Jack Kemp

Well an unproducive stock and company are called a dog on Wall St. So the coal giant joins its namesake - and wishes it, too, had a Wayback Machine.

Peabody Energy has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11.

The Company has left the Australian operations out of the filings.

Will more bankruptcies follow? They sure can.

U.S. coal giant Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU<http://seekingalpha.com/symbol/BTU>) has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/peabody-majority-of-its-u-s-entities-file-for-chapter-11>, confirming the worst fears which I discussed in an earlier analysis

<http://seekingalpha.com/article/3959156-stock-sold-1300-now-just-2>
A Stock Which Once Sold For $1300 Is Now Just $2<http://seekingalpha.com/article/3959156-stock-sold-1300-now-just-2>. More like zero? Trading was suspended this Wednesday.

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Wil Wirtanen

The truth about the harpies special day.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/equal-pay-day-whats-really-causing-the-gender-wage-gap-and-how-to-fix-it/article/2588232

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Timothy Birdnow

Last night I watched the old Peter Seller's classic "The Mouse that Roared". While this is an anti-war screed, it did make some interesting points.

The storyline entails a fictional country founded by a British nobleman in the "French Alps" that was a scant 16 miles in area (and incorrectly billed as the smallest country on Earth.) The sole export of "The Duchy of Grand Fenwick" was a mediocre wine that sold primarily in the United States. A large California conglomerate created a cheap knock-off of the product, and Grand Fenwick, despite sending several protests, was ignored because of her tiny size and lack of formal relations with the U.S. The tiny country was going broke, and something desperate had to be done. Here is the plan of action:

"Prime Minster Count Rupert Mountjoy: We must declare war on the United States.

Benter: But we can never win such a war!

Prime Minster Count Rupert Mountjoy: Of course not, but we could win the peace. I've given this a lot of thought gentlemen and I'm perfectly positive that I am right. You must remember, the Americans are a very strange people. Whereas other countries rarely forgive anything, the Americans forgive anything. There isn't a more profitable undertaking for any country than to declare war on the United States and to be defeated."

End quote.

Spoiler alert! Don't read if you ever wish to watch the movie!

Grand Fenwick sends their only military man, a bumbling young man who trained the militia in the use of bows and arrows and played dress-up in Medieval garb, on a bus trip to Marsailles, then an ocean voyage on a rusty old scow to America to invade. The plan was to find the authorities and surrender, prompting the U.S. to come and shower Grand Fenwick with reconstruction money. The plan fails when the Grand Fenwickians bumble upon a super bomb and capture it - along with the scientist who created it and an America general to boot.

At any rate, the quote from the movie above presents an interesting point; America is almost insane in her willingness to forgive and forget, and as a result we are being led to a raod to disaster of unmitigated proportions by our enemies. They simply feign sorrow and we leap to forgiveness, to a point where we won't even discuss not letting them come into our country while a hot war is being waged throughout the Middle East. Sellers, a big liberal, saw this characteristic of America back in the late 1950's when this movie was made. He thought it a rather comic quirk, and it would be if we didn't have the deadly serious situation we now face.

But we do and we are forever manipulated by our forgiving nature. Saying "sorry" does not de-facto make everything o.k. There are liars, and the Islamic faith especially encourages lies to lull the Infidel into a false sense of security. It's called Takiya and it says a good Muslim may lie where convenient. And we are the fools who are quick to believe those lies because we so want to believe in the inherent goodness of everyone. It's just not the case.

America needs to grow up or she will never get the chance.

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Paul Driessen

With the war on coal well underway, the Obama Administration has shifted its attention to natural gas – methane. My article this week examines this new assault on the energy that powers our economy, showcases the shallow substance behind it, and highlights the massive environmental impacts of trying to shift to an all-renewable-energy economy

Methane mendacity – and madness

Radical green and government agitators slam methane in latest bid to terminate fossil fuel use

Paul Driessen

Quick: What is 17 cents out of $100,000? If you said 0.00017 percent, you win the jackpot.

That number, by sheer coincidence, is also the percentage of methane in Earth’s atmosphere. That’s a trivial amount, you say: 1.7 parts per million. There’s three times more helium and 230 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You’re absolutely right, again.

Equally relevant, only 19% of that global methane comes from oil, natural gas and coal production and use. Fully 33% comes from agriculture: 12% from rice growing and 21% from meat production. Still more comes from landfills and sewage treatment (11%) and burning wood and animal dung (8%). The remaining 29% comes from natural sources: oceans, wetlands, termites, forest fires and volcanoes.

The manmade portions are different for the USA: 39% energy use, 36% livestock, 18% landfills, and 8% sewage treatment and other sources. But it’s still a piddling contribution to a trivial amount in the air.

Of course, the Obama EPA and Climate Cataclysm Industry ignore these inconvenient facts. They insist that methane is "a far more potent greenhouse gas” than carbon dioxide, and that its emissions must be drastically reduced if we are to avoid "runaway global warming.” So EPA and other federal agencies are preparing to unleash a tsunami of new regulations to block natural gas drilling, fracking, flaring and production, while radical environmentalists orchestrate new assaults on petrochemical plants that create plastics, paints, fabrics, computer and vehicle components and countless other products for modern life.

They want us to believe that government regulators can decree Earth’s climate simply by controlling methane and carbon dioxide – regardless of what the sun, ocean circulation, recurrent planetary temperature cycles and other powerful natural forces might do. They say it’s pure coincidence that these two trace gases (CH4 and CO2) are the only climate-affecting mechanisms that are associated with the fossil fuels and industrialized economies they despise.

They also want us to believe reducing United States methane emissions will make a huge difference. But even if US manmade methane emissions are 20% of the worldwide total, the 39% US fossil fuel portion of that US portion means even totally eliminating US methane emissions would reduce global manmade methane output by a minuscule 7.8 percent. Under a best-case scenario, that might keep atmospheric methane below a still irrelevant 0.00020% (2.0 ppm; 20 cents out of $100,000) for a few more years.

This smells like fraud. And as New York AG Eric Schneiderman so kindly reminded the climate skeptics he’s threatening with RICO, "The First Amendment does not give anyone the right to commit fraud.” http://www.cfact.org/2016/04/03/democrats-seek-to-prosecute-climate-chaos-skeptics-with-rico/

Perhaps EPA plans to go after America’s agricultural sector next. After all, as former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan intoned last year, red meat is bad for us (cancer) and for the climate (animal flatulence and manure). Moreover, "insects have a very good conversion rate from feed to meat,” there are 1,900 species of edible insects on Planet Earth, and more than a billion people already make bugs part of their diet. Perhaps the IPCC and White House will serve roasted roaches at their next state dinners?

That would reduce US methane emissions a bit more. But it gets even more deceitful, more barking mad.

The un-ratified 2015 Paris climate treaty obligates the United States, Australia, Canada and Europe to continue reducing their fossil fuel use and emissions – even though they can hardly afford to kill more millions of jobs and further roll back living standards for all but their ruling elites.

