Posts Tagged → good
Speaker Johnson’s religious behavior
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson is being widely criticized in the mainstream media for kneeling in prayer while on the job the other day. I watched one mainstream media TV personality take Rep. Johnson to task in an interview, about minding the supposed “separation of church and state,” and “keeping prayer in private,” and not letting it out into the public sphere.
Pretty curious approach, given that across America and Europe hordes of bloodthirsty primitives have also recently knelt in prayer in public spaces, promoting baby butchery, baby baking, and gang rape with a huge helping of subsequent mutilation and torture on Israelis, to the great joy of mainstream media. Why all these sincere people, just look at them, bless their hearts. Get them some brown shirts and night sticks.
The Left’s love affair with radical Islam is no secret, and it is just and fair to say this love affair exists because both the Left and radical Islam seek absolute destruction of Western Civilization with a resulting dominion over everyone and every thing on Planet Earth. The Left and radical Islam have a common cause, and whatever differences they have will be settled between one another once people like Rep. Johnson and his religion are out of the way. Keep this foremost in your mind as the drumbeat about Rep. Johnson’s Christian practice goes on.
Couple of things about this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’s religiosity.
First, Christianity is the founding belief system of America, albeit that was a nascent and broad minded Protestantism that immediately resulted in the anti-slavery abolitionist movement. America’s pilgrims and Founders also identified strongly with the Jews’ quest for freedom from evil tyrant Pharoah, and with the Torah’s value-laden story of that quest. And so thousands of towns and locales across America are named after Biblical places like Hebron, Shiloh, Judah, Bethany, and Zion. Christianity’s sacred Judaic touchstone places, and their inherent unspoken values, are interwoven into the cultural fabric of America from our very beginning.
Second, Christianity is still the main and largest repository of morality and right action in America. This is a cold numeric fact, not a defense of or advocacy for Christian theology. As sad and deflated as American Christianity is right now, it is nonetheless still the biggest single force for all things good and for learning about good values in our nation.
You oppose Christian theology? OK, so what is your suggested substitute in its absence here in America? Atheism? Well, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin are all great advocates for atheism and horrible, unjust places to live. Judaism? You think 200,000,000 Americans are going to convert to orthodox Judaism? Never! There would be an immediate and everlasting shortage of pickled herring, and so the rabbis would never allow it. Radical Islam will cut your throat, cut off your head, or throw you off a roof, sometimes all three, so nah, hard pass on that, right?
So, I say an occasional annoying knock on the door by some nice church ladies is a small price to pay for living happily in the most successful nation in the history of humanity.
The Left’s attacks on Christianity are strategic. If they can brow beat, shame, drown, flood, and eliminate Christianity, they will eliminate America’s renewable, sustainable, organic cultural source of opposition to the Left’s tyranny, immorality, and evil.
The Left has gotten really creative about their attack on Christianity, and they have only succeeded to date because of the long flaccid acquiescence of American traditionalists and Christians, and by the Left’s official enablers, the GOPe. By accusing Christians of establishing religion when they merely practice it, a la Rep. Johnson, the Left has appealed to the First Amendment’s clear prohibition against establishing a formal state religion for America. And yet, the truth is Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims all are merely expressing their First Amendment rights when they pray in private or in public. None of their public prayer behavior establishes any of these religions as the de facto state religion of America.
What the Left really objects to is anyone actually seeing the Christian religion practiced in public. Their message is it’s a dirty practice that people ought to keep to themselves behind closed doors.
Rep. Johnson’s public prayer on the US House of Representatives floor is an in-your-face to the tyrants and cultural Marxists in the mainstream media. And of course history is on the side of Rep. Johnson, because the US House of Representatives opened with public prayer for I don’t know how long, but for the vast majority of the chamber’s existence. And when inaugurated in 1789 as America’s first president in Manhattan, New York, George Washington led a grand procession to Trinity Church on Wall Street, where he led an hours-long prayer service.
