An open letter to Greta Thunberg

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Dear Greta –

Congratulations on making a carbon-free trip to New York. You are setting a great example for people who believe fossil fuel use is destroying the planet. While I fully support your right to protest, I hope you’ll allow me to explain why I’m skeptical of the cause you embrace.

I’m not a scientist, but do have a degree in electrical engineering, which I mention only to point out that I have at least some basis for arriving at reasoned opinions concerning dire claims about the climate. I guess I’m what’s referred to as a climate denier, but I bend over backwards to limit my own carbon footprint. I use less than two gallons of hot water to shower, wash dishes by hand, wash clothes in cold water, never use my electric clothes dryer, never have my groceries put in plastic bags, and keep my thermostat at 61 in winter, 81 in summer. The monthly energy bill of my 1,800 sf home has never been above $100. I believe we all are duty-bound to be good stewards of the planet, but I have many doubts about man-made global warming theory. In the interest of brevity, I’ll touch on just one of those concerns here.

As you may have noticed, the wealthy people who talk the loudest about the need for “each and every one of us” to make dramatic cutbacks in the way we live aren’t making dramatic cutbacks in the way they live. These wealthy climate preachers are many in number. Since you’re aware of the most prominent, I won’t list them here. Suffice it to say that not a single member of their living-large alliance practices what they preach.

Please allow me to cite one example.

Since leaving the White House, President and Mrs. Obama have amassed an enviable fortune of $100 million. President Obama speaks passionately about how we all must choose to live in smaller homes that require less energy to heat and cool. During a speech in South Africa last year, he criticized rich people for their lavish lifestyles:

“There’s only so big a house you can have; there’s only so many nice trips you can take. I mean, it’s enough.”

Big houses…

The first major purchase the Obamas made as private citizens was an 8,200 sf mansion in the nation’s capitol. They reportedly are buying another spacious mansion, a luxurious oceanside estate in Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe it’s impolite to say, but two high profile climate preachers living in such spacious homes just because they can afford it is not what most people would refer to as of environmental leadership.

Nice trip …

President Obama speaks with deep conviction about how we all must dramatically cut back on leisure trips fueled by carbon energy. As I’m sure you know, Greta, private planes are the most planet-abusive way to fly. Here’s a list of leisure trips President Obama took during the first four months of his retirement:

► The day he left office, he flew 2,200 miles in a near-empty U.S. government Boeing 747 all the way across the continent to Palm Springs, California for his first post-presidency vacation.

► After relaxing in an 11,000 sf villa at the exclusive Thunderbird Heights Resort in nearby Rancho Mirage, he flew 3,300 miles, by private jet, all the way back across the continent to the Caribbean, where he vacationed with Richard Branson on Branson’s private island.

► After that vacation, he flew 6,000 miles, by private jet, for a brief stay at Marlon Brando’s French Polynesian hideaway in Tahiti.

► He left Tahiti, by private jet, on a 2,700-mile trip to Hawaii, where he golfed for a few days before leaving, by private jet, for the 4,800-mile return trip to his DC mansion.

► Once home, he twice traveled 400 roundtrip miles to New York, both times by private jet, the first to take in a play on Broadway, the second to have dinner with U2’s Bono.

► In early May, he flew 8,400 roundtrip miles, by private jet, to Milan, Italy, where a caravan of 14 carbon-powered SUVs took him to a conference to give a speech about—sit down for this—people burning more than their fair share of fossil fuels.

► While in Italy, he flew, by private jet, from Milan to Tuscany, where he unwound at Borgo Finocchieto, an exclusive resort featuring luxury villas measuring out at 9,500 sf.

► After leaving Italy, he returned, by private jet, to his home in DC.

During his first four months of retirement, America’s most recent former president flew more than 27,000 miles, a distance greater that Earth’s circumference. There’s no telling how many private jet leisure trips he’s taken in the last two years.

Other prominent climate preachers indulge in the same type of lavishness as the Obamas. To justify living large, some purchase ‘carbon offsets,’ which allegedly are used for some green purpose, such as planting a few trees. When eco-preacher Prince Harry recently took heat for his incessant use of private jets, Elton John came to his defense by purchasing a carbon offset that purportedly neutralized the atmospheric degradation caused by the private jet flight Harry and his wife took for a leisurely stay at the famous singer’s extravagant home in Nice, France.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems carbon offsets are little more than a clever fig leaf that enables wealthy climate preachers explain away unlimited private jet travel, which cannot occur without using copious quantities of fossil fuel. These mega-rich people rationalize pigging out on fossil fuel energy by purchasing offsets, the cost of which is an infinitesimal drop in their immense financial buckets. Offsets are useful for environmental chest thumping, but do nothing to change the fact that the virtue signaling rich folks who purchase them are nevertheless guilty of burning unconscionable amounts of carbon energy in their insatiable pursuit of lavish living.

Despite your young age, Greta, you have considerable sway with the wealthy elitists whose only contribution toward saving the planet is preaching. Because you walk the walk, you have the moral standing to call them out. And you should, because they’re the same self-indulgent carbon gluttons who terrified you when you were a little girl. Their opulent lifestyles are unmistakable proof that not a single one of them is the least bit concerned that CO2 is destroying the environment.

Call them out, Greta. Make them man up. They owe it to you and the millions of other young people they traumatized, all while burning fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow.

Respectfully and best wishes,

John Eidson
Atlanta, GA

RELATED ARTICLES:

Free Greta Thunberg From Her Cruel Political Exploitation By Leftists

“Climate Change” Is A Hoax

CNN’s Town Hall on Climate Change Revealed More Than Intended

America Tunes Out the Demented Dems

VIDEO: Important LIVE speech by Boris Johnson

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Posted by Eeyore

H/T Oz-Rita

A couple of thoughts about all this.

Unlike Italy, where undemocratic forces sought to thwart an election because they knew that Salvini and the forces for the preservation of the nation state and the polity of Italy would prevail, in the UK, Corbyn et al are attempting to force the existing government to stay in power because the opposition knows he does not have a majority able to put BREXIT through.

Corbyn now claims he wants one, but this is unlikely. However it could be possible he does via the second point.

The left opposes BREXIT not because they think the Right’s claims are wild and conspiratorial, even if they say they do. The want to REMAIN in the EU precisely because they know the Conservatives are correct and the left seeks the dissolution of the nation state and absolute control to be taken by unelected and unrepresentative supranational bodies like the EU and the UN.

So they may actually want a new vote because they think they can treat it as a second referendum on BREXIT. Which in practical terms it would be.

Despite the anti-democratic nature of such an act, (in fact it would be typical of the EU tactic of forcing vote after vote till they get their way) so long as the Corbyn communists can be prevented from rigging the vote, and we know this happens as I believe at one point fairly recently the entire city council of Tower Hamlets had to resign due to massive election fraud, Boris has a very good chance of getting the mandate he needs, even if he shares power with the BREXIT party.

All in all, it is a powerful expose on UK communists that they have so far managed to thwart the referendum of 2016 for so long and nearly derail it. And that they have managed to do it without people realizing who and what they really are, and why they are doing it.

Eeyore for Vlad.

4 Catastrophic Climate Predictions That Never Came True

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Current climate predictions can be terrifying if you don’t know about the previous dire climate claims that amounted to nothing.

If you’re under 50, there’s a good chance you’re expecting to see climate change create chaos and death in your lifetime. Scientists and pundits seem so certain we’re headed for global collapse and their predictions can be terrifying—especially if you’re young enough not to remember the last dozen times they predicted imminent collapse and were wrong. In each case, claims of impending environmental disaster were backed by allegedly irrefutable data and policymakers were encouraged to act before it was too late.

The Prediction: Top climate specialists and environmental activists predicted that “global cooling trends” observed between WWII and 1970 would result in a world “eleven degrees colder in the year 2000 … about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” Bitter winters and floods from “delayed typhoons” would trigger massive drops in food production, followed by widespread famine.