Meanwhile, developing countries will not and cannot afford to lock up their fossil fuels, shut down their economic growth, and leave billions of people mired in poverty, malnutrition and disease. Indeed, under the Paris treaty, they are not required to reduce their fossil fuel use or "greenhouse gas” emissions; they need only take voluntary steps to reduce them, when it is convenient for them to do so.

That means slashing US methane (and carbon dioxide) emissions – and the jobs, living standards, health and welfare that fossil fuels bring – will have no effect whatsoever on atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.

But that is irrelevant to Mr. Obama and his EPA. The fact is, this methane mendacity and madness has nothing to do with stabilizing Earth’s climate. It has everything to do with hogtying and bankrupting US fossil fuel companies, controlling industrial activities and people’s living standards – and mandating a costly transition to renewable energy, while rewarding the hordes of scientists, activists and industrialists who benefit from the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Crisis, Inc. money train.

That raises a critical question: Just where and how will we produce those "eco-friendly” biofuels?

US ethanol production alone requires all the corn grown on an area the size of Iowa (36 million acres), and it makes up only 10% of the country’s E10 gasoline blends. Replacing all gasoline with ethanol from corn, sorghum or still-illusory switchgrass would therefore require ten Iowas: 360 million acres. But there is one other critical factor: ethanol has one-third less energy per gallon than pure gasoline.

That means we would need to plant an additional 120 million acres, 480 million acres in all, just to replace gasoline. That’s equal to Alaska, California and West Virginia combined!

Replacing all the liquid petroleum we use annually (291 billion gallons) would require twice as much land – some 45% of all the land in the United States: six times more land than we currently have under cultivation for all cereal crops – plowing even marginal croplands, deserts, forests and grasslands.

We’d also need far more fuel to grow, harvest and convert those crops into "eco-friendly” fuel. That would likely mean turning southern Canada into a vast biofuel plantation – unless, of course, the ruling classes simply impose lower living standards and vehicle ownership restrictions on us commoners.

Growing biofuel crops also requires hundreds of times more water than is needed to conduct hydraulic fracturing (fracking) operations to produce the same amount of energy from oil and gas, on a tiny fraction of the acreage. Where on this water-starved planet will that precious liquid come from?

Biofuel crops also require prodigious amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. And if organic and anti-GMO factions have their way, far more land would be needed, pest control would be minimal or done by hand, and fertilizer would come from human wastes and animal manure – raising even more complex issues.

To put it bluntly, a biofuel future would be totally and disastrously unsustainable.

There’s another deep, dark secret about biofuels. Somebody needs to tell Obama, McCarthy, Clinton, Sanders and their army of "green” supporters that biofuels are hydrocarbons! They are composed of carbon and hydrogen, though in less complex molecular structures than what we pull out of the ground – which means we get less energy per gallon. And when we burn them, they release carbon dioxide!

We have at least a century of untapped oil and natural gas (and of coal) right under our feet. To lock that up, based on unproven, illusory, fabricated, fraudulent climate chaos claims, is utter insanity.

Even crazier, most anti-fossil-fuel zealots also oppose nuclear and hydroelectric power – and want future electricity generated primarily or solely with wind turbines and solar panels. To blanket our scenic, crop and wildlife lands with wind farms, solar installations and biofuel plantations – and destroy economies, jobs, living standards, health and welfare in the process – is nothing short of criminal.

President Obama and presidential candidates Clinton and Sanders assure us we can have 30% renewables by 2030, 50% by 2050, 100% by 2100 – or some similar magic, catchy, sound bite concoction.

Voters should demand to know exactly how they will make this happen. If they cannot or will not answer satisfactorily, a strong case can be made for the proposition that they are too ignorant and dishonest to hold office – and that their supporters are too stupid and anti-environment to vote. J

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-

Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

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Paul Driessen

The useful myth / fabrication about climate change consensus just won’t go away. President Obama, other alarmists and many news media outlets cannot stop repeating the bogus claim that "97% of scientists agree that climate change is manmade and dangerous.”

To drive a stake through the heart of this creature, my colleague David Legates has written a detailed analysis of how this myth originated … and why it should finally land on history’s garbage heap with the "hockey stick” and other convenient falsehoods propagated by the Climate Crisis Industry.

Deep-sixing another useful climate myth

The vaunted "97% consensus” on dangerous manmade global warming is just more malarkey

David R. Legates

By now, virtually everyone has heard that "97% of scientists agree: Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.

The correct representation is "yes,” "some,” and "no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another.

People can and do have some influence on our climate. For example, downtown areas are warmer than the surrounding countryside, and large-scale human development can affect air and moisture flow. But humans are by no means the only source of climate change. The Pleistocene ice ages, Little Ice Age and monster hurricanes throughout history underscore our trivial influence compared to natural forces.

As for climate change being dangerous, this is pure hype based on little fact. Mile-high rivers of ice burying half of North America and Europe were disastrous for everything in their path, as they would be today. Likewise for the plummeting global temperatures that accompanied them. An era of more frequent and intense hurricanes would also be calamitous; but actual weather records do not show this.

It would be far more deadly to implement restrictive energy policies that condemn billions to continued life without affordable electricity – or to lower living standards in developed countries – in a vain attempt to control the world’s climate. In much of Europe, electricity prices have risen 50% or more over the past decade, leaving many unable to afford proper wintertime heat, and causing thousands to die.

Moreover, consensus and votes have no place in science. History is littered with theories that were long denied by "consensus” science and politics: plate tectonics, germ theory of disease, a geocentric universe. They all underscore how wrong consensus can be.

Science is driven by facts, evidence and observations – not by consensus, especially when it is asserted by deceitful or tyrannical advocates. As Einstein said, "A single experiment can prove me wrong.”

During this election season, Americans are buffeted by polls suggesting which candidate might become each party’s nominee or win the general election. Obviously, only the November "poll” counts.

Similarly, several "polls” have attempted to quantify the supposed climate change consensus, often by using simplistic bait-and-switch tactics. "Do you believe in climate change?” they may ask.

Answering yes, as I would, places you in the President’s 97% consensus and, by illogical extension, implies you agree it is caused by humans and will be dangerous. Of course, that serves their political goal of gaining more control over energy use.

The 97% statistic has specific origins. Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard professor and author of Merchants of Doubt, which claims those who disagree with the supposed consensus are paid by Big Oil to obscure the truth. In 2004, she claimed to have examined the abstracts of 928 scientific papers and found a 100% consensus with the claim that the "Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities.”

Of course, this is probably true, as it is unlikely that any competent scientist would say humans have no impact on climate. However, she then played the bait-and-switch game to perfection – asserting that this meant "most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

However, one dissenter is enough to discredit the entire study, and what journalist would believe any claim of 100% agreement? In addition, anecdotal evidence suggested that 97% was a better figure. So 97% it was.

Then in 2010, William Anderegg and colleagues concluded that "97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support … [the view that] … anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for most of the unequivocal warming of the Earth’s average global temperature” over a recent but unspecified time period. (Emphasis in original.)

To make this extreme assertion, Anderegg et al. compiled a database of 908 climate researchers who published frequently on climate topics, and identified those who had "signed statements strongly dissenting from the views” of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The 97–98% figure is achieved by counting those who had not signed such statements.

