I read with discouragement that Trump signed the $2,200,000,000,000 “Your Politician CARES About You Reelecting Him In Six Months” Act. It’s loaded with so much pork that Trump and Pelosi cooperated on it!

But then I saw a little side comment… about a no-name Representative from Kentucky who nearly derailed the bill single-handedly, and possibly killed his career trying to stop this monetary atrocity.

Who was that masked man?

Thomas Massie. Knowing he’s a politician, what strikes me first about his face is that the skin color is patchy. That’s the skin of a man who 1. gets a lot of outdoors sun and 2. is not obsessed with his appearance. Two facts making him very unlike the average politician. Bonus for not having thick-framed Problem Glasses.

A narrow nose suggests a lack of social energy. Lots of right angles to his face on top of the rest of my observations makes me peg him as a high-functioning nerd.

Sourced from his political homepage. This pic is not going to age well and you’ll read why in a minute. Notice he was amateur enough at having his picture taken for glasses-glare to ruin this otherwise plaque-worthy photo… and uncaring enough to publicly post it regardless. Yep, he’s got to be a nerd.

https://www.thomasmassie.com/#ISSUES

U.S. Representative Thomas Massie entered Congress in November 2012 after serving as Lewis County Judge Executive. He represents Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District which stretches across Northern Kentucky and 280 miles of the Ohio River.

U.S. Representative Massie attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering.

NERRRRD!

During school, he invented a technology that enabled people to interact with computers using their sense of touch, and leveraged that technology to found SensAble Technologies, Inc., which raised over $32 million of venture capital, created 70 jobs, and obtained 29 patents. The hardware and software he developed is now used to design automobiles, jewelry, shoes, dental prosthetics, and even reconstructive implants for wounded soldiers.

In Congress, Thomas serves on two committees: the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure and the Committee on Oversight and Reform. The House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure has jurisdiction over roads, bridges, mass transit, railroads, aviation, maritime and waterborne transit. Thomas’s selection to the Oversight and Reform Committee puts him in a position to hold the federal government accountable to taxpayers.

A humble posting until Chinavirus hit.

Thomas lives on a cattle farm in Kentucky with his wife and high school sweetheart, Rhonda, and their four children. He’s honored to be able to serve the citizens of Kentucky’s 4th District.

A nerd who managed to breed. Some guys have all the luck.

“Weapons bans and gun-free zones are unconstitutional. In speeches, legislation, and through my votes in Congress I continuously make the point that gun-free zones make law-abiding citizens less safe.

“I support President Trump’s efforts to stop illegal immigration and voted to fund the wall for the full amount requested by the President.”

Good.

“The Government has no right to be snooping without a warrant through your digital records and communications any more than they do through your filing cabinet at home. I’ve also sought to protect American technology companies from being forced to create “backdoors” or introduce vulnerabilities to their security systems.”

Better! He’s going a bit further than the usual talking points AND he notices the Deep State!

“Congress has recklessly given up its Constitutionally delegated “power of the purse.” I’ve urged Speakers Boehner, Ryan, and Pelosi to return to regular order, and I have voted against every single one of their Omnibus funding bills they have passed.”

That’s not even a talking point. Calling out how Congress shirks its Constitutional responsibilities is going off the plantation of Business As Usual!

Dear God, please clone Massie. But maybe that’s why You gave him a young wife?

I enthusiastically supported and voted for President Trump in 2016, I have vigorously defended him against the impeachment sham, and I will be working to re-elect him in 2020 as an Honorary State Chair of the 2020 Kentucky Trump Victory team.

Um, about that…

Donald Trump: Throw Thomas Massie out of Republican Party

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/27/donald-trump-throw-thomas-massie-republican-party/

By Charlie Spiering, 27 March 2020

President Donald Trump berated Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) on Friday, demanding the Republicans throw him out of the party for obstructing the massive coronavirus rescue package.

[From Trumps’s Twitter account on 27 March]

“Looks like a third rate Grandstander named @RepThomasMassie, a Congressman from, unfortunately, a truly GREAT State, Kentucky, wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers Bill in Congress. He just wants the publicity. He can’t stop it, only delay, which is both dangerous & costly. Workers & small businesses need money now in order to survive. Virus wasn’t their fault. It is “HELL” dealing with the Dems, had to give up some stupid things in order to get the “big picture” done. 90% GREAT! WIN BACK HOUSE, but throw Massie out of Republican Party!”

Oh, yes, however could we benighted Dirt People survive without our Ivory Tower leaders ruling us from Moscow for their own benefit?

“By empowering the Radical Left Democrats, do nothing Kentucky politician @RepThomasMassie is making their War on the 2nd Amendment more and more difficult to win (But don’t worry, we will win anyway!). He is a disaster for America, and for the Great State of Kentucky!”

Yes, please. Do nothing. In the hard calculus of survival, letting the elderly take the bad end of an Act of God originating in their Most Favored Nation would have been a much better fate for America than mortgaging the future of everybody but the elderly in America.

Doing nothing is exactly what Congress, and President Trump, should have done after not caring to take any preventative measures. Chinavirus isn’t hemorrhagic fever or drug-resistant Bubonic Plague. Everybody sane who watched America’s industrial muscle get siphoned off to the Third World saw this plague coming from upwards of fifty years ago. We just didn’t know which plague it would be. Turned out to be Bat Chink Soup.

Calling Massie a Do-Nothing because he refused to support a cosmically unbalanced overreaction to a minor national crisis is high praise to Massie. Few politicians are so worthy… even fewer want to be.

Massie is expected to force a roll call vote in Congress on the $2 trillion emergency funding bill, requiring members of Congress to rush back to Washington instead of passing the bill unanimously by a voice vote.

In a voice vote, no names go on the official record as supporting or rejecting the bill. The cowards in the House didn’t want to leave fingerprints on their crime… not that a unanimous voice vote gives them much wiggle room.

If Massie demands a quorum, 216 members of Congress are needed to return to Washington to pass the bill.

The Kentucky congressman shared an image of text from the Constitution on Thursday, suggesting that he would demand a quorum.

It appears that Massie believes that members of Congress should be required to record a vote on one of the biggest spending bills in the history of the country.

Makes sense to me, when passing one single bill will double the government’s annual budget. Especially when we didn’t have $2.2T sitting around for a rainy day.

But Trump described him as a “disaster for America” for holding up the vote.

It’s not like Trump to be so nervous about delivering on the pork. His (((allies))) must have been yanking hard on his leash.

Massie also reportedly called the White House on Friday morning to discuss his position but it is unclear whether they spoke.

The associated link was dead; happens a lot with articles that quote heavily from social media. Whoever said “the Internet never forgets” was not a well-connected Congressman. But seeing as Massie didn’t convince Trump of anything, it was probably a falling-out kind of conversation.

Massie isn’t the only man who was hopeful then disappointed by Trump’s Presidency.

Most members of the House of Representatives left town last week after passing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s $150 billion spending bill to help fight the coronavirus.

Oops, that should have been “$2.4T sitting around for a rainy day”. And check back tomorrow for the revised revised figure!

The Washington political establishment was sharply critical of Massie’s threatened political stance.

“It is quite the statement of his character that Thomas Massie is legitimately threatening the health of his colleagues, many in their 60s or 70s even 80s, for a stunt on a bill he knows is going to pass,” wrote Brendan Buck on Twitter, a former aide for Speaker John Boehner and Speaker Paul Ryan. “I hope no one forgets what he’s done here.”

“Risk of infection and risk of legislation being delayed. Disgraceful. Irresponsible,” wrote an angry Rep. Peter King on Friday morning.

Full tweet: “Heading to Washington to vote on pandemic legislation. Because of one Member of Congress refusing to allow emergency action entire Congress must be called back to vote in House. Risk of infection and risk of legislation being delayed. Disgraceful. Irresponsible.”

Nothing, but nothing scares a Real American like the government taking emergency action. Massie is Good People.

An early response to the full tweet: “I’m an essential teacher who has to go to work today. So if I can do it, you Ivory Tower occupants can do it. My son is still working, my husband is still working, my brothers, sisters-in-law, my dad, my cousins, my friends are still working in harms way, so do you job.” Barbie has more courage than Rep. King!

Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters she would probably not demand a recorded vote on the stimulus

”There’s just a lot of members whose lives are at risk right now,” she said.

Yeah, at risk of missing out on the biggest barrel of free bacon since the previous bank bailout in 2010.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry called Massie an “asshole.”

“Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole,” he wrote on Twitter. “He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity. He’s given new meaning to the term #Masshole.”

