The death throes of political correctness

Is political correctness on life support

Not everyone, not even a majority, is comfortable with the bizarre and dehumanizing ideas routinely foisted on less militant citizens in the name of self-affirmation for one group or another. The public is not interested in cultivating obsessive concern over microaggressions. Not everyone agrees when they are told, often angrily, that belief in marriage as a sacrament is merely a centuries-old excuse for oppression. Not everyone heeds the command to pretend that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman

Reprehensible conduct by the Obama administration

In 2012, Frank VanderSloot gave money to the Romney campaign. Obama blogged about him, and the power of the US government was aligned against him: the IRS, the Department of Labor, and of course the liberal media. This is not right in America.

Global warming may get real research now

In the world of climate science, the skeptics are coming in from the cold. Researchers who see global warming as something less than a planet-ending calamity believe the incoming Trump administration may allow their views to be developed and heard. This didn’t happen under the Obama administration, which denied that a debate even existed. Now, some scientists say, a more inclusive approach – and the billions of federal dollars that might support it – could be in the offing.

Suddenly, the global warming debate may get actual debate.

Dave Barry's Year in Review

All year long, humorist Dave Barry keeps careful notes about what noteworthy events happen each month. At the end of the year, he summarizes the year in an article widely picked up by newspapers every where.

In the future, Americans – assuming there are any left – will look back at 2016 and remark: “What the hell?”

They will have a point. Over the past few decades, we here at the Year in Review have reviewed some pretty disturbing years. For example, there was 2000, when the outcome of a presidential election was decided by a tiny group of deeply confused Florida residents who had apparently attempted to vote by chewing on their ballots.

Then there was 2003, when a person named “Paris Hilton” suddenly became a major international superstar, despite possessing a level of discernible talent so low as to make the Kardashians look like the Jackson 5.

There was 2006, when the vice president of the United States, who claimed he was attempting to bring down a suspected quail, shot a 78-year-old man in the face, only to be exonerated after an investigation revealed that the victim was an attorney.

And, perhaps most inexplicable of all, there was 2007, when millions of people voluntarily installed Windows Vista.

Read more here:

Leftists at the University of Wisconsin

This writer takes the position that conservatives can defeat campus radicals. The article is interesting and anecdotal, but doesn't make it clear that conservatives can succeed at the University of Wisconsin. Read the whole thing. It seems to say that college is a lost cause.

A high-visibility vest will get you anywhere

These folks tried an experiment: wear a high-visibility vest and see where you can go. It turns out you can go most anywhere: movies, zoos, rock concerts. Try it yourself, they're not expensive

The most dangerous dam in the world

A flood of Biblical proportions could inundate the traditional site of the Garden of Eden. The Mosul Dam on the Tigris River holds back a gigantic reservoir, but like the parable in Mathew 7 about the man who built his house on sand, the Mosul Dam is built on soluble rock. The gypsum beneath the dam is dissolving, leaving caverns underneath. If the dam fails, and the 8-mile long reservoir floods down the river to Bagdad, hundreds of thousands could be killed.

This is a can't-stop-reading article

12 Fantastic Thomas Sowell Quotes In Honor Of His Retirement

In honor of Dr. Thomas Sowell’s retirement, here are some of his best quotes from his many years as a writer, columnist, and thinker:

1. People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

2. If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

3. Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.

4. Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

5. The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

6. The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

7. The biggest and most deadly ‘tax’ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

8. The real minimum wage is zero.

9. What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

10. In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.

11. People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

12. Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

Read some more great Tomas Sowell quotes

Is Jeff Sessions a racist?

Senator Jeff Sessions has been nominated for Attorney General. The Left is reacting by calling him a racist.  The Left seems to have a problem with virtually every Trump nomination, generally producing specious arguments.

Jeff Sessions is not a racist, as this article demonstrates. He has a long history of supporting blacks, as this article demonstrates. The real problem is that he will bring common sense and actual justice back to the Department of Justice which has been politicized for the last eight years.