Silence, in Anderegg’s view, meant those scientists agreed with the extreme view that most warming was due to humans. However, nothing in their papers suggests that all those researchers believed humans had caused most of the planetary warming, or that it was dangerous.

The most recent 97% claim was posited by John Cook and colleagues in 2013. They evaluated abstracts from nearly 12,000 articles published over a 21-year period and sorted them into seven categories, ranging from "explicit, quantified endorsement” to "explicit, quantified rejection” of their alleged consensus: that recent warming was caused by human activity, not by natural variability. They concluded that "97.1% endorsed the consensus position.”

However, two-thirds of all those abstracts took no position on anthropogenic climate change. Of the remaining abstracts (not the papers or scientists), Cook and colleagues asserted that 97.1% endorsed their hypothesis that humans are the sole cause of recent global warming.

Again, the bait-and-switch was on full display. Any assertion that humans play a role was interpreted as meaning humans are the sole cause. But many of those scientists subsequently said publicly that Cook and colleagues had misclassified their papers – and Cook never tried to assess whether any of the scientists who wrote the papers actually thought the observed climate changes were dangerous.

My own colleagues and I did investigate their analysis more closely. We found that only 41 abstracts of the 11,944 papers Cook and colleagues reviewed – a whopping 0.3% – actually endorsed their supposed consensus. It turns out they had decided that any paper which did not provide an explicit, quantified rejection of their supposed consensus was in agreement with the consensus. Moreover, this decision was based solely on Cook and colleagues’ interpretation of just the abstracts, and not the articles themselves. In other words, the entire exercise was a clever sleight-of-hand trick.

What is the real figure? We may never know. Scientists who disagree with the supposed consensus – that climate change is manmade and dangerous – find themselves under constant attack.

Harassment by Greenpeace and other environmental pressure groups, the media, federal and state government officials, and even universities toward their employees (myself included) makes it difficult for many scientists to express honest opinions. Recent reports about Senator Whitehouse and Attorney-General Lynch using RICO laws to intimidate climate "deniers” further obscure meaningful discussion.

Numerous government employees have told me privately that they do not agree with the supposed consensus position – but cannot speak out for fear of losing their jobs. And just last week, a George Mason University survey found that nearly one-third of American Meteorological Society members were willing to admit that at least half of the climate change we have seen can be attributed to natural variability.

Climate change alarmism has become a $1.5-trillion-a-year industry – which guarantees it is far safer and more fashionable to pretend a 97% consensus exists, than to embrace honesty and have one’s global warming or renewable energy funding go dry.

The real danger is not climate change – it is energy policies imposed in the name of climate change. It’s time to consider something else Einstein said: "The important thing is not to stop questioning.” And then go see the important new documentary film, The Climate Hustle, coming soon to a theater near you.

David R. Legates, PhD, CCM, is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware.

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A.J. Cameron

NCLB, Common Core, ESSA, etc., are not the ultimate enemies of education for our children, in and of themselves. The true enemies of our children, and our society and culture, are the leech-like attacks embedded within NCLB, Common Core, ESSA, etc.

When one steps back to see the forest (ultimate attack), not just the front line of trees (individual attacks), it is easier to realize what has been and is being done, just under the cover of the outrageousness of NCLB, Common Core, ESSA, etc. The more outrageous the math methods, or literature, the more distracted the children, their parents, genuine educators, etc. become.

A key of NCLB, Common Core, ESSA, etc. isn't just to prevent a child from learning and growing into the individual God intended him/her to be, it is to separate the child from our Christian God at the earliest age ‎possible. Without this connectedness, a child can be manipulated in ways only those sold out to Satan can envision.

NCLB, Common Core, ESSA, etc. are attacks that lead to the abortion of God, God-given individualism and ambition within the youngest of generations. This is why it is being forced upon the 'educational system' at an expanded and accelerated rate, and why the theft of local control is crucial to the success of the attack.

NCLB, Common Core, ESSA, etc. are mechanisms designed to bend children's compliance to a Humanist/Satanic view of the world. The sooner the system has access to the children, the easier it is to impose this attack upon the most vulnerable in our society, aside from the elderly, who are to quietly exit this life (thus, ObamaCare).

The measurement of children's emotions, attitudes and 'beliefs', are the jewels of Common Core and ESSA. With the appropriate data-mining, 'the system' will know if a child comes from a traditional, two-parent (male & female) family, and if the parents hold Christian beliefs. In previous days, this was seen as the best source of a child learing and maturing for their individual benefit and the benefit of our society. Now, this is seen as a threat to the agenda being foisted upon us by Satan's human puppets, those in the shadows, acting as puppeteers for a radically different, fundamentally transformed world.

This should be a tipoff that the current puppet president and those who came before him are not the instigators of this agenda, but the influencers and installers of the agenda. The major difference between the current puppet and previous puppets is the intrinsically evil delight he has in destroying everything sacred to us. All we need to remember is that if this isn't part of the agenda, those in the shadows would have stopped him. Instead, they are cheering behind closed doors at how simple it has become to destroy what God provided us through our Founding Fathers, and many other great people since then.

The question remains, 'Will the 'majority' remain ignorant of reality and silent, for fear of being attacked by visious packs and PACs, or will we stand on moral grounds to beat back our oppressors'?

A. J.


http://mobile.wnd.com/2016/04/expert-government-schools-destroying-belief-in-christianity/

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A.J. Cameron


I suggest everyone think of the 'leaders' atop government, industry, the propaganda machine, academia, entertainment, even religion, and not question how this technology won't be used as a weapon against the masses.

http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2016/04/08/absolute-mind-control-is-here-newly-released-experiments-spell-out-the-dangers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=absolute-mind-control-is-here-newly-released-experiments-spell-out-the-dangers

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Jack Kemp forwards this:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/the_bigger_problems_of_georgias_governor_nathan_deal.html

A NOTE FROM TIM, A CATHOLIC:

This fight has been ongoing for a long, long time. In fact, it is the same fight that spawned the Protestant Reformation, and prior to that was at the core of the many heresies fought by the Church (not always successfully; Islam is Arianism and Manicheanism with an Arab flavor, for instance.) The cultural changes triggered by the Renaissance opened the door to Protestantism, which is indeed Christian though with an independent and reform minded spirit, and that shattered the cohesion of the Christian world, which was divided between the several Patriarchies of the Orthodox faiths and the Catholic. While I think the Protestant Reformation was a good thing, by and large, I do think it opened the door to some very bad stuff, primarily the atheistic Liberalism that stalks the world today. The Enlightenment ended with Robespierre, the guillotine, Karl Marx, Nietzche, and a host of others who would remake the world if it killed us. The spirit of the modern age is rebellion, rebellion against God, against the Church, against Nature even. And that is precisely what is at work here.

The catholic Church fought the good fight with the Counter-Reformation, but a part of that effort was to "modernize" the Church as a way to take one of the big criticizms away from the Protestants. It was often argued that the catholic Church promoted ignorance and superstition to amaintain power. (It did not; science as we know it was developed by the Church, and the most infamous case, indeed, the only real case that critics of Catholicism can point to with any degree of accuracy is that of Galileo, a clergyman who, as a Papal State citizen, openly defied his King - the Pope - and refused to simply teach heliocentrism as a theory rather than as fact, officially recognized by the Church fact. He was treated as kindly as any such rebel would be in that era.)

