[The Federalist] Over the weekend there was a massive march in Washington and other cities to demand new laws, ostensibly on behalf of innocent lives being endangered. That sounds like another giant protest march that takes place once a year in Washington, except this one is being reported coast-to-coast, buoyed by celebrity endorsements, and hailed as the dawn of a revolution, rather than being studiously ignored or downplayed.
It should be obvious that I’m speaking of the March for Our Lives and the March for Life, two ostensibly similar marches advocating ostensibly similar views. Yet comparing the two positions reveals illuminating fundamental differences.
OWNERSHIP VERSUS ACTION
Of course the most obvious distinction is in the subject matter: one favors limiting or ending gun owners, the other limiting or ending abortion. Let’s consider the two subjects, for here the crux of the matter rests.
Gun rights deal with a person’s right to own a particular tool for a particular purpose. Put briefly, a gun is a weapon; weapons are used in fighting. People want to own guns so if they ever need to fight to defend themselves, their families, or their rights, they can do so effectively. There are obvious and legitimate reasons why they would want this, ranging from violent attackers to civil unrest.
But, although they have legitimate uses, guns by nature are open to abuse. They allow a person with evil intent to inflict more damage than he would otherwise. Gun-control advocates argue the potential for abuse is greater than the legitimate need for private firearms, at least with regards to certain weapons. In other words, gun control advocates wish to limit access to guns in order to limit their potential for abuse.
Abortion rights deal with a person’s right to do or have done a particular procedure. This procedure, by definition, destroys a human life: specifically the human life the people in question created by having intercourse, whether consensually or violently. They desire this because, to one degree or another, the life to be destroyed is unwanted or inconvenient and was not intended to be created.
Although the reasons for wishing to destroy this life may be understandable, abortion still destroys an innocent human life. Moreover, in most cases that innocent human life was created by other people voluntarily engaging in an act they knew could lead to this outcome. Pro-life advocates argue that deliberately killing an innocent human being simply cannot be justified, save in cases of direst need such as when the life of the mother is at stake.
In other words, pro-life advocates wish to forbid a particular action that, by definition, destroys a human life.
Note the difference: one involves a right of possession, the other of action. To own a gun says nothing of how it is used, and there are clearly legitimate reasons someone would want to own one. To perform an abortion, on the other hand, means to kill a human life, and the only question involved is whether such an act can be justified. Gun-control advocates argue that the undeniable potential for abuse outweighs the undeniable goods derived from gun ownership, while pro-life advocates argue that abortion itself is an unjustifiable action.
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[Breitbart] Actress Kirstie Alley issued a dire warning on Friday, noting that children are being exposed to "everything perverse on every kind of screen" and cautioning that Hollywood is conditioning society to be so "open minded" that it will soon "support" pedophilia as "just loving children."
"Was watching TV ...we’ve gone too far in my opinion. I feel sorry for our children. Their exposure to everything perverse on every kind of screen is mind boggling. And even more tragic, it’s being hyped as ’normal,’" the Cheers star wrote.
"No other generation has had such easy access to the underbelly of humanity. SO many screens & chronic bombardment of images and concepts. Our current society would have been praising Caligula. Protect your children," she continued in the series of tweets to her 1.5 million Twitter followers, confessing to have a "heavy heart" over what she described as the "shit that’s being crammed down our kid’s throats."
"A ’moral code’ is not old fashioned. Morals are simply guidelines for better survival. Explicit sexual ’education’ and ’select’ ideals being forced on kids is NOT better survival," the Trump-supporting actress said before warning that society is on the path to accepting pedophilia.
"People are becoming so ’open minded’ that down the road they will support pediphilia [sic] as people ’just loving children’ You think I’m kidding. I’m not. It’s the direction this insanity is headed. You can ’ok boomer’ me all you want but this is where we will veer unless we change," Alley cautioned.
[RD] Over the past few days I’ve seen a number of references to "America’s Birthday" coming up on Friday. If a commercial advertiser wants to say this, fine (I guess). But I have spotted a couple of otherwise sober-minded writers using the "birthday" tag as well, and their ignorance is more disturbing.
