Wisconsin voters took legal action against their state’s five largest cities on Wednesday over the illegal use of unmanned drop boxes during the 2020 election.

Filed by the Thomas More Society on behalf of voters against Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine, the legal complaints allege that city officials ignored state law by implementing unmanned drop boxes over the course of the 2020 cycle.

Every publicized mass-shooting incident elicits the same rhetoric of gun control from the “left” and reactionary gun-rights protection from the “right.” We dig into the assailant’s social-media history to find out what he was interested in and inquire about his video-game usage. //

We do everything possible to find the root cause of a broken man showing such disregard for life — yet we consistently overlook a significant contributing factor: fatherlessness.

So there is no misunderstanding: No matter how horrible your childhood was, it does not give you license to take the lives of innocent people. Like everyone else, I have no tolerance for such an act of evil.

At the same time, I recognize that people aren’t born murderers; they’re a creation of life experiences that lead them to decide to cross that line. //

A child’s most important parental figure is the same-sex parent because children model themselves after them. For young men, having that father figure in their lives provides a blueprint for manhood and a source of protection from the outside world.

The world can at times be harsh for young men, but your father is supposed to be your source of security, a builder of confidence and a teacher for how to regulate your emotions in stressful situations. Most crucial, the father is the son’s purpose compass as he helps guide him throughout the trials of adolescence towards purposeful adulthood.

But what happens when there is no father in a child’s life? What happens to those boys when their compass is nowhere to be found? They all too often become lost boys and grow into lost men. //

What people misunderstand about mass shooters is that they are more suicidal than homicidal. To do something of this nature, you have to no longer care whether you live or die. The action of taking other people’s lives in the process of killing themselves is a way for them to grab attention on the way out because they’ve spent a significant portion of their lives feeling invisible.

This pattern isn’t limited to mass shootings. While those between the ages of 14 and 24 constituted a little more than 16% of the population between 1980 and 2008, they were responsible for over 48% of the murders. Overall, those 18 to 24 consistently had the highest offending rate over the 28-year period. And the overwhelming majority of those responsible for homicides were male. //

The rate of suicide attempts is also highest between ages 14 and 21.

There are good reasons for these statistics: The frontal lobe and other parts of the brain responsible for impulse and emotional control and judgment do not fully mature until roughly age 25 or 26. Additionally, 75% of people who develop psychiatric disorders will do so by 24, while the peak onset of psychotic disorders in men is just under 25. //

Auto-insurance rates are higher for drivers under 25, because, statistically, they are responsible for more accidents than any other group. Similarly, most car-rental agencies either don’t rent to people under 25 or charge them a premium. Even Airbnb enacted restrictions on rentals for those under 25 to make it harder to throw potentially dangerous and destructive house parties.

What the NYT Cancel Culture Editorial Got Wrong, And What It Got Right //

The New York Times’ Editorial Board did not offer such a thoughtful conversation in its piece “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” which discusses oft-invoked “cancel culture.” It’s vexingly unserious.

True the Vote bought three trillion geo-location signals from cellphones that were near drop boxes and also near election nonprofits, from Oct. 1, 2020, through to the election on November 3. In Georgia the end date covered the Jan. 6, 2021, run-off.

…

For example, in the Atlanta-metro area they drew a line around 309 drop boxes and bought all the cellphone data of people that had been near those drop boxes and NGOs.

That narrowed the search to 2,000 mules.

Then they went looking for public surveillance camera footage of those drop boxes. In all they found 4 million minutes across the country.

The results are stunning. When a mule is matched with video, you can see the scheme come to life.

A car pulls up at a drop box after midnight. A man gets out, looks around surreptitiously, approaches the box, stuffs in a handful of ballots and hightails it out of there. Then he goes to the next box, again and again.

After Dec. 23, 2020, Phipps noticed mules in Georgia started wearing gloves. He pinpoints the change to an indictment for ballot stuffing handed up in Arizona on December 22. “The way the FBI nailed them was fingerprints.” After that, mules started wearing gloves.

The data pattern is unmistakable, as D’Souza shows a spider web of routes taken by various mules between NGOs and drop boxes.

For each of the 2,000 mules the average number of drop box visits was 38, with an average five ballots deposited per visit. That’s 380,000 suspect votes.