So many Catholics joined the "modernism" bandwagon, arguing that societal changes mean we have to stop taking the Eternal Things so literally. Concepts of modesty, of sexual morality, of authority, of familial cohesion were eschewed as "old fashioned" by the modernists. In fact, it was this movement among Protestants that led to a rebellion and the creation of the Fundamentalist wings of Protestantism in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. Unfortunately the fight over Darwinian Natural Selection gave the churches collective black eyes (even though they did not actually lose the argument) and at least many in postions of authority in Catholicism vowed "never again". These are the worldly Catholics, the people who support every Progressive fad, be it gay marriage or the welfare state or open borders or the nuclear freeze movement, what have you.

But a religion can only be stretched so far before it no longer really exists, and frankly what is the purpose of being a member of a religious faith if there is no there there? There certainly are more entertaining ways to spend a Sunday than in a church pew, and this content-less Christianity is leading to an emptying of those pews as a result. As a Catholic I can attest to this. No churches I have ever attended have ever dealt with anything but the most mundane and calorie-free drivel, with the homily generally being about how we should all just get along. It's Barney the Dinosaur meets a sclerotic ritual. I've watched as people have drifted away over the years, and to be honest I show up as late for mass as I can and leave as early as I can, because I am offended by what the liberals in the Church have done to it. There's no point to it anymore.

And there is no spiritual fortress one can take from Catholicism anymore. Why bother with it if we don't know right from wrong, if relativism is all there is? If we cannot judge reality and subjectivism than there is no reason bothering with it. If everyone winds up in the same place at the end Christianity is immaterial. In fact, it is as many atheists would argue, a pox upon humanity, a bunch of killjoys and prudes getting in the way of the freedom of others, a freedom that says you can do whatever you want because it's your decision. In a world with transcendant Truths that is a monstrously erroneous statement, but it is how these people think. They rejected God and thus all Truth.

What caught my attention in this essay was this statement from Dr. Coates:

"Each church will have to decide how to walk through this marriage equality debate. I think we should respect those who choose to allow their ministers not to perform same-sex weddings out of their own deep convictions, and I think we should respect churches that choose to allow their ministers that right, for they make their choice out of deep convictions, too… I say this: I do not always know what the truth is, but I can always tell what love is. I believe love is the greatest of all, and to do the loving thing will always be the right thing. Most congregations will eventually find their way there.”

End quote.

This is an astonishing post-modern statement of moral relativism and, frankly, a denial of the primacy of God. It is in fact a rebellion against the very concept that God transcends our existence and that we know eternal truths because HE TOLD US. This is a denial of the inerrency of Scripture.

The Apostle Paul stated unequivocally that homosexuals would not enter the Kingdom of Heaven (nor would the effeminate i.e. transsexuals.) He lumped them in with fornicators, adulterers, the wrathful, thieves, murderers, etc. This was repeated throughout the New Testament, where homosexuality was called an abomination. That was nothing new; it was likewise looked upon in the Old Testament. This was not just to be mean; it was because the Almighty, Creator of all things, intended sex to be for reproduction and the creation of new families, with two complementary individuals becoming "one flesh". Homosexuality is a parody of that, a thing that bears some resemblence to the original but cannot in any way ultimately satisfy the purposes of sex and marriage. It is much like arsenic; arsenic bears a close molecular similarity to phosphorus, a necessary substance for living tissue. It is this similarity that makes arsenic so dangerous - it tricks the body into using it like phosphorus, then it does not work. Ingesting arsenic is generally deadly to most organisms. Homosexuality may not physically kill you, but it will kill you spiritually, and it will cause great pain and suffering in this life.

Which is why the loving response is not to celebrate "gayness" as is demanded by Coates. Would it be the loving thing to give a person an apple with arsenic injected inside? On the contrary we would consider that a horrible, vile, evil act. Yet Coates wants us to simply close our eyes - or worse - and let these people perish so we can say we were loving. How loving is it to watch a man drown without tossing him a life preserver? And this is very much the duty of a Christian church, to act as a spiritual life preserver. Excusing homosexuality is an act of spiritual violence. That does not mean we mistreat them, because we are all sinners, have all fallen short. Homosexuality is no greater sin than many others, certainly no worse than adultery or tail chasing, or being a stinking drunk who neglects his responsibility or what have you. That does not mean it is any better, either, even though gay people suffer greatly from their condition prior to embracing the lifestyle and, yes, it is a sad and unfortunate thing. But in the end this will not make them happy, and it will lead to eternal unhappiness. If we carry what we are with us into eternity, then the weight of this will be ever with them. Christ came to free us from this. Love does in fact mean having to say you're sorry - and sometimes say you are wrong.

No father punishes his small child out of hatred. Conversely he doesn't let him run wild out of love.

So there are two huge errors in this pastor's thinking. He does not believe in self-evident truths, the very backbone of the American experiement. (Funny he quotes Jefferson yet ignores Jefferson's appeal to Natural Law.) The second error is that love is accepting of all THINGS and not of all people. Hate the sin and love the sinner? Not in the world of this dude; you either are a hater or a lover. You have to take it all.

Which is why militant homosexuals (and other militant liberals) invented identity politics in the first place. It was a way to attack Christianity by making it an all or nothing proposition. A gay person is indivisible from his or her sexuality; it is what defines who they are. As a result you cannot criticize what they DO without being guilty of a direct attack on who they ARE. Cute trick. If you say "you are a wonderful person and I love you but it's not good that you do this" you are a hater because you are, in their warped way of thinking, negating the entire first portion and attacking them personally.

Look at it this way; I am overweight and have a doctor's appointment tomorrow. I'm going to get an earful and i won't like it. Does that mean my doctor hates me? No; he's trying to do his job and help me to be healthier. I could simply say "fatness is my identity" and then any suggestion that I lose a few pounds can be met with rage at the attack on me. But no matter how I choose to look at it in the end the doctor is simply doing what doctors are paid to do. He wants to keep me alive longer.

Of course identity politics serves many useful purposes for the Progressive Left, and by getting everyone at each-oother's throats they can move in quietlly and steal power. Just look at the things that have happened since this whole debate erupted years ago; we are now talking about laws needed to defend the right of Christians to not be forced into joining a celebration of homosexuality. Just ten years ago the gay community assured us that nothing like this would ever happen. This was a tool, a wedge issue used to drive Christianity into the shadows. If we cannot live our faith, if we cannot be a candle in a dark place, what purpose is there to our religious rituals? The Left has always known that, and they have always sought to push Christians under the covers. The endgame is to destroy the Faith so we can all be good little liberal atheists.