The Universities are going insane

George Washington University has made a course in US History optional for history majors.

The history department at GWU has been facing declining interest and enrollment. As a result, they’ve decided that an answer to that problem, and an effective way to recruit new students, is to “to better reflect a globalizing world,” according to comments made by George Washington University faculty members to the student newspaper, The Hatchet.

I guess with declining student enrollment, there less need for those tenured professors in the department. I doubt that downgrading the academics will attract more serious students willing to pay $68,725 per year for tuition. Of course the government will loan them the money and it will take two lifetimes to pay it back working at Starbucks.

A new age of Christian martyrs is upon us

This is written on December 26, Saint Stephen's day. Steven was the first Christian martyr. Now the number of Christians being martyred is growing, and Obama is doing nothing to help, even while welcoming thousands of Syrian refugees and Islamic terrorists into the US.

The Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas" celebrates the "Feast of Stephen"

Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State

Rex Tillerson has been nominated for Secretary of State.  The Left is in a tizzy because Rex has had dealings with Putin (successful ones in fact) and they claim he is too friendly to be qualified for the job.

Here's a report by a person who served on jury duty with Tillerson. She seems to think he might be pretty qualified.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

An entertaining version of the Christmas carol

Global warming update--new ice age evidence

“The New Little Ice Age Has Started.” This is the unambiguous title of a new study from one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions, the Russian Academy of Science’s Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg. “The average temperature around the globe will fall by about 1.5 C when we enter the deep cooling phase of the Little Ice Age, expected in the year 2060,” the study states. “The cooling phase will last for about 45-65 years, for four to six 11-year cycles of the Sun, after which on the Earth, at the beginning of the 22nd century, will begin the new, next quasi-bicentennial cycle of warming.”

Read the whole thing

USDA wants to remove holiday snacks from schools

Starting next year, bringing a dozen homemade cupcakes to your child’s classroom to celebrate his or her birthday will be tantamount to lighting up a cigarette on the blacktop. Candy canes and gingerbread men people will be verboten during the school’s Christmas party winter celebration. And this Spring, don’t expect any candy in the classroom; the Easter fuzzy bunny is strictly prohibited from entering school grounds. As for next year’s Halloween fall festivities: kids should brace for water and carrots (hey, they’re orange!). What fun

Surely the government has better things to do  Further proof of my theorem that there are too many government employees, giving them free time to make trouble.

How about those ladies in the Israeli army?

This Female IDF Soldier Fought Off 23 Terrorists in Surprise Attack.

Captain Or Ben-Yehuda of the Israeli Defense Forces has cemented a legacy that will endure well past her lifetime. The young, decorated IDF Captain was in charge of a company of soldiers when they were violently attacked by nearly two dozen terrorists near the Egyptian border. Due to her leadership and bravery, she and her men were able to survive.

I suppose it would be sexist to note how attractive she is. Read the article

Freakout on the Left

This article has a great lead-in

The Democratic Party has been making a fool of itself ever since Election Day. (Before that too, probably, but that’s a different post.) An utter lack of self-awareness apparently disables Democrats from understanding that 1) they lost the presidential election because they nominated the worst candidate of modern times, 2) they have been losing ground across the large majority of America for a decade or longer, and now are at best a minority party everywhere except California, New York and a few other enclaves, and 3) their party’s leadership is uniformly both geriatric and corrupt

Read the whole thing, including the comments

The New York Times erroneous view on gun carriers

Liberals imagine that law-abiding citizens do not have any idea how to use a gun responsibly — and that criminals will start following rules.