Again, let’s hear the whole tweet:

“Breaking news: Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole. He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity. He’s given new meaning to the term #Masshole. (Finally, something the president and I can agree on!)”

Left and Right both hated, HATED Massie for blocking their reelection gravy train. They’re all the same, they’re all parasites at heart. Some don’t want to kill the host, is all.

Except for Massie. Thank you, Tom!

‘Frankly, he should resign.’ NKY congressman Massie’s coronavirus comments receive backlash from primary challengers

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/local/northern-ky/2020/03/16/coronavirus-kentucky-thomas-massie-twitter-todd-mcmurtry-alexandra-owensby-shannon-fabert/5063370002/

By Julia Fair, 16 March 2020

Northern Kentucky U.S. congressman Thomas Massie blasted novel coronavirus precautions taken by governments on his social media platforms this week.

His posts from Facebook and Twitter knocked the cautionary steps governments took to slow the spread of the pandemic. He called for the private sector to solve testing issues, said eliminating dine-in options at restaurants would “lead to worse public health outcomes than if they had remained open,” and was one of the 17 Republicans who didn’t vote on the Coronavirus Relief Bill.

“When this is over, I fear FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans is going to look like a ‘light touch.’” he wrote on Facebook Monday morning. President Trump announced at a press conference later in the afternoon that people should avoid crowds larger than 10 people.

The candidates who want to unseat Massie denounced his comments as the number of confirmed novel coronavirus cases in Kentucky rose to a total to 25, as of Monday evening.

25 Cases and zero deaths is clearly a pandemic! And Julia, it’s CHINAvirus not “novel coronavirus”. We see you kowtowing to Beijing.

Todd McMurtry, a Republican running against Massie in the rescheduled June 23 primary election, called his actions “shameful,” in a statement sent to The Enquirer and added “Frankly, he should resign.”

A Harvard-educated trial attorney. Not my people.

“I stand by all of my social media posts,” Massie told The Enquirer.

Massie said McMurtry’s comment was “laughable,” defended his comments and pointed to the thousands of likes and shares the posts got as a sign that they were well received.

Yes! Exactly! Stand your ground and don’t apologize to the anklebiters!

McMurtry said Massie’s posts weren’t appropriate for a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

“He brags about his ‘sass,’ calling himself ‘Sassy Massie,’ but these times and our current needs demand someone who is serious,” McMurtry said. “What we need from our representative is competence and hard work.

And trillions of free dollars!

“Massie has failed us. It’s time for a change.”

The two Democrats vying for the Democratic party nomination for the congressional seat, Alexandra Owesnby and Shannon Fabert, also criticized Massie.

“I’m Dr. Alexandra Owensby. I’m running for US Congress against Thomas Massie in Kentucky District 4. As a single mom and a nurse, I will fight to make sure we get affordable healthcare and fight for rights of the middle and working classes! Get on Board!” -from her Twitter

A nurse, not a doctor. Her degree is “Doctor of Nursing Practice”. As a single mom, she’s a worthless piece of skank-ho shit.

Segue

‘We need representation that looks and feels like us,’ Candidate vies for Dem nomination to unseat Rep. Thomas Massie in 2020

Heavy makeup and borderline sampan eyes.

Shannon Fabert likes to keep a close eye on Northern Kentucky politics. She’s watched the election cycles heat up and cool down, observed candidates and took notes. This time she decided it was time to stop observing campaign herself. Fabert, 41, of Burlington, threw herself into the Democratic primary for the 4th Congressional District to unseat incumbent Republican Rep. Thomas Massie. Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning. “Congress belongs to the people and I think we need representation that looks and feels like us,” Fabert told The Enquirer.

Hmm, she doesn’t look brown or black. That heavy makeup at work? Massie looks like me and has a background like mine, so that must be why I like him so much. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him taking his oath of office seriously enough that this feral bitch has a chance to unseat him because Kentucky’s parasites want my their money.

Fabert, a newcomer to politics, described herself as a moderate with a few progressive ideas.

She’s a hardline Marxist but still wants a man to fight her battles.

Her background is rooted in business consulting, which included a stint at Jack Casino when it was named Horseshoe Casino.

A hooker with a heart of gold?

Fabert will face Democratic candidate Alexandra Owensby of Fort Thomas in the May primary election. Both woman want to unseat conservative Massie who has represented the district for seven years. The district covers Boone, Campbell, Kenton, Pendleton and Gallatin, stretching into into 15 more counties. Previous Democrats haven’t gotten close to beating Massie. In 2018, Democratic candidate Seth Hall got about 34% of the vote when he ran against Massie. Fabert grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work brought her to Pennsylvania until she and her husband moved to Northern Kentucky 10 years ago. The Burlington residents like to play golf and typically cook meals at home with their 9-year-old Old English Sheepdog, Hines. When they do […]

End segue. That background doesn’t sound right. It’s a two-working-parent household that typically cooks meals at home?

Segue

Meet Shannon

Born in San Francisco, California, I moved around with my parents to various states in the South until they settled in Memphis when I was nine.

Aha! A lot of fat, woke wimminz in politics with kitchen-bitch husbands come from my Commiefornia.

Growing up in my house, I’ve always been politically aware with a uniquely inclusive perspective. I am the child of an immigrant and veteran who as a child was thrust into the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up with stories of activism as a family history.

Translation: ghetto rat. Hmm, she does look like London Breed.

I grew up believing that our best leaders worked hard and respectfully to represent all of their constituents, not just the ones that voted for them nor for special interests.

That’s how stupid she is. She “grew up believing that our best leaders worked hard and respectfully to represent all of their constituents”. As opposed to actual acts of leadership and stewardship, like Massie.

“I believed that these elected officials rose up from humble beginnings with altruistic intentions.”

She has retarded levels of stupid.

I don’t mind that the effort to delay or derail the bill failed. Massie tried hard enough that he might lose reelection as a direct result. Every saint of Christ understands what it’s like to suffer for doing good.

You did right by America, Representative Massie!

 

One wonders how the Baby Boomers are reacting to Chinavirus, if they really are driving it as frantically as indicated by groceries dedicating their opening hours to BBs getting first pick of the restock. This article is part Boomer Bashing and part examination of their curiously apocalyptic pseudo-Christianity.

Wallace Henley started out as a journalist in the 1960s, then did 22 years in Congress and the Nixon Presidency, becoming a Christian partway through that, and is now the middle management senior associate pastor at Second Baptist Church in Houston. Sounds like a good pick to hear the Boomer perspective from.

Eyebrows thick at the outside but not inside signal a managerial mindset, as opposed to “visionary” mindset. He definitely looks like a Baby Boomer in that picture, especially with that head tilt.

Wait, if he’s a Boomer then shouldn’t he be much more geriatric than that?

Ahh, there we go. A screen shot from one of his youTube videos. SOMEBODY isn’t facing old age with grace and acceptance.

Perfect for today’s purposes.

The tipping point for churches: The strategic remnant (pt. 2)

https://www.christianpost.com/news/the-tipping-point-for-churches-the-strategic-remnant-pt-2.html

By Wallace Henley, 25 March 2020

Don’t sweat Part I.

When the accumulation of sin brings nations to the tipping point of judgment, who is there to stabilize them and bring them back from the precipice?

Your kids smothering you with a pillow? Because those sins didn’t accumulate on their own. Henley opens up with a plea for somebody to wash his sins away. This could have been a “come to Jesus” moment for him except Jesus’ price is repentance. Exactly which sins have brought America to the tipping point of judgment and who committed them?

That might have been the most-asked question in ancient Amorite society when it reached that critical fourth generation when its sins became “full” and caused God to remove His shielding hand. (Genesis 15:16)

Even though I rate myself as a theologian, that was such an obscure reference that I had to look it up. Context is God’s prediction of the Egyptian captivity. Gen. 15:16 “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”

One, there’s no mention of a “shielding hand” of God. That image is not in Scripture. Two, God didn’t remove His protection from the Amorites. He took personal credit for butchering them. Exodus 33:2 “I will send an angel before you and drive out the Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.”

If, as you say, Wally, your ‘nation’s’ sins have reached the tipping point then it’s too late to beg for mercy. The fourth generation from yours would be… Generation Z. Z for Zyklon. Sounds right.

Now, millions every morning scan their news feeds for some sign of deliverance from a ravaging virus and a collapsing global economic system. It seems to an apocalyptic moment has come upon us when the global order is shattering before our eyes. Civilizations appear to be disintegrating as described in Revelation 18.