The Prophecies:

  • Newsweek Magazine’s “The Cooling World” Peter Gwynne April 28, 1975 
  • Time Magazine’s “A New Ice Age?” April 28, 1974
  • BBC’s Nigel Calder International Wildlife magazine, 1975
  • Betty Friedan in Harper’s magazine, 1958
  • University of California at Davis professor Kenneth Watt, Earth Day 1974

What Actually Happened: Global cooling trends didn’t continue unabated, and temperatures stabilized. Within a few years, the same alarmists were predicting a life-threatening rise in temperatures, presaging many of the same dire effects on plant and animal life. Those new predictions were continually revised as their “near certainty” collided with the truth year after year, but prophets seem unchastened by their abysmal historical accuracy. Newsweek issued a correction to the 1975 article in 2006.

The Prediction: More women having babies in the developing world was expected to exceed the “carrying capacity” of the earth, experts were certain. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supply we make,” Ehrlich said. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [1970-1980].” Ehrlich predicted that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.” This would lead to “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

The Prophecies:

What Actually Happened: Motivated by the urgent call for population control and fears of famine, India and China performed millions of forced abortions and sterilizations. But the number of people at risk of starvation dropped from 25 percent to 10 percent globally as genetically modified seeds and advances in irrigation improved crop yields. Far from the Great Die-Off, the global population nearly doubled while agricultural capacity soared and rates of starvation plummeted. Ehrlich’s star has continued to rise, though his signature predictions were nonsense, and now holds an endowed chair in Population Studies at Stanford. The millions scapegoated by his fear-mongering have not fared as well.

The Prediction: Ecologists and environmentalists claimed that the buildup of nitrogen, dust, fumes, and other forms of pollution would make the air unbreathable by the mid-1980s. They predicted all urban dwellers would have to don gas masks to survive, that particle clouds would block the majority of sunlight from reaching earth, and that farm yields would drop as dust blotted out the sun.

The Prophecies:

What Actually Happened: When these doomsayers were pronouncing the imminent death of our atmosphere, the rate of air pollution had already been falling for most of the world, usually in the absence of dedicated policy changes. Developments like air filtration, as well as an overall decline in household pollutants (like the smoke from cooking with coal or wood) greatly reduced the health risks of the particles that remained. Increased adoption of fossil fuels and electricity grids, rather than traditional stoves, accelerated the improvements.

The Prediction: Alleged experts in biology and zoology predicted that of all species of animals alive in 1970, at least 75 percent would be extinct by 1995. They blamed human activities like hunting and farming for shrinking wild habitats and cited pollution and climate change as key drivers of the new extinctions. Paul Ehrlich claimed “[By 1985] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

The Prophecies:

What Actually Happened: You may have noticed that earth has not lost three-quarters of its 8.7 million species, and indeed total biomass continues to grow. 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are already extinct, and natural rates of extinction predict we might lose anywhere from 200 to 2,000 species per year without any human intervention. Since 2000, we’ve identified fewer than 20.

The language surrounding these various environmental disasters sounds much like Wednesday night’s town hall, and yet each thesis has faded from public consciousness, and the fear-mongers faced no accountability for their misplaced alarmism. Before we make unprecedented sacrifices to fight a climate phantom, let’s review the credibility of claims that the end is near—but really, this time.

COLUMN BY

Laura Williams

Dr. Laura Williams  teaches communication strategy to undergraduates and executives. She is a passionate advocate for critical thinking, individual liberties, and the Oxford Comma.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Myth That Our Planet Faces an Overpopulation Crisis

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Stop It, America. Politicians Can Not Make Our Lives Better

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Here’s the deal, if you are looking to this president, or you were looking to the past president, or you are looking to a future president to make your life better you’re on a fool’s errand. It was the furthest thing from the minds of the Founders and Framers that any individual should have such power and sway.

If you are looking to Congress — this Congress or a past Congress or a future Congress — to make your life better you’re on a fool’s errand. It was maybe the second furthest thing from the minds of the Founders and Framers that any part of the federal government could so greatly impact your life.

There is very little government can do to make your life better. There are quite a few things government can do to make your life worse. (See: All of history.) Most of your problems in life are going to be up to you to solve, to improve or at least to deal with.

For instance, if you want to make more money you’re going to either have to work harder and/or longer, or get training or education to get a better paying job. And if you keep making the same decisions you’ve made all along, and you’re 35 and stuck working at Walmart at minimum wage, there’s nothing the government can or should do for you. You need to change your choices to change your future. If the government steps in to improve your future for you, it inevitably begins a cascade of events that makes many lives worse, including yours eventually.

When governments try to solve poverty by giving poor people a little more money each month, they actually end up keeping them subsistent on government largesse and locked in a hopeless cycle. This has been demonstrated for 50 years now. And the government forcibly takes other people’s money to do it; lose-lose.

The best overall situation is when we can all act freely; free people exchanging goods and services for money freely in markets that are both free and competitive. That simple, relational structure has lifted, literally, billions out of poverty in the past 40 years. Government’s primary role was to stay out of the way, with a small role in making sure there were no monopolies and there were courts to settle contractual disputes.

This is well-documented through our history, but it is not well-known among our population. Schools, universities and the media are the primary culprits in purveying this ignorance. There may be a role for a temporary safety net, but because politicians are politicians it always grows, such as what we have now with enormous entitlements and transfer payments.

But promising more giveaways often garners votes. Some would say buys votes.

So naturally, we have a lot of politicians saying that they can, and will, make things more fair for you, make things better for you and give you this, that and everything you want. Just vote for them. Well not to burst your bubble but there’s nothing they can give you except that they take it from someone else, through taxes now or taxes later to pay off deficit spending now. And eventually they’ll be taking it from you, too, unless you stay at the bottom in poverty, in which case the government will in due time run out of other peoples’ money and then you are lost, too. More lose-lose.

As Margaret Thatcher said: “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

The better way, the only proven way, is the collective intelligence of hundreds of millions of Americans, and even billions of people around the world. This is almost infinitely greater than any group of central-planning politicians. (See Russia’s five-year plans, East Germany’s junk new cars, Maoist China’s everything, Venezuela’s oil.)

So when you hear all these politicians promising a plan for this and a plan for that, trillions here and trillions there, remember that the Great Society government plan to end poverty starting in the late 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson resulted in the transfer of $22 trillion from working Americans to poor Americans. It was not charity. It was government force, benefitting politicians along the way, but no one else. The result was that as of today, there is virtually no change in the poverty rate. More welfare programs will have the same net effect until all of the money is gone.

No politician is going to improve your life. That is going to be up to you and your choices. The American dream does not come from government; it relies on a constrained government. It then comes via each American exercising their individual God-given natural rights in liberty.

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

September 17th Israeli Election: Will the Right snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…again?

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The continued existence of the Left as a viable force in Israeli politics, despite the manifest failure of its political credo, is the gravest indictment of the Israeli Right.

For by… faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good. – William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850).

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the upcoming September 17 elections is the fact that they are taking place at all—after the “ Right” managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of almost certain victory . But no less astounding is the fact that the “Left” actually has plausible chance of winning them!

(Of course, in the Israeli political context, the Left- Right rift is not along the usual welfare state vs free market divide in the socio-economic sphere; but more along the dove-hawk split on security and foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with the former advocating Palestinian statehood and far-reaching territorial concessions by Israel, and the latter opposing them.)

Lack of intellectual depth and daring

Indeed, there can be no greater indictment of the political incompetence and impotence of the “Right” than fact that the Left still remains a viable force in Israeli politics. After all, not only has their entire political credo been proven, beyond shadow of reasonable doubt, to be a disastrous blunder that has wrought death and devastation on Jew and Arab alike, but the Right has been totally vindicated in warning of the calamitous consequences that the “Left’s” patently ill-founded folly would precipitate.