It is only when America now finds itself in the throes of hypercoagulative materialism that its own long and deep religious roots, and religion’s fruit-bearing shading branches, become anathema. So what a breath of fresh air is this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, this cherubic Rep. Johnson.
Don’t stop, Rep. Johnson, for all our sakes, I pray you, do not stop and do not back down, and may you shine as a beacon light to Christians everywhere, and may that rallying light shine and defeat the cruel darkness that is swallowing my civilization. I may not agree with you on the particulars, but by God I will defend your right and our collective necessity to have you pray in the US House of Representatives.
Either Christianity will save America as a free constitutional republic, or America and western civilization will die.
May God bless you, Rep. Johnson.
Trump is you, Trump is America, Trump is a canary bird
No one person in politics better embodies America’s best qualities, such as equal opportunity for anyone willing to work hard, than President Donald J. Trump. He really captures and represents the good things that America has stood for at least since World War Two.
Yes, the man has his weaknesses, and who doesn’t. His swagger and gregarious personality repulse the faint hearted and attract the confident. His one juvenile locker room-type comment caught on tape is lame, and it also pales in comparison to the violent rapes committed by Bill Clinton. But Trump’s detractors don’t really care about Bill Clinton’s actual sexual assaults, or Obama’s gross homosexual locker room liaisons, or Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia and sexual assaults of children along with his long list of ultra wealthy donors from just one political party.
Nope, to his opponents Trump is just a bad guy, the one and only bad guy, and he is all they can talk about, think about, and rail against. And in response, I say all criticism must be made in context to others in the same position. And on that count, Trump is like a ten year old kid on his bicycle with training wheels earnestly challenging a 1957 Corvette to a road race. It’s laughable to compare him to sincere criminals and deviants like Clinton, Obama, Joe Biden, and Epstein. Trump has the cleanest hands of any person in American politics in many decades.
In fact, Trump is such an outsider to American politics that nearly everyone in American politics hates him and fears him, because he just can’t be bought, and he refuses to buy into their anti-America-money-is-everything arrangement. A second term of President Trump threatens to overturn at least fifty years of cozy Uniparty corruption and misallocation of American taxpayer public dollars. And so the 2020 election had to be stolen from the American People right in front of our faces, and now that the 2024 election looms, the entire DC Beltway is at war with Trump. He is literally the ham sandwich that got indicted.
Trump has been indicted for things no one in America has ever been indicted for. He has been indicted for things that other people, like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden have all done or are actively doing right now without any legal or even social repercussion. Official documents in Biden’s garage? Whatever. Tons of documentation that the entire Biden family is a treasonous influence peddling scheme? Whatever. But apparently Trump must die in prison for having taken his own documents home after leaving the White House.
A friend of mine, albeit a lobbyist, recently said to me that Trump is surrounded by “too much drama.” Yeah, well, war is drama because war is hell, and Trump is at war with the forces of evil because they declared war on him and you and me.
President Trump is not just some guy. He is not just some guy who bucked “the system.” Trump is THE guy who tore the mask off the criminally corrupt vampires illegally feasting on the American taxpayer and draining the American body politic down to a hollow husk that can then blow away in a faint breeze blowing from the East. And so he now faces a horde of vampires trying to kill him one unholy way or another so that they can go back to doing the horrible crap they were doing (e.g. illegally making money off of you the American taxpayer while simultaneously molesting children). This is a historic showdown, and Trump represents the light, the good, the sunshine, the promising dawn breaking over a gory battlefield. He represents you.
We are in a holy war, folks. It is good versus evil, and Trump is the good.
Trump represents you, the forgotten American taxpayer, the forgotten American worker, the forgotten American parent of small children, the white Millennial or purposefully impoverished black person taken for granted and used as cannon fodder in the Left’s war on freedom. At this point, Trump represents all that was a free America.
