Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Trump’s Serious Diagnosis as a Test of Your Humanity

by Leave a Comment

A litmus test of someone’s humanity is whether they celebrate another’s suffering. Even in my limited sampling of less than half an hour, it’s clear a lot of people on social media are failing that test today.

In case you’ve been under a rock or detached from news for 24 hours, several people who were at the Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination have come down with the Wuhan-originated (factual statement!) coronavirus. This includes President Trump and Melania, the First Lady. Also infected: presidential adviser Hope Hicks (the spreader?), Kellyanne Conway, RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, Sens. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, Rev. Ron Jenkins (President of Notre Dame University, where Barrett matriculated), and a few others. So far, VP Mike Pence has tested negative, with no word on Barrett. Since this disease skews its harm toward the old, chances are somebody from this group will have serious problems. I hope not, but hope isn’t scientifically falsifiable virology.

Disagreements with someone’s policies (and I certainly have some with this president’s, but that’s irrelevant) don’t justify being glad somebody is sick with potentially deadly virus. This is a serious disease for anyone, much less a 77-year-old out-of-shape male. That’s among the highest-risk profiles. This truly could kill or permanently maim him, and it’s no laughing matter.

I would say the same if Biden caught this disease and “conservatives” celebrated. Given recent contacts, Biden just might; so in case he does, refer to this same post as well. It applies equally.

There is no valid rationalization for wishing personal misery on someone because you don’t like their governance policies or think they’re a rotten person. There’s also no such thing as Karma. The virus doesn’t care about political affiliation nor your opinion thereof.

I’m not just talking about the obvious hate ghouls you can easily find on Twitter overtly wishing suffering and death on someone else. [There are *thousands*…I am not kidding. It’s not hard to find them right now if you try just a little.] At least the overt haters reveal who they are openly and with brutal honesty. I can respect that (and report it), even as I strongly disapprove of their behavior.

Perhaps more pathetic are the implicit, passive-aggressive expressions from people who preach often about kindness and “empathy”. It’s especially disappointing to see a few self-professed Christians cheering this on, albeit tacitly in a lame attempt to put a smiley veneer over their real sentiments, but who have referred to the President as a horrible person.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Heard of that? We’ve all been guilty at some point, including me; regardless, that reminder is sorely needed now for a lot of people. In general terms, it is possible to disagree with somebody and disapprove their sinful *behavior*, without hating them as people or wishing grave misery on them. Try it.

Another character test is if you are willing to pray for Trump despite your disagreements with him. Can you? I won’t know, and don’t need to. However, God knows, and that’s who really matters in all this.

What I told my Facebook “friends” (and I don’t accept requests from people I don’t know and haven’t met) is: “If you’re the sort who will revel in another’s suffering, I should ‘unfriend’ you, but won’t. Why? Because you need to be watched…closely.” So if you know someone behaving this way, keep an eye on them, for real; something pathological and perhaps demonic could be at work.

Example of Leftist Anti-Freedom Tactics

by Leave a Comment

The First Amendment does not say “except” or “unless”. In fact it exists specifically to protect peaceful assembly and controversial and offensive speech from governmental intrusion.

After school, on a public (key word there, public) sidewalk next to the Downington STEM Academy in PA, Christian teen siblings Lauren and Connor Haines held signs protesting abortion, including one with a picture of a dead aborted baby, while peacefully discussing the issue with passersby. Their assistant principal Dr. Zach Ruff came out harassing, threatening and cussing them, while using his large girth to stand in front and impede viewing of their message.

The school authority’s message: “You can go to hell where they are, too. They’re not children. They’re cells. … I’m as gay as the day is long and twice as sunny. I don’t give a f*** what Jesus tells me about what I should and should not be doing. … You do not have my permission to speak and engage. You are harassing public school students, and I will call the police if you don’t shut up.”

Full 18-minute video:

During his assault on the First Amendment, the self-described “twice as sunny” principal (under PA law) assaulted Connor too, by getting within inches of his face and trying to rip a sign from him. That’s not all. Following the assistant principal’s pathetic example of bullying and threats, other students and parents (!) engaged in mob-scale harassment by sending Connor, Lauren and their families hundreds of messages, some profane.

These are the tactics of oppressors and anti-freedom mobs, folks: herd-mentality threats, intimidation, and authoritarian bullying.

