America's Destiny in the Balance

In 1856 Harper's Magazine published a quote first attributed to Jose Correia de Serra, a Portuguese Abbot, scientist and close friend of Thomas Jefferson: "It has been said that a `special Providence watches over children, drunkards and the United States'."  The presidency of Barack Obama is the latest example of the accuracy of this observation, since the American people have been granted a last chance, before it is too late, to reverse course as a window has been forced open for the citizenry to view what future will bring if the nation remains on its present course.

Beginning in the 1930's, under the aegis of Franklin Roosevelt, the nation began a drift to the left as a reaction to the Great Depression.  However, those truly committed to socialist/Marxist philosophy and tactics remained in the shadows until the 1960's.  The Viet Nam war protests unleashed far more than just a demand for an end to the war.  Those that blamed America for all manner of alleged sins in the past and determined to transform the United States into a socialist/Marxist nirvana were able to step out from behind the shadows and enter the mainstream of national legitimacy.  This swarm of locusts soon enveloped the higher levels of academia spawning countless clones to further infiltrate all strata of society -- most notably the mainstream media, the entertainment complex and the ultimate target: the Democratic Party.  These vital segments of the culture are now instruments of indoctrination, propaganda and political power.

The curriculum throughout all levels of schooling and the scripts of movies and television shows were gradually but inexorably altered to reflect the American left's mindset, not only about governing, but their determination to undermine basic societal moral and religious underpinning as a necessary step in assuring that an eventual ill-educated and dependent populace would look to a government controlled by a single political party as their savior and provider.

Over the past fifty years, as the foundation of the United States was being stealthily eroded, the vast majority of the American people slumbered content in unprecedented peace and prosperity.  Regardless of who was in the White House or in control of Congress, no one has been able or willing, as by-product of this public apathy, to curtail the incessant spread of so-called Progressivism in the nation's institutions as well as the exponential growth of government with its tentacles increasingly intertwined in the day-to-day lives of all Americans.

Nonetheless in 2008 this was still a right of center country, as less than 20% of the populace identified themselves as liberal or in favor of an all-powerful central government and over 80% self identified as religious.  It was clear that it would take at least 15 to 20 years of public and political indifference and another fully indoctrinated generation before the tenets of socialism/Marxism would completely envelop the nation and its social and political institutions, thus being impossible to ever reverse.

It was at this point that Barack Obama was thrust upon the scene.  No nominee in the history of the United States was less qualified to be president, as he had no accomplishments or executive experience except to be steeped in socialist/Marxist ideology and tactics.  Nonetheless due to a extraordinary confluence of circumstances -- the self-inflicted and near universal unpopularity of George W. Bush, a catastrophic financial meltdown six weeks before the presidential election, uninspiring and feckless opposition in the primaries and the general election and, most importantly, the unique factor of skin color -- he was elected President.

With the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the White House the acolytes of the American Left, in their giddiness over the election of a fellow traveler, abandoned all pretext of moderation.  Their adherence to the scorched earth tactics of Saul Alinski, open and unabashed advocacy of socialist/Marxist tenets, the depths to which they had infiltrated American society and the Democratic Party quickly began to come into focus.

After nearly six and half years of the Obama administration and the ongoing rampage of the Left, it is clear for all to see what future lies in store for the United States under the long term reign of this cabal:

 The Supreme Court is one justice away from being dominated by politically motivated leftists, four of whom are already in place, bent on relegating the Constitution to the dustbin of history and replacing it with the Left's agenda.

In due course, freedom of speech, religion and the press will be what the central government and courts, controlled by one party, allow it to be.

All macro-economic activity will be determined by Washington D.C., and in order to continue to operate major corporations, their managements will have to be subservient to the central government per the basic tenets of fascism.  Small business formation will be severely curtailed as the federal regulatory state determines who and what business can be formed.

The power and independence of the individual states will be vastly eroded as the courts and the power of the purse emanating from Washington will force them into compliance with the whims of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party will cease to effectively exist except as a token opposition party, as fund raising laws, a media controlled by the government, regulations and court decisions will render it ineffective.

There will be a permanent massive underclass encompassing over 50% of the population as a result of central planning, massive open door immigration, the near non-existence of new business formation and the inability of the country to weather the next global financial crisis.  They and the remnant of the middle class that remains will be increasingly dependent on government largess as the national debt approaches 200% of a declining Gross Domestic Product and the nation lives under a constant threat of hyper-inflation.

The United States will, in due course, become a hollow military power unable to play a role on the world stage as other government expenditures and a declining standard of living render defense spending moot.  As a result the country will find itself under increasing level of domestic attacks by terrorists spawned in the Middle East and acting as agents of America's enemies.  China will take over the status as the world's super power as the United States voluntarily casts itself into a subservient role.

Eventually this nation as we know it will cease to exist as a violent reaction to all the above will eventuate in a revolution and split the country into three or four independent nations.

Notwithstanding the above, a plurality of the American people have begun to wake up to this potential reality as revealed by the outcome of the 2014 mid-term elections wherein the Democratic Party suffered massive defeats at all levels of government.  However, far too many are still living in their self-induced stupor unable or unwilling to understand where this nation is headed and why.  Coupled with the urgency of the populace and the opposition party to vigorously push back against the onslaught of the American Left for the next 18 months the election of 2016 will be the most critical in the nation's history if the nation is to survive in peace and prosperity.

I am an immigrant to this country and a displaced survivor of a war that destroyed a continent. A war fomented by men, beginning the 1920's, who also adhered to the same basic tenets espoused by Barack Obama and his fellow travelers.  I have seen and experienced the end product of their narcissism and megalomania.

SOURCE

********************************

Get a room (but only if it is government-approved)

In 2008 Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were having difficulty paying the rent for their loft in San Francisco. A large conference was coming to town and the hotels were filled. Recognizing an opportunity to make ends meet, the pair converted their living room into a bed-and-breakfast, offering up to three guests an air mattress and morning meal in exchange for some cash.

"I remember seeing on their websites that all the hotels were sold out. So we got the idea, why don't we make our apartment into a little bed-and-breakfast?" Chesky said.

The pair made $1,000 that weekend -- and paid their rent.

AirBed & Breakfast, or Airbnb, was born.

Along with a third cofounder, Nathan Blecharczyk, the company initially focused on large events in places where hotels were likely to be sold out. They wanted to provide a variety of lodging, booking anything "from a tent to a castle" at any price point.

The idea took off. Airbnb's online lodging platform has allowed people to make money renting their homes and other properties for various periods. According to the company's website, Airbnb has arranged for more than 25 million people to visit more than 34,000 cities in 190 countries. The site boasts over 1 million lodging options worldwide.

Despite this overwhelming success, Airbnb has met significant resistance. In Louisville, Kentucky, for example, property owners renting their homes through Airbnb recently received cease-and-desist orders from the local government claiming they were running illegal hotels. The city could fine the owners up to $500 per day if they don't stop renting their spaces.

Why would the city of Louisville and others want to ban such a popular service?

Some claim it's an issue of safety both for guests and hosts, since Airbnb isn't regulated by the government as hotels are. But Airbnb strives to ensure safety for all concerned. The website requires guests and hosts to verify their identities by connecting their social networks and scanning their official IDs -- that's more than you get from the local motel operator.

Moreover, the system operates on a peer-to-peer review system. Guests and hosts review one another. But unlike with a hotel, for which anyone can submit a review, Airbnb renters and hosts can only review their experiences after a confirmed stay.

This provides future guests and hosts key information, enhancing their safety.

Before we assume that the government crackdown on Airbnb comes from genuine concern about safety, we should consider some other, less benevolent motives.

First, many state and local governments have turned to hotel taxes to pad their budgets. Travelers can pay a tax up to 17 percent of the cost of their hotel room. Airbnb threatens this revenue stream, giving government officials an incentive to shut it down.