July 4, 1776, was in no way the birthday of anything. It was the start of a long and savage struggle against the world’s most powerful empire at the time. If the United States can be said to have an actual birthday, that date should be June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution—the number specified in order for the Constitution to be in full and binding effect for all 13 former colonies. Those who prefer a winter birthday might want to go for Dec. 15, 1791, the date on which the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the Bill of Rights. (I know: much too close to Christmas, doesn’t have a chance.)
This "birthday" business matters because people who are utterly ignorant of their own history need to be slapped around a little. As well, people who seem to think that the British Empire’s response to the 1776 Declaration was "Right, then: you want to leave! Ta!!" are also unlikely to appreciate the very significant role of religion in fueling the rebellion and driving it to victory.
Oddly, no professional historian has managed to tell the story as well and as thoroughly as non-historian Kevin Phillips tells it in his magisterial 600-page tome, The Cousins Wars (1999). Phillips notes that the fiercest American revolutionaries by far were New England members of the Dissenting churches (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists) whose forebears, in the preceding century, had battled the proto-Catholic Stuarts back in the Mother Country.
In the English Civil War, these middle-class sectarians, mocked as "Roundheads," routed the aristocratic Cavaliers. They were driven to resistance and even to regicide by their fear of episcopacy: they feared that their model of congregational governance would be outlawed and they would be forced to suffer under bishops and use prescribed Anglican forms and formulas still reeking of their popish provenance. Some who fought with Cromwell came back over from Massachusetts and Connecticut in order to do so; the very judges who condemned King Charles to death were sheltered in a cave in New Haven.
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#1
What defines a birthday? I’d say Declaration of Independence was birthday and signing/ratifying constitution was more of a sign of entering adulthood as a nation.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/04/2021 15:18 Comments ||
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#10
Peter Laarman
Peter Laarman is a United Church of Christ minister who served as senior minister of New York's Judson Memorial Church and then as executive director of LA's Progressive Christians Uniting before retiring in 2014. He remains deeply involved in national and regional social justice projects touching on race, class, and religion.
Pete, you should consider continuing on with your retirement, you have caught "Bidenitous", and you have in no time, become confused, disoriented, and nonsensical. That is not unlike the diminution of the UCC, in which I was previously a Deacon, an organization which has seen itself go from a 10 Million + membership in 1962 to a less than 900K organization today. It swept far Left in the 1960s and obviously lost its flock due to this kind of thinking, among other issues.
Although Soviet authorities did investigate the atrocities at Chernyansky concentration camp in the 1960s, very little publicly available information exists.
#3
only a few miles are built in Montenegro and, IIUC, they are not yet open to traffic; as can be seen from the images in the article, the terrain is mountainous and construction is expensive and slow
however, some 60+ miles are built and open to traffic in Serbia
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
07/04/2021 14:43 Comments ||
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[American Thinker] Imagine if these people were White! It would be the top story all weekend, and you know it. But they are Black, so only in the 22nd paragraph of this New York Times article does the word "Black" appear.
First paragraph:
Eleven men were taken into custody on Saturday after a lengthy roadside standoff between police officers in Massachusetts and a group of heavily armed men in tactical gear who claimed to be part of a group called Rise of the Moors. ...a Moorish Sovereign Citizens group.
Twenty-second paragraph:
“We do not intend to be hostile, we do not intend to be aggressive,” he added later. “We are not anti-government, we are not anti-police, we are not sovereign citizens and we are not Black identity extremists.”
Update from the Daily Mail at 1:15 p.m. ET from Skidmark’s link in comments to make it searchable for future reference:
Jahmal Latimer, who also goes by the title Talib Abdulla Bey, is the Moorish American Consular Post Head of the Rise of the Moors militia group.
[American Thinker] Those of Joe Biden’s public behaviors that align with classic dementia symptoms are escalating. In the past few days, he strongly exhibited two symptoms: A type of belligerence that’s a cover-up for confusion and memory loss and a paranoid fear of those in charge of him.