Let’s see… for California thus far, this “ravaging virus” has killed… 11 people out of fifty million or so. Wally thinks the Rapture is at hand because of it? More Boomers than that have died by volunteering with “Habitats for Humanity”. Or is he thinking of the poor Communist Chinese? The downtrodden overseas that you’ll never meet are far more worthy of your concern than your State kidnapping your son’s children because he got angry at his feral wife!

The level of solipsism required to believe the End of Reality is upon us because Grandpa’s Generation is on the cusp of dying off is astonishing. I blame television. Everybody getting their perspective of the outside world fed to them by the same Big Three Commie networks did a lot to promote an in-group culture more powerful than the bonds of family.

Not that I’m looking to excuse the unrepentant. I just don’t want to see it happen again. Subsequent generations… X, Millennial, Z… are indeed splitting into distinct halves, defined by acceptance or rejection of the mainstream Narrative. Which is still a single-sourced document despite having many mouthpieces.

The haunting question underlying all our anxieties is this: What lies beyond the tipping point?

Instead of big-butt useless churches like yours, Wally, we’ll have real-deal Christians showing the world by personal example what it means to follow Christ the True. Probably by dying in the Coliseum for its entertainment and risking plague to defend the innocent.

Genesis and Isaiah give the answer — tohu (formless chaos) and bohu (desolate emptiness). (Genesis 1:1-2) Apollyon — the destroyer — aims to weaken the nations, shake kingdoms, make the world a wilderness, overthrow its cities, and entrap people in dark addictions, suffocating sins, terror and hopelessness. (Isaiah 14:12-23)

That sounds EXACTLY like what you Boomers did to the entire world. Or if you prefer, you Boo-hoo Troopers? …nah, forget it. The Left still can’t meme.

When Sodom and Gomorrah came finally to the tipping point, God gave Abraham a key that could have also saved the Amorites in their day, and us in ours. “Lord… suppose there are only ten righteous people there,” asked Abraham. “Then I will not destroy it for the sake of ten,” God replied. (Genesis 18:32 NLT)

Suddenly we are face-to-face with the answer. When our nations are at the tipping point there is a strategic remnant that has the authority to pull whole societies back from the precipice and release the blessings of God upon suffering people.

Okay, enough Boomer Bashing. Time for serious theology. Jesus is New Testament, not Old Testament. “God punishing the nations” is Old Testament. New Testament is every man standing before God individually. No more tribe, no more corporate identity.

Corporate identity being the Baby Boomers’ central fault, they naturally gravitate to an Old Testament understanding of God. But they do that in defiance of Christ, not in acceptance.

God toys with nations as He wishes. Some He elevates, some He tears down and rarely because they deserve it. The idea that God stands by to smite the peasants if the barons choose to disobey Him is completely unChristian. That’s the concept of “whipping boy” and it’s pure arrogance for Wally to demand salvation for himself by the efforts of third parties.

The innocent and righteous suffer because of how our (Boomer) leaders maltreat us, not because God is punishing us for “the nation’s” crimes. Thus, Wally can stuff the point of his tipping up his wrinkly, diapered ass.

By the way, God debating with Abraham over Sodom’s fate? That wasn’t God sparing the wicked because they had ten hostages. That was God rubbing in how depraved San Francisco was. Sodom, I mean.

God to Abraham: “Okay, fine, if there’s just one single righteous man in the city then I’ll spare them all.”

Abraham: “Thanks, God! That’ll be enough.”

God to Lot: “Flee the city and don’t look back.”

The strategic remnant principle is found in every historic season revealed in the Bible. Noah was a remnant man in his age, one we should study intensely. In Noah’s time God stopped the frenetic dash to the tipping point through the Flood. There is a sense in which we are again under a global deluge.

Jesus said that a time would come “as it was in the days of Noah” when the people “did not understand until the flood came and took them all away…” (Matthew 24:39). We seem to be in such a moment when the flood is upon us, and suddenly has taken much away.

That was a tipping point? God regretting He ever made humanity and drowning us all like rats? Something He promised not to do a second time?

The Lord said there would be “many tribulations” mounting to a great tribulation before His return to restore the world to its original mint condition, and establish the manifest rule of His kingdom of righteousness, peace, and Spirit-given joy in the earth. (Romans 14:17)

Original mint condition? God’s depiction of His remaking the Earth was the first literary description of atom-smashing. “The elements will burn in fire.” This current reality is the diaper of our spiritual infancy. It will not be renewed because it will not be needed, and humanity’s crusty old turds like “Stairway to Heaven” will not be remembered.

We are certainly living in one of the “many tribulations” periods. Jesus also gave a vital promise to nations living in such a time. Speaking of the ultimate tribulation, the Lord says that “unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened.” (Matthew 24:22)

It doesn’t count as a “tribulation” unless you end up skipping a meal. *GunnerQ looks at groceries with their Boomers-only hours* Yeah, no. We working stiffs who lost our work in order to guarantee you an ICU bed should you get a sore throat? That’s more what a tribulation is.

Does Wally think his generation is “the elect” of the End Times? What God was saying in that verse is that absent Christ’s return, humanity will exterminate itself down to the last human being. He was not saying that there was a special group of humans deserving of His protection.

Jesus gave the “keys of the kingdom” to the church, not the White House, Whitehall, Kremlin, Beijing, or any other human institution of power. (Matthew 16:13-20)

You arrogant piece of pastor shit. Did you not notice that your wooden box is itself a human institution of power?

But what is the real church?

The frivorced husbands. The women staying loyal to their men against all whispers. The children who refuse to grow bitter and feral after the devil rips their family apart. The unwanted men keeping society running, the wives despised for being happy at home. The people who instead of demanding Sky God make their problems go away, endure unjust suffering because that’s the example Christ set.

The real Church is the people you forgot about, Pastor Wally.

The authentic church is Jesus-centered (carrying on His incarnational ministry in the world), Spirit-energized (producing the fruit of God rather than human imitations), Word-anchored (not tossed about by every “wind of doctrine”) and Kingdom-envisioning (not focused merely on its narrow interests and preferences).

Wally’s “authentic church” is a State-compliant NGO with authentic mission statements shat by authentic boards of directors. Meanwhile, real churches order women to cover their heads and obey their husbands without qualification.

Such churches are made up of remnant people. Jesus Himself, in His great prayer for His disciples in John 17, indirectly reveals their characteristics:

Jesus has manifested the name of the Father to remnant men and women so they don’t know Him merely in a generic sense, but in personal relationship

Christianity is personal only in the sense of personal salvation, which puts the lie to “sins of the nations”. We could go Charismatic at this point but instead, notice Pastor Wally isn’t Charismatic. He’s just babbling about “Real Christians” versus mere Bible-thumpers with their Bible hangups.

Not an attitude one would historically expect from a Baptist church; however, a clear distinction has grown between “do what the Bible says” Christians versus the “personal relationship” Christians.

They are people to whom He entrusts the Word that the Father entrusted to Him

Credentialed clergy.

Remnant people are hated by the world because of their identification with Christ and His message

Piece of shit Senior Associate Pastor Henley doesn’t notice how much the world DOESN’T hate him. How many campuses does Second Baptist have? Six? Heavily persecuted, they are! He’s not even banned off youTube!

Remnant individuals are not “of” this world in the sense of their identification, nor do they belong to the world system that wants their allegiance

Remember that the next time you make use of Boomer Hours at the grocery, Wally. Also, remember that donations to your church are tax-deductible.

The remnant is not taken out of the world because the world is the place for their ministry. They are, however, pulled out of the “lump” that is the world to undergo transformation so they can be put back into the world to be catalysts of Christ’s transforming work.

No. Christianity is not something Christians do to not-Christians. It’s not even something Christ does to Christians. He wants us to become a certain type of person. That’s why “Christian” means “Christ-like”. Many of us are not in any position to “redeem the lost” or make disciples of Ethiopians or whatever the dreck du jour is. What, did Christ leave us here to suffer because His plans will fail without us?

Remnant men and women are commissioned by Christ to work under His authority in making disciples, baptizing people, and teaching them everything Christ teaches them, as they are going into the world

Credentialed clergy again. Wally, how many laymen perform baptisms at your Second Best Baptist? I’ll guess zero. How many laymen are allowed to teach in your church? I’ll guess zero. And if you attended seminary yourself then stop running your mouth about making disciples.

*checks* He’s worse than a seminary student. Wally is a seminary founder per this article! “He is the founder of Belhaven University’s Master of Ministry Leadership Degree”. Memo to all prospective students, you can’t learn leadership of men from a college class any more than you can learn animal handling from National Geographic. Go manage a Burger King instead. Seriously!