Second, and not surprisingly, many hotels staunchly oppose Airbnb. Since the company provides a competitive alternative, hotels have a strong interest in hampering its operation or blocking its growth.

The threat is significant. Last year The Economist magazine stated that Airbnb could reduce hotel revenues as much as 10 percent. Recognizing this threat, hotels are lobbying elected officials for policies to protect their interests.

In fact, the American Hotel & Lodging Association spent over $1 million in lobbying last year, including a variety of attempts to legally disrupt or dismantle Airbnb's business at state and local levels.

The losers from banning or impeding Airbnb and other innovative services, such as ride-booking services Uber and Lyft, are consumers and producers. The 25 million transactions facilitated by Airbnb were undertaken because guests and hosts believed they would be better off.

Politicians deny individuals this choice not because it benefits those individuals, but because it benefits the politicians themselves. Letting the market operate freely would make producers and consumers better off, but it would anger sources of political support and threaten government coffers.

If we choose to visit a city, we don't ask the government what we should see, where we should dine or how we should travel. Likewise, government has no business telling us where we should lay our heads at night.

Let's keep government out of the bedroom, even if we're renting it for only an evening.

SOURCE

******************************

Obama Just Keeps Cutting the Military

While the U.S. military is facing a myriad of threats, a smattering of merry little wars, the Obama administration is pushing forward with its plan to cut 40,000 troops from the ranks. According to a pentagon document that USA Today acquired, the administration wants to finish drawing down America’s military capability by Sept. 30, 2018.

In 2013, the Pentagon said a reduction of troops past 450,000 would start to impair the military’s ability to respond to crises around the world. And these cuts would bring military strength right to that edge. The further budget cuts imposed by Obama’s sequestration could push the number lower.

For an example of how this hampers the U.S., look to the fight against the Islamic State. The Obama administration would rather train proxy fighters in Iraq and Syria — but just 60 Syrian fighters have so far been trained. On Monday, Barack Obama said the U.S. is ramping up the training of the Islamic State Iraqi forces. But the Senate Armed Services Committee found those training programs to be “anemic” and it called for reform of the airstrike campaign.

If Obama continues these limp-wristed strategies, his only option will be to debate the Islamic State out of existence.

SOURCE

****************************

Miserable old antisemite says ‘I Believe Jesus Would Approve Gay Marriage’



 Former President Jimmy Carter in an interview with HuffPost Live on Tuesday said he believes Jesus would approve gay marriage and would encourage any “love affair” that was “honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else.”

“I believe Jesus would,” Carter said when asked whether Jesus would approve of gay marriage. “I don’t have any verse in scripture ... I believe that Jesus would approve gay marriage, but that's just my own personal belief. I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don't see that gay marriage damages anyone else."

Carter, a born-again Christian and Baptist, said he still teaches Sunday school whenever he attends his home church. He. said he has never ran across “any really serious conflicts” between his political obligations and his religious faith.

When asked about gay marriage, Carter said he has no problem with it and thinks everyone should have the right to get married, “regardless of their sex.”

“The only thing I would draw a line on, I wouldn’t be in favor of the government being able to force a local church congregation to perform gay marriages if they didn’t want to. But those two partners should be able to go to the local courthouse or to a different church and get married,” he said.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************

Carter's Wrong — America Is Not in Inevitable Decline

America survived Carter.  It can survive Obama too

As the worst U.S. president of the 20th century, Jimmy Carter’s prognostications about foreign policy should be taken for what they’re worth — nothing. But that didn’t stop MSNBC from asking the former president his thoughts on the state of America in the modern world. Carter’s response was predictably pessimistic.

America is “in an inevitable relative decline,” Carter said, “not because of any fault of ours” but through “the combination of China and India and Brazil and South Africa and others” exercising “economic and cultural influence [that] will replace a lot of the power and preeminence that the United States enjoyed in the past.”

“It’s just happening,” Carter explained, “in the historical evolutionary, unavoidable circumstance.”

At least he didn’t use the word “malaise.”

Carter’s mindset is shared by the leftist intelligentsia. They have predicted and, more importantly, sought to bring about our nation’s downfall for decades, rolling out a string of would-be superpower replacements ranging from the former Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, Japan, the European Union and now China. Carter joins the likes of Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, serial plagiarist Fareed Zakaria and former Enron adviser Paul Krugman in wistfully speaking of America’s bygone status, but their views are tainted by a raw disdain for the U.S. and what it stands for.

They pretend to lament the days of American greatness, but they often rail against the U.S. for being an international “bully” standing athwart some socialist utopia. Simply peel back Carter’s words on MSNBC or one of Krugman’s New York Times columns, and lurking just below the surface is contempt for capitalism, individual liberty and the republican form of government that made this country great.

As Investor’s Business Daily pointed out, American decline is no more inevitable than its rise as a world power. And who’s to say that America is in decline anyway? Despite the best efforts of Carter, Obama, Krugman and friends, America remains the world’s preeminent power. No other country, or combination of countries, can do what we do, because they don’t have what we have.

This nation’s wealth rivals that of China, Japan, the UK and Germany combined. It is home to by far the richest and most robust consumer market. And our military still holds sway the world over despite recent and unwise cutbacks.

Carter’s assertion that other countries stand ready to replace America is overselling it a bit. The oft-cited bogeyman China just suffered an economic shock this week that wiped out a third of its stock market’s value. And years of forced abortion and social engineering are destined to send that country into a demographic tailspin that could unravel its social fabric in the coming decades.

The European Union is constantly on the brink of unraveling because of debt issues from member states like Greece and Portugal. The nations that make up the EU can’t even agree on a defense strategy, despite the fact that the two bloodiest wars of the last century were born there.

Decline, as political analyst Charles Krauthammer once put it, is a choice — one that Carter consciously made when he buckled to the Islamists who took over Iran in 1979, and one our current commander in chief is making with that very same regime over its nuclear weapons program.

Carter, Obama and their ilk speak of American decline not so much because that’s what they see, but because it’s what they want. Their inherent pessimism guides their decisions, as does their disdain for individual liberty and personal responsibility. The very things that make this country great are what annoy them most, and they want to knock us down a few pegs. Consequently, they look to nations that don’t possess America’s qualities as a means to offset our power and influence.

In recent times, few have understood the greatness and unique qualities of this country better than Ronald Reagan. It was no accident that America thrived under his leadership because he believed in this country and recognized how special it truly is. He shared that vision succinctly in his farewell address in 1989:

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

In fact, Reagan concluded, “We did it. We weren’t just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.”

As Reagan did after Carter, our nation is in desperate need of a post-Obama leader who can once again prove how very wrong the anti-America Left really is.

SOURCE

******************************

Jan Brewer: Donald Trump 'Telling It Like It Really, Truly Is'

Although he's been villified by amnesty advocates, business tycoon Donald Trump is right about the problems, including crime, caused by people crossing into the United States illegally, says the former governor of Arizona.

"I believe that Mr. Trump is kind of telling it like it really, truly is," Republican Jan Brewer told CNN's Don Lemon Wednesday night. "You know, being the governor of (Arizona), the gateway of illegal immigration for six years, we had to deal with a lot of things.

"I think that the people of Arizona realize that we picked up the tab for the majority of the violence that comes across to our border with regards to the drug cartels, the smugglers, the drop houses. It has been horrendous. And, of course, they come through Arizona and therefore, end up in other states and go throughout the country."

Trump says Mexico is pushing its problem people into the United States:

"I'm talking about the government," Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an interview that aired Wednesday night. "Everybody knows it.

"This man -- or this animal -- that shot the wonderful, that beautiful woman in San Francisco, this guy was pushed out by Mexico. We bring them back and they push them out. Mexico pushes back people across the border that are criminals, that are drug dealers."