Carrying a gun usually stops crime just but pointing it at the perpetrator, much more often than shootouts actually occur. But liberals neglect these statistics in their efforts to make the country safe for criminals. Read this analysis on gun control

Victor Davis Hanson on The Donald

"Key is his emperor-has-no-clothes instinct that what is normal and customary in Washington was long ago neither sane nor necessary. And so far, his candidacy has not only redefined American politics but also re-calibrated the nature of insight itself...leaving the wise to privately wonder whether they were ever all that wise after all." - Victor Davis Hanson on The Donald

Victor Davis Hanson is a thoughtful historian that brings his knowledge of the classics to observations on contemporary culture. Here is his analysis of the Trump candidacy

Candidate Trump blasted the “free-loading” nature of NATO, wondered out loud why it was not fighting ISIS or at least Islamic terrorism, and lamented the inordinate American contribution and the paucity of commensurate allied involvement. Pundits called that out as heresy, at least for a few weeks — until scholars, analysts, and politicos offered measured support for Trump’s charges. Europeans, shocked by gambling in Casablanca, scrambled to assure that they were upping their defense contributions and drawing the NATO line at the Baltic States. 

On the call from the President of Taiwan

President-elect Trump generated even greater outrage in the aftermath of the election when he took a call from the Taiwanese president. Pundits exploded. Foreign policy hands were aghast. Did this faker understand the dimensions of his blunder? Was he courting nuclear war? Trump shrugged, as reality again intruded: Why sell billions of dollars in weaponry to Taiwan if you cannot talk to its president? Are arms shipments less provocative than receiving a single phone call?

Read the whole thing

The charm of an asp and the charisma of a slug.

Is how one person described Hillary Clinton in this article about the recent Presidential election. The gist of the article is about how the Democrats are working to delegitimatize the President Elect. Instead of accepting and supporting the winner as they advocated before losing.

EPA caves in to political pressure

Last year, the EPA published a draft report on fracking. The report said that fracking was pretty safe. To appreciate how strong this statement was in favor of fracking, remember that the EPA is controlled at the upper levels by environmentalists who really don't like oil and natural gas as an energy source. Here's a quote from the Washington Post

In 2015, a draft report found that fracking has caused isolated instances in which drinking water was affected, but did not bring about “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. At the time, Burke added that “the number of documented impacts to drinking water resources is relatively low when compared to the number of fractured wells.”

That was too much for the Left. The environmentalists and the movie stars protested so much that the final report came out with a list of ways that fracking can damage drinking water. If you read the list with a critical eye, it mentions all the things that can possibly go wrong. Seldom do any of these things go wrong, and the harm is minuscule in the universe of  energy development, but the Left is jumping all over this report as condemning fracking. Consider the New York Times, which is turning into a less reliable source of information than the tabloids at the check stands. At least they got the quote right:

The new version is far more worrying than the first, which found “no evidence that fracking systemically contaminates water” supplies. In a significant change, that conclusion was deleted from the final study.

It is unfortunate that pressure from the left, with no basis in real science, influences public policy to the detriment of all people.

How The Left Overreached In Court

The Left has been using the courts to attack Christian beliefs. They drove a small Christian bakery out of business for refusing to bake for a gay wedding. They managed to make it legal for men to use the ladies restroom. This article argues that this overreach cost the Left the Supreme Court. Christians were so upset at the attacks on their values that they voted for Donald Trump for President despite their trepidation about the man's character.

Will the global warming movement collapse?

For years, anybody who wanted to study the terrible effects and causes of global warming could get government funding. Any paper that questioned the dogma, would get rejected by scientific journals which subject the papers to "peer review". Things may change.

Over the past three decades, the environmental movement has increasingly hitched its wagon to exactly one star as the overwhelming focus of the cause, namely "climate change."  Sure, issues of bona fide pollution like smog and untreated sewage are still out there a little, but they are largely under control and don't really stir the emotions much any more.  If you want fundraising in the billions rather than the thousands, you need a good end-of-days, sin-and-redemption scare.  Human-caused global warming is your answer!

Even as this scare has advanced, a few lonely voices have warned that the radical environmentalists were taking the movement out onto a precarious limb.  Isn't there a problem that there's no real evidence of impending climate disaster?  But to no avail.  Government funding to promote the warming scare has been lavish, and in the age of Obama has exploded.  Backers of the alarm have controlled all of the relevant government bureaucracies, almost all of the scientific societies, and the access to funding and to publication for anyone who wants to have a career in the field.  What could go wrong?