He is also the proverbial canary in the coal mine, because if he goes down under the weight of the vampire horde, then a free and fair America goes down with him. If the wave of illegal and unconstitutional and unfair and double-standard lawfare assaults on Trump prevail, then America will die, because there is no one strong enough or brave enough or patriotic enough to follow through on what Trump unwittingly started in 2016. None of the other Republican candidates have the strength of character Trump has. No one else can right the ship and set it on course again.
And this is why we must all band together and support President Donald J. Trump now. We are in a holy war not for Trump, but for America, for our children, our homes. Get in this fight and roll up your sleeves. Everyone is needed to return America to a government Of, By and For The People, and not of, by, and for the corrupt bureaucrat and special interests, like China, who now clearly own Joe Biden’s very soul and America’s wide open southern border.
Post Office is a gun free zone, right? Nope!
Anyone who uses a US Post Office facility is probably aware of the many signs posted against bringing firearms into the premises. The signs show different types of handguns, from the iconic Colt Detective Special .38 Special snubnose, to the old Colt and Smith & Wesson Police revolver, to the Glock semiautomatic. All of these firearm depictions have a red circle and line slash across the firearm image, which is a loud and clear message: No firearms allowed here.
And although I have not researched the recent prosecutions against Americans for breaking this particular gun free zone law, I imagine that when people are prosecuted for it, they are absolutely hammered. Gotta make examples of these kinds of law breakers, is the thinking of the federal bureaucrats in charge of enforcing this law.
Yesterday I was in Uptown Harrisburg’s Post Office, and the man in front of me (there is always a long line at this postal facility) had a semiauto pistol sticking out of his left waist band. He also was speaking simultaneously into three different cell phones. His sideways baseball hat added a real confidence-inspiring impression of him as a law-abiding citizen of upstanding moral character.
The guy standing behind me had a pierced nose and earrings on both ears, but said quietly to anyone who was near enough to hear him “Jesus. Look at this guy. I don’t carry [my pistol] in here because I would get into trouble, and I can’t afford it.”
I concurred with the nose piercing guy, and said in return “I just want everyone else to follow the same laws that I have to follow,” to which nose piercing guy nodded in agreement. He rarely took his eye off the pistol grip sticking out for all in line to see.
When my turn to send the certified mail envelope came, I asked the teller/ clerk if she had seen the pistol out in plain view. “No I did not see it. And I am not a police officer,” she said.
And thus we have a prime example of how “Gun Free Zones” are total bullschiff. The only people who obey them are people like me, who do not break the law and who are afraid to break the law. The consequences of me and other good people breaking the law and getting in trouble would be catastrophic to our lives, to my life. So I was standing there, completely unarmed and defenseless against an obvious criminal flaunting his illegal firearm in a “Gun Free Zone.”
The only people who promote “Gun Free Zones” are those who actually want law-abiding citizens to cower in fear from law-breakers and aggressive criminals. As we saw in Biden’s crazy ‘F-15 versus AR-15’ speech last week, beating down and subjugating the good people in America is the goal of one political party. Apparently we good people are the threat to that political party, while violent criminals are not.
“Gun Free Zones” are BS, they mean nothing, no one enforces them against the bad people who violate them. They are meant just to limit the good law-abiding people who need guns for self protection against criminals.
Just say No to “Gun Free Zones.”
Conoy Township in Lancaster County is not a gun free zone, and it is an exceptionally safe place.
Gaza or everything you love: Your choice
Gaza. Poor, poor Gaza.
The ultimate self-victim, the impoverished and destroyed Gaza Strip is the compressed store house for every bad, wrong, foolish, selfish, suicidal, stupid, short-sighted, and self-defeating choice any group of humans ever made or could make. Like launching thousands of randomly aimed fatal missiles at their next door neighbor, and then falsely claiming victimhood when the neighbor defends themselves.