"They're causing tremendous problems," Trump continued. "In terms of crime, in terms of murder, in terms of rape...If somebody is an illegal immigrant they shouldn't be here at all. There shouldn't be any crime. They're not supposed to be in our country. And I'm not just talking Mexico."

Trump has said he would seal the U.S.-Mexico border and get Mexico to pay for it.

Brewer, speaking to CNN after Trump's interview aired, said, "I think everybody knows that he's right in regards to that -- the coming across our border."

She said only one in four illegal aliens is apprehended at the border. "So, we don't even know how many are here."

Asked if Trump should "change his tone," Brewer admitted she  hasn't heard everything he's said. "I just know what I have lived through, being resident and governor of the State of Arizona. That we have a horrendous problem. And we've got an illegal immigration problem in our country. And I think the people overwhelmingly understand and realize that. And we have to find a solution, and that solution is getting our border secured so we can deal with the other issues."

Later, Brewer asked Lemon a question: "Why is it that we want to not look at the fact that people are illegal? They're coming into our country illegally. And along with the immigrants that are coming for work, there are others that are coming for criminal reasons.

"And they let them go and they let them go and they let them go and deport them, and then they come right back and commit other crimes. You know, we're a country that we believe (in) and we support the rule of law. And if we're out there saying, 'Well, we don't support the law,' then we'd be crazy, too."

Brewer said the border can be secured with a wall, technology, or even boots on the ground. "They did a pretty darned good job in California -- why they can't they do it in Arizona?" she asked. "But they haven't because they don't want to. For whatever the reason is, I will tell you, earnestly, I believe that with all the issues that all of this illegal immigration has caused in this country, if we don't get the border secured, we're never going to find a solution. We're never going to find a solution."

Trump also said the first order of business is to make the southern border "impenetrable," as he told Anderson Cooper on Wednesday. Second,  he said he would kick out the criminals -- "and the people that are forced in by Mexico, and you know exactly what I am talking about,"  he said.

"The rest I would be looking at very seriously," he added, but he did not endorse a pathway to citizenship. "It is too early for me to say. And when you say citizenship, the most we would be talking about was legal (status). But let me just tell you, before I even think about that, we have to build a...wall, a real wall. Not a wall that people walk through."

Trump noted that he's speaking this weekend in Arizona: "They say the crowd is going to be enormous. Somebody said I am the most popular person in Arizona because I am speaking the truth. Those people are living with it.

SOURCE

***************************

Racist Republicans Hate Children

“GOP has knives out for school lunch rules,” headlines The Hill. “First lady Michelle Obama’s signature school lunch regulations are … a pillar of the first lady’s initiative to curb childhood obesity in the United States,” The Hill informs us. And who could be against healthy kids? Or the first lady? Evil Republicans, that’s who.

Never mind that top-down regulation virtually never works, or that kids universally hate the new lunches to the point that schools are dropping them and/or demanding changes. The bottom line is that the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) expires on Sept. 30, and Republicans are holding hearings to determine if it’s worth more than the $3 billion already spent to dump unwanted food in the trash.

In 2014, Michelle lectured, “The last thing that we can afford to do right now is play politics with our kids' health.” But playing politics is the name of the game. The first lady — an honorary and not official position, by the way — can’t federalize school lunches and then insist it’s not political.

SOURCE

****************************

Obama wants to choose your neighbors

Having spent years perfecting the art of inciting race warfare, Barack Obama and his administration released new housing rules that will define, qualify and categorize every community across the country by race, with the aim of forcing every neighborhood to comply with government race quotas.

It sounds ominous because it is. But it’s hardly surprising from the narcissist who pledged to “fundamentally transform” America.

Under the new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH), announced by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro this week, the federal government will amass and centralize nationwide public data on communities, including “patterns of integration and segregation, racially and ethically concentrated areas of poverty, disproportionate housing needs, and disparities in access to opportunity.” Big Brother doesn’t just want to look over your shoulder; he wants to move into your home.

HUD claims the rule will “equip communities that receive HUD funding with the data and tools that will help them to meet long-standing fair housing obligations.” In truth, however, AFFH is a stealth move to socially engineer every street in America and to force compliance with what Obama thinks communities should look like — namely, more "affordable" housing in affluent neighborhoods.

But as political analyst Marc Thiessen noted, “[W]e believe in diversifying communities, too, as conservatives. The way you do that is through economic opportunity. ... It’s not by building more affordable housing in the affluent communities. It’s by helping more Americans afford housing in affluent communities. And right now the problem is that people at the bottom of the Obama economy can’t get ahead.”

Still, Washington wants to take over local zoning authority to impose racial quotas on communities. And as Ethics and Public Policy Center Senior Fellow Stanley Kurtz warns, “Once HUD gets its hooks into a municipality, no policy area is safe. Zoning, transportation, education, all of it risks slipping into the control of the federal government and the new, unelected regional bodies the feds will empower."

Nevertheless, Liberty aside, The Washington Post’s Emily Badger heralded the new rules as a way to “repair the [Fair Housing Act’s] unfulfilled promise and promote the kind of racially integrated neighborhoods that have long eluded deeply segregated cities like Chicago and Baltimore.” Funny she mentions those particular cities. While she points to Chicago’s “decades” of segregation as evidence that AFFH is needed, Badger fails to note those same decades were spent under solely Democrat leadership. Similarly, Baltimore has been led by the Left since Lyndon Johnson was president. Coincidence? We think not.

Also not coincidental is the way the government and media have remained largely mum on what the administration’s real plan is. Kurtz notes, “Obama has downplayed his policy goals in this area and delayed the finalization of AFFH for years, because he understands how politically explosive this rule is. Once the true implications of AFFH are understood, Americans will rebel.”

And rebel they should. As if Washington putting on a lab coat and stethoscope weren’t bad enough, now Obama wants to become zoning authority, landlord, realtor and public transportation chief combined. He's is leaving no racist rock unturned in his quest to undermine Liberty.

Making matters worse, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Texas Fair Housing case — in which a liberal majority said groups claiming housing discrimination no longer need to prove their case on the merits but only to claim “intent" to discriminate — means the real implications of AFFH will be a racially charged free-for all, with no gray areas and everything defined in black and white (pun intended).

Forget Martin Luther King’s noble notion of judging people by the content of their character. Obama wants to judge entire neighborhoods by the speciously calculated color of their skin. This is not the way of Liberty or of opportunity; it’s another giant leap down the road to statism, and it has no place in a nation that promises equal opportunity, not equal results, for all.

SOURCE

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************

America the crazy

By David Limbaugh

Lately I've shared my lament that in America today we are witnessing a surreal transformation of the greatest nation in history. Last week, a spate of headlines made this point better than I could make it on my own.

I was minding my business, mind you, surfing the Internet to check out the news and political sites and forums I customarily visit, and these news and column headlines, most from last week, some from a bit earlier and a few from this week, bombarded me. I wasn't looking for trouble. Nor was the satirical website The Onion, one of the sites I visited.

The world is upside down, inside out, sideways, crazy, nutso. Bad is good; up is down. Left is right; right is wrong. Evil is good; insanity is sanity. Abnormal is normal. Circles are squares. Hot is cold. Luke warm is red hot - among Republicans, anyway. Common sense is uncommon. The world is otherworldly. Dissent is "hate." Diversity means conformity. The good guys are the bad guys; virtue is vice; sophistry is intellectualism; jerks are celebrated; debauchery is glorified; the holy is debauched. Let me share some of these headlines, which speak for themselves - loudly and depressingly.

-Shakespeare's Works - Too Hard, Too White.

-Obama Red-Faced: Iran Nuclear Stockpiles Grew 20 Percent in 18 months.

-Obamacare Dangerous to Our Health.

-Eye-Popping Premium Increases.

-Obama, Clinton Want To Enforce 'Correct' Thinking in America.

-High School Denies Pro-Life Club!

