“Maybe this is their job. Maybe they’re paid to do it,” Boebert said in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Saturday. “You see this from extreme leftist progressives because either this is their job, either they are paid to do it, or they have nothing better to do, they’re sitting at home collecting a check, and this is their life.”

“I mean, I don’t have time for that,” the Republican lawmaker said. “You don’t see conservatives doing things like this because we have families to take care of, we have jobs to work at, we have communities to grow. And that’s our focus — not to destroy, but to build.”

It lacks any facts because it's a pressure piece, pure and simple, designed to intimidate America's bishops into doing what The New York Times thinks they should do.

The only reason to torture Tolkien’s work like this is not to understand it more deeply but to tear it down. And why would modern scholars want to do that? Because everything that Tolkien was, and everything he wrote, is an affront to the modern secular scholar’s understanding of the world, reality, and the meaning and purpose of life.

Put bluntly, the worlds Tolkien created sprang from an imagination shaped and suffused by his deep Roman Catholic faith. “The Silmarillion” in particular is in some ways a poetic and literary reflection on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In considering Tolkien’s Middle Earth, there is no way to escape this reality.

His creation, as he himself said, was a kind of sub-creation under the inspiration and aegis of almighty God. His grand themes — good and evil, truth and falsehood, power and glory and honor and sacrifice — all flow forth from his Christian faith and his decidedly sacramental view of the world. For Tolkien, all the world is shot through with meaning by a Creator who loves mankind and is manifest in His works.

That men and women now come to slander and distort and ultimately destroy these sub-creations of Tolkien is also, in a strange way, a testament to his legacy. Like Melkor, they are possessed by dark thoughts of their own imaginings, unlike those of the great Tolkien, and seek not so much to increase their own power and glory, but to bring Tolkien’s down to their grubby station, where everything can be reduced to race and sex and politics.

These people are taken today to be Tolkien scholars. What can we, who love Tolkien and his profoundly Christian art, do but repeat in sorrow a line from “Lament for the Rohirrim”—

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

On Monday, Townhall’s Marina Medvin shared a tweet showing shoplifting in San Francisco that should be considered shocking; a young man simply rides through a pharmacy with a trash bag, steals whatever he can, and not only does security allow him to ride out of the store, it seems nobody even moves to call the cops. //

For those unfamiliar, restorative justice is the progressive philosophy regarding crime. Its basic definition is “a system of criminal justice that focuses on the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the community at large.”

In other words, the solution to crimes is not punishment, but rehab and trusting that the criminal wants to change and be better and that the person committing said crime had no other choice — society forced him/her to do so.

So, all a criminal has to do is apologize, say he’ll commit to working hard, and prosecutors like Boudin give him a pass because, as Donahue referenced, these progressives believe that society–not the individual–is to blame for their crime.

To that extent, you’d be hard-pressed to find that society has ever forced a young man to ride through a pharmacy with a trash bag and snag whatever he can.

Maybe instead of imbibing from the church of progressivism, Boudin can listen to a priest from his city’s namesake’s religion; Roman Catholicism.

The now-deceased Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, “The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.”

He also stated, “There is a tendency among many shallow thinkers of our day to teach that every human act is a reflex, over which we do not exercise human control. They would rate a generous deed as no more praiseworthy than a wink, a crime as no more voluntary than a sneeze. . . Such a philosophy undercuts all human dignity. . . All of us have the power of choice in action at every moment of our lives.”

Indeed, perhaps progressives need to stop viewing society as the problem, start giving these criminals their rightful dignity, and recognize that they choose to commit crimes such as shoplifting which should rightfully be punished. Otherwise, San Francisco will continue to descend into anarchy. //

mjc227
an hour ago
Look for all the leftist losers running the city whining that SF is a food desert, hardware desert, drug store desert, dollar store desert and every other business desert and then blaming "society" after they ran every business out. It will be Trump's fault somehow or Republicans or the Tooth Fairy. Lefties create the problem, blame everyone else but who caused the problem and then come riding in with a crackpot solution to a problem they created that could not possibly solve the problem but the taxpayers wind up paying for the solution that has a zero chance of ever working. Wash, rinse and repeat.