Note carefully that while God created a professional clergy in the Old Testament, He did NOT in the New Testament. The example Christ set was apprenticeship, not institutionalization. Note also that the Levites were a complete failure as a loyal priesthood leading the nation to God.

Therefore, remnant people are set apart, dedicated for the continuation of the ministry of Jesus wherever they go in the world. So, as in the days of Noah there is a strategic remnant… with the authority (keys of the Kingdom) to yank us back from the edge.

Noah didn’t yank anybody back from the edge. God hated the wicked and killed them off. The Christian concept of “remnant” is simply the believers who survive the devil’s various pogroms. Often not without being badly affected by it, either. The first thing Noah did when he got off the Ark was plant a vineyard in order to get wasted drunk. Lot impregnated his daughters. And that prodigal son? The last word of that story was the patriarch reminding his loyal, eldest son that he would inherit everything… the prodigal would not.

Wally obviously flatters himself as the “strategic remnant” with this screeching about how everything is wrong with everybody else and God will protect the people exactly like him because he’s special.

God gave a reset, a system reboot, in Noah’s day. The worldwide Flood was a great instrument of redefinition. Our current global “flood” is also. God has allowed a sweeping planet-encompassing pause. The Lord of history will bring a new world, a new order out of the tohu-bohu…

Seriously, Pastor Wally? You end this article with a call for a New World Order? It is little wonder that apocalyptic “only God’s special chosen will survive unharmed” theology fascinates the insular, self-absorbed Boomers. Most of us legit Christians have enough trouble just treading water these days and not because the Boomer Remover is menacing every gas pump handle.

We have trouble because we ACTUALLY aren’t of this world. Meaning in part, that we aren’t among the fools looking up to Wally for salvation.

We have trouble because we believe good & evil exist and alter our behavior accordingly. In all of Pastor Wally’s rantings, he never brought up the concept of evil and God punishing the wicked. Just “God removing the shielding hand from the Amorites when their tipping point came”.

Those of us that God does consider special, He treats us cruelly. He send us through the Valley of Death because He believes we can make it through. He’s not here to win hearts and minds like the Bush Dynasty. God is here to see if we will still love Him when He costs us everything.

By contrast, the Amorites that Wally brought up went unpunished until the very end.

Most of all, we have trouble because the Baby Boomers hogging the reins of power don’t even think of their own descendants as human beings worthy of their concern. Will their successors be Squatemalan parasites, H1b Hindus or their own children? Meh, whichever. We’re all just the grease that keeps their stock investments up.

Screw your “strategic remnant”, Pastor Wally. Screw your “everybody jump into Noah’s Ark” delusions of escaping mortality and screw your New World Order. I would not want your escape even if the offer was real. We can take nothing from this world except our honor and our devotion; should we leave this mortal world untested?

 

While I doubt the Chinavirus will fully convince Normals of globalism’s evil, the sight of families spending time together has triggered at least one globalist pundit into honesty.

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/

By David Brooks, March 2020 issue

The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”

The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. “It was cold that day,” one says about some faraway memory. “What are you talking about? It was May, late May,” says another. The young children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece together the plotline of the generations.

After the meal, there are piles of plates in the sink, squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement. Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. The old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It’s the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.

As visions of Heaven go, that one comes closer than most.

This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore. Five brothers came to America from Eastern Europe around the time of World War I and built a wallpaper business. For a while they did everything together, like in the old country. But as the movie goes along, the extended family begins to split apart. Some members move to the suburbs for more privacy and space. One leaves for a job in a different state. The big blowup comes over something that seems trivial but isn’t: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him.

“You cut the turkey without me?” he cries. “Your own flesh and blood! … You cut the turkey?” The pace of life is speeding up. Convenience, privacy, and mobility are more important than family loyalty. “The idea that they would eat before the brother arrived was a sign of disrespect,” Levinson told me recently when I asked him about that scene. “That was the real crack in the family. When you violate the protocol, the whole family structure begins to collapse.”

What a selfish, arrogant prick, to demand that all should suffer for his whimsy…. but the author said the family did wrong? I don’t see that story’s relevance to how families break up, which today is typically variations on “wifey got bored”. Not because the eldest son wasn’t properly kowtowed to.

As the years go by in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role. By the 1960s, there’s no extended family at Thanksgiving. It’s just a young father and mother and their son and daughter, eating turkey off trays in front of the television. In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. “In the end, you spend everything you’ve ever saved, sell everything you’ve ever owned, just to exist in a place like this.”

A place like… America? If David doesn’t like living here then there are six other continents. I recommend Central Africa for its total lack of white, male Christians.

This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

By design. We all can point to the laws and NGOs whose stated purpose was making that fragmentation happen. The nuclear family did not fall; it was pushed. Betrayed.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

Yes, yes, congratulations on the success of your Long March. Problem, however: extended families are made up of nuclear families. How is it that Brooks can champion the one against the other?

This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.

Buckle up for his vision of Brave New World!

Part I: The Era of Extended Clans

Through the early parts of American history, most people lived in what, by today’s standards, were big, sprawling households. In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands. (On some southern farms, of course, enslaved African Americans were also an integral part of production and work life.)

That was a frontier situation… not something that was going to last and certainly not the One True Way to raise a family.

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, calls these “corporate families”—social units organized around a family business. According to Ruggles, in 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed, but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families.

It took a village to raise a child!

Are we talking about Baby Boomers not being cared for by their kids, David? Open THAT can of whoop-ass, I dare you.

Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

That is not true at all. Brothers are still brothers. Nephews still have uncles. If you lose one parent then you still have the other.

The second great strength of extended families is their socializing force. Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and cultural change began to threaten traditional ways of life. Many people in Britain and the United States doubled down on the extended family in order to create a moral haven in a heartless world. According to Ruggles, the prevalence of extended families living together roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900, and this way of life was more common than at any time before or since.

Bullshit. We colonial Americans/Englishmen did not look to the family for a moral haven. We looked to Christ Jesus, our Creator. Accept no substitute deity!

You want to see extended family, check out the clans of Scotland. Early America was nowhere close to that level of extended family.

During the Victorian era, the idea of “hearth and home” became a cultural ideal.

No. The nuclear family was created by God Himself, from the beginning. Genesis 2:24 “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” Grandpa is not a factor in that. The clan chief is not a factor in that. The husband symbolizes Christ and the wife symbolizes humanity.

Does Brooks reject the father’s leadership of his family as a symbol of rejecting Christ’s leadership of humanity?

The home “is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love,” the great Victorian social critic John Ruskin wrote. This shift was led by the upper-middle class, which was coming to see the family less as an economic unit and more as an emotional and moral unit, a rectory for the formation of hearts and souls.

But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life. In the Victorian era, families were patriarchal, favoring men in general and first-born sons in particular.

Victorian England did a lot of things wrong but household idols wasn’t one of them. Did Brooks really quote a social critic to describe Victorianism? *Checks* Ruskin was involved in a famous love triangle when his wife fell in love with another man and sought an annulment on grounds that Ruskin had, after years, never consummated their marriage. Ruskin even confirmed it! I would not trust his perspective on Victorian family life.

As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could. A young man on a farm might wait until 26 to get married; in the lonely city, men married at 22 or 23. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women.

That’s not family breakup. It’s simple math: if a man has many sons and divides his farmland equally between them, then in only a couple generations his descendants will own uselessly tiny acreage.

Thus, all of the farm is given to just one of the sons, typically the firstborn. The other sons either leave the farm or work for their brother.

One reason for the marriage age dropping was because young men had more money because of factory work. That’s why they went to the city in the first place, for well-paying jobs. Henry Ford didn’t send press gangs into the countryside.

The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles—they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy.

This is a recurring point that Brooks makes. He doesn’t like men having independence.

By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.

The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family

For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family—what McCall’s, the leading women’s magazine of the day, called “togetherness.” Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey, more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic.”

Because sex. We were a Christian nation and God says no sex except in marriage. Marital status was thus a proxy for sexuality. They took it too far, of course, and hated bachelors as well as homosexuals.

During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids.

A stereotype, not an ideal. Planned Parenthood wasn’t yet around to provide that half of a kid.

When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

Unlike today when all of society conspires, wittingly and not, to sabotage the nuclear family? Since 1965, coincidentally? How can Brooks claim the nuclear family was essentially fragile when the government had to make hideously expensive efforts (read: the welfare system) to replace it?