-Pentagon Officials Call Out Obama's 'Pathetic' ISIS Strategy.

-Shabazz Calls on Nation of Islam, New Black Panther 'Army' to Defend Black Communities Against Police Brutality.

-Obama: Climate Change Deniers Endangering National Security.

-Team Clinton Swarms Sunday Interview Shows, Minus Hillary.

-Antonin Scalia Is Unfit To Serve: A Justice Who Rejects Science and the Law for Religion Is of Unsound Mind.

-In L.A., Obama addresses Washington's Dysfunction: "I Did Not Say I Would Fix It."

-Authorities: Gay Slur Carved Into Utah Man's Arm Was Staged.

-Justice Department: Transgender Students Can Use Bathrooms that Match Their Gender Identity.

-Political Correctness 101: Praising America, Virtues of Hard Work Dubbed 'Micro-Aggression' On Campuses.

-Video Shows U.S. Citizens Willing To Ban American Flag.

-Are Americans of Faith in Danger?

-Obama Administration Says Redskins Nickname Could Block Potential Stadium Deal.

-TV Land Drops "Dukes of Hazzard" Amid Confederate Flag Controversy.

-Gay Teacher Files Federal Discrimination Lawsuit Against Catholic School.

-Terrific: Attorney in Charge of Releasing Lois Lerner 'Lost' Emails Now in Charge of HRC's Emails.

-For Obama, Rainbow White House Was 'A Moment Worth Savoring.'

-Montana Polygamist Family Applies for Marriage License.

-74 Children Executed by ISIS for 'Crimes' That Include Refusal To Fast, Report Says.

-New Undercover Footage Shows VA Officials Admitting of 'Unaccountability at Every Level.'

-Black Teacher Hits Handicapped White Child, Tells Him Black People Fought To Not 'Serve White People Like You.'

-Girl Scouts Raise $250K for Transgender Cause.

-Teen Leads Mob in Ransacking of Georgia Walmart.

-U.S. Debt Headed Toward Greek Levels.

-Obama Administration Invokes Executive Privilege on Benghazi Probe?

-United Church of Christ Anti-Israel Extremism.

-U.S. Troops in Afghanistan 'Feel Abandoned.'

-More than 42 Million Muslims 'Support ISIS.'

-17 Shot Since Monday Morning in Baltimore.

-Baltimore Mayor Wants Park Named for Robert E. Lee Changed, Other Monuments May Come Down.

-Christian Preachers Brutally Beaten at Gay Pride Festival.

-Seattle 6th Graders Can't Get a Coke at School, but Can Get an IUD.

-Local Minister Urges the Flying of Black Liberation Flag This Weekend.

-Christian Bakers Face $135K Fine and Gag Order Over Wedding Cake for Same-Sex Couple.

-Center for American Progress Helped Craft EPA Talking Points, Emails Show.

-White House Blames GOP for Kathryn Steimle's Slaying, Rise in Gun Violence.

-10 Killed, 55 Wounded in Fourth of July Gun Violence in Chicago.

-Shock: Arizona Paper Decries Border Fence As Too High For Mexicans To Safely Jump.

-California Family Supports 4-Year-Old's Decision To Transition from Male to Female.

-Illegal Alien Who Murdered Woman Went to San Francisco Because It Was a 'Sanctuary City.'

-Chris Matthews: Hillary Clinton is 'More of a Conservative ... Traditional Politician.'

-Netanyahu Says Nuke Deal Getting Worse by the Day.

-Chicago Convulsed By Another Violent Weekend; Top Cop Blames Justice System.

SOURCE

*****************************

Left-Right Differences: It's All About Big Government

By Dennis Prager

If most Americans were clear about the differences between Left and Right, they would not vote Democrat in nearly the numbers they do. The Left understands this, which is why most left-wing rhetoric is dismissive of conservatives' character - "sexist," "intolerant," "bigoted," "hateful," "xenophobic," "racist," "Islamophobic," "homophobic" - rather than conservatives' positions. By focusing on conservatives as people and characterizing them as bad, the Left successfully deflects attention from its positions.

This brings me to explaining Left-Right Difference No. Five: How the Left and Right regard the role of the state (or government).

This is such a significant difference that it might be the defining difference between Left and Right. Without the belief in an ever-expanding state, there is no Left. Without a belief in limited government, there is no conservatism. Moreover, understanding this difference is essentially all people should have to know in order to determine whether they are on the Right or the Left.

The Left believes the state should be the most powerful force in society. It should be in control of educating all of its children; it should provide all the health care for all of its citizens; and it should supervise just about all other areas of society. There should be no competing power. As to the all-important question of how much government is too much government, I have never encountered a person of the Left who had an answer to that question.

Conservatives believe the individual is the essential component of a good society, not government. The government's role in society should be limited to absolute necessities such as national defense and to serving as the resource of last resort for citizens who cannot be helped by other citizens, private organizations or charities that donate money and time.

Conservatives understand that as governments grow in size and power, the following will inevitably - yes, inevitably - happen:

1.) There will be ever-increasing amounts of corruption. Power and money breed corruption. People in government will sell government influence for personal gain. This is as true for America as it is for Africa and Latin America, where government corruption is the single biggest factor holding these nations back from materially progressing.

2.) Individual liberty (outside of sexual behavior and abortion) will decline. Liberty is less important to the Left than to the Right. This is neither an opinion nor a criticism. It is simple logic. The more control the government has over people's lives the less liberty people have. The bigger the government the smaller the citizen.

3.) Countries will either shrink the size of their government, or they will eventually collapse economically. Every welfare state is a Ponzi scheme, relying on new payers to pay previous payers. Like the Ponzi scheme, when it runs out of new payers, the scheme collapses. European countries, all of which are welfare states, are already experiencing this problem to varying degrees.

4.) Taxes are constantly increased in order to pay for ever-expanding government. But at a given level of taxation, the society's wealth producers will stop working, work less, hire fewer people or move their businesses out of the state or out of the country.

5.) The big state inevitably produces large deficits and ever-increasing - and ultimately unsustainable - debt (national, state and city). This is only logical. The more the state hands out money - to state employees as salaries and pensions; to government agencies (education, environment, energy, transportation and myriad others); and to individual citizens (monthly cash welfare grants, rent subsidies, health care, unemployment benefits, education, college loans, meals, food stamps, etc.) - the more the government employees and agencies, and the citizens who receive government aid, will demand. None of them has ever said, "No more, thank you. I have enough."

Greece's unpayable debt is only the beginning. Unless big governments get smaller, they all eventually will collapse of their own weight - with terrible consequences socially, as well as economically.

6.) The 20th century was the most murderous century in recorded history. About 200 million people, the great majority of them noncombatants, were killed, and more than a billion people were enslaved by totalitarian regimes. And who did all this killing and enslaving? In every case, it was a big government. The bigger the government the greater the opportunities for doing great evil. Evil individuals without power can do only so much harm. But when evil individuals have control of a big government, the amount of bad they can do is unlimited.

7.) Finally, the moral impact of big government on its citizens is awful. Not only do people stop taking care of others - after all, they know the government will do that - but they stop taking care of themselves, as well. And the more people come to rely on government the more they develop a sense of entitlement, which then leads to a nation of ingrates.

Other than all that, big government is terrific. See Greece. Or Puerto Rico. Or Detroit. Not to mention the Soviet Union, North Korea or Mao's China.

SOURCE

****************************

Scott Walker alienating conservatives

Last week, Right Wing News did an article about Scott Walker's PAC hiring Brad Dayspring. If you don't know who Brad Dayspring is, here's an introduction from one of the conservative candidates he slimed during the GOP primaries .

"Brad Dayspring is well known as a despicable establishment operative who specializes in slander and character assassination against conservative candidates," Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel-one such conservative Dayspring personally frequently attacked-told Breitbart News exclusively on Wednesday. "He is the perfect example of why conservatives no longer trust the GOP. He's little more than a paid attack dog, without principle and honor, the personification of everything wrong with our present political system."