Fortunately, this time, by eliciting legal aid from legal-defense nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom (one I am proud to support tangibly), the good guys courageously prevailed over hateful authoritarian bullies. Ultimately the school had to apologize and acknowledge the violated First Amendment freedoms of Lauren and Connor, the vice principal was suspended, then resigned, and Lauren and Connor are free as they should be to exercise their free-expressive rights on public property.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. This is but a microcosm of public-school and college incidents of First Amendment violation all across the nation, hundreds of them and adding up yearly. With his PhD and “educational” background, Ruff very well could get a job elsewhere around students, where the same bigoted anti-Christian bullying can begin anew. And he’s far, far, far from the only one with that mentality. Protectors of freedom must be vigilant and call out the destroyers of freedom at every turn in this era of hate and intolerance of peaceful dissent.

You see, freedom is our greatest earthly gift and is God-ordained. Support and protect it, even when people freely express things that bother or offend you. No question, I wholly endorse and approve of Connor and Lauren’s message, and defend their right to say it. Even as an open and unapologetic social and fiscal conservative, I also am a governmental libertarian to the core, and defend the right of those peacefully expressing messages I don’t approve, to do so in the public arena…yes, even left-wing messages! Freedom is for all, not just liberals, conservatives or “moderates” (whatever that is…seems everybody from far left to far right thinks he/she is a moderate). This includes artistic freedom from the vicious viceroys of political correctness.

I fully am using my freedom of expression to post this…and folks, it has been happening for decades and is not going to stop. I have my ideals, opinions, and biases as well. I absolutely do preferentially post instances of left-wing violations of freedom, in large part to counter the intense bias of most mass media against the right, and against Christians. So be it. As long as I breathe, and as long as the left violates others’ rights (anymore, a given) there’s plenty more where this came from. Deal with it.

Don’t like my expressions of free speech, or others’? Ignore it, or argue non-violently. Don’t weaponize authority to squash others’ God-given and Constitutionally codified right to free expression! If you do, expect a well-earned backlash in support of freedom, and expect to lose — ideologically for starters, and in court if necessary.

Want to fight ideas you disapprove? Use facts, reason, logic, and levelheaded, rational counter-argument. Never threats, intimidation, bullying, or violence! And yes, that applies from the President (hardly a role model here) right on down to some spiteful vice principal, and ultimately, you and me.

Election 2016 Part 4: Left-wing Anguish, Hate and Violence

by Leave a Comment

In the previous installment of the Election 2016 series, I discussed hazards to conservatives and conservatism from the ascendancy of Trump to highest office. Now let’s look at what’s happening on the left. To summarize, quite a lot of people need to be taught, as they should have been by parents, how to behave when things don’t go their way.

THE ANGUISHED LEFT

Liberals immediately began weeping and gnashing teeth over how such a horror can take place. Naturally, being driven by emotion and feelings more than rationality and reason, many leftists dove straight into over-the-top, “I can’t cope!” type melodrama on social media, and posts to the effect of, “Now is not the time for kindness and reconciliation, not yet.” Not the time for kindness? Wow. I feel so sorry for those consumed by such bitterness.

Then there were the soft, pampered, coddled, overly tender little snowflakes at colleges around the country whose precious little naive worldviews have no conceptions for real-world harshness and developments that don’t go their way. Emotion, not rationality, reason and logic, drive every fiber of thought. This is another existence (and it’s not life, but existence) for which I have profound pity. It only creates more self-made victims. How exquisitely ironic and fitting that so many have adopted diaper pins as their collective pity-party symbol. And now we even have a gaggle of left-wingers ironically jumping on the bandwagon of a new Red Scare — which looks, sounds and smells exactly like the pattern of conspiracy theory-mongering they accuse the right of doing.

Many on the left cannot comprehend that their party (political party as opposed to pity party, though there is currently little difference) put forth a deeply, deeply flawed candidate infested with corrupted ethics and rotten to the core. Instead they launch bogeyman conspiracy theories and desperate stabs in the dark to blame the FBI director, who spinelessly failed to recommend prosecution for stuff that would have landed a mere proletariat like me in jail by now, the third-party candidates (bullshit…they took from Trump as well!), “racist and xenophobic” bogeymen under every bed, and all manner of other lame excuses for the sorry, sad-sack performance of their own candidate and repudiation of their ideals in the most critical parts of the electoral marketplace.

