Kanye, Meet Scott

Scott Peck describes the process of spiritual growth as going from:
-I am the most important thing, to
-There is a being greater than I am, and will do exactly as directed by that being; some folks term this fundamentalism. The person in this phase feels saved, because they are liberated from the tyranny of their own self importance. Then comes
-I can regulate myself and have a more liberal interpretation of the greater being's intent - may not go to church each religion day, may not interpret the holy text literally, will begin to see the application of the greater being's intent as less compliance and more cooperation for a bigger purpose
-Mysticism, which I don't understand fully enough to describe

And here's Kanye:

West has led church services that have attracted thousands of black youths, some of whom said they had never entered a church before. More than 14,000 thousand people jammed Joel Osteen’s megachurch when West confessed to his previous lifestyle of arrogance and self-aggrandizement and acknowledged his bouts with mental illness. Departing from conventional forms of worship, Kanye’s large chorus surrounded him and, hands raised, stepped to the beat of his new album, “Jesus is King,” which he rapped as an enthralled crowd swayed with the beat. 

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/472091-kanye-west-a-welcomed-disruptive-voice

The Frailty of Human Nature

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/the-failure-to-see-what-jeffrey-epstein-was-doing

No one would say "the emperor has no clothes"? Epstein provided a product that was worth the risk? People in those circles don't rock the boat for fear someone will come for their boat? 

Why was anyone willing to tolerate Clinton palling around with this perve, given Clinton's proclivities? #metoo is a joke compared to the tolerance for this person and his accomplices.

"Money offers one explanation for why people seemed to ignore what was plain to see. But money, here, is really shorthand for a range of ways to exert influence. Epstein used it to buy prestige, donating millions to Harvard and hosting dinners for scientists and scholars; and to buy protection, hiring ruthless legal representation. Even now, though, it’s not clear what his business was. Some of the people who dealt with him were wealthier than he was and, one would think, at least as financially adept."

Ruby

Dallas, Oswald, Ruby, Watts, Whitman, Manson, Ray, Sirhan, Bremer, Viet Nam, Nixon, Watergate, FBI, CIA, Squeaky Fromme, Sara Moore—the list goes on and on. Who the hell wrote this script, and where will it end? A dozen years of violence, shock, treachery, and paranoia, and I date it all back to that insane weekend in Dallas and Jack Ruby—the one essential link in the chain, the man who changed an isolated act into a trend.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/who-was-jack-ruby/

Deer - a "menace"?

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2018/12/20/deer_are_a_menace_and_we_need_to_kill_a_lot_more_of_them.html

What if, absent the natural predators for deer, they are a menace as hunters have said they would be all along absent hunting?

What if the bambi idea is backwards - that deer are eating plants to extinction and their populations have grown all too fast after being devastated by the deforestation of the early 1900s?

That seems to be true, not to mention their risk to humans in cars.

I love deer. I've hunted them all my life. I like to see them, hunt them, eat them. They are beautiful. The whitetail is apparently more adaptable than the mule deer, which is decreasing in numbers.

I hope the human race keeps learning how to help them live in balance with the rest of nature.

Stick to Theology

If I had unlimited time and money, I would memorize this article.

"Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid." With those 10 words, spoken to an audience at Georgetown University in 2013, philanthropist rock star Bono demonstrated a keener understanding of economic reality than the leader of global Catholicism.

The U2 frontman clearly has it right—and Pope Francis is wrong to suggest that poverty is growing, or that capitalism, free markets, and globalization are fueling the (non-existent) problem. In just two decades, extreme poverty has been reduced by more than 50 percent. "In 1990, almost half of the population in developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day," reads a 2014 report from the United Nations. "This rate dropped to 22 per cent by 2010, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 700 million."

https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/21/if-pope-francis-wants-to-help-the-poor-h

Progressives Don't Like Progress

For anyone other than a "social justice" demagogue, the Supreme Court's Shelby decision, striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), is cause for celebration. In real life, this is a success story: A society that overcomes ingrained, systematic racial discrimination - and does it during a 40-year span while, in parts of the world the Left somehow prefers to America, discrimination endures and becomes even more lethal. But the Left does not live in a real nation; it lives in a false narrative: The United States is the villain that can never be redeemed, and racism is not just its original but its indelible sin.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/352075/shelby-and-lefts-false-narrative-andrew-c-mccarthy

Stalin, No Wonder They Love Him

During the years of his absolute rule over the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people. They included victims of state-engineered famines, particularly in Ukraine, intended to starve the peasantry into submission to collective farming; people from all walks of life shot on trumped-up charges of subversive activities; and others sent to the Siberian labor camps known as the gulag, never to return. Untold millions who survived lost years of their lives to the gulag. (Among the latter were my own paternal grandparents, who were arrested in 1947 and released after Stalin's death; ironically, unlike most of their fellow prisoners, they were actually guilty as charged -- of "betraying the motherland" by trying to escape the Soviet Union and go to Palestine.)