Perhaps more than anything, its failure to vanquish the “Left” reflects the lack of intellectual depth of the Right—and even more so, a lack of intellectual daring.

It is true that Israel has progressed and developed almost beyond recognition under Likud-led coalitions, which had held power the for first two decades of this century—except for the five years of the brief Ehud Barak incumbency and the slightly longer one of Ehud Olmert. In terms of its physical parameters, its architecture, its infrastructure, in terms of its economic stature, its cultural achievements, its diplomatic relations and its military prowess, it is almost unrecognizable from what it was in the last decade of the preceding century.

Yet despite all of this, the “Right” has not been able to inflict strategic defeat on its failed political rivals on the “Left”. In this regard, it is important to note that the point is not merely to defeat the “Left” at the polls but to remove any thought of implementation of its perilous prescription from the political discourse.

Inexplicable ideological capitulation

Indeed, in the wake of Oslo and up until recent years, the “Right” focused its energies (rightly) in condemning the dangerous defects of the concessionary policy of political appeasement and territorial withdrawal that the “Left” had embarked upon—without ever offering an actionable prescription of its own.

As a result, it found itself unable to respond effectively to the pointed and pertinent question from its adversaries on the “Left”: “So what’s your alternative?”

With no comprehensive, countervailing policy paradigm to promote or defend, the “Right” found itself gradually forced to give way under the weight of this irksome question, and to adopt increasing portions of the failed formula it had once rejected.

This process culminated in 2009 at Bar Ilan University, when Palestinian statehood was officially—albeit under duress—embraced.

Having crossed the ideological Rubicon into the “Land of the Left,” the “Right” found itself in what, for it, was largely uncharted territory.

This ideological capitulation by the “Right” is totally inexplicable—for it came about after all its censure of the “Left’s” wildly reckless doctrine had proven totally justified.

After all, by 2009, the jury was no longer out—or at least, should not have been. None of the promises of sweeping benefits, pledged by the architects of the land-for-peace initiative, launched by the “Left” over a decade and a half previously, had been fulfilled; while all the perils, warned of by its opponents on the “Right”, had indeed materialized.

Lebanonization or Balkanization?

Unwilling, or unable, to base its own strategic paradigm on an independent analysis of Israel’s strategic imperatives and deriving a consequent comprehensive policy prescription from that analysis, the “Right” took the “Left’s”  paradigm as a conceptual point of departure and attempted to formulate its alternative as a negation thereof.

The result was an unfortunate and unconvincing batch of proposals that were easily exposed to be either a formula for:

(a) The Lebanonization of Israeli society (by annexation of all of Judea-Samaria, together with is Arab residents remaining part of Israeli society); or

(b) The Balkanization of Judea-Samaria (by partial annexation—with the overwhelming bulk of the Arab population left encapsulated in disconnected, quasi-autonomous enclaves, whose orderly administration would be all but impossible).

Indeed, any dispassionate assessment of Israel’s minimal strategic needs will reveal that, to endure as the nation-state of the Jewish people, it must adequately address at least two imperatives—the geographic imperative and the demographic imperative.

This is almost a self-evident truism since if it does not, it will either be untenable geographically, or demographically—or both.

The former precludes any withdrawals west of the Jordan River, significant enough to facilitate a self-governing Palestinian entity; while the latter precludes the inclusion of a large, recalcitrant Arab minority within the permanent population of Israel—whether fully enfranchised or not.

For more details of the perils of full and partial annexation—see here and here respectively.

Dangerous & detrimental symmetry

Clearly then, the geographic imperative rules out the “Left”-wing prescription for a Palestinian state; while the demographic imperative rules out the alternatives usually proffered by the “Right”—for full or partial annexation of Judea-Samaria together with the Arab population resident therein.

Thus, while the “Left” is prepared to imperil Israel geographically to preserve it demographically; the Right is prepared to imperil it demographically to preserve it geographically.

It has been the Right’s inability to eliminate this perceived vulnerability to the charge of promoting a policy that exposes Israel to no less a peril than the concessionary policy of the “Left”, which has breathed life into what should have been, by any rationale criterion, the long lifeless shell of its political adversaries.

For, unless it breaks away from unlikely proposals that entail “domesticating” an addition to Israel’s permanent population of around two million hostile and recalcitrant non-Jewish inhabitants, drenched with decades of incandescent Judeocidal hatred, the Right will not be able to dispel claims of a detrimental symmetry between the dangers entailed in its policy prescriptions and those of the “Left’s”.

For that, it is not enough to point out the flaws, however fatal, of the “Left”.  It must present the public with a plausible and persuasive alternative that does not merely replace a geographic peril with a demographic one.

Until it does that, the “Left”, in defiance of all rationality and reality, will remain a viable political force, with a tangible chance of retaking the reins of power. That is the gravest indictment of the political “Right” in Israel.

Epilogue

Of course, one need not be endowed with exceptional powers of deductive analysis to reach the inescapable conclusion that the only non-kinetic policy that can effectively address Israel’s twin imperatives of geography and demography—in order for it to survive as the nation-state of the Jewish people—is that of a large-scale initiative for incentivized emigration of the non-belligerent Palestinian population to third party countries.

Happily, the necessity of such a policy seems to dawning on increasing sectors of the political “Right” in Israel—see here, here, here, and here – although, regrettably, it is doubtful whether its promotion will play a significant part in the upcoming elections.

(Just how the Right should go about advancing this crucially important policy—and the public discourse on it—in an upcoming column.)

Sadly, until September 17, there is little to do in this regard but to wait and see whether, once again, the “Right” will snatch defeat from what should be, without a shadow of doubt, the jaws of certain victory.

© All rights reserved.

U.S. Road To Hell Is Paved With Gun-Grabbing Intentions by Francis Marion

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America’s largest retailer, Walmart, is the next to succumb to the anti-gun movement following the high-profile shootings over the past few weeks.

Walmart has decided to remove all “handgun” and “short barreled rifle” ammunition from their shelves in order to focus their sales on ammunition more appropriate for hunting purposes. This should not be a surprise considering the recent push to appease voters in the Democrat primary battleground, along with the relentlessly anti-gun focused media coverage of these killings.

The firearms industry will not suffer as a result of Walmart’s decision. There are plenty of available outlets for purchasing ammunition. The greatest concern for many 2nd Amendment supporters is the level of ignorance in anti-gun circles, from retail stores to the media to politicians.

First and foremost, America’s favorite rifle platform is a highly modular device with hundreds of variations, configurations, and caliber options. So what does Walmart mean by “pistol and short barreled rifle ammunition?”

The AR-15 rifle which is traditionally chambered in 5.56 NATO or 223 Remington rounds has been extended well beyond the ammunition that had been the standard cartridge of the U.S. military and her allies for the past 60 years. In the past 20 years, the AR-15 has been modified to accept more than 50 additional calibers to include popular hunting and defensive pistol cartridges, not to mention the several dozen calibers associated with the larger cousin of the AR-15, the AR-10.

Lastly, hunting cartridges far exceed the performance of small arms cartridges like the 5.56 nato round. For example, one of the most popular hunting calibers, the 30-06, saw military service for seven decades and is still in common use today. The 30-06 cartridge has an effective range double that of most modern small arms cartridges.

All of this means that Walmart’s decision, along with virtually every political proposal, doesn’t truly impact anything more than to put on display the dangerous level of ignorance on the subject.

So where do we go from here?

It is incumbent upon 2nd Amendment supporters to educate those who do not understand the finer points of the gun debate, from the gun terms to the history and meaning of the 2nd Amendment.

We have begun our descent down the slippery slope of citizen disarmament and an infringement on our basic natural rights outlined within our Constitution. As virtue-signaling policies fail to address the greater issues in this country that lead to mass shootings, the woke left will take advantage of the next tragedy to try to grab the next mile of Americans’ rights.