McDaniel added:  "Scott Walker appears to be a good man with solid conservative instincts. But his hiring of the unstable Dayspring is an insult to honorable political discourse. If Dayspring is aligned with Walker, then conservatives should be warned to look elsewhere for leadership."

Right Wing News has contacts with Scott Walker's campaign and with his PAC. We reached out to both and asked for them to go on the record about Brad Dayspring. Unfortunately, nobody was willing to go on the record defending him - which should tell you a lot.

If Brad Dayspring is indefensible, why did Scott Walker's team hire him? Well, you hire a guy like this either to stab conservatives in the back or to let your backers in the establishment know that you intend to do exactly that despite the rhetoric you're using to trick the "bubbas" into voting for you.

Why else would they go to the mat for a new staffer after the reaction Dayspring received?

Breitbart has written a negative article about the hire and so has the Daily Caller (Where it was noted Dayspring had been telling people he was going to work for Jeb Bush). Over at Redstate, where Walker wrote a July 4th guest diary, the Wisconsin governor has been compared to Thad Cochran over this. Brent Bozell, the head of the Media Research Center, wants Dayspring gone. Mark Levin, who has roughly 7 million listeners, has been smeared by Dayspring before and retweeted the Right Wing News article we put out about him.

Since the article came out, we spoke to another one of the grassroots conservative candidates that Dayspring vilified, Dr. Milton Wolf, who primaried Republican Senator Pat Roberts in Kansas. Here's what he had to say about Scott Walker's team hiring Brad Dayspring.

"It's baffling that a principled conservative like Scott Walker would hire Brad Dayspring. Dayspring is an attack dog for hire who specializes in slandering and maligning conservatives in order to protect the failed insiders who have abandoned conservative principles and are destroying our Republican Party."

Maybe Scott Walker's team didn't do its due diligence before it hired Dayspring. That would be a mistake, but forgivable. On the other hand, if Walker's team hangs onto Dayspring, it might as well be flat-out telling you to leave a spot open on your back so a knife can be slammed in there down the road. A veterans' group wouldn't bring in Jane Fonda and no conservative you can trust is going to keep Brad Dayspring on his team.

SOURCE

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************

Warning:  Pregnant women may wish to avoid Tylenol/Panadol

It can shrink your baby's balls.  Below is only a rodent study, but is a better one than most, so caution may be advisable.  Aspirin has fallen out of favour because of some usually minor side-effects but acetaminophen/ paracetamol seems to have much worse effects (e.g. Liver failure).  Another instance of conventional medical advice getting it ass-backwards, it seems.  Excerpt only below

JAMA. 2015;314(1):16. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.7177.

*******************************

White House blames killing by an illegal on conservatives

By claiming that the administration is doing exactly what it is not

The White House on Monday defended its immigration policies and blasted Republicans following the killing of a San Francisco woman — allegedly by an illegal immigrant.

When asked if the case was a failure of the administration’s enforcement policies, White House press secretary Josh Earnest chided Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill that would have boosted funding for border security. 

“I recognize that people want to play politics with this,” Earnest said. “The fact is the president has done everything within his power to make sure that we’re focusing our law enforcement resources on criminals and those who pose a threat to public safety.”

Kathryn Steinle, 32, was shot and killed Wednesday at a popular tourist destination in San Francisco. The suspect, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, had multiple felony convictions and had been deported to Mexico five times. 

Earnest faulted the “political efforts of Republicans” for blocking “the kind of investment that we would like to make in securing our border and keeping our communities safe.”

The spokesman refused to comment on the details of the case, but he pointed to Obama’s executive actions on immigration launched last fall, which instructed the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize the deportation of people who are considered “public safety threats.”

“We have started to make changes in terms of structuring and staffing … to ensure that our law enforcement efforts are focused on felons and not on families,” he said. “These efforts would be significantly augmented had Republicans not blocked common-sense immigration reform.”

Federal authorities have suggested San Francisco bears responsibility for the fact that Lopez-Sanchez was still on the street. U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) turned him over to San Francisco authorities in March on a drug warrant. 

But he was released in April after the charges were dropped, and local law enforcement did not honor federal officials’ request to be notified when he was freed. 

“We’re not asking local law enforcement to do our job,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said, according to Fox News. “All we’re asking is that they notify us when a serious foreign national criminal offender is being released to the street so we can arrange to take custody.”

San Francisco is a “sanctuary city” that does not cooperate with federal authorities in enforcing immigration laws.

SOURCE

**************************

The rich port: Progressive Paradise Lost

It's a progressive paradise. Public employees get 30 vacation days a year. Anyone who works over eight hours in a day gets paid time-and-a-half. Employees have strong rights.

The minimum wage is high: 77 percent of the median wage.

Environmental regulations are settled beyond the pressure of local economic interests. The forests and mountains are pristine destinations for ecotourism.

Energy costs are kept high, pushing consumption down to a level deemed "socially beneficial". Utilities have strong public backing and provide jobs to thousands.

Union jobs in shipping are protected from outsourcing to cut-rate foreign competitors.

The social safety net is buoyant and provides a solid working-class standard of living. People who are injured can rely on disability insurance to maintain their income.

Student-to-teacher ratios are very low so that every child gets the very best.

The flagship research institution is a well-funded public university. Just ten years ago, the university was linked to downtown and the suburbs by a new light rail line.

Best of all, richer people living far away pay most of the taxes. This little paradise has open access to large export markets and is part of a major currency union.

The government borrows at low interest rates and runs large deficits when output is below trend and does not give up on stimulus after a few years.

But economic output, oddly, is always below trend.

Puerto Ricans have lived through decades of this left-wing utopia, and they are fleeing it.

The island's working-age population declined by 100,000 since 2005, as the economy shifted from stagnation to depression.

In a parallel universe with free markets and low regulation, Puerto Rico could have become the Singapore of the Caribbean.

It has a sizable educated, bilingual workforce, is a natural hub for regional commerce, and has free access to U.S. markets.

Credit must be given to left-wing Gov. Alejandro Garc¡a Padilla for commissioning an independent economic report on Puerto Rico's economy, and his administration did not repudiate the economists' blistering critique of the commonwealth's progressive policies and shabby governance.

In the report, economists Anne Krueger, Ranjit Teja, and Andrew Wolfe call for spending cuts, tax reforms, and structural reforms-necessities if Puerto Rico is to resume economic growth.

Spending Cuts

Krueger, who will present her research at The Heritage Foundation on July 8th, argues that fiscal stimulus by successive Puerto Rican administrations failed to end the stagnation because it was based on a misdiagnosis.

"Solving Puerto Rico's problems through fiscal expansion has not worked," she writes, "and will not work."

Instead, spending cuts that reduce the footprint of government can return the commonwealth to solvency and allow economic growth. Their suggestions include:

Cutting subsidies to the University of Puerto Rico to save $500 million per year (throughout, annual savings are estimated as of 2020).

Cutting extra Medicaid spending to save $150 million per year.

Gradual cuts in public school employment and closure of some rural schools to reflect the shrinking number of students and save over $400 million a year

Renewing a law that freezes the real value of certain transfer-spending formulas to save $1 billion a year.

Staffing cuts at bloated public utilities.

Tax Reforms

The economists advocate comprehensive tax reform. Replacing a 35 percent corporate tax rate riddled with exemptions with a 10 to 15 percent, broad-based corporate tax would increase annual revenues by $250 million.

Governor Padilla's administration has called for a new sales tax, which the authors estimate would raise $1 billion annually.

However, many European countries can now attest that raising taxes during a crisis is a recipe for slower growth and lower revenues.

The largest potential revenue gains come from reforms to the labor market and business sector rather than from tax increases.