At least three of Trump's nominations are likely to be antagonistic against the global warming juggernaut.

Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State.  As of today, we still have as our chief diplomat the world leader of smugness who somehow thinks that "climate change" caused by use of fossil fuels is the greatest threat to global security.  He is shortly to be replaced with the CEO of Exxon.  Could there be a bigger poke in the eye to the world climate establishment?  I'm trying to envision Tillerson at the next meeting of the UN climate "conference of parties" with thousands of world bureaucrats discussing how to put the fossil fuel companies out of business.  Won't he be laughing his gut out?

Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy.  Not only was he the longest-serving governor of the biggest fossil fuel energy-producing state, but in his own 2012 presidential campaign he advocated for the elimination of the Department of Energy.  This is the department that passes out tens of billions of dollars in crony-capitalist handouts for wind and solar energy (Solyndra!), let alone more tens of billions for funding some seventeen (seventeen!) research laboratories mostly dedicated to the hopeless task of figuring out how to make intermittent sources of energy competitive for any real purpose.

And then there's Scott Pruitt for EPA.  As Attorney General of Oklahoma, another of the big fossil fuel energy-producing states, he has been a leader in litigating against the Obama EPA to stop its overreaches, including the so-called Clean Power Plan that seeks to end the use of coal for electricity and to raise everyone's cost of energy.

And how about cooking the data?

Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years.  Questions like:  Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted?  How do you explain an almost-20-year "pause" in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated?  What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of "warmest year ever" when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago?  Suddenly, the usual hand-waving ("the science is settled") is not going to be good enough any more.  What now? 

Read the whole thing

 

Democratic donors want to know what went wrong

They gave a billion dollars to Hillary's campaign and got trumped. Now they are rebelling against future giving until they know what went wrong.

The call for a deep and detailed accounting of how Clinton lost a race that she and her donors were absolutely certain she’d win didn’t begin immediately after the election — there was too much shock over her defeat by Donald Trump, and overwhelming grief. Her initial conference call with top backers, which came just days after the outcome, focused primarily on FBI Director Jim Comey’s late campaign-season intervention.

But in the weeks since, the wealthy Democrats who helped pump over $1 billion into Clinton’s losing effort have been urging their local finance staffers, state party officials, and campaign aides to provide a more thorough explanation of what went wrong. With no dispassionate, centralized analysis of how Clinton failed so spectacularly, they insist, how can they be expected to keep contributing to the party?

Advanced boifuel standard has problem with economics

The government, especially the liberal wing, likes to ignore economics.  For example, the government has mandated that the oil companies include advanced biofuels in gasoline.  We're not talking about good old "corn liquor" here, but alcohol made from other stuff, like grass. The amount of advanced biofuels required increases every year by government edict. The problem is that there isn't enough advanced biofuels available to meed the mandates, and now the government wants even more.

One problem with good old grain alcohol is that the amount of energy required to grow the corn make the stuff is so close to the amount that comes out that it isn't clear whether there is a net benefit or cost in terms of carbon footprint. If the politicians were honest, they would admit that the principle benefit of corn alcohol is that Iowa is the first step to the presidential nomination. Scott Walker lost my support for the nomination when he came out in favor of corn alcohol, despite his otherwise reasonable positions.

Each year, congress and the gasoline producers arm wrestle over the legal requirement. You just can't legislate economics, all you can do is tax it and make things more expensive.

News about fake news is fake

The mainstream media have provided a lot of coverage lately about fake news. Here's an article documenting many times that the media has presented fake news as though it were real. There are many examples, most commonly in what they decide to report as "news", but here are what one writer considers the top ten examples, starting with "Rathergate".