ABOUT FRANCIS MARION

Francis Marion is a nine-year veteran of the U.S. Army, as an Infantryman and Airborne volunteer. He led a squad fighting in the Iraqi and Afghan campaigns. He was wounded during a deployment to Paktika Province in Afghanistan and medically retired in 2016. He is currently transitioning into a medical career while working as a small arms repairmen, firearms instructor and advisor to security professionals.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Why the Right to Bear Arms Is an Individual Right

Dumb Arguments About Gun Control

To Promote Gun Control, AOC Just Accused Dan Crenshaw’s Friends of Being Violent Domestic Abusers

Dear Walmart, It’s Time We Start Seeing Other People

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Video Special Report — Bishop Busted on Secret Audio Tapes

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Buffalo bishop remains defiant.

TRANSCRIPT

The beleaguered bishop of Buffalo, Richard Malone, is now facing furious calls for his resignation.

The calls are reaching fever pitch following the release of secret audio recordings revealing that Malone himself thinks he will not be able to survive as bishop much longer.

The tapes were recorded secretly by Malone’s own personal secretary, Fr. Ryszard Biernat, during a conversation between the two men.

In that conversation, Malone confesses that his own staff is saying it’s time to go and that he does not think he can survive this latest scandal.

Despite what he said in the secret recordings, Malone continued in what critics call his arrogance, holding a press conference where he declared he is staying.

The specific scandal is tied directly to Christ the King Seminary in Buffalo and involves yet more charges of homosexual harassment of seminarians — and the reappointment by Malone of accused priests.

Malone has tried unsuccessfully for a year to keep the lid on the burgeoning scandal that has been decades in the making.

His repeated attempts to cover up, however, have blown up in his face, owing to a series of whistleblower disclosures made to local Buffalo media.

It got so bad that CBS News’ 60 Minutes aired a segment last October interviewing whistleblower Siobhan O’Connor, who was Malone’s private secretary and who had released hundreds of pages of internal documents proving Malone was covering up abusers.

It was less than a month after the 60 Minutes segment that Church Militant caught up with Malone in the Detroit airport asking him about his reinstatement of a three-times accused homopredator priest.

Malone, traveling back from the national conference of bishops meeting in Baltimore was accompanied by his spokeswoman, Kathy Spangler, who attempted to run interference for the bishop and physically block our access.

Spangler is key here because Malone brought her on staff last year specifically for damage control.

She is part of Malone’s inner circle and reports are she too was saying resignation was imminent.

As the scandals erupted last year, Malone stood defiant, refusing calls back then for him to step down.

The latest case involves the striking story of Fr. Jeffrey Nowak, who is alleged to have broken the seal of confession and made sexual propositions to second-year seminarian Matthew Bojanowski.

Bojanowski went to Fr. Biernat, Malone’s secretary, and told him everything about Nowak’s harassment.

Father Biernat then secretly recorded meetings with Malone where the case of Fr. Nowak was discussed.

In an Aug. 2 damage control meeting with his inner circle, Malone comes straight out with his deep concerns about Fr. Nowak.

Yet, after being caught on tape freely admitting he fully comprehends the issue of Nowak’s homopredation of Bojanowski, Malone plotted a course to keep everything covered up.

In a disturbing turn of events, Buffalo insiders tell us that Malone is trying to cover for Nowak because Nowak has dirt on Malone and is using it as blackmail against him.

While details have been relayed to us here at Church Militant, we have not yet been able to confirm those, so we will hold off on reporting any specifics. But that is at least the talk folding into this scandal.

In either case, Malone was keeping details of Nowak under wraps and even issued a midnight statement last night to try and cover his tracks.

What’s clear is that Malone’s history in Buffalo, where he inherited a polluted seminary which was part of the South American gay seminarian pipeline, a story Church Militant broke last summer, has been nothing less than abominable.

All sources in Buffalo report that it’s no longer a question of if, but when, the lying, cheating Malone will have to step down.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Buffalo Abuse Cover-Up Allegations: Will ‘Vos Estis’ Be Applied?

Homosexuality and Catholic Decline

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Why an Arab-Israeli Peace may be Impossible

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According to an article on www.aljazeera.net (Arabic version) of 28 July 2019, the Jordanian “artists union” demanded that all Jordanian actors and technicians working on a certain film set in the Petra region should withdraw from the project–even though the producer of the film is himself, an Arab.

The reason given for pulling all the Jordanian actors and technicians out of the film project was the claim by the union that “it falsified the history of the Levant region, especially Petra and southern Jordan, and was a security threat to Petra and southern Jordan.”

The producer, himself an Arab, argued that the film is based on historical facts and it will be filmed as the script is written because it will not be shown in the Arab world, but in America.  Yet, the Jordanian actors, and the union, have all stuck to their guns in rejecting this film because of the belief that it “gives the Jews rights in the Petra region.”

So, what is the storyline of this script that so offends Jordanian sensibilities?

According to the producer, the script, though based on historical facts, was drawn from a “fictional story” published by the “Arab Institute for Studies” in Beirut, and was well-known in Jordan’s capital ‘Amman a while back.  The story is about a young Jordanian boy who discovered a slab of stone with ancient Hebrew writing on it.  He then turns the stone over to the Jordanian department of antiquities.  The plot then revolves around the Department of Antiquities trying to confront the criminal gangs that trade in stolen antiquities, while also trying to fend off the Israeli Mossad trying to intervene in the matter.

Looks like a good patriotic script for Jordan, but what the naysayers are all objecting to is the very idea of an ancient Hebrew inscription even existing in Jordan.

In actual fact, such an inscription on a stone slab stele was found in that region in the 1860s.  It is known as the Mesha stone.  The Moabite king Mesha (Moabite for “Moses”) had this stele inscribed and erected (as a sort of ancient “Facebook page”) complaining about their god Khamosh deserting them and allowing “Omri,” the king of Israel (northern ten tribes) and his son to achieve hegemony over them for forty years, and then Khamosh giving king Mesha the strength to win back lost territories and then some.  This stele was written sometime in the 9th century B.C., and the basic facts are confirmed in 2nd Kings 3:4-8.

Most scholars of North West Semitic languages (Hebrew, Amorite, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Phoenician, Moabite, and Edomite) believe that the Moabites were illiterate and that the Moabite king had to hire an Israelite or Jewish scribe to inscribe the stele.  So, in other words, the famous Mesha Stele is an historical example of an ancient Hebrew inscription, written by a Jew, or an Israelite (not the same thing), discovered in southern Jordan and which the Jordanian government itself is demanding its return to Jordan from France (where it is currently on display in the Louvre in Paris).

And, yet, we now see Jordanians protecting a film that depicts exactly that sort of thing and in a fictional story no less!

In a possibly related story, on 03 August, the Saudi-owned al-arabiyya TV channel reported that Jordan has issued a prohibition against all Israelis from praying at the tomb of Aaron which is located in that same general area of southern Jordan.

ANALYSIS:

What these stories tell us is that there is so much hatred in Jordan towards Israel in particular and Jews in general that the Jordanians (most of whom are actually Palestinians) deny the existence of the historical fact of Jews and Israelites having ever passed through Jordan during all the centuries that they lived in the region.  In other words, their current belief system demands the erasure of all history that predates Islam in the region.

And this goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian issue.  Arab propagandists have long been trying to rewrite the history of the Levant to erase any evidence of Jewish and/or Israelite presence in the region–ever.  This is in spite of the fact that their own Qur’an, as well as early Arabic histories, make countless references to the bani Israel and repeat many of the Old Testament stories almost verbatim.

This hatred-generated denial of history makes it impossible for Jordanian Palestinians, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to ever accept the state of Modern Israel as an entity that deserves to continue to exist.

The only possible solution to this impasse would be a Western supported and managed program (using radio, TV, and the internet) to “force feed” the history of the region to the region’s Arab and Palestinian citizens until they come to accept the reality of the historicity of the Jewish and Israelite presence in what is now Israel and the West Bank, and the influences these ancient Jewish and Israelite communities had on their neighboring cultures.