Why didn’t four reporters from the NYT run this down before impugning Benevenuto’s professional integrity? They couldn’t risk it.

Impugning Benevenuto’s professional integrity was part of the narrative that Bill Barr was doing something corrupt right up to the end.

Bill Barr is working on a book. The first effort from the Democrats will be to prevent any publisher from agreeing to print the book. But that won’t work.

So the fallback position is to continue to hammer away on Barr in advance of his recounting of events.

It’s all about the narrative for the NYT — fact or fiction doesn’t factor into it.

On June 1, 2020 and afterward, corporate media didn't simply get it wrong, they flagrantly and shamelessly lied to Americans in order to hurt the president //

We were treated to what at first appeared to be rare mea culpa this week as reporters read the Department of the Interior inspector general’s report on the riots and police response in Lafayette Park last summer and appeared shocked to find that the Park Police and Attorney General Bill Barr and even President Donald Trump were telling the truth when they said the crowd was going to be dispersed before police knew the president was thinking of coming down there.

AOC and her ilk thought they could accomplish their legislative goals while they appeared to be ascendant within the party — “get on board or get left behind”. But the progressives/socialists never had the votes even when the media touted every move they made. Yes, the Democrat caucus is more liberal, but it is not monolithic. It’s easy to vote “Yes” in the House or Senate when you know the legislation is DOA because Joe Manchin said so.

Joe Manchin is the Senate’s exterminator, and he allows a lot of Democrat friends to make “Show Votes” to keep the socialist hounds at bay back at home.

But AOC has seen enough. She knows he’s not the only problem.

We’ll know if she more than “just talk” when it comes time for her to decide whether to try and slay the King himself — a primary challenge to Chuck Schumer.

The left operates on its own internal currency and it’s the one currency in the world where the more of it you have the less of a person you are…at least by intent.

Social justice rules the Democrats and it’s a kind of ideology that puts more value on victimhood than it does success, merit, or talent. In fact, the more you have of those three, the worse of a person you are in the eyes of social justice adherents. It’s from this ideological foundation that we get “critical race theory.” //

Democrats are a lot like Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He whispers lies into the ears of anyone he targets, and sometimes what he says may seem soothing and understanding but really they’re pure poison meant to make you doubt yourself and your own ability. Like the Democrats, he speaks for people, accusing those who resist his agenda of attempting to bring burdens and troubles upon the people he speaks for. Meanwhile, the person he’s poisoning believes what he says and grows as weak and incapable as he tells them they are. //

CRT is an attempt at teaching the black community, specifically children, that they can’t do anything because it will automatically result in failure thanks to the American system. The only way they’ll get anywhere is if they lean heavily into whatever program the Democrats say they should, oddly enough, driving them further into a system that oppresses them.

This is an unbelievable amount of racism that no one is addressing. The left says it’s attempting to help out those who America considers second class, but in truth, it’s Democrats who continue to put them there. They continue to divide races against each other, making them even more incapable of working for a better future.

Telling someone of a certain race that they can’t function without them is racism. Period.

The left ignored the people in order to flaunt a narrative, but that narrative is costing them voters, and it’ll cost them even more down the line as previously Democrat voters realize that Republicans actually do far better at governing than the left does.

If Democrats are smart, they’ll stop to realize that it’s their own racism that’s blinding them to reality, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Except that it was deceptive to make it appear that Gaetz was threatening Silicon Valley.

Gaetz was speaking about the First Amendment — about Silicon Valley, Big Tech censorship and cancel culture.

“Let us use the Constitution to strengthen our argument, and our movement. We have a First Amendment right to speak and assemble, and we better use it. The internet’s hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us, discourage us. Maybe if you’re just a little less patriotic, maybe if you just conform to their way of thinking a little more, then you will be allowed to participate in the digital world. Well, you know what? Silicon Valley can’t cancel this movement or this rally or this congressman.”

He then started a separate point about the Second Amendment with, “We have a Second Amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it.”

But the deceptive clip left out the context that those were two separate thoughts, with that last sentence being that start of a discussion of the Second Amendment, as the longer Youtube clip reveals.