Sadly many in the Church today go along with this. Pope Francis was supported by the "Lavender Mafia" in the Vatican, a group of pro-homosexual priests and Bishops who have wanted to "modernize" Catholic teaching. In fact, this Pope, when asked if homosexuality was a sin, replied with "who am I to judge?" Well, you are THE POPE and that was the job you ran for when you were elected. The Pope is supposed to judge moral and spiritual actions. Yes, he's not supposed to judge PEOPLE but he certainly has a right and duty to judge the morality of certain issues based on the Bible and Catholic teaching from the past. Francis is very happy to judge some things; he loves to judge capitalism and those who pursue wealth as somehow immoral, and he is obviously sympathetic to socialism, despite the teachings of his predecessor in Rerum Novarum. So it's only certain issues this Pope will judge. Sadly, homosexuality is mentioned as an evil in the Bible - free enterprise is not.

This is a centuries old fight, one ultimately between those who would convert the Gospel of Jesus Christ into a social gospel, a mere code of ethics and institution for providing charity, and those of us who think the salvation of souls is the primary purpose of Christ and His Church. Jesus once said "if thy right hand offends thee, cut it off, if thy eye offends thee, pluck it out." Why? Because these things shall pass away, but if your attachments to your sins and worldly things keep you from Heaven than you have truly lost everything.

We aren't here to enjoy this world. There are eternal consequences to our beliefs and acts. Too many christians have forgotten that.

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Dana Mathewson

Oh, WTF? These idiots should all go soak their heads, as we used to say back home. Next, they'll want control of the methane atmosphere of, what, Neptune?

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/04/08/exclusive-un-starts-toward-new-control-over-worlds-oceans.html

The United Nations has launched a far-reaching initiative that could give U.N.-sponsored authorities sway over the biological resources of the high seas—all the waters that lie outside national territories and economic zones.

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Dana Mathewson

You suppose "he" didn't act like a "true man?"

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2016/04/08/transgendered-whole-foods-employee-sues-sfter-being-called-it-by-coworkers/

A transgendered New York man has sued Whole Foods after allegedly experiencing discriminatory harassment.

A NOTE FROM JACK KEMP:

Ho Hum.

I've seen the founder of Whole Foods talk talk at the NY Junto Club. He said that when he started the company, he worked very hard, tried to please everyone with the lowest prices, and was criticized as not being enough "for the people." In those days, he broke even at the end of a year of very hard work. To paraphrase what followed, he realized unless he raised prices, he was going out of business anyway while he couldn't pay his own food and shelter expenses. The following is a quote from him, "I've got things at Whole foods that will make you healthy and things that will kill you."

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Timothy Birdnow

I was watching a "Secrets of the Dead" episode on PBS last night, and it got me to thinking about the line between the past and present. The episode I watched was about the Trojan War, and archaeologists have been in much dispute over Homer's account of the Trojan Horse; many do not believe this seemingly simple trick would have worked, or that the Greeks would have believed it would work, and forensic archaeologists have done a great deal of labor to see if it - or other possible scenarios that may have looked like what Homer describecd - would have worked. Many different scenarios were examined by the show, from the horse being a battering ram machine to it being a seige tower, and none of them worked given the parameters under which they had to operate. So a horse it must have been.

And archaeologists have worked out the size and scope of the "gift", explaining that a horse was the symbol of Troy so it would have appeared to the Trojans that the Greeks were saying "well, you wore us out; here is a token to show we are going to let bygones be bygones." It seems incredible that after nine years of battle the Trojans wouldn't look inside the thing before bringing it into the city, but mistakes are often the key to warfare, and sometimes a people are so desperate for peace they will overlook anything.

Does that sound familiar? America ignores repeated attacks by Muslims, calling it workplace violence or lone wolf attacks, desperate to find any way to avoid labeling these things as terrorist acts, acts of war. And we go so far as to make a deal with Iran, our sworn enemy, to allow them to obtain nuclear weapons but only after a certain amount of time as though that matters with these people. We are so desperate for peace will simply refuse to look inside the big wooden pony.

That pony is likely to contain a shiny uranium sphere, one that goes "boom!"

But the point of this short essay is that the narrator spoke of the notorious reverence for guile and deceit held by the Greeks at this time, and how many manuscripts from ancient Greece contained high praise for trickery. The Greeks, for all their virtues, were cheats, dirty tricksters who would lie in wait, ready to betray. During the Roman period the Greeks were despised as liars and cheats, and that was a cultural trait carried forward from this love of trickery.

I found this interesting because Liberalism was born out of the Renaissance, which was a revival of Greco-Roman culture and philosophy. The Enlightenment had two roots - Greek and Roman on the one side and Christian on the other, and a great many marvelous things were born of this. But from the beginning of the Enlightenment there was a strong atheistic strain, a group that wanted to reject the Christian aspect and focus on the purely material. It was that strain that would later work in the French Revolution and would see itself actualized in Rousseau and Voltaire and later in the German philosophers, all of whom promoted an atheistic worldview. The modern Progressive movement is solidly atheistic, even while using Christian doctrine to advance itself.

And the Liberal movement is perhaps the most dishonest and treacherous of any large belief system one could encounter. Rarely will the liberal tell you what his real goal is, and the left fights extraordinarily dirty, with winning at all cost the objective. Ends justify the means with the Left. Now where did we see that?

Oh yes; in Troy. The Trojan Horse was an example of Greek guile, and the Liberal movement was born of a revival of Greek things. Coincidence? I think not.

Religion determines how a People approach the world, and in particular the Judeo-Christian religion put strong ethical and moral standards in place, standards that imperiled the eternal soul of the believer if broken. Enlightenment thinking coupled with Christianity bore much good fruit; the rise of market economics, science, inalienable rights, etc. But it only worked as long as there was a standard of absolute truth. Those we call liberals today, the children of Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, Nietzche Stalin, Hitler, and Woodrow Wilson eschewed those eternal truths for their own godhead, the right to determine right and wrong based on utilitarian needs. The end result has been a world thrown into utter chaos as each god-man holds absolute power over reality as far as he is concerned. Don't like your sex? Change it! Don't like your race? Spray tan yourself to a new one. Your nation's history? Simply rewrite it. Without Truth there is no stability, for Truth is the bedrock of all things. And those who would use treachery and deceit to get their way have not the love of Truth in them.

Think about that next time you read Homer - or the New York Times.

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Timothy Birdnow

Robert Weissberg has a thoughtful piece about the anti-white actions of the Obama Administration, particularly the efforts by HUD to colonize the white suburbs of Baltimore. Weissberg argues this is to punish whites who fled the cities - and so it is, and that the plan is to turn these areas into new versions of Ferguson (Ferguson was 70% white in the 1990 census and 65% black as of 2010, largely through government funding to relocate black people from the ghetto into a better neighborhood.) Weissberg's main arguement is that the liberal theory that improving environments will simply erase bad behavior is idiotic. He's right, but he misses the point.

A big part of the HUD scheme is to gerrymander Republican districts, turning them Democrat. It's a simple trick to overturn the results of state elections, to make the power to redistrict irrelevant. Simply put, they want to colonize red districts so they turn blue. Add enough liberal black voters and you turn these districts. It is a dirty trick of of a largely partisan nature.