The “D” in Democrat stands for “Delusional”

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A friend sent me the following in an email:

When one tries to “reason” with a lefty democrat, remember you are dealing with a person that believes that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man and that such a delusion should be encouraged, not discouraged.  Discouragement of the delusion is considered immoral and bigoted. Thus our society has unnecessary dilemmas concerning bathrooms,  athletic competition at all levels, and “pronoun” controversies subjecting ourselves to all manner of laws, rules, regulation and more needless government control.

Here is a suggestion to break the left’s ridiculous gender ideology and denial of biological reality.  President Trump should make a declaration that he is identifying as a woman.  The left will have to admit the absurdity of their gender ideology or accept and celebrate “Donna Trump” as the first woman President, thus beating Hillary, Liz Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand to the glorious goal of one of their “female firsts”.  Furthermore, if he remains married to Melania he will also be the first gay president and the first lesbian president. He will also be the first lesbian president married to an immigrant! What a most glorious event for the democrats to celebrate.

This, in a nut shell, explains just one of the many delusions that have become part of the Democratic Party’s platform. Ask any Democrat, and even some Republicans, about “gender identity” and you will get as many different answers as their are gender pronoun choices on Facebook.

Why there’s even going to be the second annual International Gender Pronoun Day on October 16, 2019. International Gender Pronoun Day, “seeks to make respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace.”

One can lose their job, be arrested and even be fined up to $250,000 for addressing someone by the wrong gender pronoun.

Science is clear, there are two sexes XX (female) and XY (male). There is no gay gene.

But science only counts when Democrats want it to count, like in climate change.

The Delusion of Gender Politics

I recently wrote about identity politics. Identity politics began with Black feminists in 1977 as a socialist movement to further the “destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”

Gender politics has the same goals but adds to it the destruction of scriptural beliefs of the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Here are quotes from the Old Testament, New Testament and Qur’an on homosexuality:

  • Genesis 19:4-7 Before they could lie down, all the men of Sodom and its outskirts, both young and old, surrounded the house. They called out to Lot and asked, “Where are the men who came to visit you tonight? Bring them out to us so we can have sex with them!” Lot went outside to them, shut the door behind him, and said, “I urge you, my brothers, don’t do such a wicked thing.”
  • Leviticus 18:22 You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
  • Amir ul-Mu’minīn ‘Ali (a.s.) has said: “Sodomy is a Greater Sin and carries punishment when a man mounts upon another man but does not penetrate. If he penetrates, it is kufr”.

Destroy God and replace Him with government is the ultimate goal. One of the minority groups (less than 4%) that want to destroy every culture and its religious foundation are gays. They do it in the name of “equal rights.” They use words such as “pride.”

Equal rights, pride and gender pronouns are oxymoronic.

The LGBTQ community wants equal rights for them but not for you. The LGBTQ and their allies (i.e. Antifa) protest against straight pride parades being held in cities like Boston. The LGBTQ community wants you to guess what is their preferred pronoun and if you get it wrong they want to punish you.

Each of these oxymorons violates the U.S. Constitution.

Destroy the U.S. Constitution bit-by-bit and you will eventually destroy America. Once this is done you can then fundamentally transform the culture as you wish.

Making personal pronouns commonplace requires that the idea of heterosexuality be erased.

Just as identity politics has destroyed the nuclear family (especially in the black community) so to does gender politics destroy the traditional family, defined as marriage between one man and one woman.

Destruction of the traditional family means that the new patriarchy is government.

Conclusion

The primary outcome of this socialist/LGBTQ identity politics is the destruction of the nuclear family.

Delusional right? But happening.

© All rights reserved.

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Ruling in Minnesota Wedding Videographers’ Case Properly Prioritizes First Amendment Rights

Did Jefferson Really Edit Out the Miracles from his Bible?

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Once in a while, the myth that Thomas Jefferson edited down the Bible in order to remove the miraculous, resurfaces. He supposedly did this because he was essentially an unbeliever who thought that religion had no place in the public square.

A couple of years ago, I teamed up with a pastor from Jefferson’s home town of Charlottesville, Virginia, Dr. Mark Beliles, to write a book on the faith of our third president. The book is Doubting Thomas: The Religious Life and Legacy of Thomas Jefferson (Morgan James, 2014).

There are two main points to our book.

  1. Whatever serious doubts he may have privately held later in life, Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic. In fact, when he was most productive and helpful to the country, he was from all outward appearances a practicing Christian. This would include when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1777, passed in 1786), which says that because of the example of the “holy author of our religion” (Jesus), people should be free to believe or disbelieve.
  2. Regardless of whatever theological unorthodoxy he held (later in life), he did not believe in the separation of God and government—which is the way the ACLU and other secularists try to portray him. For example, on a regular basis, when he was president, Jefferson attended the Christian worship services held at the U.S. Capitol building—services he approved of, which continued long after he was president.

As president, Jefferson took time one night in 1804 to cull through the sayings of Jesus as found in the four Gospels. Why did he do this?

The title he himself put on this unpublished work gives us a clue: The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted From the Account of His Life and Doctrines as Given by Matthew, Mark, Luke & John; Being an Abridgement of the New Testament for the Use of the Indians Unembarrassed with Matters of Fact or Faith Beyond the Level of Their Comprehensions.

This abridgment, clearly intended for the Indians, was not a biography of Jesus, only His “philosophy” as the title states. As such it left out most material found in the Gospels that did not fit the goal of compiling a “philosophy,” but there is no evidence of a motive to delete all of the miracles or evidences of Jesus’ divinity.

As our third president, Jefferson had made the largest land addition in American history with the Louisiana Purchase. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of Native-Americans, many of whom had never heard about Jesus, were added to American territory. He wanted them to benefit from the moral teachings of Jesus Christ.

Jefferson believed:

“Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.” (Letter to William Canby, September 18, 1813).

Much thought in the Christian world has gone toward important theological matters like the nature of Christ (as fully divine and fully human), and the nature of the Godhead—Three Persons, One God (the Trinity). Jefferson felt (perhaps condescendingly) that such matters of theology and philosophy were beyond the Indians. As a result, he wanted to simplify Christ’s teachings. He may have been misguided, but there’s no evidence that his motive was secularization or anti-supernaturalism, as many today claim.

Jefferson wanted the Native-Americas benefit from Jesus’ moral teachings–things we take for granted, like: the golden rule (i.e., do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Matthew 7:12) or the command to love one another, as Christ loves us (John 13:33).

There is no evidence I am aware of that Jefferson ever published “The Philosophy of Jesus.” There is evidence that around 1819, he created a second version of his private book, this time in English (the King James Version), in French, in Latin, and in Greek (the language of the Gospels). It was only published long after his death.

Apparently, he used this compilation of the teachings of Jesus for his own personal edification.

Here are some miracles that remain the so-called “Jefferson Bible”:

  • Jesus sent His disciples to “heal the sick,” “cleanse the lepers,” “raise the dead,” “cast out devils” (Matthew 10:8).
  • He healed a man on the Sabbath (Luke 14:1-6);
  • He raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead (Matthew 9:18-25);
  • He healed the bleeding woman (Matthew 9:20-22);
  • Jesus healed two blind men (Matthew 9:27-31).

Jefferson’s approach to the Bible, to strip away some of its rich doctrine in Christology or in the beauty of the Godhead, is not commendable or worthy of imitation. But contrary to what some atheists say today, Jefferson was not on a crusade to edit the miracles out of the Bible.

The Black Roots of Identity Politics

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Identity politics began with the the 1977 publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement. The statement was written by “black feminists” with this goal:

Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy.

The Combahee River Collective Statement reads:

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. [Emphasis added]

Merriam-Webster defines identity politics as:

politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group.

The Democratic Party has fully embraced identity politics in all of its forms.