Mentioned in the Bible as one of the great Phoenician strongholds (‘Aza), Gaza’s failure today is Biblical in every way. While the place and its present day human population do deserve better everything, and could have it if they but willed it, its human population has also consciously determined that being miserable, phony symbolic martyrs is their highest and best use. Gaza the ever-martyr serves one purpose: To destroy Western Civilization.
What is Western Civilization? Whether we call it Christendom, Europe, America, Australia, or Judeo-Christian values, it is a rare democracy of republican institutions that diffuse political power among its citizens, rewarding free choice with maximum individual liberty and minimal government power. Open societies, whose governments are owned by The People, not by warlords.
Nothing could be more different from Gaza (or Syria, Iraq, and other self-destroyed Middle Eastern nations etc) than Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Venice, Rome, Madrid, or Manhattan. Willful decay, poverty, and constant pointless warfare on the one hand, juxtaposed to great communal celebrations of freedom of thought and conscience, science, and mutual beneficence on the other carved in stone.
Gaza’s role is to worm its way into the mind of Western Civilization and play Iago, always questioning what our eyes and ears plainly see and hear, and placing the blame for their misery not on the merciless ideology of Gaza’s Hamas, or on the infestatious Arab colonialism that carved up the current Middle East, nor on brute Islamic imperialism, but on the world’s beacon of light, Western Civilization. Gaza’s siren song is playing to the shallow desire for many affluent Western people to virtue signal that they are not really as bad as they might be thought. That they are soft hearted for even the worst of murderers.
And so Western “journalists” — come on, they are open propagandists and partisan political activists, not arbiters of accuracy or truth — broadcast totally false images back into Western Civilization that blames us for what we see happening over there.
These false images are crying parents, grieving over the dead propaganda prop children they allowed Hamas to use as magnets hidden among their missile batteries that targeted children in Israel. Or the destroyed building that the Associated Press knowingly shared with Hamas’ most important people, in addition to missile batteries on its roof, raining down on kindergartens in Israel. None of the sadness for Gaza the media portrays back home is true. It is all false.
Truth represents the penultimate achievement in Western Civilization, and every decision we make is ideally for truth, for the common good. Few other civilizations now or in the past sought truth or common good. Most great civilizations sought power and domination, and most still do today. Democracy and freedom are outliers, and truth is anathema to most governments around the world.
So the idea that a tiny nation of seven million Jews is somehow an unjust outpost in an area a thousand times Israel’s size is a preposterous idea. Most Muslim Arab capitols house more Muslim Arabs than there are Jews on the entire planet, so how Israel’s Jews are a threat is another preposterous idea. Only the most simple minded, careless people can identify with Gaza or its self-manufactured unhappiness.
A month ago, when Gaza was bombarding its neighbor with thousands of missiles, a nice man emailed me. He asked what I thought of the situation. Knowing that my views are generally conservative, I believe he thought I was going to bend the knee and worship the false graven images being broadcast back into our homes by the lying media. And gosh, was the international media ever full of that junk! My response was:
*Flatten Gaza
*Defend Western Civilization
*Do not reward or give in to violent crybullies
The war between Gaza and Israel is the war between good and evil, Hitler and the West, all that is good versus all that is wrong and bad in humanity. Western Civilization cannot afford to cry for Gaza, especially because Gaza does not cry for itself. To allow Gaza to shape Western Civilization is for Westerners like the people who read this blog to throw overboard everything that our own civilization represents. I know this following statement is really difficult for a lot of Westerners today, especially the young, but grow a pair of balls and make a stand for what is right and just and good.
Support Israel, oppose Gaza.
Whatever your religious belief, our nation now basks in goodness
Christmas is America’s national holiday, and while there are many Christians reminding fellow citizens that there is a more spiritual and faith based core to the holiday, it is, in fact, a glorious time of year no matter what your religious beliefs may be.
Seven days ago, Hanuka began on the 25th day of the Hebrew month Kislev, as usual. Just after Hanuka ends this year, tomorrow night, Christmas will then begin on the 25th day of the Gregorian month of December, as usual.