Granted, there is a delight in rubbing the noses of prosperous whites in their powerlessness to stop this. It was once said that whites wouldn't be allowed to retreat to the suburbs and school busing was designed precisely to force this on the white community. Here in St. Louis we've had a court-ordered city/county desegregation. Black children are bused out of the failed City district to what were once excellent suburban schools, and now many of these schools suffer from crime and declining test scores. Rush Limbaugh's uncle once administered this program, I might add; he was a federal judge and was assigned the case.

Speaking of Ferguson, I have pointed out repeatedly that Ferguson turned into ghetto primarily because the community of Kinloch was bought out for a planned airport expansion that never occured, and the government financed wholesale colonization of Ferguson with unemployed peoples. Still, Ferguson survived and, thanks to some beautiful charming homes that sold for cheap, was becoming a mecca for youn professionals; Ferguson is near the Universityof Missouri St. Louis, and many employees settled there. It had a quant downtown with an old train station that was rehabilitated with some wonderful, gentrified businesses; a brewery, wine garden, great restaurants, etc. It was an up-and-coming place after a decade of decay.

Until the Mike Brown riots. Now it is finis.

We'll have a lot more of this as HUD implements their nefarious scheme.

There is an all-out assault on what was considered traditional America, and the white community is where the idea of America still lies. Whites cannot be allowed to cluster, in the liberal mind, because they will start talking about the old days and perhaps stop kowtowing to the progressive scheme of "imagine there's no country" and everyone is mixed up in a hodgepodge where they retain their own particular culture whle living cheek-by-jowel. I remember the 1980's where the liberal college professors (and back then you did have to still preface that) were all a-twitter about "cultural diversity". I remember how insane I thought the concept; the Balkans were one example of how you cannot have different cultures occupy the same space, and history is replete with endless warfare between peoples who are stuck together in too close a proximity without coming together. But the left can only think about how to break things, and they realize that they can break America with this. They want to isolate and bully white America since that is the repository of the old ideas.

Integration without first enculturating peoples is one of their tools. It breaks down any resistance from anybody since they feel threatened and will simply keep quiet.

So there are a great many reasons for HUD to push this sort of thing.

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Dana Mathewson

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Paul Driessen

My article this week addresses the outrageous, unconstitutional and un-American efforts of 16 Democratic attorneys general to pursue, investigate, prosecute and punish "dangerous manmade global warming” skeptics – for the "abhorrent crime” of challenging the "97% consensus” that "climate change is real.” It presents some very inconvenient facts for these prosecutors … and suggests that they might have much greater success if they went after the real deceivers: climate alarmists who have been cooking the books for years on this issue.

Prosecuting climate chaos skeptics with RICO

Al Gore, Torquemada Whitehouse, Democrat AGs threaten to silence and bankrupt skeptics

Paul Driessen

It’s been a rough stretch for Climate Armageddon religionists and totalitarians.

Real World science, climate and weather events just don’t support their manmade cataclysm narrative. The horrid consequences of anti-fossil fuel energy policies are increasingly in the news. And despite campaigns by the $1.5-trillion-per-year government-industry-activist-scientific Climate Crisis Consortium, Americans consistently rank global warming at the very bottom of their serious concerns.

But instead of debating their critics, or marshaling a more persuasive, evidence-based case that we really do face a manmade climate catastrophe, alarmists have ramped up their shrill rhetoric, imposed more anti-hydrocarbon edicts by executive fiat and unratified treaty – and launched RICO attacks on their critics.

Spurred on by Senator Sheldon "Torquemada” Whitehouse (D-RI), Jagadish Shukla and his RICO-20 agitators, and their comrades, 16 of the nation’s 18 Democratic attorneys general (the other 32 are Republican) announced on March 29 that they are going after those who commit the unpardonable offense of questioning "consensus” climate science.

If companies are "committing fraud,” by "knowingly deceiving” the public about the threat of man-made carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, New York AG Eric Schneiderman intoned, "we want to expose it and pursue them to the fullest extent of the law,” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. "The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.”

Their initial target is ExxonMobil, but other companies, think tanks like CFACT and the Heartland Institute (with which I am affiliated), and even independent researchers and analysts (like myself) will be in their crosshairs – using a law intended for the Mafia. Incredibly, even United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch says her office has "discussed” similar actions and has "referred [the matter] to the FBI.”

These RICO investigations and prosecutions are chilling, unprecedented and blatantly un-American. They abuse our legal and judicial processes and obliterate the First Amendment freedom of speech rights of anyone who questions the catechism of climate cataclysm. The AGs’ actions are intended to browbeat skeptics into silence, and bankrupt them with monumental legal fees, fines and treble damages.

It is the campus "crime” of "unwelcome ideas” and "micro-aggression” on steroids. It is the inevitable result of President Obama’s determination to "fundamentally transform” the United States, ensure that electricity rates "necessarily skyrocket,” and carve his energy and climate policy legacy in granite.

Mr. O and his allies are on a mission: to rid the world of fossil fuels, replace them with "clean” biofuels (that are also carbon-based and also emit carbon dioxide when burned, but would require billions of acres of crop and habitat land) and "eco-friendly” bird-killing wind turbines and solar installations (that will require millions more acres) – and implement the goals of a dictatorial United Nations.

Former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres put it in the bluntest terms: "We are setting ourselves the task of intentionally to change [sic] the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years” – the free enterprise capitalist system. "The next world climate summit is actually an economic summit, during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated,” her UN climate crisis cohort Otmar Edendorfer added. "We will redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Thus, under the 2015 Paris climate treaty, developing nations will be under no obligation to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions. They will simply take voluntary steps, when doing so will not impair their efforts to drive economic growth and improve their people’s living standards. Meanwhile, they will be entitled to share $3 billion to $300 billion per year in "climate change adaptation, mitigation and reparation” money. In fact, Mr. Obama has already transferred $500 million in taxpayer money (illegally) from a State Department emergency fund to the UN’s Green Climate Fund.

No wonder developing nations were thrilled to sign the 2015 Paris not-a-treaty treaty.

Recent headlines portend what’s in store. EU electricity prices rise 63% over past decade. Rising energy costs, green policies threaten to kill steel industry and 4,000 to 40,000 jobs, as Tata Steel quits Britain. Thousands of Europeans lose jobs, as manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy prices. Unable to afford proper heat, 40,000 Europeans die of hypothermia during 2014 winter.

In Africa and other energy-deprived regions: Millions die in 2015 from lung and intestinal diseases – due to open cooking and heating fires, spoiled food and unsafe water, and absence of electricity.

Meanwhile, despite mandates, loan guarantees, feed-in tariffs, endangered species exemptions and other subsidies, renewable industries are barely surviving: SunEnergy, world’s largest green energy company, faces bankruptcy, as share prices fall 95% in one year. Solar company Abengoa US files for Chapter 15 bankruptcy. China stops building wind turbines, as grid is damaged and most electricity is wasted.

But Climate Crisis ruling elites pay little attention to this. They will be insulated, enriched, and protected from their decisions and deceptions – as they decide what energy, jobs, living standards and freedoms the poor, minority, blue-collar and middle classes will be permitted to have.