Those who embrace identity politics are fickle and can, and many times do, either turn against one another or their political party. We are seeing this happen since the 2016 Presidential election.

My Way or the Highway

My way or the highway is a predominantly American idiom that dates back to the 1970s. It is an ultimatum like “take it or leave it.” You’re either with me or against me.

Identity politics is tearing the Democratic Party apart.

Identity politics died on November 8th, 2016 according to the Left Voice’s Albert L. Terry III. In his column A Few Words on Marxism and Identity Politics Terry wrote:

The year 2016 will be remembered as the year that identity politics, as it is commonly understood, began the long descent into irrelevancy. The first Black President that saw conditions grow worse for Black Americans and Clinton’s corporate identity politics saw electoral defeat. We must build a Marxist identity politics, which recognizes the special oppression that comes with race and the consequent importance of fighting racism head-on. [Emphasis added]

Terry says identity politics is irrelevant but believes that only Marxism will help restore identity politics to its glory. What Terry wrote on January 8, 2017 is coming true today in the Democratic Party.

The Black Rot that has Infected Identity Politics

The key question: What are the outcomes of the effort to “liberate” the black feminists.

According to according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data:

The share of U.S. children living with an unmarried parent has more than doubled since 1968, jumping from 13% to 32% in 2017. That trend has been accompanied by a drop in the share of children living with two married parents, down from 85% in 1968 to 65%. Some 3% of children are not living with any parents.

The Pew report notes:

More than half (58%) of black children are living with an unmarried parent – 47% with a solo mom. At the same time, 36% of Hispanic children are living with an unmarried parent, as are 24% of white children. The share of Asian children living with unmarried parents is markedly lower (13%).

The primary outcome of this socialist/black feminist/identity politics is the destruction of the nuclear family.

Socialism, true to form, equally shares the life long misery of single parenthood. We are now in a time when there is no real liberation, rather there is government patriarchy in the form of welfare programs. Welfare is dependence and not freedom. Only jobs, created by capitalists, and a Constitutional Republican form of government can defeat imperialism.

The single parent family is neither valuable nor autonomous, rather it is dependent on government largess. 

The black roots of identity politics has infected the entire family tree, which is now rotten to its core.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: About one-third of U.S. children are living with an unmarried parent

RELATED VIDEO: Bill Whittle – Racism – Democrats and Republicans switch sides?

News Flash: Legally Buying a Gun Isn’t So Easy After All

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Earlier this month, an intrepid news reporter for Business Insider decided to see for herself how easy it was to get a gun from Walmart, even as gun control activists were calling on the retail giant to stop selling firearms. She then recounted her experience in an admirably straightforward article.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out so well for her or for gun control advocates who hope to convince Americans that guns are just too easy to get.

There’s a whole genre of gun control rhetoric centered around all the things that are supposedly more difficult to get or to do in America than buying a gun.

Barack Obama was a frequent practitioner of this trope, insisting guns were easier to get than computers, books, and even fresh vegetables.

One author went so far as to claim it was easier to buy a gun in America than to take a shower or to find toilet paper in a public bathroom.

Of course, America is a big country, and not everyone has the same experience buying guns from sea to shining sea. In New York City, for example, buying a firearm will take an eligible person many months and hundreds of dollars, apart from the price of the gun itself. In the nation’s capital, you can’t shop for firearms at all, because there are no stocking firearm dealers. And if you want to buy a gun in San Francisco, you’re just plain out of luck, as the local officialdom ran off the last dealer some time ago.

But Hayley Peterson conducted her investigation in Virginia, one of the more straightforward places to buy a gun. Virginia has stricter laws than the U.S. government for firearm purchases. But an eligible person who comes prepared to a gun shop can still hope to fill out a couple of forms, receive a timely answer from the Commonwealth’s “instant check” system, and leave with the firearm at least in the same day, if not considerably sooner.

Private businesses, however, may have their own policies that add additional time and complications to this process, as Ms. Peterson would soon discover.

Ms. Peterson was not being particularly choosy about the gun she wanted to buy. She understood that Walmart does not sell handguns or semi-automatic rifles. Her main criteria, it seems, was to find the most inexpensive gun she could.

Her first hurdle was that Walmart does not advertise its gun sales, and only some of its stores sell guns. In fact, Ms. Peterson learned that neither Walmart’s website nor even the corporate personnel who answered its telephones would provide information on which Walmart stores stock firearms. It took her hours and dozens of calls before she found a location that acknowledged it sold guns onsite.

When Ms. Peterson did find a Walmart stocking guns, the selection was limited. The guns were also locked behind glass and strung together with zips ties and a metal cable, so customers could not handle them without a sales associate’s assistance.

Ms. Peterson was able to inspect a gun on her first trip to Walmart. She did not get to complete her transaction, however, because a manager told her there was no one working that day who was authorized to sell firearms. Only select Walmart employees go through the enhanced vetting and special training necessary to be eligible to sell firearms.

Ms. Peterson returned to the same Walmart store two days later. This time there was an authorized seller on hand.

But before the reporter could even finish the paperwork, the employee had identified a problem. The address on Ms. Peterson’s driver’s license, which she was using as her official form of identification for the purchase, didn’t match her actual home address. Thus, Ms. Peterson would have to provide additional substantiation of her actual address for the transaction to proceed.

That’s the point at which the young reporter decided to abandon her attempt to buy a gun at Walmart.

Her assessment: “Overall, the experience left me with the impression that buying a gun at Walmart is more complicated than I expected, and that Walmart takes gun sales and security pretty seriously.”

Welcome to your first experience with American gun culture, Hayley Peterson. Complexity, security, and taking rules seriously are par for the course.

In fact, law-abiding gun owners have been routinely and patiently jumping through a variety of governmental and private sector hoops to exercise their right to keep and bear arms throughout modern history.

But when gun control proposals focus on the hoops for their own sake, rather than as safeguards against the diversion of guns for nefarious purposes, then it’s time for gun owners to take a stand in favor of their rights. With more and more gun control proponents admitting that what they really want is to keep guns away from everybody, law-abiding or not, and even take away the guns people already own, this is more necessary than ever.

As for Ms. Peterson, she didn’t get her gun, but she did produce an honest and revealing article.

And even we might admit that it’s easier to get a gun than to get honest reporting on firearms out of most of the “mainstream” media.

RELATED ARTICLES:

NASCAR Takes a Hard Left

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NRA Statement on Walmart’s Decision to Change Firearms Policy

California: Anti-Gun Legislation Passes Appropriations Committees and Heads to the Floor

EDITORS NOTE: This NRA-ILA column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

INTEL REPORT: Israel-Lebanon, Israel-Egypt-Hamas, Japan-America

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ISRAEL-LEBANON

Last week we reported that the Foreign Minister of Bahrain, Shaykh Khaled bin Ahmad bin Muhammad Aal Khalifa, tweeted that Israel has a right to defend itself, in response to the flap over the two Israeli drones that violated Lebanon’s airspace, one of which carried explosives and took out an Hizbollah office in south Beirut.  In this context, the Bahraini FM stressed that since Iran “has declared war against all of us,” implying that any attack against any of their IRGC entities, their Lebanese Hizbollah, their “popular mobilization” militias in Iraq, or their Houthi arm in Yemen, constitutes “self defense.”

This week, according to www.al-jazeera.net, the Bahraini FM has doubled down by directly accusing Hizbollah of escalating the situation by attacking Israel (in reference to Hizbollah’s taking out an Israeli military vehicle this weekend).  Then he took it a step further by accusing the Lebanese government itself of being complicit in the escalation.  This would stem from the fact that the “Lebanese government” (which includes Sunni and Christian members) is essentially hostage to Hizbollah).

Therefore, according to the Bahraini FM’s reasoning, the Lebanese government is responsible and “any aggression by one state against another is forbidden by International Law” and is subjecting its citizens to the subsequent danger.

The Foreign Ministry of Bahrain then issued a formal statement ordering all of its citizens in Lebanon to leave immediately.