Just add another drop in the bucket of examples on how our public school system has been invaded by hard-left radicals that wish to brainwash your children into believing racist concepts that paint America in a horrible light, this new story from the Young American’s Foundation shows an elementary school principal’s disgusting response to parents who spoke out against the critical race theory-focused education the school was forcing on their children.

Meet Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood as we all know, murders over 300,000 children in the womb every year.

Of those, the Family Research Council using CDC data reports, 36 percent are Black //

How did we get to this point? It starts with Margaret Sanger and her belief in — nay, active promotion of — eugenics. Her stated desire was the same as a certain well-known Austrian Corporal. According to a number of quotes laid out in, The Strange World of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review: Part I.

Her aim was to prevent the procreation of those she deemed unfit “To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.”

https://www.hli.org/resources/sangers-birth-control-review-part-i/#_edn4 //

audax
a year ago edited
Something I wrote a few years ago:

Someone asked me to "pass on" a meme about "Assisted Dying Laws" because "it is so easy"! Let's put the "people in pain" out of their misery!

It has ALL happened before! This Eugenics philosophy thing. It sounds so "gentle", this killing. I certainly hope I never become one of these "Lebensunwertes Leben". You don't remember the "Lebensunwertes Leben"? You don't remember the past? Well, you are on the road to repeat it. Because this ALL happened before, the old, the sick, those in "pain"...all became the "Lebensunwertes Leben"...."The Life Unworthy of Life".

The first of the "Lebensunwertes Leben" were the people in pain and the "erbkraken", those with congenital, cognitive, and physical disabilities like the feeble-minded, the epileptic, the schizophrenic, the manic-depressive, the cerebral palsied, those with muscular dystrophy, the deaf, the blind, the weak, and the insane.

Up next, were the degenerate's and the homosexuals.

After that, they came for the idle, the dissident's, and the prisoners.

Then the Roma (Gypsies), the Slavs, and the other peoples of color, had their turn....

....and finally, they came for the Jews.

Yes, all of the above started out as the "Lebensunwertes Leben"...."The Life Unworthy of Life"...who became the "Untermensch", the "Subhuman Creatures", the "Lesser Men", and it all started with the people in pain....so when you "pass this on" because "it's so easy" remember...it has all happened before! We didn't like how it turned out in the 1930's and '40's and we won't like what it turns into now - Gregory Wilson aka audax

Despite the fact that disgraced Florida data tech Rebekah Jones was discredited multiple times last year over her claim that she was “fired” for refusing to “manipulate” the state’s coronavirus dashboard in a way that would make Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) look even better, Jones has continued to be lovingly embraced by an MSM who treats her like a martyr for supposedly being willing to lose her job by speaking Truth to Power. //

But though much has been written about and speculated on regarding Jones’ massive deception campaign over the last year, Charles C.W. Cooke did some more digging and wrote what may be the most definitive, receipt-filled investigative piece on Jones to date this week, thoroughly nuking her most explosive claims and documenting how viciously retaliating after rejection is one of Jones’ most notorious hallmarks. //

Charles C. W. Cooke
@charlescwcooke
Replying to @charlescwcooke
Rebekah Jones is not an epidemiologist. She’s not a data analyst. She's not a whistleblower. She's a fabulist, who has an uncanny ability to convince online types that something dodgy happened in FL. It didn’t. If you believe her, you’re the mark.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-covid-whistleblower-who-wasnt/

https://nypost.com/2021/05/13/how-rebekah-jones-peddled-lies-about-florida-covid-19-deaths/

Stephen L. Miller
@redsteeze
Rebekah Jones was promoted and propped up by our media for the same reasons as Michael Avenatti - It doesn't matter how credible they are - only that they say the right things and have the right opponents. It's absolute malfeasance that this continues without consequences.

Kyle DeMarino
@KyleDeMarino
It’s inappropriate to copy and paste verbatim ‘guidance’ from a political organization; rather than CDC using science and their own methods to form guidance. It’s clear the AFT was leveraging their power to keep kids out of school, regardless of science.