If there was ever a true devil in the flesh, Stalin was one of the prime candidates for the title. A tyrant with a deeply sadistic streak, he reportedly howled with laughter when told about the final moments of a former associate who had been promised clemency in exchange for a false confession and vainly begged his executioners to "please call Comrade Stalin" and clear up the misunderstanding. He jailed the wives of several men in his inner circle, presumably just for the pleasure of seeing his underlings squirm and showing them who's boss.



Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/03/13/a_troubling_after-image_of_stalin_60_years_after_his_death__117396.html#ixzz2VSaHdsng
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Blue Model, Epic Fail

"Some arguments are based on theory, as when politicians say they think their ideas will work well in practice, whereas their opponents' will work out poorly. Then there are arguments based on proven and practical facts. The fact today is that what Walter Russell Mead calls the "blue social model" -- high taxes, much regulation, strong unions and a fairly high level of government services -- is in deep trouble wherever tested. The red model -- low taxes, low spending, more business-friendly policies -- is still thriving."

http://washingtonexaminer.com/noemie-emery-the-right-states-of-mind/arti
cle/2516296#.UNGwEm99Kh0

The author goes on to demonstrate this principle, and the distinctions are obvious. The Blue states are failing, the red states do better.

Go red young man/woman.

It's the Spending

Progressives say: If you're so worried about the deficit, raise taxes! But it's a fantasy to imagine that taxing the rich will solve our deficit problem. If the IRS grabbed 100 percent of income over $1 million, the take would be just $616 billion. That's only a third of this year's deficit.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/07/11/budget_insanity_114758.html

Amazingly, we could grow our way out of debt if Congress simply froze spending at today's levels. That would balance the budget by 2017. If spending growth were limited to just 2 percent per year, the budget would balance by 2020!

But the politicians won't do even that.

Willful Ignorance or Forbidden Knowledge?

Consider Obama's background. He grew up among leftists, his childhood mentors were outright communists, and he then went off to academia, where he spent his formative years in an environment where business and profit-making are looked down upon as ugly, dirty, rapacious, immoral. Is it any mystery why he doesn't know about business or economics? Asking him to study the economics of the free market is like asking one of the old New England Puritans to thumb through a manual on sex education. Why immerse oneself in a subject that is so unseemly? Why make a study of how to be immoral?
It is for this attitude that Obama was elevated in American politics. He won the Democratic primaries because, unlike Hillary Clinton, he really seemed to believe in all of the old "liberal" pieties. He projected the sense that he still regarded big government as an untried new idea that would do better than the free market. But to believe that, he had to resist the contamination of pro-free-market economics or any independent observation of the workings of the economy. He had to live through 25 years of ATMs and low unemployment--or, for that matter, of balanced budgets while CEOs still flitted about in untaxed corporate jets--and not let any of it register. He had to preserve a carefully maintained, earnestly burnished ignorance of the economics of a free market.
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/07/01/obamas_carefully_burnished_economic_ignorance_99111.html

You Want Everyone But Americans To Be Jobless?

"There are 13 million Americans who are counting on Congress to do something." 
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/18/the-ipad-is-taking-away-american-jobs-jesse-jackson-juniors-sa/

Actually, there are 13 million Americans suffering from what the government has done, but I don't expect many elected officials to say that, it would controvert their raison d'etre.

I'm surprised that this question does not come up more often:
"Mr. Elected Official, are you saying that Americans have a right to make iPads and the Chinese do not?  Are Americans more entitled to jobs than people born in other nations?  If so, why do we give so much anxst to the underemployment and unemployment in impoverished nations, the governments of which we give money, taken by force from citizens via taxation, ostensibly to reduce their suffering?  Wouldn't it be better that we not tax the citizenry, not give the governments of these nations money, and celebrate the employment of their formerly impoverished citizens?"

What do you want - impoverished nations or not?  If not, why would you begrudge their success in manufacturing, which actually reduces poverty?  This is cognitive dissonance on display, but we ignore it.