The above statements by the Bahraini FM were also reported on the Saudi-owned www.al-arabiyya TV, a day later.

ISRAEL-EGYPT-HAMAS

Israel sharing sensitive Counter-Terrorism (CT) intelligence with its arch enemy, the terrorist entity of Hamas?  Ridiculous!  Or is it?  According to an article published by

al-Monitor, a Washington, DC-based news entity founded by a Christian Arab-American from Lebanon/Syria, that is exactly what is happening.  The author of this al-Monitor article is one Shlomi Eldar, an Israel-based journalist who for the past two decades has covered the Palestinian Authority and Gaza for Israel’s TV channels 1 and 10.

Here is how this has come about:  Israel and Egypt have been sharing intelligence information for several years.  At first this intelligence information included CT on Hamas, which both countries considered to be a terrorist group.  Egypt had declared the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist group in 2013 with former General as-Sisi assuming the presidency of Egypt’s nominally civilian government.  Since Hamas was founded as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), Hamas was automatically included in that designation.

Furthermore, Egypt has been having trouble with Hamas in terms of cross-border smuggling of weapons, drugs, and jihadis.  As a part of this Egypt-Hamas contention Egypt had closed its border with Gaza and joined with Israel in enforcing an embargo on it.  Egypt had also accused Hamas of aiding the anti-government protests and terrorist activities in Egypt’s Sinai.

So, what gives?  What led to both Egypt and Israel altering their positions on Hamas? Or vice-versa?

For one thing, according to Mr. Eldar, Hamas has been moving closer to Egypt in order the get the embargo eased.  Egypt, for its part is wanting to woo Hamas to get its aid and cooperation vis-à-vis the ongoing CT war in the Sinai, and beyond that, to entice it on board a possible future pan-Palestinian peace deal with Israel.

However, as Hamas has moved closer to Egypt, including pretending to disassociate itself from the mother ship, the MB, in order to please Egypt, a note-worthy splinter group has declared Hamas to be a “traitor” to the “Arab-Islamic-Palestinian” cause and has begun conducting car bombings and other terrorist acts against the terrorist group Hamas!

The name of this splinter group is bayt al-miqdis, which in Arabic means “The House of Holiness” and is a name for Jerusalem.  This term also refers to an Islamic prophecy contained in the ahadeeth referring to a massive Islamic army that will march out from Khorusan (an area in SW and central Asia including Afghanistan and parts of Iran, Pakistan and other Central Asian countries).  This army, it is said, will bear the “black banners” and will reconquer bayt al-miqdis for the Muslims.  Most Palestinians believe that when this Latter Day army reaches their region that they will become the vanguard, the spearhead, of this army as it destroys Israel and takes over Jerusalem.

Hamas, consequently, fears that this bayt al-miqdis organization will out recruit it and become a major threat to its hold on power in Gaza.  Thus its acceptance of CT intel from Israel, the very entity it has vowed to destroy.  But, of course, it can’t admit to itself that it is doing so.  This is where Egypt enters the equation according to Mr. Eldar.  This bayt

al-miqdis group is the primary group causing Egypt headaches in the Sinai, and so, as Hamas has recently moved closer to Egypt, it and Egypt are now sharing CT intelligence on bayt al-miqdis and “inadvertently” as Hamas accepts CT intel from Egypt among that CT intel is intel Israel has provided to Egypt.  Egypt, for its part, passes along Israeli CT only that intel agreed upon by Israel.  “The very essence of a paradox” says Mr. Eldar. “The relationship between Israel and Hamas is tangled and complex, with all sorts of remarkable twists and turns.

This paradox also underscores two age-old adages:  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” (at least temporarily), and “politics makes for strange bedfellows.”  Frankly, Egypt, Israel, and Hamas all in bed together is about as strange as it can get.  Welcome to the modern Middle East.

JAPAN-AFRICA

Over the weekend, and immediately after the G-7 meeting in France, Japan hosted the Japan-Africa conference.  Egyptian talk-show host ‘Amru Adeeb reported on this conference for his al-hakaya (The Story) show as a vehicle for boasting about Egypt’s importance.  Mr. Adeeb first beamed with pride over President as-Sisi’s hobnobbing with the world leaders of the planet’s major powers, then flying directly to Japan to represent the entire continent of Africa as this year’s president of the Organization of African States.

According to Mr. Adeeb, Japan has pledged to invest some $20 billion U.S. in Africa, in hopes of competing with China for Africa’s allegiance.

Homosexuality and Catholic Decline

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David Carlin: To approve of homosexuality is tantamount to saying that the Church has been teaching a false sexual morality for 2000 years.

Many factors have contributed to the 50- or 60-year decline of Catholicism in America, but one of the most important – and in recent decades THE most important – is the sympathy felt for homosexuality among many priests, bishops, and laypeople, especially liberal or progressive laypersons.

I’m not talking only about those who are homosexual in their orientation or have been homosexual in their conduct.  I’m talking also about a more general sympathy, the sympathy felt by those who say something like this to themselves: “Well, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not really horrible – at least not when they refrain from molesting underage boys, a dreadful thing that has little to do with homosexuality.  It’s hard not to sympathize with gay priests when one remembers that they are in all probability born that way.”

“Born that way.” The LGBTQ movement, one of the great manifestations of present-day atheism, has had no more effective propaganda slogan than this.  It has played a major role in persuading most Americans, including Catholic Americans, to drop their traditional moral (and aesthetic) antipathy to homosexual conduct. Among Americans in their late teens and twenties, there is now something close to universal approval of homosexual sodomy.  Only homophobes, it is held, could possibly disapprove of that kind of love.

The reasoning goes like this.  A decent person, above all a decent Christian who believes that “love your neighbor” is the greatest commandment, doesn’t blame somebody for a trait that he or she is born with.  And so we don’t blame a person for being born with dark skin. Therefore we shouldn’t blame a person for being born with a sexual attraction to persons of the same sex. And while it is not totally unfair to ask persons with same-sex attractions to abstain from acting on those attractions, it is pretty unrealistic to do so given how powerful are the human drive for sex and the human need for intimate affection.

And so (feels many a Catholic) the Christian thing to do is to feel sympathy for people of this kind, and especially for priests of this kind.  Further, they claim, we should remember that there is such a thing as “development of doctrine.”  And thus it may well be that Catholic moral doctrine is now developing in the direction of giving its stamp of approval to homosexual conduct – provided, needless to say, that it is done in a loving way, the two lovers genuinely caring for the well-being of one another.

But the “born that way” thesis has been conclusively “proven” only by means of an obviously fallacious bit of reasoning.  It is argued that there are only two possibilities: (a) gays and lesbians are born that way, or (b) they choose to be gay or lesbian.  But since it is obvious that nobody chooses to be homosexual (for why would anybody wish to endure the hostility that homosexuals have to endure?), it follows that they are born that way.  But there are more than two possibilities; and so the conclusion doesn’t follow.

As a recent large study has shown, there is no single “gay” gene, and scientists believe a complex interplay of multiple genes may account for as much as one-third of the same-sex inclinations. (Scientists strongly sympathetic to homosexuality conducted this study so the data will have to be carefully checked.) But even this tells us that environmental factors are at least twice as strong as the biological factors.

What might those be?

(1) A child is socialized to believe that homosexuality is a fine thing – and often is these days because all sexual “choices” are deemed equally good.

(2) A maturing child mimics the attitude of a liberal parent – or turns to homosexuality as a way of rebelling against anti-homosexuality parents.

(3) A teenager is homosexually seduced or raped by an older teen or an adult, e.g., a Catholic priest, finds the experience pleasant, and after further experiences becomes addicted.

(4) Even if you don’t choose the end result (homosexuality), you may choose those things that lead to homosexuality – just as you may not choose to be a drug addict yet choose those things that lead to drug addiction, e.g., bad companions, risky experimentation.