Elder offered up a few pertinent questions to Mad Max:

The police? All of them? Not just racist white cops? And Waters meant now, today — not decades ago. She said police are “led to believe that their greatest challenge … is to keep … Black people in their place”? Led to believe this by whom?

Is it relevant that many of our major cities have or have had Black police chiefs? Is it relevant that many big-city police departments increasingly reflect the racial diversity of the communities they protect and serve?

Is it relevant that an increasing percentage of the nation’s sworn police officers are officers of color, including the police chief in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died? //

“Police departments across the country have become less overwhelmingly white since the 1990s, according to a study published by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics last fall.

“The agency’s survey of police departments found that the share of white non-Hispanic police fell from 78.5 percent in 1997 to 71.5 percent in 2016.” //

“Irresponsible attacks against the supposedly “systemically racist” police by politicians like Waters are, in part,” wrote Elder, “responsible for the “Ferguson Effect,” the phenomenon of cops pulling back from proactive policing for fear of accusations of engaging in “systemic racism.”

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles County, Waters’ home base, homicides during the first two months of 2021 were up 186% compared with 2020, according to Fox News. //

When cops pull back from proactive policing, crime goes up. By teaching young Blacks that cops hate them, why would a young Black man comply when pulled over by a “systemically racist” cop?

And this failure to comply can turn a traffic stop into something deadly. Waters’ rhetoric has led to an increase in homicides in America’s cities, where the majority of the victims are the very “people of color” she claims to care so deeply about.

Of 943 viewers surveyed: 54% were Democrats, 25% were Independents, and only 18% were Republicans. They also seem to have had 3% go missing, without any explanation as to what those folks were, which makes me question all their other numbers.Many then extrapolated that out to “85% of Americans” approved of the speech, which is not the same thing as 85% of CBS viewers who responded to the survey, who are heavily weighted towards Democrats. It’s not even 85% of CBS viewers. //

Additionally what was funny was they initially reached out to 10,420 U.S. adults. Only 4,211 of that 10,420 planned on watching. But it ended up that only 943 watched and responded to the survey. So, it doesn’t sound like too many people of the folks they reached out to were even interested in watching and/or responding to the survey. People are not exactly enthralled with the idea of watching Joe Biden for any length of time and commenting. //

USMC69
4 hours ago
They reached out to over 10,000 and only 942 responded. Seems to me that means only about 8.5% of Americans approve. I think they got the decimal wrong, but that isn't surprising, they do like to use common core math.

Snopes has published an article that claims that Apocalypse Never is being “challenged by scientists he cites.” The author, Alex Kasprak, claims scientists “say their work either refutes or is irrelevant to the broader points Shellenberger makes in his book.”

In fact, Kasprak quotes scientists who confirm several key claims of Apocalypse Never:

The most dramatic confirmation is around my debunking of the myth that humans are causing a “sixth mass extinction.” As background, Facebook censored my article announcing Apocalypse Never in part because an activist scientist writing for the web site Climate Feedback insisted humans were, in fact, causing a mass extinction. Kasprak quotes a scientist who admits that it would “require current rates to continue for several tens of thousands of years to reach the 75% species-level extinction characteristic of the ‘Big Five’” mass extinctions. //

Kasprak either didn’t read Apocalypse Never, didn’t understand it, or chose to deliberately misrepresent it. //

10. Kasprak uncritically quotes a scientist falsely asserting that “the industrial food system is effectively a poverty-generating machine.”
    Industrial agriculture has played a major role in lifting nations out of poverty by reducing the share of the population that must farm from over 80 percent in poor nations to just two percent in rich ones. The notion that the industrialization of agriculture drove economic growth is only controversial among Malthusian scientists, several of whom are debunked in Apocalypse Never, and in ways that Kasprak never addresses. //

11. Kasprak falsely suggests there might be some better way to determine whether or not natural disasters have become “worse” than death toll or property damage, even though that is how IPCC and others define disasters.