The two holidays are naturally linked, as early Christians both tied their new religion to the parent faith with a holiday (“Holy Day”) on nearly identical dates, and then separated from it from Hanuka with a new holiday, “Christ’s Mass,” which has been turned into a conjunction, Christmas.
Much has been said about the Judeo-Christian roots of America, and our Christmas holiday is just one more example of that shared religious basis of our nation’s founding. It is a testament to the tolerant and open sensibility at the root of American identity, to shared values among many different people.
You don’t have to be Jewish to like Jewish-style rye bread, and you don’t have to be Christian to enjoy Christmas. Every American should enjoy Christmas, and wish one another a Merry Christmas. There is no declaration of faith in that, but rather it is a declaration of love for all things good and for a shared, common identity in a truly good nation.
Probably the only really good nation on the planet: We have the rule of law, more opportunity than anywhere else, the highest standard of living, etc. Christmas crowns that all at the end of the year, and it reminds us that the sum total of our year is simply good.
In that spirit of goodness, I wish all my fellow Americans and our many guests here Happy Hanuka, and Merry Christmas!
Despite digital technology advances, actual humans are necessary
Digital technology is amazing, no doubt about it.
Yes, it enables all kinds of speed in research and communications.
But the internet has also inspired a “digital wall” response to basic inquiries that used to be handled by people answering phones. You cannot just pick up a phone and ask someone a question, any longer. Instead, you must navigate a maze of circular questions and answers and phone tree options, long before you get to hit the star key or number one and talk to a person.
eBay is the prime example of the digital wall. You cannot get real customer service at eBay. eBay’s digital artificial intelligence is supposed to satisfactorily respond to all customer issues, but it doesn’t. It is a failure.
One online commenter says “It is easier to talk with the Pope than to actually speak with a person at eBay,” a sad but true fact that I myself have learned the hard way.
Here in Pennsylvania, the Tom Ridge Revolution for responsive government is looong over.
Remember how back in the 1990s, Governor Tom Ridge opened up Pennsylvania state government with a crowbar and a box of dynamite, and got the scurrying inhabitants of the many faceless concrete government buildings in downtown Harrisburg to actually view taxpayers as “customers”?
Maybe you don’t recall that time, but it was refreshing. Suddenly, state workers at most agencies were required to actually answer the calls of the taxpayers they serve, and to act professionally, and to help resolve problems.
PennDOT was at that time a notoriously labyrinthine experience, kind of like the Vatican, one might guess, in that if a taxpayer was fortunate enough to find an IN door, they might spend a day shambling down shuttered halls with closed doors with jargon printed on them, searching yet more for the answer to their government-inspired problem.
The workers there at that time could not have cared less for serving the public, and no one took any initiative to make them serve the public, until the Ridge Administration arrived.
Then, PennDOT was required to post phone numbers, email addresses, have customer service representatives on call, so that no citizen had to waste their time trying to make sense of the bureaucratic maze while to trying to meet some official mandate.
After all, if the government is going to require something, then the government absolutely must provide the means to achieve that.
Well, now PennDOT is back to its bad old ways. The foolish young punks running the disastrous Corbett Administration into the ground at Mach 4 wouldn’t know a damned thing about customer service or taxpayers, for that matter. PennDOT has been allowed to crawl back under a heavy cloak of secrecy and impenetrable darkness. Go ahead, call PennDOT. Try to reach a human being through their main portal:
“Call 1-800-932-4600 (from within PA) or 717-412-5300 (from out of state). You can also send an email through our Driver and Vehicle Services Customer Call Center, or write to the following address:
Riverfront Office Center (Driver and Vehicle Services)
1101 South Front Street
Harrisburg, PA 17104-2516
1-800-932-4600”
Oh, you will hear a human voice, which right off the bat asks you that if you want to continue in English, “Press One.” Imagine my surprise when I just held the line, did not press one, and was shuttled off into yet another maze of foreign languages, as if just wanting to encounter my own government in our native language was something we should have to ask for.