Here’s a Ward Cleaver family ideal that Brooks didn’t bring up: a man’s home is his castle. That concept isn’t just gone, it was criminalized.

How like a Socialist to create the very problems he then uses to justify Socialism! First, scum like Brooks outlawed fatherhood, now he says fatherhood doesn’t work because there aren’t any fathers left. What we need is more government in the families! It takes a village to raise a child! We can’t trust a father to stick around for his kids, not when we destroy every one we find!

For one thing, most women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.

For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “modified extended family,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, “a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.” Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.

No. Men disciplined their own children and unless you were exceptionally tight with him, taking that duty upon yourself was a gross violation of… paternal rights.

Yeah, I’m picking up LOTS of hostility for the concept of a man raising his own children as he sees fit.

In short, the period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families—so long as women are relegated to the household…

Agreed.

…nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name…

That’s oxymoronic. “Nuclear families can work when they’re basically extended families.” And again, extended families are made up of nuclear families. This is like arguing that steel is good because it doesn’t contain iron.

and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

Fuck your whore-mother, David, and fuck your “every economic and sociological condition in society” Convergence. That’s what YOU do, not US.

Brooks, you aren’t even talking about extended families, are you? You’re talking about government services that replace the father’s position in a nuclear family, that’s what your “extended family” is all about.

Disintegration

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-’70s, young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented.

If being individualistic and self-oriented a bad thing then get back in the kitchen, Barbie, and prepare for Nookie Night!

Ohh, I see. “Society” only means men. Women didn’t abandon their families for the Eat, Pray, Love life in the Seventies, they were… liberated, or something.

People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.

QED! “Society became self-oriented” but “women were endowed with greater freedom”.

A study of women’s magazines by the sociologists Francesca Cancian and Steven L. Gordon found that…

Skip. A study of womens’ magazines informed Brooks’ beliefs that fatherhood is bad? I know he’s a pathological liar for the New York Slimes but that’s just sad.

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written, “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”

David Brooks, can you PLEASE cite a non-Jew? Besides a Victorian freak and Cosmo magazine? I’ve been biting my tongue at how you approach American family life from, apparently, the inside of a kibbutz. You even started this article with a depiction of Russian Jewish family life made by a Jewish film director about how terrible life among the Gentiles is. It’s so horrible that you keep staying here! You care nothing about the Christians whose nation you live in, whose nation your people have repaid evil for good, whose beliefs you killed and now fault for being killable.

Go home, you xenophobic Christ-killer. Go home to HELL and take your feminists with you!

This cultural shift was very good for some adults, but it was not so good for families generally.

It was good for nobody, not even the feminists who dare not admit they were wrong.

Over the past 50 years, federal and state governments have tried to mitigate the deleterious effects of these trends. They’ve tried to increase marriage rates, push down divorce rates, boost fertility, and all the rest. The focus has always been on strengthening the nuclear family, not the extended family. Occasionally, a discrete program will yield some positive results, but the widening of family inequality continues unabated.

Over the past 50 years, the problem got worse while the government ‘tried to help’. Hmm.

Skipping ahead to what Brooks proposes by way of solution,

The most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode, single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common, a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way. Common also recently teamed up with another developer, Tishman Speyer, to launch Kin, a co-housing community for young parents. Each young family has its own living quarters, but the facilities also have shared play spaces, child-care services, and family-oriented events and outings.

The kibbutz. Holy sheet, he wants to re-model American family life into the freaking kibbutz. I didn’t know how right I was when I made that slur.

Courtney E. Martin, a writer who focuses on how people are redefining the American dream, is a Temescal Commons resident. “I really love that our kids grow up with different versions of adulthood all around, especially different versions of masculinity,” she told me. “We consider all of our kids all of our kids.” Martin has a 3-year-old daughter, Stella, who has a special bond with a young man in his 20s that never would have taken root outside this extended-family structure. “Stella makes him laugh, and David feels awesome that this 3-year-old adores him,” Martin said. This is the kind of magic, she concluded, that wealth can’t buy. You can only have it through time and commitment, by joining an extended family. This kind of community would fall apart if residents moved in and out. But at least in this case, they don’t.

Pedophile Central!

As Martin was talking, I was struck by one crucial difference between the old extended families like those in Avalon and the new ones of today: the role of women. The extended family in Avalon thrived because all the women in the family were locked in the kitchen, feeding 25 people at a time. In 2008, a team of American and Japanese researchers found that women in multigenerational households in Japan were at greater risk of heart disease than women living with spouses only, likely because of stress. But today’s extended-family living arrangements have much more diverse gender roles.

THAT *IS* THE STRESS!!!! “Women who live our Brave New lifestyles die younger of heart attacks, true, but the living arrangements have much more diverse gender roles!”

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, “The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class.”

Disgusting, loathsome mockeries of God’s work! This is wrong, evil, pure evil. Sodomy has never defined a relationship. It’s an abomination specifically because it’s a perversion of the natural order.

And QED again, Brooks’ “new families” will be Pedophile Central.

Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma—millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: “Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile & who love you no matter what.”

Behold Satan’s endgame for us.

Brooks believes that nuclear families are bad because the father leads them. Extended families, and forged/chosen/homopedosexual families, are ‘good’ because fathers are either controlled by third parties or nonexistent. Typical for both a Socialist and an atheist Jew, David Brooks’ fundamental problem with family life is God the FATHER.

 

Forcing medical personnel to go without safety masks during a national crisis is a non-violent crime!

Meet Vladislav Drozdek. That’s not frizzy hair, that’s untrimmed hair. He lacks social skills & awareness. He’s not antisocial nor a loner, necessarily, but a guy who simply doesn’t care about others’ perception of him. That’s commonly associated with high intelligence but his eyebrows are either rounded for social or angled for conflict. Eyes aren’t hooded, either.

Vladislav Drozdek: Oregon Man Stole Thousands of N95 Masks, Cops Say

On March 6, 2020, workers at The Rebuilding Center at 3625 North Mississippi Avenue noticed that about 25 cases of N95 respirator masks were missing and called the police. The Rebuilding Center is a non-profit organization that salvages reusable building materials for sale at massive discounts and teaches classes on carpentry, plumbing and electrical.

Each case contained about 400 N95 masks. The 25 cases were valued at about $2,500, the Portland Police Bureau explained in a news release. The day after reporting the theft to police, a worker at The Rebuilding Center spotted the stolen masks for sale on Craigslist. She arranged a meet-up with the seller in Beaverton, Oregon, and alerted the police. Officers with the Beaverton Police Department were the ones who arrived at the meet-up and arrested Vladislav V. Drozdek on March 7 without incident.

His victims found him in the first place they looked. Not smart is confirmed.

Drozek has been charged with one felony count of “Theft in the First Degree by receiving.” He was booked into the Washington County Jail, but released two days later on his own recognizance. Public records with the Oregon Judicial Department do not list an attorney for Drozdek.

He walked free after being charged with grand theft? Of medical supplies during a medical quarantine? At this rate, when the Left Coast goes full Venezuela the black market won’t even be a criminal operation.

I feel vaguely cheated, somehow.

Vladislav Drozdek has been accused of stealing medical supplies that were not meant for public use. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, surgical N95 respirators are meant for medical professionals in order to protect them from “high velocity splashes, sprays, or splatters of blood or body fluids.”

The N95 respirators have a much tighter fit than regular face masks and filter out at least 95 percent of particles in the air. By comparison, a face mask guards the wearer against “large droplets.” If the person wearing the face mask is sick, the mask protects others from the wearer’s “respiratory emissions.”

Huh, so that’s what the jargon means. One would think more journalists would care to explain the occasional buzzword. Nah, that would involve asking questions… and we all know what happens to Party Members who ask questions.

Vladislav Drozdek has been charged multiple times in Washington County for traffic violations dating back to 1996, according to the Oregon Judicial Department. His citations include instances of failing to wear a seat belt, failing to obey a traffic control device, and speeding. In a 1998 case, court records show Drozdek did not show up to a scheduled court hearing but ultimately paid a fine of just $150.

In 2007, Drozdek pleaded “not guilty” to charges of reckless driving and recklessly endangering another person. He was convicted and ordered to complete 40 hours of community service. He was also placed on probation for 18 months and his driver’s license was suspended.

Based on a search of online records, it is unclear whether Drozdek may have had a financial motive for selling the N95 respirator masks. There are no bankruptcy cases, evictions or liens against any properties he may own. Heavy has requested a copy of the arrest report, which may indicate whether Drozek is employed.

“He just doesn’t care about society” is confirmed.