We never told our supporters what had happened with Abbas. We never told our teammates. It took years before the two of us could even talk about it between ourselves.

We’d absorbed the unwritten rule in missions: Failure is unacceptable. I’d grown up immersed in missions culture, yet I couldn’t remember a single time that a missionary story, presentation, or newsletter ever included failure.

I know better now. But even today, missionaries are reluctant to share defeat, depression, or despair. Maybe there is too much at stake. Hundreds of people are donating thousands of dollars for you to do this work. Everyone craves numbers: numbers of converts, numbers of churches planted, and so on.

The “successful” missionaries always have lots of numbers. They fill their newsletters with compelling stories and photographs of large groups of believers. But nobody gives presentations about evangelistic events where no one showed up, or posts a picture of the local pastor who abused his daughter, or writes a newsletter about the exciting convert who just slowly disappears. //

Could we have done anything different with Abbas to prevent his falling away from faith? At the time, we were so consumed by our own hurt that we never helped him explore the root cause of the theft. Maybe we could have taught him to lean more heavily on grace—and reminded ourselves to do the same. Maybe we could have remembered that missionary stories in a broken world rarely end with a “happily ever after.” Until that day when all things are made new, life is always going to be messy.

Will this gambit work? Can you cut a deal to rid yourself of sanctions imposed because you started a war of aggression if you promise not to starve a few million people to death? Even when there is no guarantee those people still won’t starve if sanctions are removed? Never lose sight of the fact that Putin is a strategic genius in the same way that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” He’s dealing with self-serving idiots incapable of resolve, so don’t count out the EU shouting “Leeeeeroy Jenkins,” and coming to Putin’s rescue.

Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century. //

When its development began in the 1950s, power generated by nuclear fission was heralded as the energy source for the future. I am old enough to remember when the “atomic age” was used in a non-ironic fashion. The energy density of uranium, exploited optimally, is more than a million times greater than than of fossil fuels, and producing electricity from it emits no carbon dioxide, smoke, or noxious gas pollutants. Since its energy density is so great, nuclear power plants are compact and require little land compared to low density sources such as solar power farms or wind turbine arrays. Finally, the mining and refining of the small quantities of uranium fuel required and the modest quantities of radioactive waste produced have a small environmental impact compared to producing, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.

But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise.

Today, nuclear power is not usually considered among the “sustainable” alternatives to fossil fuels and, since it relies upon uranium as a fuel, of which a finite supply exists on Earth, is classified as “non-renewable” and hence not viable as a long-term energy source. But what do you mean “long-term”, anyway? Eventually, the Sun will burn out, after all, so even solar isn’t forever. Will ten thousand years or so do for now, until we can think of something better?

Energy “experts” scoff at the long-term prospects for nuclear fission power, observing that known worldwide reserves of uranium, used in present-day reactor designs, would suffice for only on the order of a century if nuclear power were to replace all primary power generation sources presently in use. But is this correct? In fact, this conclusion stems not from science and technology, but stupidity and timidity, and nuclear fission is a “bird in the hand” solution to the world’s energy problems awaiting only the courage and will to deploy it.

That is the conclusion by the authors of a paper with the same title as this post, “Nuclear Fission Fuel is Inexhaustible 1” [PDF, 8 pages], presented at the IEEE EIC Climate Change Conference in Ottawa, Canada in May 2006. Here is the abstract:

Nuclear fission energy is as inexhaustible as those energies usually termed “renewable”, such as hydro, wind, solar, and biomass. But, unlike the sum of these energies, nuclear fission energy has sufficient capacity to replace fossil fuels as they become scarce. Replacement of the current thermal variety of nuclear fission reactors with nuclear fission fast reactors, which are 100 times more fuel efficient, can dramatically extend nuclear fuel reserves. The contribution of uranium price to the cost of electricity generated by fast reactors, even if its price were the same as that of gold at US$14,000/kg, would be US$0.003/kWh of electricity generated. At that price, economically viable uranium reserves would be, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible. Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago. Fast reactors have distinct advantages in siting of plants, product transport and management of waste.