Equally disturbing, their drive for total control is based on a chaotic world that is totally at odds with what the rest of us see outside our windows. Even after "homogenizing” and massaging the raw data, climate alarmists can only show that global temperatures may have risen a few tenths of a degree (barely the margin of error) during the 2015 El Niño year, after 19 years of no temperature increase, following two decades of slight warming, following three decades of slight cooling and warming.

On the "extreme weather” front, tornadoes, snows, floods and droughts are no more frequent or intense than over the past century. No Category 3-5 hurricane has made US landfall in a record 125 months. Polar ice remains well within historic fluctuations, and sea levels are rising at barely seven inches per century.

Alarmists thus rely on computer models that predict even "worse catastrophes,” if global temperatures rise even 0.5 degrees C (0.8 F) more than they already have since the Little Ice Age ended and Industrial Era began. However, the models are hopelessly deficient, and totally unable to predict the climate.

They overstate the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide and methane, atmospheric gases chosen because they result from fossil fuel use (and from many natural sources). They assume these two gases have become the primary forces in climate change – and ignore or downplay changing solar energy, cosmic ray and geomagnetic output; major periodic fluctuations in Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean circulation; volcanic activity; regional and planetary temperature cycles that recur over multiple decades, centuries or millennia; and other natural forces that have always driven planetary warming, cooling and weather.

The models and modelers do this because these factors and their roles in climate change are not well understood, are difficult to measure, and do not fit the "humans are at fault” meme. They compound these errors by assuming that any warming will be dangerous, rather than beneficial for people and agriculture.

These oversights can be characterized as careless, recklessly negligent, or even "knowingly deceitful” and fraudulent. So can "nine inconvenient untruths” that a United Kingdom judge highlighted in Al Gore’s infamous fake-documentary movie – and Mr. Gore’s recent claim that atmospheric CO2 is fueling Zika outbreaks. Likewise for James Hansen’s repeated assertion that sea levels could rise "several meters” (117 inches) over the next century, and the bogus studies behind the phony "97% consensus” claims.

Can you picture the cabal of AGs filing RICO actions in these cases? If you want the facts, and a few chuckles about climate alarmism, see the Climate Hustle movie, coming May 2 to a theater near you.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

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(I've already posted about this but it's worth a repeat - Tim)

William Kay

There is a new posting at Environmentalism is fascism

http://www.ecofascism.com/

Environmentalism is fascism
Welcome to the Environmentalism is Fascism website.
View on www.ecofascism.com

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This posting contains 356 enviro-critic website links plus additional info on the enviro-critic community and its funders.

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Timothy Birdnow

Jack Kemp e-mailed this article to me this morning and I thought it may be worth posting a few thoughts on the matter. The New York Post article discusses the way Silicon Valley uses young Millenials as labor cannon fodder, in a cult-like anti-corporatist counter-culture which injects juvenile values into the work environment in lieu of pay or proper benefits.

In a tell-all book, Dan Lyons, former employee of Hubspot, details the way these outfits operate:

‘What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist?’
- Dan Lyons

"HubSpot’s leaders were not heroes,” says Lyons, "but rather sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformational technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that has still never turned a profit.”

Inside HubSpot’s colorful offices — orange, the official color, is everywhere, as is the company logo, which to Lyons looks like a sprocket with three phalluses sticking out of it — fun is mandatory. Workers, many in shorts and flip-flops, are inordinately proud of the "candy wall” where they can fill up on free snacks. Dogs roam the halls. Occasionally, amid a slave-ship galley of workers hunched over laptops, a Nerf-ball war breaks out. Conference rooms contain beanbag chairs.

For bike commuters, there are showers upstairs, but too many staffers were using them as sex cabins, so a memo went out to discourage that. Oh, and there’s unlimited vacation.

Which turns out to be one of the many traps of HubSpot: Fired employees have no accrued vacation time, which saves the company payouts to its "graduates.” Firms with vacation plans are also required to set aside cash ­reserves to cover the cost. HubSpot dodged this cost.

(...0

• An all-pervading sinister air. Calling HubSpot a "startup cult” and comparing it to Scientology, Lyons notes that employees have to wear rubber bracelets containing transponders, which are needed to lock and unlock doors when moving around HQ. Which means, of course, that the Company is tracking you at all times. The Company also gives employees a lengthy, pseudoscientific, entirely scary-sounding personality test (devised by a crackpot whose claim to fame was creating the Wonder Woman comics). All of this sounds kinda like the bizarre questionnaire Scientologists take while grasping tin cans.

So eager are innocent young bunnies to comply with the unique language, rituals and culture of this happy-face corporate police state that "drinking the Kool-Aid,” while a trite phrase in Silicon Valley, is scarily apposite. "What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist?” asks Lyons. "Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults.”

Groovy young techies, you’ve been played. Tech startups are one gigantic millennial meat-grinder.

A 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that describes HubSpot culture (one slide says "team > individual”) describes "a kind of corporate utopia . . . where people don’t worry about work-life balance because work is their life.” No one, Lyons emphasizes, ever jokes about any of this stuff.

• Unyielding death-grip on childhood. The company’s chief technology officer announces he’s bringing a teddy bear to meetings and invites everyone else to do the same. On Halloween, everyone comes to work in a wacky costume so the company can do a group photo captioned, "We dare to be different.”

To convey the feeling that life means carrying on campus goofiness indefinitely, training sessions are held by "marketing professors” and "faculty” belong to "HubSpot Academy.” Beer taps are installed in the kitchen. The worst thing you can say is that "at my last company, we used to do it this way,” because that implies you’re a grownup with experience instead of a peppy little lamb seeing the world with fresh, dewy eyes.

After serving as technology editor for Newsweek, and with decades’ experience, Lyons finds his intern-age boss is a guy with only one previous job (an entry-level gig doing sales for Google). People constantly talk about imaginary friends such as "Mary,” a marketing person they think of as their typical customer. Mary has a detailed persona: She has an MBA from Babson; she’s 42, has two kids (10 and 6), etc. One Friday, Lyons discovers a group of employees sprawled out on the carpet making "ghastly” paintings on poster board. After a while, Lyons’ children send him off to work mornings with the words, "Have a good day at kindergarten, Daddy!”

• Chaos. The marketing department at HubSpot features so much personnel churn that it acquires the nickname "the French Revolution.” Employees disappear without warning. The human resources people have no clue how to discover talent, asking potential hires, "How weird are you, on a scale from 1 to 10?” Applicants with proven job skills get ignored because, Lyons says, they’re in their 50s and HubSpot prefers young know-nothings.

Due to what Steve Jobs called a "bozo explosion,” mediocrities hire even more mediocre people to work under them. All of these worker bees bustle around doing nonsense work such as creating would-be viral videos that vanish into the void. "Watching this video gave me cancer,” a viewer said in a comment on one such video, a parody of "What Does the Fox Say?”

End excerpts.

Indeed, this would be a dream job for a young person, and I'm not totally certain it is absolutely wrong to discount certain aspects of this; the company, instead of paying a good salary or benefits, offers an alternative form of compensation that only works with the young single person. In a way they ARE offering compensation, just not the type that attracts stable people.