Did the Duke Lacrosse case influence the election

Two players in the Duke Lacrosse were Stephen Miller from the class of 2007, who took great pains to argue in print that charging the Lacrosse players was political correctness gone bad. The other was Attorney General Roy Cooper, who investigated the case and concluded that the players were innocent and District Attorney Nifong's malfeasence was the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations. Read the article to see how these two influenced the 2016 elections.

Military Religious Freedom Foundation is confused

The Air Force Academy has upheld the right of a coach to post religious messages on his Twitter account, despite complaints from MRFF

The Air Force Academy ruled that Bible verses shared on a football assistant coach's Twitter account did not violate policy or law because they were private statements on a social media profile with the proper disclaimer. The Academy was responding to a request from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) to investigate "Christian evangelizing via Twitter, blatantly violating Air Force regulations."

MRFF is upset and plans further efforts to protest this behavior, contrary to their mission statement:

No member of the military may be compelled to curtail — except in the most limited of military circumstances and when it directly impacts military discipline, morale and the successful completion of a specific military goal — the free exercise of their religious practices or beliefs.

For more on religious freedom, read this article about the movie Hacksaw Ridge

“Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library”

This is an amazing story. Dolly Parton sends books, every month, to children in rural Tennessee. For those who think she's just a county-singing bimbo, like the author of this story, this is shocking news. She says she owes Dolly Parton an apology.

Ben Stein says "they have gone insane"

Ben Stein can't understand why people are so upset Trump hasn't appointed unreasonable people to his cabinet, or said anything bad about blacks or gays. What's the deal?

I just don’t get it. People are going insane about Donald Trump being president-elect. It’s beyond the wildest anger and fear I saw even about Richard Nixon, my hero. And, as I say, I just cannot see it.

Fake news is in the news.

Hillary Clinton is blaming fake news for swinging the election. The Washington Post ran a story about fake news that turned out to be fake The Clinton campaign even generated fake news that the Podestra e-mails were fake, created by the Russians. These were repeated by MSNBC, always ready to do anything to support the Clintons.

The stock market is always right

Being the collective thoughts of hundreds, if not millions, of minds, the stock market can predict future events.  The stock market has been hitting new highs almost on a daily basis in reaction to Donald Trump's election and the choices he has been making afterward.

Roger Simon asks who do you trust: the stock market or the media?

While on the road, I asked those supporters on multiple occasions whether they thought Trump was going to send all eleven million illegals home and found not one person who thought he would. The press -- that's another matter. Now the Associated Press is making a big deal of his "softer" line on immigration, but didn't you always know he would take one? It should be no surprise to anyone that Trump intends to get rid of as many criminal aliens as possible and then let the others blend into society -- but (Chuck Schumer take note) without ever getting full citizen rights, meaning the vote. To give people the vote who came here illegally would not be "fair" (as Barack Obama might put it) to those who waited in line.

Roger Simon is always insightful and fun to read.

Did the 'Obergefell' Decision Cost the Democrats the Election?

The Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees the right to marry as one of the fundamental liberties it protects, and that analysis applies to same-sex couples in the same manner as it does to opposite-sex couples. This decision was wildly unpopular with many in the general population and especially fundamental Christians.

This article argues that the decision cost the Democrats the election.  Read it for the list of anecdotes that upset the people of the country: from Pizza shops to bakeries.

Harvard study reveals press unfair to Trump

A story in the Washington Post reveals that Trump was right about the press

Let this sink in for a moment: a Harvard study about media bias is being written about in the publication that the study ranked as one of the worst offenders. Call me skeptical, but I wonder if we would even be made aware of this had Granny Maojackets prevailed.

Of course even this article is biased. Those of us who watched the news saw the bias every day. In particular, when Trump made substantive policy speeches they got absolutely no coverage, but let him say something stupid and it was continuous headline news.

Trump's choice for head of the EPA

The EPA has run roughshod over the people of the United States with rules and decisions and movements to harm the economy, moving jobs away from the US. Now, Trump has chosen an alleged "climate denier" as the new head of the EPA. I couldn't be more delighted, and it illustrates how great it is that the Republicans have a majority in the Senate to help him get confirmed.

