the false view that they live in an evil country.

This lie will not succeed because everyone in America can see that it is not true.

It will not succeed simply because it is not true? The truth will always prevail in the long run? And the truth being that America is good (or at least far more good than bad) is enough to restore it to freedom? To repair its justice system? To punish Joe Biden?

Conrad Black believes it:

Most Americans are reasonable and fair-minded people most of the time, and their numbers, their patience, and the righteousness of their not-uncritical faith in and love for their country will ultimately prevail. There was no excuse for the secretary of state to turn a meeting with the Chinese on American soil into a confessional for a cringe-worthy recitation of America’s faults. Despite everything, America remains a proud country with much to be proud of, and no person nor any nationality can stand unlimited, unjustified, self-loathing. It will end sooner than we dare think, and it will take down its ghastly and contemptible preceptors with it, including the dismal Pharisees of this administration.

Great! But how will it happen? When?

Tell us please, Conrad Black!

Posted under America, Ethics, Law, liberty, United States by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, April 6, 2021

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How to be a racist 92

To answer letters from readers asking questions about race and racism, we engaged a woke Agony Parent’s Sibling of mixed genders.

Zir pen-name is DEI (derived from the Universal Motto of Virtue, “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”).

Here are some of zir replies:

 

Dear Retired Firefighter,

So you believe you are not a racist?

You think that race is one of “the least important or interesting things” about people, and you “know” that the differences between individuals of every race are “far more numerous and significant” than the differences between races.

What you fail to understand is that those very notions make you a racist.

If you want to stop being a racist – and you really should – you must get it firmly into your head that race IS the most important thing about us all.

But first you must sincerely want to be cured of your wrong-think. If you do not, then you want to be a racist. In which case my message to you is – that’s what you ARE.

So you do not deserve to live.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear Black Supremacist,

Of course the more melanin you have in your cells the more physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, socially, politically, and mystically superior you are. I can confirm that without even having to appeal to the Washington Post’s fact-checker.

If anybody says you’re wrong, they do not deserve to live.

Hail, hero!

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear History Corrector,

No, Africans never sold fellow Africans to white slavers.

No, there have never been white slaves of black or brown slave owners. There have never been any black or brown slave owners.

No, it was not a minority of southern white Americans who owned slaves. All white Americans owned slaves.

No, aid does not flow from white countries to black and brown countries. It only goes the other way.

If any white person or Uncle Tom argues with you about any of these facts, they do not deserve to live.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear Peaceful iPhoner,

Yes, it is shocking the way whites have culturally appropriated whatever they have culturally appropriated.

Yes, owning a gun is your unalienable right.

Enjoy your riot in Portland next Saturday night.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear White Penitent,

Apologies, though necessary, are not sufficient.

Whiteness is an unforgivable sin against humanity, democracy, Joe Biden and Harvard University.

Continue to live on your knees.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

Posted under Humor, satire by Jillian Becker on Monday, April 5, 2021

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In the name of Allah 5

The jihad goes on. (Read more about its recent atrocities here.)

Religion of Peace

Atrocity of the Week
Mozambique: Dozens Slaughtered

Other Recent “Misunderstandings
of Islam”

2021.04.03 (Somalia)
A suicide bomber detonates at a market populated by impoverished people, killing ten.

2021.04.02 (Mali)
Mujahideen murder four UN “peacekeepers”.

2021.04.01 (Tunisia)
A suicide bomber kills her own baby.

2021.03.30 (Nigeria)
Clerics order a mob to burn a man alive for insulting Muhammad.

2021.03.30 (DRC)
Two dozen innocents are massacred by ADF Islamists.

2021.03.30 (Afghanistan)
Three female polio workers are brutally gunned down.

The Religion of Peace

Posted under Islam, jihad by Jillian Becker on Sunday, April 4, 2021

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Buying Texas for the corruptocracy 63

More evidence emerges of bribery as part of the Democrats’ conspiracy to cheat in the November 2020 election.

J. Christian Adams writes at PJ Media:

A new report documents that private foundations spent more than $36 million to pay local election offices in Texas to alter policies and practices in the 2020 election. The money was overwhelmingly spent in solid Democratic strongholds and designed to maximize turnout in these Biden-leaning jurisdictions. The money was concentrated in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and the Rio Grande Valley, according to a new report.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, with which I am associated, reviewed the grant letters and other government documents executed between Texas county election officials and the Center for Technology for Civic Life, a nonprofit that poured over $350 million nationwide into government election offices in order to have those offices adopt policies the nonprofit supported.

The nonprofit was funded by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg after a dinner meeting where controversial Biden Justice Department nominee Vanita Gupta advocated for the strategy in 2019.

Other organizations donated another $100 million nationwide to local election offices in addition to the Zuckerberg-related nonprofit, raising the total to influence government election policy to almost half a billion dollars. 

Documents from Texas county election officials obtained for the Public Interest Legal Foundation report show that the private dollars were focused on adopting procedures not always consistent with Texas law and practices, such as drive-through voting and voting by mail for any reason, contrary to Texas law.

In other words, the private dollars were used in a way to pressure officials to alter existing Texas election procedures adopted by the Texas legislature.

Texas Rep. Phil King has introduced HB 2283 to solve the problem and prohibit private dollars from flowing into government election offices. The bill has sat in committee since March 15.

The private dollars appear to have made a difference. Tarrant County received $1.6 million in Zuckerberg cash. Biden’s performance improved 43% in raw votes over Hillary Clinton’s compared to Trump’s increase of 18% in raw votes. The same dynamic played out in urban areas across Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Democratic urban cores opened the floodgates to Biden votes – all through the creation of structural bias.

Austin area counties also received Zuckerberg dollars, and raw Democrat vote totals there jumped 70 and 80 percent over 2016 in counties like Hays and Williamson, according to the PILF report.

So how does this happen? The Zuckerberg dollars turned urban offices into massive turnout machines.

What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines.

The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding. It is true that red counties in Texas also received grants, but those were fig leaf grants designed to insulate the Center For Technology and Civic life from accusations of bias.

More importantly, those grants were smaller, sometimes only $5,000, and barely enough to make any dent in behaviors, unlike the large blue-county grants in Texas. If the Texas election were confined only to those counties that received Zuckerberg dollars, the report notes, Biden would have won Texas by 270,000 votes. That’s the point. The private dollars created efficiencies and capacities.

When a given county is majority blue to begin with, such as Harris or Travis, and you create efficiencies and capacities in the election process in those counties, you are manufacturing votes for Democrats that did not exist before the efficiencies and capacities were put in place with Zuckerberg dollars.

Some might wonder why Zuckerberg money was wasted on Texas, a state Trump was sure to win.

Two answers. First, Texas was not always a certain Trump win. The October spin in the Democrat-friendly media was that Texas was in play. Second, and more importantly, the play in Texas wasn’t about 2020. It was about flipping Texas blue in the future. And if and when that happens, it will be done by building out efficiencies and capacities in the counties in 2020 that were part of the trial run.

Now you understand why banning private money that builds in bias in Texas is so important.

Posted under corruption, Crime, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, April 3, 2021

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