I used to spend a lot of time in the company of doctors. What always fascinated me were the tales they told of dealing with patients with early-stage dementia. The most interesting point they made was that elderly people, so as not to lose face or admit their own fears, are superb at deflecting the questions aimed at assessing their cognitive skills and memory.
For example, one of the most common questions is "Who’s the president of the United States?" Rather than admitting that they don’t remember, people in early-stage dementia will get defensive or otherwise deflect. They might say, "That is incredibly insulting that you’d ask me that question," picking a fight to distract from their memory loss. Others might go for flattery: "I can’t believe that a young man like you doesn’t know who’s president. That’s just a silly question to ask me."
Biden perfectly illustrated that type of angry, defensive, deflecting behavior when reporters on Friday asked him about Afghanistan:
#5
#3 The question the reporter asked was a scripted question. When trying to answer it Biden actually said that he was briefed on that question on the plane on the way to the event. But then he had to pull out the cheat sheet they gave him on the plane and answer it that way.
[VOX recode] Social media has drastically restructured the way we communicate in an incredibly short period of time. We can discover, "Like," click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don’t quite understand.
And while some social scientists, journalists, and activists have been raising concerns about how this is affecting our democracy, mental health, and relationships, we haven’t seen biologists and ecologists weighing in as much.
That’s changed with a new paper published in the prestigious science journal PNAS earlier this month, titled "Stewardship of global collective behavior."
Seventeen researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat the study of technology’s large-scale impact on society as a "crisis discipline." A crisis discipline is a field in which scientists across different fields work quickly to address an urgent societal problem — like how conservation biology tries to protect endangered species or climate science research aims to stop global warming.
The paper argues that our lack of understanding about the collective behavioral effects of new technology is a danger to democracy and scientific progress. For example, the paper says that tech companies have "fumbled their way through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, unable to stem the ’infodemic’ of misinformation" that has hindered widespread acceptance of masks and vaccines. The authors warn that if left misunderstood and unchecked, we could see unintended consequences of new technology contributing to phenomena such as "election tampering, disease, violent extremism, famine, racism, and war."
It’s a grave warning and call to action by an unusually diverse swath of scholars across disciplines — and their collaboration indicates how concerned they are.
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#4
They, of course, mean the wrong kind of social media. Meaning the free, uncensored kind.
Just think of the title for a few minutes: Stewardship of global collective behavior.
That should tell you all you need to know.
From the same people who brought you Climate Change.
#5
Will we look back fondly to the 90’s as the time when the “Internet was FREE” ? And forward to times where AI’s stealthily edit everything on the internet so they don’t need the ‘firemen’ of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 ?
#6
"That sheep is, like, so out of bounds.
I am so, like, releasing the hounds."
Smith had really come round
Since employed at the Pound.
"Inappropriate movement and sounds!"
[Just The News] group of scientists this week announced that they had confirmed a theory proposed years ago by eminent physicist Stephen Hawking regarding the physical properties of black holes.
The U.S.-based physicists in the journal Physical Review Letters said they had discovered "observational confirmation of Hawking’s black-hole area theorem."
That theorem, first proposed by Hawking five decades ago in 1971, holds that the "event horizon" of a black hole—the boundary within which nothing in the universe can escape the gravity of the astronomical object—can never shrink and can only grow larger. "I call it the Stacey Abrams Phenomenon"
The scientists to test that theory examined the data of gravitational waves, a long-postulated phenomenon first detected in 2015 from the merger of two black holes; they reported confirmation of that finding with 95% confidence.
The researchers also said the data from the gravitational waves was "consistent with the same remnant mass and spin" in the merged black hole, an observation "in agreement with general relativity."
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
It's not just Hollywood. 
[American Thinker] Imagine if these people were White! It would be the top story all weekend, and you know it. But they are Black, so only in the 22nd paragraph of this New York Times article does the word "Black" appear.
[VOX recode] Social media has drastically restructured the way we communicate in an incredibly short period of time. We can discover, "Like," click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don’t quite understand.
[Just The News] group of scientists this week announced that they had confirmed a theory proposed years ago by eminent physicist Stephen Hawking regarding the physical properties of black holes.