The liberals and environmental wackos (but I repeat myself) are having a fit

Leaving your church because of the election?

The election is over and so is Brandi Miller’s religious affiliation.

“On Nov. 8, white evangelical Christianity and I called it quits,” she wrote in a message posted on Facebook. Ms. Miller, a campus minister at the University of Oregon, says that exit polls showing that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump revealed a divide over race that she, as a biracial woman, can’t condone.

“Evangelicals have decided who and with what they will associate,” wrote Ms. Miller, 26 years old, in an online magazine and on Facebook. “It’s not me.”

People are actually doing this. Before you do, consider this

December 7, a day that will live in infamy

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They were pretty successful, except for the fact that the U.S. carriers were out to sea and they came in quite handy at the Battle of Midway. In the next four years, the U.S. built 50 more aircraft carriers, the atomic bomb, and won the war with Japan.  In these times, the military can't even build one ship in that time, let alone dominate the world's oceans.

Here's a web site with fascinating photo tours of museums and ships from that war.

What does Dilbert say about global warming?

Scott Adams draws the Dilbert cartoon, and it is famous for it's piquant observations on work. Less well known is Scott Adams blog, equally insightful. He predicted that Donald Trump would win the election a year ahead of time.  Here is his observation on climate change.

You can follow his blog here and read insightful comments on other subjects.  Here's a fun comment on the Carrier/Ford deal

The call from Taiwan to Donald Trump

The media and the chattering class were all in an uproar when Donald Trump took a call from the president of Taiwan; saying it was an example of his ignorance of statecraft and the delicate balance of international relations. This editorial disagrees

Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy.
It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that

How did Hillary lose an election that was in the bag?

Hillary had her first choice for an opposition candidate--Donald Trump--the easiest one to beat. But, she managed to lose the election.  Here's a list of the things done wrong.

Bill Whittle on Hillary and the election

Watch this video just to see the endless line of buses that brought protesters to Chicago after the election, probably paid for by George Soros.

China has a thriving business transplanting organs from live donors

In 1999, Chinese hospitals began performing more than 10,000 organ transplants annually, generating a vast and lucrative traffic in “transplant tourists,” who flocked to China on the assurance that they could obtain lifesaving organs without having to languish on a waiting list. China had no voluntary organ-donation system to speak of, yet suddenly it was providing tens of thousands of freshly harvested organs to patients with ready cash or high-placed connections. How was that possible?

They did it by harvesting organs from political prisoners.  Now, a couple of movies are becoming available which expose the practice

Conservatives are mostly cheering the Trump election

NBC’s Saturday Night Live ran a skit over the weekend lampooning Donald Trump as the clueless center of his transition team, portraying his aides as sycophants and his chief strategist Steve Bannon as a black-robed creature in a skeleton mask. The reality is far different. Trump has reached out to former critics such as Nikki Haley and James Mattis and offered them key Cabinet positions. He’s met with Mitt Romney, one of his fiercest critics, twice. His picks for the heads of such departments as Health and Human Services, Education, and Transportation are knowledgeable conservatives. The pace with which he’s been naming top officials is faster than that of any modern president-elect.

Read the article

Surprise: there seems to be excessive bureaucracy in the DOD

The Washington Post has an article that says there Department of Defense wastes an extra 125 billion dollars on bureaucracy. No surprise there. For government employees, who really can't be fired, there is no feedback mechanism like there is in private industry. And the defense contractors are just as bad because they are paid to spend money, not make money*.

*Government contracting is usually done on what is called "cost plus fixed fee". The contractor totals up what it cost to do a job and then adds a percentage for their profit. If they make extra profit, the government takes it away, thus there is no benefit in saving money.

Which churches are growing and which are declining?

Most Christians with conservative views are aware that churches that subscribe to beliefs in the Bible are growing while liberal churches are declining. Here's an update on the trend You'll be surprised at what the article says about contemporary vs. traditional music.