By spurring economic growth, Puerto Rico could add $1.35 billion in revenues without a tax increase.

Labor and Social Reforms

Tax reforms and spending policies will not be sufficient without reforms to Puerto Rico's social safety net.

By using a welfare system designed for the mainland U.S., where average wages are much higher, both federal and Puerto Rican policies discourage work.

The U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 is only slightly lower than the median wage in Puerto Rico, $9.42. Contrary to the claims of some progressives, a higher minimum wage destroys jobs.

Puerto Rico cannot compete with similar regional economies at mainland-U.S. wage rates.

But only the U.S. Congress can grant Puerto Rico a minimum wage exemption.

The economists recommend Puerto Rico repeal its European-style labor laws, which make it difficult to lay workers off, expensive to employ them, and thus risky to hire them.

Reforms of the benefits Puerto Ricans receive when they are not at work are important as well.

The economists show in one estimate that "a household of three eligible for food stamps, AFDC, Medicaid and utilities subsidies could receive $1,743 per month-as compared to a minimum wage earner's take-home earnings of $1,159."

Since the minimum and median wages are so close, the welfare income would also exceed a median wage earner's income by about $240 a month.

The authors conclude that the "federal government should therefore give the Commonwealth more latitude to adjust welfare requirements and benefits."

It would then be up to Puerto Rico's lawmakers to administer transfer payments in less distortionary ways.

Business Barriers

The World Bank's "Doing Business" survey ranks Puerto Rico significantly below the mainland U.S. in its "Ease of doing business" rankings.

One barrier to business is the Merchant Marine Jones Act, which gives a monopoly on trade between Puerto Rico and the U.S. to a small fleet of old, inefficient vessels.

This partial embargo raises prices of all sorts of consumer goods, making Puerto Rican residents poorer.

In particular, Puerto Rico has been shut out of the energy boom on the mainland.

But lack of access to mainland gas and oil is not the only reason energy prices are so high in Puerto Rico.

The report notes that only in insolvency is the Puerto Rican electrical utility beginning to address its "over-staffing and inefficiency," which have kept electricity prices high.

They recommend assigning a "high-level official" in the Puerto Rican government to improving the island's "ease of doing business ranking."

Their hope is that someone whose reputation is on the line will have the willpower to break through the bureaucratic inertia and enact reforms on registering property and permitting new businesses.

Beyond the content of Puerto Rico's policies, Krueger and her team were clearly troubled by the opacity of the commonwealth's civil service.

Their immediate problem was a lack of accurate, up-to-date economic data. But the data deficiencies reflected generally chaotic record-keeping and poor coordination throughout the central bureaucracy.

The Stricken Land

Puerto Rico's progressive policies are not a coincidence. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Rexford Tugwell, one of his most progressive lieutenants, governor of Puerto Rico in 1941.

Tugwell created a unique stream of tax revenue and used it to experiment with a centrally planned economy, extending the reach of the government of Puerto Rico into every sector of the economy.

Stricken and stunted by the plans of Tugwell and his successors, Puerto Rico has never lived up to its promise as an American commonwealth.

Now in a depression and a debt crisis, Puerto Rico serves as a warning against the very policies that Tugwell championed.

SOURCE

*************************

Chick-fil-A Keeps Doing It Right

It’s interesting that just days after the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage is a heretofore undiscovered constitutional right Chick-fil-A came out on top in a customer service satisfaction survey. In fact, the Atlanta-based fast-food chain registered the highest score in the history of the survey. 

What does same-sex marriage have to do with fried chicken? Recall that, in 2012, the company became the Rainbow Mafia’s number one target after Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy voiced his support for biblical marriage. Leftists tried to organize a boycott, but it fell flat as a conservative counter-boycott gave franchises their longest lines ever as people flocked to grab a tasty sandwich on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. 

The lesson: Stand by solid principles and make a great product, and people will come. They’ll like it, too.

SOURCE

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************

More on the theology of homosexuality

A few days ago I put up here a coverage of the claims by mainstream Christian clergy that homosexuality is permissable to Christians.  That permissiveness may be kindly meant and it may provide solace  to some tormented souls but it clearly flies in the face of both the Christian teachings in the New Testament and the Jewish teachings of the Old Testament.  Christ was a devout Jew living in a very orthodox Jewish community and, if you read Matthew chapter 19 in full, you will see that he was even more restrictive about sexual morality than were the very orthodox Pharisees.

I am therefore pleased that one of my Jewish readers has sent in some comments on the matter too.  See below.  He obviously has a searching knowledge of his own religion so I am impressed that he knows Christian thinking very well too. I had always imagined that only the most searching Protestant exegetes used the wonderful "Strong's  Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible" but I see that he uses it too.  I myself always have a copy on my desk in front of me


By Willem

I read your recent post, "Homosexuality and Christian apologetics" with considerable interest. You are of course entirely correct in what you say.

I would like to offer a couple of footnotes.

Your note that Paul refers to a chastisement - "kolasin" - that you translate as "cutting off" interested me, because a frequent consequence for a variety of transgressions in the Jews' Bible is "kareth" - which is translated as to be cut off. This is a chastisement from Heaven, rather than a punishment to be imposed by an Earthly court, and it is usually interpreted as meaning a life that is cut short - although I think the implications are more serious, involving being cut off from the Divine, and so on.

That Scripture forbids homosexual acts was, as you note, very clear to the early Christians from Leviticus 18, which proscribes and condemns a variety of possible sexual liaisons, including a variety of forms of incest.

It is surely of interest, that the vast majority of prohibited relations are simply listed as being forbidden, without further "editorial" content. In the wonderful King James version:

7 The nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover: she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

8 The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father's nakedness.

9 The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.

10 The nakedness of thy son's daughter, or of thy daughter's daughter, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover: for theirs is thine own nakedness.

11 The nakedness of thy father's wife's daughter, begotten of thy father, she is thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

12 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's sister: she is thy father's near kinswoman.

13 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother's sister: for she is thy mother's near kinswoman.

14 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's brother, thou shalt not approach to his wife: she is thine aunt.

15 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter in law: she is thy son's wife; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

16 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife: it is thy brother's nakedness.

17 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter, neither shalt thou take her son's daughter, or her daughter's daughter, to uncover her nakedness; for they are her near kinswomen: it is wickedness.

18 Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her life time.

19 Also thou shalt not approach unto a woman to uncover her nakedness, as long as she is put apart for her uncleanness.

20 Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her.

21 And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.


Remarkably, alone among so many prohibited relations, are homosexual acts labeled an "abomination."



22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

23 Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion.

24 Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:

25 And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.

26 Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:

27 (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;)

28 That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.

29 For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people.

30 Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God.

Bestiality is denounced as "confusion," and collectively, all of these sexual liaisons are considered "abominations," but only lying with a man as one would lie with a woman is an "abomination." (It occurs 117 in Scripture.)

"Abomination," or "to-evah" (Strong's 8441) is used in many different situations and I am not sure that we can be sure of all of its connotations today. The word for confusion, "te-vel" (Strong's 8397) is also translated as "perversion." (It occurs only twice in Scripture, in Leviticus 18 and 20.)

It is as if the Bible knows, that in the future (as I am sure it was contemporaneously, in some parts of the ancient world) homosexual liaisons would be regarded as normal, and therefore an extra emphasis is needed.

The recent recognition and sanction given to same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court of the United States, a judicial body that had never defined or opined on traditional heterosexual marriage, suggests that same-sex liaisons have a cachet and status even better than the status of traditional marriages today. In the "Reform" Jewish congregations, the rule has been for many years, that "anything goes." (If - in the last words of the founders of the Assassins, to mix creeds, "nothing is true," then "everything is permitted," is it not?)