Highway patrol: “Are those $70k in medical supplies in your backseat?”

Drozdek: “I got lucky at Costco. No receipt, sorry.”

Patrol: “Wow. Anyway, the reason I pulled you over is because your registration is expired, your license is suspended and you have multiple outstanding warrants for traffic offenses.”

Drozdek: “Yep. I’m guilty as sin. So, what’s my bail going to be set at?”

Patrol: “… … …Please slow down. Your driving is reckless.”

 

Clergy have a real hard time being loyal to Truth over Lies. Sometimes, that’s important. And sometimes, that’s VERY important.

This story begins very man-bites-dog.

RIP Darius Tarver: Bodycam Of Police Shooting ‘Sharply Contradicts’ Cops’ Account

htt ps://newsone.com/3902161/darius-tarver-police-shooting-bodycam-questions/

By Adrian Moore, 11 February 2020

According to CBSDFW.COM, Tarver was shot and killed by Denton, Texas, police during an early morning confrontation at an apartment complex back on Jan. 21. Tarver was a University of North Texas student and according to the cops, he was approached by responding officers around 3 a.m. at The Forum at Denton Station apartments after residents called 911 about a guy who was banging on doors and yelling for someone to let him in. Occupants also said the man was breaking light fixtures with a frying pan in the breezeway.

He wuz goot boy, gwan to college. Sounds more like a tweaker on a bender.

Police say Tarver was holding a cleaver and frying pan once they arrived and they claim he ignored commands to drop the items and instead started advancing towards the cops. Police said they tasered Tarver but he was able to rise back up. “Then he charged full-on, at some point stabbing an officer in the shoulder,” Denton Police Chief Frank Dixon said.

A cop then fired his gun multiple times, hitting Tarver at least once. Tarver was taken to the hospital where he passed away. Meanwhile, the officer who was reportedly stabbed was taken to the hospital and treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

Cause of death, failure to comply, sentence enhancements for holding a weapon and the taser not working.

Despite the police report, Tarver’s father isn’t buying the officers’ full stories, according to lawyer S. Lee Merritt. “Tarver’s father, a McKinney Police Department chaplain was allowed to see the bodycam from the shooting and believes it sharply contradicts official narratives,” explained Merritt in a tweet.

Da cops shot him cuz he was frying bacon while black!

Wait, Tarver had a father in his life?

And Daddy was a police chaplain who said the cops lied?

Hmm.

According to WFAA, Tarver survived a terrible car accident just a week earlier when the roads were icy that day, according to family. The accident put him in the ICU and he was released from the hospital the following day. His family shared concerns that Darius might’ve been released too early and the accident might’ve changed him.

The car was totaled and Darius took a selfie of himself in the ICU.

An overnight stay in the hospital is common practice for head injuries, to make sure there’s no sudden personality changes or internal bleeding. So yes, this attorney’s story might well be true.

The story of him being honestly brain-damaged, mind you, not the story of police murdering him in cold blood. Get your stories straight, peeps. Was he shot because he acted crazy or because the cops were trigger-happy?

“Police were called when Tarver was observed breaking overhead lightbulbs with a skillet,” Merritt continued in his tweet.

One emergency call was from Daruis’ roommate, complaining that Darius had barricaded him inside his bedroom while babbling Christian gibberish.

“This behavior was consistent with the extreme sensitivity to light and difficulty with impulse control resulting from a severe impact to the brain. Police encountered Tarver muttering to himself while carrying a frying pan. Tarver did not immediately comply to commands to drop the pan. Denton PD officers responded by firing a taser that caused Tarver to writhe in pain. When the taser failed to take Tarver to the ground he was instead shot several times by a responding officer.”

Writhing in pain is when the taser works… not the situation here. He left out “Darius charged the cops” between the taser deployment and the gun deployment.

Tarver family is set to hold a press conference on Tuesday where Tarver’s father will “describe the body cam and outline false statements given by police in the official narrative,” according to Merritt. Other members of law enforcement, local government, clergy and the UNT student body is also set to speak and condemn the shooting.

Darius was a tragedy but his priest-father committed blasphemy when he made a false accusation against the group he shepherded, after watching the bodycam that proved his words would be lies. “My race right or wrong” strikes again.

The tilt of his eyelids makes me a little suspicious but their heaviness is typical for blacks. He is definitely his son’s father, however, which is a refreshing novelty.

Daddy citing bodycam footage motivated the police chief (also black) to call his lie out.

Climax begins at the five-minute mark. The play-by-play:

Darius comes down the stairs holding frying pan but not the reported meat cleaver. Acts odd but nonviolent. Refuses to drop the frying pan.

*Taser doesn’t work*

Enraged, Darius draws the cleaver and charges at cops. One shot puts him down screaming. Butcher knife falls to the side, easily visible.

Police stop shooting and begin securing the scene.

Darius gets up, charges cops again.

More shots. KIA.

There’s nothing different the police could have done within the constraints of standard procedures.

htt ps://dentonrc.com/news/chief-dixon-releases-bodycam-video-defends-officers-in-darius-tarver/article_77ea4c90-2ae7-5bd1-ad3b-a7cbca2f1033.html

Denton Police Chief Frank Dixon said Thursday at a news conference that after listening to residents call the officers involved in a Jan. 21 shooting death “murderers” and “suspects” at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, he felt it was time to provide the facts to prevent further civil unrest or violence.

Dixon showed body camera footage during the news conference Thursday at the Denton Public Safety Training Center. The chief said he wanted to present the facts to the public because he couldn’t let false and inaccurate information continue to spread, of which he said citizen commentary at Tuesday’s City Council meeting was the tipping point.

“This is simply the right thing to do at the right time,” Dixon said, adding that police aren’t releasing the video to cater to anyone. “But it’s been suggested that we’ve been delaying the release of this video because we have something to hide. That’s absolutely not the case.”

Although the police would prefer to not release the video yet to avoid disrupting their process — where a Denton County grand jury would hear the Texas Rangers’ investigation before the video was released to the public — Dixon said he can no longer stand by and allow inaccurate information to spread.

“We’re not going to allow people, no matter if it’s for your personal agenda or your political aspirations and agenda, or even if you’re grieving, to say hateful things about our cops,” Dixon said. “It’s time for people to stop with the rhetoric, look at what happened and come together and make us a better community for it.”

A thumbs-up to Chief Dixon, who made the correct decision to break standard procedures in order to protect his men from false accusations… from a police chaplain!

Chaplain Kevin Tarver blasphemed against God. Hypocrites like him are why non-believers think Christ is a meaningless joke.

 

I’ve sneaked back online for at least one posting. Permissions have been modified so people who have posted before can skip moderation.

It’s always fun, watching SJWs react to being held to their own standards after the utility to the Narrative has ended. They truly believe that rules don’t apply to them; reason #1 that I hope God serves popcorn on Judgment Day. Yesterday, they believed that exposing Badthink People with their Badthink beliefs was righteous. Today, they fear that quarantine-imposed distance education will force them to speak on the record about what they preach.

Professors worried students will share lectures with ‘right wing sites’

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14563

By Jon Street, 19 March 2019

Heheh. Luke 4:21 “And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.””

Professors across the country are taking to social media to express their concern over being forced to deliver their course lectures online amid the coronavirus outbreak, sharing with each other tips on how to limit the number of people who are able to see what they’re teaching students, and criticizing “right wing sites” and even Campus Reform, specifically.

Texas Christian University Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Farris tweeted Thursday, “if you are recording a lecture on anything controversial, be prepared for right wing sites to ask students to share it.” Campus Reform reached out to Farris via Twitter Direct Messaging to allow her the opportunity to further explain her comments or to clarify. She later blocked the author of this article on Twitter.

What was not a controversial belief, from Emily Farris’ perspective, was her latest suicide attempt.

Segue

I’m not ‘mentally ill.’ I’m a student with depression.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/i-m-not-mentally-ill-i-m-a-student-with/article_b81b1f28-0f31-57f7-b870-b1b97a833105.html

By Emily Farris May 30, 2016

My best friend saved my life.

He didn’t push me out of the way of a car or jump in front of a bullet. It was much simpler than that. He saved me with his words.

“Wow … just wow,” with a photo from the front page of a newspaper. He was making fun of a hideous newspaper cover. I was a newspaper designer. We shared photos of pages all the time.

Five hundred previous generations of men: “I love you.”

Millennial: “Wow… just wow.”

The words weren’t profound or groundbreaking, but I’ll never forget them. What they were was a reminder. Most importantly, they were an interruption.