What happens when a world-renowned computer scientist applies scientific methodology to studying the Bible, writes about his findings, and has some of the world's best calligraphers illustrate the work? The result is 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, a treasure of profound biblical insight and enchanting calligraphy that will enlighten your mind, your eyes, and your spirit. Donald E. Knuth so loved the Bible that he dedicated five years of his life to creating this masterpiece. With it, you will learn about each 3:16 verse of the Bible, how it came to be written, and how it contributes to the wholeness of the Bible.

The John Wesley Institute hosted over 50 scholars for the Next Methodism Summit in January of 2022, producing The Faith Once Delivered: A Wesleyan Witness.

https://nextmethodism.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Faith-Once-Delivered-FINAL-1.pdf

Sixty-four scholars and theologians have signed on to a “Wesleyan witness,” a six-part, 62-page document they hope will shape the future of Methodism, define orthodox Wesleyanism, and ground more Christians in the story of sanctification and restoration through grace.

“This is classic, orthodox Wesleyan theology,” said Asbury University New Testament professor Suzanne Nicholson, who is one of the authors. “The power of the Holy Spirit is greater than the power of sin. It doesn’t matter your class, your race, your gender, God is at work among the faithful, and that leads us to a full-orbed devotion to who God is

“The Faith Once Delivered” was first drafted in January at a summit for “The Next Methodism.” Scholars allied with the evangelical wing of the United Methodist Church, as well as holiness and Pentecostal denominations, came together, formed five working groups, and co-wrote statements on five theological topics: the nature of God, Creation, revelation, salvation, and the church. A sixth section on eschatology or “the fullness of time” was added later.

One winter afternoon I was relaxing with a half-dozen fellow graduate philosophy students discussing theories of law and punishment. About an hour into the discussion, it occurred to me that some moral laws might limit pleasure and enjoyment in the short term but in the long term minimize suffering and maximize human fulfillment.

A few days ago I finished studying Sex and Culture for the second time. It is a remarkable book summarizing a lifetime of research by Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin.[1] The 600+ page book is, in Unwin’s words, only a “summary” of his research—seven volumes would be required to lay it all out.[2] His writings suggest he was a rationalist, believing that science is our ultimate tool of inquiry (it appears he was not a religious man). As I went through what he found, I was repeatedly reminded of the thought I had as a philosophy student: some moral laws may be designed to minimize human suffering and maximize human flourishing long term.

Unwin examines the data from 86 societies and civilizations to see if there is a relationship between sexual freedom and the flourishing of cultures. What makes the book especially interesting is that we in the West underwent a sexual revolution in the late 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s and are now in a position to test the conclusions he arrived at more than 40 years earlier. //

I have prepared a 26-page collection of quotes from his book that summarize his findings (2), but even that would leave you with a significant under-appreciation of the rigour and fascinating details revealed in data from 86 cultures. Here are a few of his most significant findings: //

Unwin found that when strict prenuptial chastity was abandoned, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking disappeared within three generations of the change in sexual freedom. So how are we doing as we enter the second generation since our own sexual revolution at the end of the 20th century?

Republicans should stop playing defense when they haven’t done anything wrong lest they be consumed. Preempt the ineffective policy prescriptions of the left, which only serve to garner unrelated political goals, by introducing actual “common-sense” reforms. Have those reforms not target the Second Amendment, but rather focus on the direct protection of schools, enforcing existing laws, and getting the mentally ill the help they need. If Democrats want to say no to all that, let them go on the record.

Democrats like Biden don’t want to look at solutions that might actually do something about addressing such situations such as making the schools more secure with things like single-point entry at schools as Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the Parkland shooting, advocates.

Then you might also want to try to enforce the laws that already exist and follow up on the warning signs that always seem to be there in such cases. It’s easy to shout “do something.” It’s harder to try to deal with difficult issues in a way that will truly have a result.

But Democrats have instead concentrated on things like “defund the police” which has made things harder. We’ve also seen progressive prosecutors not holding criminals to account. We see a lack of consequence for a lot of criminal actions now. Even in the case of Hunter Biden, gun laws weren’t enforced when it came to him allegedly not truthfully responding about his past drug use in filling out an application for a gun.

What we should be looking to stop is criminal action, not trying to once again further demonize guns, and once again not truly addressing the issues.