Some 7 years ago or so, the governing body of the "Conservative" Jewish movement's Jewish Theological Seminary agreed that it would ordain as a "Rabbi" or "Cantor" a practicing homosexual, so long as he promised not to engage in anal intercourse, which the governing committee of the Conservative movement's scholars determined was the only act prohibited by Leviticus. A traditional marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple would remain beyond the limits, however.

Thus a curious situation would be possible: no Conservative congregation would employ a man as Rabbi who openly lived in a sexual relationship with a woman with whom he was not married, but a homosexual Rabbi would be employable if he openly lived in a sexual relationship with a man with whom he was not married.

It is as if the Conservative movement sees same-sex relationships as benefiting from an inherent sanctity and propriety not possible for traditional, heterosexual couples without a formal marriage.

In contrast, the traditional Jewish Weltanschauung sees the splitting of the primordial Adam into Adam & Eve as a clear depiction of what the Bible sees as the proper and inevitable sexual relationship - one man and one woman.

Finally, with respect to divorce, and the Christian Church's teaching against it - you quote Matthew 19:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

I would put this teaching in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. The entire Sermon on the Mount is of great interest in the history of Jewish religion, and as a lengthy example of the preaching and teaching of Jesus. I don't think there is any part of it that would be incongruous if preached by an orthodox Jewish preacher to an orthodox Jewish audience - as of course it was.

He says:


17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus is proceeding along the same work that the Rabbis were engaged in - building a fence around the Law - although in a different way.

That is, the Rabbis were concerned to enact additional practical restrictions, so that one's behavior would be circumscribed well before one came into danger of violating God's commands. Jesus seeks to accomplish a similar goal, but by extending the prohibitions concerning actions, to the realm of thoughts and feelings.

27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Jesus does not counsel that the way to avoid the frank sins and transgressions forbidden by God is to give in to the zeitgeist. He teaches a thoroughgoing rectification of the individual's inner nature, to bring it into conformity with the Divine plan. The early Christian Church surely stood up against the world, and all of the powers that were arrayed against it.

In contrast, I am amazed by the extent to which ostensibly believing Christians -and Jews!- are willing to abandon the time-proven practices and principles of their religions (practices and principles which many real martyrs have died in order to uphold against a hostile World) - in favor of the latest shibboleths of, for example, the editorial board of the New York Times.

*****************************

CLEAR ENOUGH?



The evening that the Supreme Court allowed gay marriages to be treated the same as heterosexual marriages was a victory for the militant in your face LGBT.  The white house was lit up with the rainbow colors of the LGBT.  On the anniversary of our country's founding,  July 4th this year there was no lighting of the white house in red, white, and blue.  What does that tell you about the current occupant?

****************************

Episcopal Bishops Abandon Bible for Same-Sex Marriage

The Episcopal Church, the American branch of the World Anglican Communion, is a regrettable case study of how liberalism has eroded the foundations of our great American heritage. Many Episcopal Church (ECUSA) leaders have abandoned the church’s venerable legacy and forsaken the Almighty’s providence. Liberals in the church endeavor to interpret the Bible eisegetically versus exegetically in order that it comport with their contemporary social agenda rather than its “original intent” — much as Leftists interpret the so-called “living Constitution.” In other words, they reject the authority of the Bible (as outlined in the Episcopal Articles of Faith), much as they reject the authority of our Constitution.

The same sad story was on display again this week as ECUSA bishops voted to authorize their clergy to perform same-sex weddings beginning Nov. 1. Conservative bishops insisted on an accommodation for clergy who refuse to do so, which makes such ceremonies unlikely in several dioceses.

But the damage is done. ECUSA’s drift away from biblical truth has taken many years. In 2003, the “enlightened” U.S. bishops rebuffed the World Anglican Communion and codified their rejection of Scriptural authority by ordaining Vicky Gene Robinson, the church’s first openly homosexual bishop.

Perhaps such is the plight of a church born out of wedlock. In 1534, when the Roman Catholic Church would not grant Henry VIII an annulment from his 25-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry broke with Rome and instituted the Church of England — which granted his divorce.

Short of unfeigned repentance, another divorce, that of the Episcopal Church from the World Anglican Communion, looms just over the horizon.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************

Is Operetta the right musical entertainment for conservatives?

I think it is but I realize I am going to have to talk fast to make that case.

As all the surveys show, conservatives are a lot happier than Leftists. Leftists are the miseries of the world whom in the end nothing suits.  Leftist literary figure Gore Vidal once said: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little".  Leftist envy has long been known.  As a contrast, it makes me happy when other people do well. Where Leftists abhor Bill Gates, I admire him.  And I think many conservatives are like that.

So that must must influence what we like in entertainment.  Like much of Hollywood's output, Grand Opera is romantic but has sad endings.  In grand opera, the lovers mostly die in the end.  Romeo and Juliet is their model.  In "Carmen", for instance, Carmen is  in the end stabbed to death by her jealous lover.  And in "Aida", the lovers end up immured.

Operetta is much nicer.  It is also very romantic but the lovers end up happily together and heading off to get married.  Isn't that better? It sure suits me a lot better.

And operetta has wonderful songs. They are often well known but people don't realize that they originate from operetta.  Try this song, for instance. Or this one.  They're sung in German but you probably know what they're all about anyway.  Operetta was all originally in German but you can get it on DVD with English subtitles.  Sometimes you can even get them online with subtitles -- as here. Andre Rieu has a great medley of operetta tunes here.

In the end, however, it's a matter of taste.  But if you've got a romantic bone in your body you will surely enjoy Viennese operetta.  It's not heavy.  It's fun.  And there's some nice-looking ladies in it too.  See below:



No subtitles but what the clip is about it that the lady thought her husband was too boring until he moved to Vienna.  But once he moved there he acquired the Viennese spirit (Wiener Blut) and she tells him that because of that she now loves him.  And he falls back in love with his wife too.  Isn't that grand?

There's lots of detail about operetta on my personal blog.

****************************

And here is an evocation of the real America, a profound performance of "Amazing Grace" by Condoleezza Rice & Jenny Oaks Baker.  Put online to celebrate this year's celebration of Independence day.



****************************

Progressive Mass Hysteria

V.D. Hanson

Democracies have been fickle for 2,000 years, but the Internet makes it worse. One of the most harrowing incidents in the Athenian historian Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War is the democratic debate over the rebellious subject state of Mytilene on the distant island of Lesbos. Thucydides uses his riveting account of the Athenian argument over the islanders' fate to warn his readers of the fickle nature of democracy.

Outraged by the revolt of the Mytileneans, the frenzied Athenians suddenly assemble and vote to condemn all the adult males on the island, regardless of the role any of them may have played in the revolt. They are to be executed en masse for rebellion, on grounds of collective guilt. The next day, however, cooler heads in Athens narrowly prevail. The radical demos just as abruptly takes a second vote and withdraws its blanket death sentence of the day before, voting instead to execute only 1,000 of the ringleaders of the rebellion.

But what about the messenger ship that was dispatched hours earlier to deliver the mass death sentence?

A second trireme is now sent off by the contrite democracy with orders to the crew to row as fast as they can, in hopes of delivering the reprieve in time. The relief vessel and its exhausted crew arrive at Lesbos at the very moment that all the adult male islanders have been lined up and are about to have their throats slit.

Thucydides uses the frightening story to warn of the wild - and often dangerous - swings in public opinion innate to democratic culture. The historian seems at times obsessed with these explosions of Athenian popular passions, offering an even longer and more hair-raising account of popular mood swings over invading Sicily. We forget sometimes that the Athenian democracy that gave us Sophocles and Pericles also, in a fit of unhinged outrage, executed Socrates by a majority vote of one of its popular courts.

American democracy has become increasingly Athenian, as it periodically whips itself up into outbursts of frantic indignation. While the government in theory still operates according to the checks and balances of the Constitution, in reality, in the hyped Internet world of modern pop culture, fevered passions can seize the majority of the population in a matter of hours.