I once spoke with a young Millennial who was moving back to St. Louis from Silicon Valley to get a "real job" as she described it. She loved working at the tech companies; there was little work and a lot of play, but those companies disappeared like the morning dew, and she spent her time mostly trying to get a new job. After a certain point she realized that the time had come to actually start her life, that playtime had to end. It is one of the tragedies of our human existence, but at some point we all have to grow up.

So does a company like Hubspot abuse their employees? Perhaps. It does give them two things; a certain measure of work experience and enough pay to survive. These companies certainly pay as well as other entry-level positions, so to say they are cheating the employees may be accurate from the Liberal mindset but without the poor pay they would get no pay at all and no play, either.

I must say that this sort of thing speaks volumes about our modern American culture. First, it is the final stage in the cult of youth that has gripped America since the coming of the television. Time was age was valued, and the elders ran our society. They did so because they had the experience needed to make proper decisions but also they had settled into a mature mindset, one less interested in testing limits (as do the young) and more interested in bearing the burdens, the responsibilities of life. The young like to play, and don't really want responsibility. Oh, there are plenty of responsible young men and women, don't misunderstand, but their natural inclination is to play or to seek their own advancement. It is the older generation that, as Ayn Rand would say, maintains the engine of the world. They learned this responsibility from their fathers, who in turn learned from their fathers. Once they were old enough they began their own careers, taking the less desirable jobs as part of the training process. It used to take a long time to become a boss in the old America.

Not any longer. Children often don't have fathers at all, and rarely go into the business that their father was employed in if they do. The breakdown of the family has led to an extended adolescence, with kids staying at home until they are nearly middle aged, living as if they were teenagers. Often the parents, who understand that their children were denied the stability of a strong nuclear family, are permissive in this, since the "kids" need to be watched; they have adopted modern values, juvenile thinking from a culture that values immaturity, and so the parents encourage it out of guilt and necessity. We have created a machine in this country, a machine that represses growth and maturation. Social media is a race to the cradle, with the more juvenile aspects of America on full display as part of "self-fulfillment". We have been told by our liberal friends that the highest good is to be what we wish to be, to do what we wish to do. The end result is everyone wandering around lost, no sense of how to become adult. Adulthood is mocked and despised in popular media, with responsible people being portrayed as doddering fools, old killjoys. The young, with no good role models, revert to their natural state. What is the personality in a natural state? A self-indulgent juvenile, that is what. We are by nature children; we have to be taught to be adults.

America is failing to teach her children to be adults.

Work used to do that. The young took bad, dirty, unpleasant jobs so they could learn. It was not fun, but it was a part of the training that was needed to make a person into a stable, mature adult; if nothing else, the kid learned the value of hard work, and that when he or she finally did graduate to a better job they appreciated it. We don't teach children the value of work anymore. In point of fact, most young teens are not able to find work, and that largely because work is outsourced these days or given to aliens who are not even supposed to be here. As a result they never learn, and they never grow. The price of this is extended adolescence.

In short, companies like Hubspot exist because of the triumph of liberalism in America.

The welfare state, with all of the risk taken out of life, encourages this. The schools, with their ridiculous notions of "everybody's a winner" and either giving everyone a trophy on not keeping score at a sporting event encourages this. My niece attends a school like that; if you want to be on one of the sports teams you will have a place, and be played, no matter how bad you are. If you want to be in any extracurricular you will be. Yes, it may seem to be the kind thing, and it will keep from damaging the fragile self-esteem of the children, but in the end it teaches them worse than nothing. It gives them a false sense of reality, the idea that the world is somehow fair and will bend for you. Work is a terrible shock to such people, because suddenly they are facing the reality that they aren't the center of the Universe but rather that they will be judged on their merits, and will have to take all manner of abuse in the process. It's a terrible wake-up call.

The egalitarianism promoted by the Left necessitates that children do not grow up. Everyone has to be equal, and the only way for that to happen is for everybody to remain on a stagnated plain of development. It really is that simple.

And this gives a great benefit to our would-be leftist overlords in that these young are going to remain eternally dissatisfied and will be easily manipulated. They are the perfect slaves for the New World Order.

Remember Brave New World? The citizenry was so easily manipulated with stock phrases and a culture designed to promote play and avoidance of pain, just like these kids at these tech companies. Hubspot is nothing but a corporate model of the Huxleyan Brave New World.

It's time to grow up, America

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:44 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Timothy Birdnow

Wikileaks revealed a plan by the E.U. elites to manipulate markets and to push world governance via environmentalism and terrorism.

From Zero Hedge:

" One of the recurring concerns involving Europe's seemingly perpetual economic, financial and social crises, is that these have been largely predetermined, "scripted" and deliberate acts.

This is something the former head of the Bank of England admitted one month ago when Mervyn King said that Europe's economic depression "is the result of "deliberate" policy choices made by EU elites. It is also what AIG Banque strategist Bernard Connolly said back in 2008 when laying out "What Europe Wants"

To use global issues as excuses to extend its power:

* environmental issues: increase control over member countries; advance idea of global governance
* terrorism: use excuse for greater control over police and judicial issues; increase extent of surveillance
* global financial crisis: kill two birds (free market; Anglo-Saxon economies) with one stone (Europe-wide regulator; attempts at global financial governance)
* EMU: create a crisis to force introduction of "European economic government”

This morning we got another confirmation of how supernational organizations "plan" European crises in advance to further their goals, when Wikileaks published the transcript of a teleconference that took place on March 19, 2016 between the top two IMF officials in charge of managing the Greek debt crisis - Poul Thomsen, the head of the IMF's European Department, and Delia Velkouleskou, the IMF Mission Chief for Greece.

In the transcript, the IMF staffers are caught on tape planning to tell Germany the organization would abandon the troika if the IMF and the commission fail to reach an agreement on Greek debt relief.

More to the point, the IMF officials say that a threat of an imminent financial catastrophe as the Guardian puts it, is needed to force other players into accepting its measures such as cutting Greek pensions and working conditions, or as Bloomberg puts it, "considering a plan to cause a credit event in Greece and destabilize Europe."

According to the leaked conversation, the IMF - which has been pushing for a debt haircut for Greece ever since last August's 3rd Greek bailout - believes a credit event as only thing that could trigger a Greek deal; the "event" is hinted as taking place some time around the June 23 Brexit referendum.

As noted by Bloomberg, the leak shows officials linking Greek issue with U.K. referendum risking general political destabilization in Europe.

The leaked transcript reveals how the IMF plans to use Greece as a pawn in its ongoing negotiation with Germany's chancelleor in order to achieve the desired Greek debt reduction which Germany has been pointedly against: in the leak we learn about the intention of IMF to threaten German Chancellor Angela Merkel to force her to accept the IMF's demands at a critical point. "

End excerpt.

This is truly astonishing, and yet should come as no surprise; certainly the U.N. Agenda 21 has pushed much of this in the interest of world government. And absolutely nothing about the policies of European nations makes sense in regard to the Syrian refugee crisis. It's not even really a conspiracy; the evidence for this is hiding in plain sight, and has for some time. Now the plotters are confident enough to speak somewhat openly about it.

Welcome to the New World Order!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 02:42 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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