Most aspects of American life today are more secure than the average elementary school. It takes more to walk into most concerts than it does to enter into most schools. Is that ok with you? If we can have measures in place to protect attendees to sporting events, surely we can do the same for our children.

I hope that this time we can actually focus on getting something done, instead of immediately retreating to our partisan corners and fighting with each other. If our leaders are truly interested in making our children safe, they will make sure that no school in the United States is a soft target. It won’t prevent all of these tragedies, but it will go a long way to preventing most of them.

Finally, we have to admit something that we rarely discuss in public life anymore. We will never truly and fully fix this problem until we turn our hearts back to God. I know that is offensive to some, but the truth is freedom without God is not freedom, but anarchy. Laws, while important, cannot fix the heart. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior.”

Now that Georgia’s early primary voting turnout has blown tallies from the last few elections out of the water, the left is pretty quiet.

Remember when our president claimed that Georgia’s election-integrity law was “Jim Crow on steroids”? And his vice president insisted similar laws were voter suppression because rural bumpkins don’t have “Kinkos” or “OfficeMax” and thus can’t possibly be expected to figure out how to photocopy their IDs?

Now that Georgia’s early primary voting turnout has blown tallies from the last few elections out of the water, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are pretty quiet. So are the rest of the corporate media, which dutifully parroted the narrative that the Peach State’s push for election security represented Republican efforts to kill democracy with vicious racism.

According to Georgia’s secretary of state, 857,401 people voted in the state’s 2022 midterm election, including almost 800,000 of them in person by the end of early voting on Friday. By the end of early voting in 2020, the number of in-person voters was 326,351, and in pre-pandemic 2018 that number didn’t even break 300,000.

That makes this midterm tally a pretty dramatic spike. But even more impressive is the rise in the number of non-white voters, of which approximately 100,000 more voted early compared to 2018.

How could it possibly be that early voting significantly increased, especially among minorites, under a Republican regime of racist “Jim Eagle” suppression? //

Note that this smear operation entirely worked to get Democrats more of what they wanted: elections that are weeks long instead of one day, which increases their ability to affect the election outcome unfairly by checking what votes are in and what areas favorable to them they need to harvest votes from still.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February this year, many observers believed China’s Xi might be motivated to attack Taiwan while the Russian military was keeping the West occupied. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, warned that “an invasion of Taiwan could happen within this decade.” He introduced a bill recently to “increase coordination between the U.S. and Taiwanese militaries to ensure Taiwan is equipped to defend against an attack and invasion by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”

The calls for the United States to abandon “strategic ambiguity” and offer Taiwan an explicit security guarantee have grown louder. Many pointed to China’s military buildup, the expansion in the South China Sea, the brutal crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and its increasing military pressures on Taiwan as evidence that China’s aggression has become a threat to the peace and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region, affecting the U.S. and its allies’ interests and security.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is one who has made this argument. He called on the Biden administration to abandon the U.S. government’s long-held “strategic ambiguity” position on Taiwan and clarify that the United States would intervene if China invaded the island. Abe argued that “strategic clarity” is the best deterrence strategy to prevent China from going to war with the United States and its allies over Taiwan. //

Yet the Biden administration so far has created more confusion domestically and internationally rather than presenting any strategic clarity. Since day one, the Biden administration has stated it would continue the “strategic ambiguity” policy toward Taiwan. But President Biden publicly declared several times that the U.S. military would help defend Taiwan in a Chinese invasion. Each time, senior administration officials immediately walked back Biden’s comments as if he never meant what he said.

There are three possible explanations. It could be that Biden’s comments were indeed blunders, and there is no change of U.S. policy on Taiwan. It could also be that he did mean what he said, but his staff simply undermined his authority publicly to avoid antagonizing China.

The third explanation is that the Biden administration has yet to formulate a clear China policy. It probably feels a bipartisan pressure to defend Taiwan but is war-weary and doesn’t want to actually go to war with China. All of these explanations are dangerous, for three reasons.

First, it signals to Beijing that U.S. political leadership is weak and has neither the ability nor the will to confront China. Second, it doesn’t build confidence among U.S. allies. The Biden administration’s policy confusion and perceived weakness may even convince some allies and partners to switch to China’s side.