I had the stash of pills. I had been storing them for awhile, but March 11 was the first time I had seriously thought about taking them. The round, white pills felt small in my hand, but I knew the damage they could do. I felt alone and dark, and in that moment, nothing could have been worse than the sharp edge of that pain.

But that message, three words that would seem insignificant to anyone else, including him, made me think twice. It reminded me of just how much I’d be leaving behind.

I threw the pills away. I didn’t want to be tempted to use them again.

When men commit suicide, they eat a gun. When women commit suicide, they eat half a bottle of aspirin and alert the media.

End segue

LaSalle University Assistant Professor of Public Health Christen Rexing replied to Farris’ tweet, asking why others could find topics such as “gun safety, women’s health, elections, etc.” to be “controversial, as they are “evidence-based.”

Reading the actual twit… tweet?… it’s what the right-wingers might find controversial that she’s worried about. And yes, there will be “controversy” and “discussion” about their disarming us and murdering babies. Possibly about witch-burnings, too.

“Seems like the flood gates could open,” Rexing commented in response to courses moving online.

Columbia University political science professor Jeffrey Lax said he has been “thinking about” how students would be able to record classes.

Actually, he pointed out that students can record their profs regardless. I’m not impressed with this author’s paraphrasing.

One would think Lax was a fan of recording what people say:

Segue

University administrator recorded saying there were ‘too many Jews’ on his staff – even though he himself is Jewish

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4264232/Administrator-heard-saying-Jews-staff.html

By Ariel Zilber, 27 February 2017

A senior administrator at New York City’s public university system allegedly complained about ‘too many Jews’ on the faculty of one of the schools – even though he himself is Jewish.

Stuart Suss, a former interim president at Brooklyn’s Kingsborough Community College, was said to have made the remark to one of his professors, who then told a colleague while secretly recording the conversation, according to the New York Post.

On April 4, Jeffrey Lax, the chairman of Kingsborough’s Business Department, had a conversation with math professor Ronald Forman.

‘What did you hear him say?’ Lax asked Forman.

‘Oh, that there are too many Jews,’ Forman is said to have replied.

The revelations surfaced during litigation of a civil suit filed by Lax against Suss in Brooklyn federal court.

Suss serves as the vice president of academic affairs at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Guttman Community College.

Lax is suing because he alleges that Suss made anti-Semitic remarks and cut down the number of Jews on the Kingsborough faculty.

Recap: Lax was the one making the secret recording when he asked Forman what the third party, Suss, had said in a different conversation… and then entered that secret recording as evidence against Suss in a civil rights lawsuit.

Now, Lax doesn’t want his statements to be recorded because third-party right wingers might get their hands on it. That is some very Lax projection.

End segue

Trinity College Associate Professor of Political Science Isaac Kamola who, as Campus Reform previously reported sought to hire a “Campus Reform Early Responder,” specifically mentioned Campus Reform in his reply to Farris.

“If Campus Reform harasses you or someone you know, the best response is to ‘follow the money.’ Campus Reform receives $1.4 million from the Leadership Institute, a Koch-funded organization designed to delegitimize academics they consider too left. They are not a new [sic] source,” Kamola tweeted.

You haven’t truly arrived as an agent of Good until Evil has called you out specifically. The Kochs haven’t pinged my radar yet because they’re simply that unimportant to the Manosphere. Methinks the Lefties need to believe that we’re a pack of weak men ruled by uncaring overlords just like them.

Their comical desperation to identify the Leader Of Gamergate lends credence, as did the efforts of France’s Macron to create tame “leaders” of the Yellow Vests.

[Rachel Michelle Gunter] whose website says they are a history professor at a “community college in North Texas” wrote, “I’m taking steps to limit this but nothing is foolproof.”

Professor Trannie preaches, er, teaches voting advocacy for not-White Men.

Farris asked how Gunter was working to ensure her lectures are not made public, to which Gunter responded with one tip for her colleague.

“Instead of posting videos direct to LMS (which would then own them) I’m posting links to the videos on youtube. The videos themselves are ‘unlisted’ meaning you can’t find them in a search or if you go to my page-only if you have the direct link. Doesn’t stop link sharing though,” Gunter said.

I use the 4K Video Downloader program. Works great on youTube but not always with other sources such as Big Three network media.

Bonus tweet!

Someone mentioned here on Twitter having Disney soundtrack on their videos because then Disney would end up taking them down for copyright infringement.

-Leila Vieiera (couldn’t source her employment)

She must have been joking. Pirating Disneycorp IP in hopes that Disneycorp will take down us right-wingers for pirating their IP is so stupi*hic* We’re in trouble, guys. This devilishly simple plan will hurt us so much that God-Emperor Trump Himself might lose the November election! This will break the Internet!

[Shh, let’s see if they fall for it.]

 

California governments are locking down We the People Neither Chinese Nor Boomer and I don’t have Internet at home, so there’s a chance my blog will go dark for a couple weeks at no notice. Nothing to worry about; I went to the grocery yesterday hoping to watch a couple fights and they didn’t even have lines at checkout; but FYI.

Not looking forward to a month locked in my room. At least my wargame miniatures will get painted. Might have to break technically-not-a-quarantine a few times just to show how little I care about the governments that never cared about me. But sanity still might prevail.

 

The Upper Class wants expensive land and cheap labor. The Middle Class wants expensive labor and cheap land. Nobody cares what the Lower Class wants.

Reason Magazine reports on an effort by California’s most hardline atheists to transform churches into low-income housing. That’s probably how the organized Church in California is going to end… toxic leadership hollows out the church until the leadership formally turns their property over to the hordes of migrants trespassing into America… leaving un-helped, as they do now, the responsible adults most in need of advocacy.

California Wants To Carve Out Religious Exemptions to Its Insane Housing Laws

California Wants To Carve Out Religious Exemptions to Its Insane Housing Laws

By Christian Britschgi, 9 March 2020

That would be good news if true. It isn’t.

California’s housing crisis has gotten so bad that state lawmakers are considering a little divine preemption.

Translation, the sexually deranged tyrants who created the housing crisis are now proposing a solution that takes land away from churches. How consistent.

Last Friday, state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) introduced Senate Bill (S.B.) 899, which would allow religious institutions—as well as nonprofit hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes—to build affordable housing “by right” on land they own.

The aptly named Wiener is the sort of person that the Center for Disease Control should keep a deathwatch on, because homosexuals as active as him will be where the next GRIDS turns up.

That means that local planners wouldn’t have the discretion to deny these housing projects, and third parties would lose the ability to hold them up with interminable environmental appeals and lawsuits.

That is insanely criminal in the context of city planning. No matter how low the water supply is, no matter how bad traffic is, no matter the current capacity of the sewage plant and electrical grid, no matter how burdened police and fire are, local governments would be coerced by the state government into allowing swaths of high-density housing reserved for the zero-tax-paying demographic.

Look at how Sacramento simply waves away its eco-Nazi dogs when doing so suits their purposes! Pure anarcho-tyranny.

The poor of California do not need housing. The middle class of California need housing. What is happening here is that California’s Elites, deranged and proud as the devil himself, are building labor camps for the poor at middle-class (read: taxpayer) expense. When the middle class is finally gone, the Elites will start paying for their plantations themselves, but until then why not bankrupt their enemies?

The poor of California need either 1. to go back home to Squatemala or 2. be given the chance to join the middle class. But the latter requires the existence of accessible, well-paid jobs. Far be it for the Church to help a man make a buck! He might feed himself!

“Churches and other religious and charitable institutions often have land to spare, and they should be able to use that land to build affordable housing and thus further their mission,” said Wiener in a press release. “SB 899 ensures that affordable housing can be built and removes local zoning and approval obstacles in order to do so.”

Wiener’s bill would let qualifying nonprofit institutions build housing projects containing at least 40 units on their own land. If that land is located in an area already zoned for commercial or residential use, these nonprofits could build up to 150 units.

If you figure 15 units per floor, which would be a large apartment building, that’s a ten floor facility that could be built with near-total exemption from local control. The minimum would be a three floor facility. Zoning codes can be abused but trust me, they’re the difference between a city and a slum.

If Sacramento truly wanted to help then they could 1. get rid of environmentalist barriers universally, 2. develop more infrastructure and 3. stop demanding bribes. Looking at YOU, school districts!

Any organizations that take advantage of SB 899 would have to guarantee that the new housing they produce is 100 percent affordable (meaning it’s offered at below-market rates to low-income people). That affordability requirement would expire after 45 years for for-sale housing, and after 55 years for rental housing.