The idea of gay marriage in 2008 earned unapologetic disapproval from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The liberal voters of California twice rejected the idea in statewide plebiscites. But after years of constant harangues in the media, boycotts, public ostracisms, and ad hominem attacks on the integrity of skeptics, the liberal political establishment - many of whose members are recipients of large amounts of cash from wealthy gay donors - suddenly flipped.

A sort of collective hysteria took over from there. In 2008 there was common assent on the part of the Democratic party's leadership that the three-millennia-old belief that marriage involved different sexes would prevail, while a separate rubric, "civil union," would be invented for homosexual couples. But by 2012 that notion was not merely outdated, but taboo. Almost overnight, supporting the erstwhile Obama position of permitting civil unions but rejecting gay marriage became tantamount to career suicide.

Ditto on illegal immigration. Barack Obama likewise swore between 2008 and 2012 that he was no despot who by executive fiat could legalize violations of immigration laws that had been passed by Congress. Yet by 2015 anyone who would agree with Obama's past vows is now rendered little more than a nativist and xenophobe - so powerful is the Orwellian engine of groupthink.

Take the Confederate-flag debate. What started out just days ago as a reasonable move by the state of South Carolina, in the aftermath of the Charleston mass shootings, to remove the Confederate battle flag from public display on state property, within hours had descended into something like the mob's frenzy over Mytilene. We have now gone well beyond removing state sanction from a flag that represented an apartheid society. Indeed, Americans of the new electronic mob are witch-hunting the past with a vengeance, as private, profit-driven companies seek to trump one another's piety by banning the merchandising of Confederate insignia. Meanwhile, our versions of the ancient sophists and demagogues are hoping that the mob can stay agitated long enough to go on to new targets, such as banning public airings of Gone with the Wind or ending respect for public monuments of prominent Confederate war dead.

At some point, the throng will exhaust itself, and realize that while removing Confederate flags from state property was a reasonable and overdue gesture, most of what followed was Mytilenean to the core. Think of the contradictions that have already arisen from the mob frenzy.

One cannot today buy Confederate flags online, but one can easily purchase Nazi insignia of the sort that flew over Auschwitz.

One cannot today buy Confederate flags online, but one can easily purchase Nazi insignia of the sort that flew over Auschwitz or the hammer-and-sickle Communist banner that represented the Great Famine, forced collectivization, and various cultural revolutions that led to 100 million slaughtered or starved to death in the 20th century.

One can argue that the slave-owner Robert E. Lee fought to perpetuate human bondage, but Lee never took delight in personally executing without trial his ideological enemies, in the manner of the psychopathic, pistol-toting Che Guevara, whose hip portraiture adorns all too many campus dorm rooms.

Present politics mostly define the degree of past sin and the appropriate punishments, as the revolutionary mob decides in an instant which particular historical figure deserves the most immediate ostracism and should be Trotskyized from our collective memory. Should we now remove the racist Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill? Even in my small town in central California there are schools named Jackson and Wilson. Apparently our Depression-era educators thought that the one Democratic president was a populist reformer, the other an idealistic internationalist. Yet both were abject racists, at least as we understand the charge today. In fact, no president of the 20th century disliked blacks in general and integration in particular as much as the Southern segregationist Woodrow Wilson, although he adroitly cloaked his racial hatred with a thin veneer of liberal academic respectability as president of Princeton University and author of several progressive tracts.

The writings and speeches of Margaret Sanger, founder of what evolved into Planned Parenthood, trumped the biases of Wilson. Her progressive version of eugenics fueled much of her family-planning agenda. She saw reproductive rights as inseparable from discouraging the supposedly less gifted (in her view, mostly non-whites) from having lots of children.

Should Al Gore give one of his trademark teary public confessions and, in vein-bulging angst, apologize to blacks for misrepresenting his senator father's racist votes against civil-rights legislation? Should Bill Clinton join Gore on the podium to feel our pain and say he is sorry that regional Clinton-Gore campaign affiliates often plastered "Clinton-Gore '92" on the Confederate battle flag in an effort to get out the supposed redneck vote? Will Hillary Clinton join in too and apologize for her 2008 declaration - delivered during her heated, racialized primary struggle with Barack Obama - that the polls showed "how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states [Indiana and North Carolina, where primaries had just been held] who had not completed college were supporting me."

Planned Parenthood is as likely to disown its progenitor as Princeton University is to change the name of the Wilson School of Public and International Affairs - and as the Clintons are to publicly repent for their past appeals to blue-collar whites. Apparently, on the one hand, we must understand that there are inveterate haters and symbols of unrepentant racism that should be excised from the body politic, and, on the other hand, there remain well-meaning progressives of the past, who were unfortunately captives of their times and said or wrote things (often spoken in the heat of passion, or taken out of context today) that they did not quite mean. The record of the latter group, according to modern liberal tastes, is unfortunate - but is fortunately overshadowed by their greater liberal accomplishments. Consequently, the mass hysteria against anything that reeks of past racism will be carefully steered clear of monuments honoring the pro-segregationist J. William Fulbright or former Klan leader Robert Byrd, or other liberal heroes like the racist states'-righter but Watergate icon Senator Sam Ervin, who, 20 years before Watergate, authored "The Southern Manifesto," which encouraged opposition to the desegregation of schools.

There will be no liberal watchdog or enlightened corporation that goes after the federally funded National Council of La Raza for its racist nomenclature, which can be traced back to Franco and Mussolini. We cannot properly damn the liberal Earl Warren or the progressive McClatchy newspapers for their 1941 racial rah-rahing that helped convince the progressive Roosevelt administration to implement the Japanese internment.

The damnation of past segregation by race does not extend to censure of present segregation by race in campus dorms and meeting places. No one cares much that the liberal racism that prompted Woodrow Wilson to discourage blacks from attending his beloved Princeton logically continues with the modern Ivy League university adjusting SAT scores and GPAs to ensure that Asian-Americans are not "overrepresented" in Princeton's incoming class: In both cases, utopian racialism by enlightened social engineers cannot be judged by calcified notions of color-blind fairness.

These outbursts of public frenzy at supposed enemies may reflect grassroots furor, but they are also orchestrated by progressive grandees who are inconsistent in their targeting of history's villains - offering context and exemption for liberal fascist and racist thought, speech, and iconography, while connecting their present-day political rivals to the supposed sins of the country's collective past. Manipulating the past, in other words, becomes a useful tool by which one can change the present.

In another analysis, Thucydides reminds us, in regard to the stasis at Corcyra, that in frenzied efforts to reconstruct both the past and present to fit ideological agendas, "Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them." So they do today, as the mob makes the necessary adjustments in going from one obsession to the next.

SOURCE

********************************

Man Who's Never Had a Real Job Makes Rules for Businesses

With a wave of his magic wand, Barack Obama just gave five million workers a raise — or so he’d like you to believe. In an op-ed explaining his new regulations on overtime pay for salaried workers, Obama wrote, “We’ve got to keep making sure hard work is rewarded. Right now, too many Americans are working long days for less pay than they deserve. That’s partly because we’ve failed to update overtime regulations for years — and an exemption meant for highly paid, white collar employees now leaves out workers making as little as $23,660 a year — no matter how many hours they work.

 … [M]y plan [is] to extend overtime protections to nearly 5 million workers in 2016, covering all salaried workers making up to about $50,400 next year.”

And who doesn’t want a raise? Naturally, his proposal will be popular with those who think they stand to benefit, as well as those in need of an Economics 101 refresher.

The real-world results will be that employers hire fewer workers, pay lower base wages, cut hours and nix benefits like work-from-home scenarios for employees who now have to scrupulously track their hours. Just mandating higher wages doesn’t mean businesses can afford to pay them.

The conservative approach is to actually grow the economy — which, notably, Obama has not done. As John F. Kennedy once said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Not just the ones Obama points to with his wand.

SOURCE

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************