Third, the Biden administration’s policy confusion and perceived weakness have increased the risk of a conflict with China rather than deterring China. China’s Xi may decide that the best time to invade Taiwan is when the United States is led by an aging politician who often appears confused. Xi can certainly strengthen his argument to his generals by pointing to America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

For decades, the Supreme Court’s decision to hijack the abortion question blunted the moral impetus for secular and religious leaders alike. It allowed for a dishonest debate, and for the left to claim our elected representatives alone have jurisdiction over matters of life and death, while rarely exercising this jurisdiction.

For decades, from both the church pulpit and the bully pulpit, it allowed for cowardice. Soon that may be ending. It might not make for a less contentious time in American life, but it will sure make for a more honest one.

K-12 schools must allow boys into girls’ private areas to obtain federal funds for lunches, breakfasts, and snacks, the Biden administration announced this month. A U.S. Department of Education spokesman told The Federalist the Biden administration’s press releases from several agencies announcing this policy will be followed by formal rulemaking in June. //

Before many schools shut down in response to Covid-19, the National School Lunch Program fed nearly 30 million kids every school day, in approximately 100,000 public and private schools and residential care facilities.

Under this new demand, establishments that accept any federal food funding, including food stamps, must also allow males who claim to be female to access female private spaces, such as showers, bathrooms, and sleeping areas. Such organizations must also follow protocols such as requiring staff to use inaccurate pronouns to describe transgender people and allowing male staff to dress as women while on the job.

Religious institutions, however, qualify for a waiver exempting them from these requirements, said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Greg Baylor in an interview Monday. According to the 1972 Title IX law, he said, religious institutions don’t have to file any paperwork to be exempt, although they can if they wish.

Baylor noted, however, that publicly affirming a commitment to sexual reality by seeking an exemption acknowledgment from federal agencies may assist extremist pressure campaigns. //

“The Biden administration is grossly extending the Bostock holding where it does not belong. Like many of the Biden administration’s power grabs, this imposition transgresses areas of proper state and local authority. As the principal guardians of federalism, state attorneys general have the ability to combat such overreach where it injures state functions,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, told The Federalist in a statement. //

While the majority opinion said Bostock only applied to Title VII, or employment law, it provided the rationale and excuse to extend this reasoning elsewhere. And the Biden administration’s press releases are ignoring the ruling’s claimed limits to apply it to other areas of federal code, particularly education’s Title IX, as many predicted.

Not only is the Biden administration’s use of federal food subsidies to impose sexual politics legally suspect in substance, it’s also legally suspect procedurally, Baylor said. That’s because press releases are not legally enforceable. Only federal regulations that have followed proper legal procedures are.

That hasn’t happened yet with this Biden administration demand, although the USED spokesman said the proposed regulation will be issued in June. Yet even after the regulation is issued, federal agencies are required to accept public comments for several months, then they must spend several more months reviewing all comments and responding, then writing and issuing a final regulation, which then can — and will be, Baylor said — challenged in court.

“When they do things some other way, just by some regulatory guidance or a press release or a memo, that in itself can be a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and that’s precisely what we’ve argued in some of the cases we’ve filed on this issue,” Baylor said. “…We think they’re making shortcuts and we’ve challenged that in court.”

So it appears with this demand, just like with the Biden administration’s so-called vaccine mandate, the administration is slow-walking the legal procedures required. That delays inevitable lawsuits, which themselves take years to work out. This process effectively imposes unpopular, extremist gender policies extra-legally, through fiat and intimidation. Meanwhile, many elected officials can and do sit on their hands and claim it’s the courts’ job to solve what they can end immediately through legislative action. //

Remedies include withdrawing children from public schools, school boards refusing to follow regulations that are not legally binding until all court challenges are resolved, schools refusing to accept federal funding that comes at such a high cost, and state legislatures and Congress passing new laws to limit and undo the disastrous Bostock decision.

“The uncertainty is really unfortunate, and what we need are courageous parents who share their views with school administrators and school boards. We need courageous school administrators and school boards to do the right thing and push back on this interpretation of Title IX, because there are real harms to kids as a consequence,” Baylor said.