Update: The New York Times claims that Romans 1 calls for the execution of homosexuals. Is this correct or does it reveal how far out of touch the NYT is with actual Biblical teaching.

What will progressives say if Trump is actually good?

If you thought Trump Derangement Syndrome was a tad excessive, as they say, you ain't seen nothin' yet.  To channel an old Pacino flick, opening now for Oscar season, it's "Panic in Progressive Park."

Reason for the panic -- the dawning realization, repressed and often unrecognized though it may be, that Donald Trump may even a be a good president, possibly a great one.

For the time being, liberals are criticizing every action by Donald Trump and every cabinet appointment, which conservatives are cheering as great choices. Read more here

Update: even movie critics are on board with Trump whining

Trump's advantage--he's not Obama

Barack Obama will retire a president personally popular with the American people yet who served them (and himself, and his party) badly.

He fretted in 2012 that he would lose the election just in time for Mitt Romney to get credit for an Obama recovery. That long-delayed recovery is finally coming in the last months of his administration—the economy finally broke 3% growth in the third quarter—and now Mr. Trump will get the credit.

Trump may even deserve a bit, witness the outbreak of optimism in the stock market and small-business hiring plans.

If the link requires a subscription, go here and click on the WSJ result.

Global Warming Update

Here's what  happened to one global warming skeptic

There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career.

Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians. In 2011 writers in the journal Foreign Policy signaled that some accused me of being a “climate-change denier.” I earned the title, the authors explained, by “questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports.” That an academic who raised questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in an area of his expertise was tarred as a denier reveals the group think at work.

Anybody who expresses the least amount of skepticism about the party line in global warming is shunned, and their science doesn't see the light of day if the establishment can censor it. Hopefully this will change under Donald Trump and both sides of the argument will be heard.

Read what happened to this professor who isn't even a denier of global warming climate change.

What rights to Christians have? Satire.

From the Babylon Bee, a source for Christian news satire: Nation Shocked, Horrified As Christians Hold Christian Position

“We’re not saying people can’t be Christians,” a Seattle woman said in a Facebook comment. “This is a free country, after all. But when Christians decide to actually have Christian beliefs about things—I’m sorry, that’s just too far.”

Here's some background on the story  Read this great article on what happens if you express Christian beliefs.

A follow-on story about persecution of Christians

Democratic party hypocrisy by Victor Davis Hanson

After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed. What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. 

The broken record of racism/sexism/homophobia plays on and on and on

A round-up of interesting election news

On Wednesday November 30, almost every campaign strategist from the 2016 election — most unsuccessful — were in one room, listening to CNN president Jeff Zucker’s attempt to explain why one of the United States’ leading broadcast news outlets played wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump for more than a year. Bullshit!”: GOP strategists shout

At the same meeting, Trump and Clinton staffers shout at each other

Meet Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense  Obama fired several of the "fighting generals" and replaced them with weenies who would toe the line; Mattis is one of them. Another is National Security Adviser: Michael Flynn, who while at the Defense Intelligence Agency argued that exiting Iraq would open up the country to ISIS. Because this contradicted Obama's message, he also was fired.

More from Peter Thiel

Remember Peter Thiel?  He spoke at the Republican convention and also at the National Press Club. I invite you to search for those speeches on YouTube.  He is a Silicon Valley venture capital outside the usual liberal mode. Here's another speech by him on higher education.

The government goes after piano teachers

This little story is about the FTC attacking piano teachers but its more than that. It's about the fact that there are too many government employees. There is a rule in economics that "work expands to fill the time available". Give a civil servant some free time and he will look around for a way to cause mischief, and since there seems to be no checks and balances over organizations like the FTC and the EPA, the burden of regulation grows continuously. New EPA rules are costing $1 trillion with minimal benefit. After you take care of the egregious environmental problems, solving the remaining ones is not economically justified.