Joseph A. Wulfsohn
@JosephWulfsohn
UPDATE: Gannett spox issued a statement:

"We regret the oversight in updating the Stacey Abrams column. As soon as we recognized there was no editor’s note, we added it to the page to reflect her changes. We have reviewed our procedures to ensure this does not occur again." //

What they did not answer, however, was the key question from Fox News on whether they had any regrets for “allowing revisions to Abrams’ op-ed instead of preserving it as it was originally written,” which pretty much tells you that they do not regret it.

That’s really the key issue here, and the fact that they didn’t address it speaks volumes about them. If Abrams wanted to update the piece, what the paper should have done was to have her write a new one with a new headline and everything. But they allowed her to make changes to the original piece after the MLB pulled the game that made it sound like she was even more opposed to boycotts than she originally sounded. //

The lies Abrams, President Biden, Sen. Raphael Warnock, and other Democrats told about the law laid the groundwork for boycotts to be announced and MLB to pull the game. Matters were made worse once Warnock’s staff admitted after the fact that his comments about the law were made based on an early version of the bill that did not make the final cut. Then Abrams revised her piece post-MLB announcement, and the USA Today didn’t even bother to point it out until they got called out nearly three weeks later.

You can’t win, but that’s all part of the plan.

Reason, rules, processes – these are the foundations of a free society, which is why the cultural left is so dead set against them. A citizen needs to be able to rely on clear rules and fixed processes to vindicate his rights in order to have any rights. But the rights of free citizens – your rights – are an obstacle to the Lil’ Stalins who yearn to rule over us. If the liberal establishment can create a society where you can’t appeal to facts, evidence, or law, then – until the peasants' revolt – its poobahs can wield undisputed, undiluted authority. That’s their dream, a country where you live in terror of them because you can never be sure that what you are doing or failing to do is suddenly going to be criminalized. //

If you can’t rely on the law or the evidence, then you are at the mercy of the whims of the liberal elite. Sure, the cop did the right thing, and the evidence is indisputable that he did the right thing, but it doesn’t matter at all. The cop is wrong and subject to all sorts of sanctions not because he violated any rule but purely because it is useful for him to be guilty of something.

The Rule of Law has become the Rule of Power, which the bad guys possess for the moment. And they are so arrogant about it that they do not even bother to make a straight-faced argument against cops saving black children’s lives. Hey, it’s just a routine kid knife fight – no biggie. We all remember back in the day, hacking up other suburban teens with machetes and scimitars, and how the cops never bothered us. Not allowing black teens to be gutted is worse than Jim Crow – it’s Jim Eagle. Heck, it’s Jim Rodan.

And we all know if that punk planted a shiv in the other girl’s gut on the bodycam tape, the cop would be lynched for not stopping her. You can’t win, which is the idea.

You can’t have a society where normal people can’t possibly prevail by obeying well-established rules. You’re not wrong because you did something wrong but because you're being wrong is handy for the people who hate you. //

This is how our oppressors like it. But this is not how we like it. Normal people can only take getting bopped on the noggin by the southpaw monkey in the Nairobi Trio for so long before they hit back. You cannot have an enduring status quo where one side is firmly bound to rules and obligations while the other gets to make it up as they go along. Eventually, you will inevitably reach a breaking point. And that’s coming. Then the bad guys are going to miss the rules that they still expect to protect them.

This is the kind of survey liberals loathe. Not that the rest of us don’t already know they’re the most miserable people on the face of the Earth, of course, but when the survey is the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, an ongoing survey of Americans conducted since 1972, which The New York Times describes as a “widely used resource” and “the scholarly gold standard for understanding social phenomena,” that’s gotta leave a mark. //

Yep, conservative white women are the happiest people in America.

And the unhappiest people in America? Drum roll, please… the survey says… white liberal men. My initial reaction was: of course, they are; I assume the majority of them are either married to or in relationships with white liberal women. I mean, this is not a giddy crowd. //

I’M A WALKER
@HourTommy
Replying to @Timcast
Aren’t liberals upset being called men and women? //

Jim
@Jim_Bachelor
Replying to @Timcast
It’s because they are in a abusive relationship with politics where they are told 100% of the time they are the bad guy that causes so much pain for women and minorities.