Anyhow, the phone options in English are another maze of options and circular loops. One answer gives the locations of service centers, but saves providing you with the hours for each one until the very end, as if you might actually recall which service center was “one,” “two,” or “three.”
This is the very essence of Bad Government.
Government absolutely must be responsive, open, transparent, or it is illegitimate. If it cannot serve its citizens and taxpayers, then government has failed. Once government has failed, it cannot hold citizens to a higher standard.
Governor-elect Tom Wolf faces a Republican legislature, which is not likely to go along with his tax-and-spend approach to government.
Well, here is an opportunity that is guaranteed to make Wolf a hero among all citizens: Force government to open up again; get our taxpayer-funded bureaucrats to be responsive, or get out. No more digital walls for the people who pay the bills.
And maybe Wolf can talk to the owners of eBay, and persuade them to provide real customer service, too.
People ask me why
For some people, politics and political activism are their bread and butter. Politics pays their bills. With the right clients, they can make millions of dollars out of politics as a business model.
For me, politics is about personal liberty, freedom, opportunity and many other inspiring principles behind the founding of America. It is also about the little freedoms we have that emanate from the bigger ideas: The freedom to drive or walk somewhere without having to prove that you belong there, the freedom to choose where to live, the ability to select from a wide assembly of fresh food, to name a few popular ones.
Call it an innate sense of justice and right and wrong, which family and friends have said I’ve had since I was a little kid, or call it a lack of patience, an inability to watch, participate in, listen to, or tolerate BS/fluff/empty slogans/lies/self-interest, whatever it is that motivates me, I am passionate about good government.
Good government has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager, when I first got involved in political campaigns. Back then, I was horrified at the way abortion-on-demand was changing our culture, I was against gun control, and nuclear missiles scared me. Later on, watching police beat non-violent pro-democracy marchers in South Africa motivated me to put my voice behind change there (note that now the monumentally corrupt and un-just African National Congress government there is hardly better than the overtly racist apartheid government it replaced). Age, paying taxes, and work experience have a way of shaping political views for normal people, and I was no exception.
So here I am, living a life that has meaning for me, trying to shape Pennsylvania and American politics in ways I believe are healthy, necessary, and just. The citizens and taxpayers who are supposed to be served well by their government (of the people, by the people, for the people) are not being well served today. This is why I am involved in politics. That is why I will not go away, at least not until things are fixed to my satisfaction.
When the government just takes your land
About four years ago, Pennsylvania state government created a new regulation setting aside 150-foot buffers on waterways classified as High Quality and Exceptional Value.
This means that 150 feet from the edge of the waterway up into the private property, it’s designated as off-limits to most types of disturbances.
The purpose was to protect these waterways from the effects of development.
The end result is an obviously uncompensated taking of private property by the government. When the government takes a tape measure and marks off your own private land and says you can’t do anything with this huge area, or a road is going through, you’re simply taken advantage of. You’re robbed. It’s Un-American. It’s unconstitutional.
Pennsylvania is a great state. I love living here. It’s saddening to see such top-down, command and control, clunky, one-size-fits-all regulations in this day and age. We can do so much better than this approach.
To start, create incentives for landowners to go along. Give tax credits and write-offs for land taken by government.
Do we all want clean air, soil, and water? Sure. Breathing, eating, and drinking clean air, food, and water are necessary to surviving. But that’s not the question.
The question is HOW we pursue those goals.
Requiring American citizens to simply give up their investments, with no compensation, creates losers in a system that was originally designed to make everyone a winner.
Instead of pitting government against the citizens, we need policies and laws that help and serve citizens, that are fair to citizens. That is by definition good government.
This current 150-foot buffer regulation is by definition bad government.