THE HATEFUL AND SOMETIMES VIOLENT LEFT [Or: Yes, I was in Portland!]

Even before the election, various incidents of violence against Trump supporters (another example, among many) and destruction of property sneaked through the media; who knows what happened that was not widely publicized.

Fortuitously, I was in downtown Portland on unrelated business on election night, and on the next, spent a time out there observing the “civil disobedience”–deliberately embedded for an hour or more within the protestors, who had no idea I was an unsympathetic infiltrator. Here’s what I posted to Facebook friends from the streets, just upwind of tear gas and listening to both the flash/bang grenades and megaphone demands from a wave of law enforcement:

    I wandered through some of it. Tons of cops and choppers everywhere. Tear gas and flash-bang devices on occasion but nothing unmanageable. Stoner “riots” are entertaining and not very dangerous. These hipsters have trouble bench-pressing a phone book, much less hurting anybody.
    …
    Yes, it appears some of these morons did break stuff. Cops mostly were dispersing and not arresting people.

    Understanding urban meteorology/airflow does help one to stay upwind of the tear gas.
    …
    There definitely was an element that had cell phones ready and waiting [for cops to make a mistake]– as if a form of wishful entrapment.
    …
    [Earlier, on the opposite side of the river:] I was shooting calm-looking water reflectives while standing under the bridge, right alongside a group of ~100 people singing, chanting and beating drums around a makeshift bonfire. Cops came and dispersed them right after I was done. At least they weren’t breaking stuff like those anarchist idiots downtown!

However, on the two following nights after I left, the protests did get physically violent in a few locales of Portland, and I would attribute that more to out-of-town and out-of-state professional paid agitators that we’ve seen in other civil disturbances in places like North Dakota, Ferguson and Baltimore. After the surprise election results, it took some time to get the hired hooligans into town.

My end report: Most of it was civil, but not all. The cops did an amazing job considering a small percentage of the crowd consisted of anarchist thugs breaking stuff, setting fires and hurling objects. Far larger numbers were spewing hate speech directed at at Trump and his supporters. How ironic it was to see people yelling “Love trumps hate,” while carrying “F*** Trump!” signs. Even worse scenes unfolded in other cities such as Oakland, where police endured barrages of bottles, rocks, and Molotov cocktails.

I did not realize that “Love trumps hate” involves destruction and violence.

Want more evidence of hypocrisy? Over half the arrested protestors in Portland didn’t vote in Oregon! If you don’t vote, you have no credibility at all in protesting the results. Go home and play on your PlayStation whilst choking down those kale smoothies.

As a third-party voter and an eyewitness to what happened one night in Portland, I can assure you BOTH sides have a lot of hate and intolerance to weed out of their ranks, not just the so-called “alt-right” as claimed by so-called “progressives”. The vitriol spewing from the left only reinforces, in Trump supporters’ eyes, their decision to vote for him. Is that your goal?

WISE ADVICE

Those who protested the election results really need to heed the words of the President for whom they voted last time, applied to themselves. As a reminder:

    “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country’s about. Go out there and win an election.”
    — Barack Obama, 2012

Remember? Or is what’s good for one shoe not applicable to the other?

And oh by the way–stop breaking stuff and trying to hurt people. That also hurts credibility. Ever hear of Martin Luther King and his rightful advocacy of non-violent protest? We also have seen false-flag “hate” incidents (for example) committed by the left, and even before this election cycle. Those who commit false-flag crimes for propaganda truly are a “basket of deplorables”.

Assassination wishes against the President-elect also exploded across Twitter and other social-media commentary spaces. Death threats are evil, criminal, dignify no further exposure, and will not be legitimized by re-posting here. You easily can find more than enough if you try, because regardless of any lip service to the contrary, results (which are what matters) show Twitter corporately cares nothing about being a willing vector for the threat to commit a Federal capital crime. These illustrate the extreme yet still present element of the Left that need to be policed by the party that preaches peace and tolerance.

In the next chapter of this set of BLOG entries, I’ll turn to the more thoughtful, rational element of the left wing and offer credit where it is due.