(5) Despite the popular notion that nobody in his right mind would choose to become homosexual – the social penalties for homosexuality being so great – this notion is almost certainly not true. Perhaps nobody chooses it the way one chooses a meal from a restaurant menu.  But there are such things as “deep choices,” that is, unconscious or barely conscious choices made in the depths of our hearts and minds – for example, the choice of a vocation or a spouse, or the choice of whether or not to be an honest person or a devoted parent.

It is not hard to believe that one of these deep choices has to do with whether to be heterosexual or homosexual.  Most of us choose the former, or rather in our choice we simply ratify the choice that nature itself made for us.  But some of us, rebelling against nature’s plan (that is, God’s plan), choose the latter.

It used to be the case that Catholics were good at logic – back in the days when Catholic colleges insisted that their students take a course in elementary logic.  That so many of today’s Catholics would fall such an obvious fallacy as the false dichotomy of “born-that-way versus choice” (the kind of choice one makes when dealing with a restaurant menu) shows that the Catholic mind has become illogical.

Whether it is fallacious reasoning or something else, perhaps something even worse, a widespread sympathy for homosexuality is helping to ruin the Catholic Church in America – for to approve of homosexuality is tantamount to saying that the Church has been teaching a false sexual morality for 2000 years, and this in turn is tantamount to saying that Catholicism is a false religion.

This is not the “development” of doctrine.  It is the destruction of doctrine.

COLUMN BY:

David Carlin

David Carlin is a professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

How 50 Years of No-Fault Divorce Gave Us a Throwaway Culture

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Fifty years ago this week, Ronald Reagan made what he later admitted was one of the worst mistakes of his political life: As governor of California, he signed a bill bringing no-fault divorce to his state.

California was the first state to take the plunge, but by no means the last. Reagan’s signature unleashed what became a national divorce revolution.

Within five years, 44 states would follow suit and pass some form of no-fault divorce.

Many lawmakers who pushed for it had fine intentions. At the time, the divorce regime had become a sham that made a mockery of the legal system. Because a judge had to find “fault” in one spouse to grant a divorce, spouses would often make phony allegations against each other, sometimes even working in tandem to fool a judge into granting them a divorce.

Obviously, this was a problem. Some lawyers called the trend “institutionalized perjury.” They thought it would be much better to lower the barriers to divorce and thus remove the incentive to make phony allegations.

Yet 50 years later, the perverse incentive to commit perjury seems utterly miniscule when compared with the wreckage that came from the divorce revolution.

The consequences of no-fault divorce are almost impossible to overstate. It was like dropping a nuclear bomb into our nation’s social ecosystem—the blast wave has hit millions of families, and the fallout is worse than we could have imagined.

The Blast Effect

As one might expect, the nation saw a spike in divorce rates following the enactment of no-fault divorce laws. Between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled and remained relatively steady into the 1990s.

Generation X was the first of the collateral damage. Roughly half of all children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents divorce, a massive increase from just 11% of kids born in the 1950s.

Two of those Gen Xers were named Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus. They later would become the lead singers and the guitarist and bassist, respectively, for the popular punk band Blink-182.

DeLonge and Hoppus were both born in the 1970s in Reagan’s California. By the early ‘90s, they had both felt the sting of their parents’ divorces.

Their song “Stay Together for the Kids” captured the cry of a generation reeling from divorce. The song’s original music video pictured a wrecking ball destroying a house—a visual metaphor for the chaos divorce brought to their homes.

DeLonge later explained: “You look at statistics that 50% of parents get divorced, and you’re going to get a pretty large group of kids who are pissed off and who don’t agree with what their parents have done.”

He added: “Is this a damaged generation? Yeah, I’d say so.”

And the damage continues. Each year, 1 million U.S. kids see their parents get divorced. Half of all children at some point will see their parents split. And the most common reason now given for divorce? Lack of commitment, at 75%.

In a positive sign, Gen Xers and millennials seem to have taken lessons from their parents and are getting divorced at lower rates. Between 2008 and 2016, the divorce rate actually dropped by 18%.

But this comes as fewer people are choosing to get married in the first place. Many millennials are choosing to cohabitate rather than get married—a path that leaves divorce off the table from the outset.

But ironically, cohabitation offers them less security than marriage. It may keep one’s options open and eliminate the legal hassle of a divorce, but it makes bailing on a committed relationship that much easier.

Defining Marriage Away

One hallmark of a healthy and stable country is that contracts are enforceable. If two people sign a contract, one person can’t just bail without paying the consequences.

A contract has to be binding on all parties. Otherwise, it’s worth nothing, and people will stop making contracts altogether.

No-fault divorce essentially made void the contract of marriage. It told either party that they could break their vows and get divorced on the basis of “irreconcilable differences.”

Those vows derive from what our society once understood marriage to be: a permanent reality that, once joined, takes on a transcendent quality that places it beyond the reach of any human whim. This transcendent vision of marriage was the basis of its legal recognition, and the children that resulted from the union made its stability all the more important.

But no-fault divorce cut ties with this vision. Marriage vows were reduced to mere poetry for a romantic ceremony and evacuated of any legal substance.

For all legal purposes, “as long as we both shall live” became “as long as one of us doesn’t change our minds on a dime.” Spouses could no longer depend on courts to enforce their marriage vows because, legally, marriage was now severed from those vows.

People often think of same-sex marriage as the great Rubicon moment that changed America’s view of marriage forever. That’s not true.

No-fault divorce is the original rupture in our view of marriage. Same-sex marriage was just the latest mutation to an institution long robbed of its original meaning.

Millennials are onto something when they reject marriage as it’s widely understood and practiced. They see it for the contradiction that it has become. Better to shack up and take no vows, they say, than to take vows that won’t be kept.

Reckoning With the Throwaway Culture

Easy divorce is part of what Pope Francis calls the “throwaway culture.” We throw away unwanted trash, unwanted babies, and unwanted spouses. Such is life in a culture that rejects the transcendent, the idea that we owe duties to each other by virtue of being human—and by virtue of our word.

This throwaway culture is the great cost of our contemporary religion, which is self-actualization. The creed of our day is that each person’s private happiness and self-actualization is the ultimate good. Kids, the unborn, and spouses we no longer love must bow the knee to our own personal quests for happiness.

But this contemporary vision shows signs of weakness.

For all our secular disenchantment, we still crave the transcendence and permanence offered by marriage as it was once understood. We long for bonds that don’t break.

Being spiritual creatures, we ache for solidarity, and we seek it, even if from 77-year-old politicians promising to “bring people together.”

No-fault divorce sent us looking for permanence and transcendence in all the wrong places. The irony is that while many of us decry the wreckage of divorce, it’s not clear we are willing to realign our values to rebuild what’s fallen apart.

For those who are willing, the solution is available: We must begin to prize fidelity in relationships over our ever-evolving desires for self-actualization.

Legal changes to reverse no-fault divorce should come as well, but above all, we need a culture that prizes fidelity—and shames infidelity. Spouses who seek a divorce for weak reasons need an obstacle in their path, one that isn’t just legal, but cultural. It should be socially costly to break our vows.

Fidelity is the only thing strong enough to rebuild the basic blocks of our society. It’s what the Bible calls “covenant faithfulness,” and in the long run, it’s the most beautiful life available to us.

It’s also the most rewarding, because self-centered happiness is a fool’s errand. We don’t ultimately find joy in creating our own reality, but in finding our rightful place within it.

Relational bonds are much more easily torn apart than melded from scratch and maintained. We live in the aftermath of 50 years of bond-fraying, and it now falls to us to rebuild.

It may be that in the 21st century, the most heroic act for a young American will be to play a small but faithful part in this rebuilding effort—to get married and cleave to one’s spouse, till death do they part.

COMMENTARY BY

Daniel Davis

Daniel Davis is the commentary editor of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal podcast. Send an email to Daniel. Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: How the Sexual Revolution Gave Us Identity Politics

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