No housing for the middle class allowed. Tell me that’s not class warfare, and not a three-way class war either. It’s the nobles versus the merchants.

On the bright side, it won’t pass (or *sigh* be enforced) because every local government that values its continued existence will fight this law to death. They’re corrupt but not actively self-destructive.

Because, apparently, they aren’t clergy.

S.B. 899 comes on the heels of another piece of legislation—Assembly Bill (A.B.) 1851, sponsored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D–Oakland)—which would eliminate parking requirements for housing projects being built on church land.

As Wiener notes, churches often have spare land in prime locations that would make excellent sites for new housing. Many are also already involved in providing temporary shelter to the homeless. But thanks to zoning restrictions, parking requirements, and lengthy approval processes, many religious institutions are kept out of the housing development business.

One prominent example is the Clairemont Lutheran Church in San Diego, which has been trying to include an affordable housing component to the redevelopment of a dilapidated fellowship hall on its property since 2015. Their plans required building over existing spaces in the church’s underutilized parking lot, and that ran afoul of a city code that ties parking requirements for churches to the square inches of pew space that they have.

I looked them up and they’re an unremarkable church. No female/vibrant pastor. No LGBT flag draped over the Cross. Most of the officers are female and child care is all the church does besides the weekly sermon. Seems every church is like that.

“Two weeks of the year that parking lot is utilized to the full extent. 50 weeks of the year it’s not,” says Eddie McCoven, a spokesperson for the Clairemont Lutheran Church.

“We drove all the men away and now can’t afford to stay open. We could repent of female empowerment but instead, we’ll let militant atheists house illegal immigrants on our land. Section 8 housing forced upon our neighbors is how God loves humanity!”

Eddie McCoven. Half-problem glasses, neckbeard and a career journalist. The physiognomy interpretation of neckbeards is that they outline the jaw & chin. Occam’s razor: neckbeards don’t want to look like the chinless fat kid that they probably are. But it might also be cultural. Facial hair goes in and out of style. Eddie doesn’t look like a lumbersexual, however.

Thanks to lobbying by Clairemont and other faith-based nonprofits, the San Diego City Council voted in December 2019 to scrap the pew-space-to-parking-space formula and reduce church parking minimums overall.

The Church died and was reanimated as a faith-based nonprofit corpse.

These local efforts are now being mirrored at the state level with the legislation being introduced by Wiener and Wicks.

I must… resist… naughty puns…

McCoven says his church is still in the development process, and he predicts that breaking ground for the housing component of their project is still a couple of years away. The plan, he says, is eventually to build somewhere between a dozen and 20 new affordable units.

Better make it 40 new units. The devil wants his due.

McCoven says bills such as S.B. 899 and A.B. 1851 will help other congregations interested in developing affordable housing to spend less time and money on the planning process, and more on actually building homes.

“If this type of legislation was already in place when we were starting this project, we would be a lot further along than we are,” he tells Reason. “Any congregation that decides this is something they want to pursue, would probably make it a whole lot easier and a much more streamlined.”

Any congregation that partners with the homophilic tyrants of the California government is dead to Christ. Christianity was never meant to be politically neutral any more than the Church was meant to be a faith-based nonprofit corporation. As you believe, so you will behave.

 

The Left can’t meme and I missed it when they also tried to game. Turns out, the Pozzed journalist that lit off GamerGate, Leigh Alexander, consulted on a no-gamer game called Sunset (2015). The result was… well, you probably never heard of it, either.

Gaming without Gamers Doesn’t Work

Gaming without Gamers Doesn’t Work.

By Ian Miles Cheong, 10 March 2020

No one understands video games more than gamers. When a gamer picks up a game, he immediately knows how to play it—it’s what sets him apart from the social justice activist who sees the medium as a means to propagate an ideology.

Gamers just wanna have fun. SJWs just wanna share their misery.

Essentially, gameplay is an abstraction made up of loops and repetitions, delivered through the mechanics of a game (like shooting enemies or solving puzzles). In its most simple form, a video game can distribute gameplay in the form of a general loop: gameplay > cutscene > gameplay > cutscene.

On some level, the cutscenes are intended to serve as a reward mechanism, signaling to the player that they have achieved a desired outcome. More advanced games attempt to close the gap and minimize what game designer Clint Hocking calls “ludonarrative dissonance,” or the separation of gameplay from story. Criticizing the game Bioshock, Hocking writes that, “Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all.”

Generally speaking, however, gamers take very little issue with this dissonance because as a reward mechanism, cutscenes only matter in single-player campaigns. It’s like watching most movies—you’ll only really want to see it once. Gamers can spend thousands of hours in Call of Duty, without once giving a single thought as to whether the repeated rounds of battle on the same map is contextualized through a story.

No need for the fancy terms. There are two kinds of games: the kind you play with friends like Call of Duty, which have no storytelling need at all, and the kind that tell a story that you can be a participant in. Not necessarily one that you can affect the outcome of so long as the story is one you find interesting.

In her seminal piece—the one that launched GamerGate—journalist Leigh Alexander wrote: “‘Gamers’ are over, ‘gamers’ don’t have to be your audience.” Alexander’s treatise argued that it was high time game developers stopped catering to their traditional demographic, and instead, should shift their focus to the larger, non-gaming audience. “These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers—they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had,” Alexander wrote.

She cried havoc and we let slip the Nerds of Hell!

But this isn’t a recap of history.

Alexander would later take this philosophy on the road to consult on a game called Sunset (2015), in which players take on the position of an African-American housekeeper named Angela, who works in a fictional South American country during a socialist revolution. In Sunset, players read books, push buttons, and interact with items within the confines of an apartment to learn about the civil war against the capitalist dictator who runs the [fictitious] country.

That sounds horrible. Worse than horrible. It sounds like something an SJW would force himself to do as penance for wanting to have fun. Any gamer would try to jump out the window, swan dive into a BASE jump and hope that impresses El Presidente enough to offer a mercenary contract.

Of course, it failed as a game. One, it’s not a game you can play with friends. Two, it’s not a story you can participate in. Sit inside an apartment doing menial labor while the cool NPCs fight a war without you? Talk about missing the Call of Duty.

Three, it’s not even edutainment. You roleplay a Marxist fantasizing about how a proletariat uprising SHOULD work because every real-life uprising ended with the capitalist winning. Hello, black market!

Even Commies can be fun to play… I enjoyed Red Faction, a fictitious proletariat uprising on Mars… if you include enough railguns and ICBMs instead of making the protagonist a vibrant janitor dusting the fricking bookshelves.

Which is reason #4 that the game failed: no conflict. I can only suppose that a Man vs Man narrative would have been as triggering as if Aunt Jemimah had come across an AK-74 behind the bookshelf.

Segue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_(video_game)

Sunset is played from a first person perspective. Angela Burnes, an American citizen who is visiting the fictional country of Anchuria, has to perform numerous housekeeping tasks an hour before sunset. As she performs her tasks, the player finds out more about the Civil War and the dictator that currently leads Anchuria. As time goes by, changes occur both within the house and in the city which Angela can see through the windows.

Reason #5: When you do first-person perspective, the character should be either a blank slate (ex. System Shock) or somebody the player is likely to identify well with. A black woman on an American visa to a brown country being exploited for cheap labor is too overdeveloped in ways the game-buying demographic is not going to relate to.

Also, Reason #6… BORING.

Burnes was inspired by Angela Davis,

Pam Grier,

and Nina Simone.

Unite to form..!

[Developer] Tale of Tale’s Aureia Harvey’s experience as an American expatriate informed Burnes’ character. The choice of the 1970s setting drew from Tale of Tales’ belief that the period represented a shift, a time worth exploring when “Western culture morphed from an authoritarian civilization based on rules of decency and formal traditions to an egalitarian society that celebrates individual freedom above all“.

Translation, the Sexual Revolution.

Tale of Tales spoke of recapturing a spirit of innocence, where belief in social change through popular revolution was still alive.

Get real, Barbie. Convincing your father than a week in Dubai is missionary work for Jesus is no revolution. Missionary position, more like!

The game was part funded by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund, and further funding came from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign which began in June 2014, it achieved its $25,000 goal and raised $67,636 in July 2014.

One thing about SJWs: they can find funding for ANYTHING.

The game received a score of 65/100 on reviews aggregation website Metacritic based on 33 reviews, indicating a mixed response. Michael Thomsen of The Washington Post wrote, “Sunset creates a beautiful and sometimes-unnervingly artificial platform for the alienating role-play bound up in employer-employee relationships, staged against a backdrop of historical revolution that threatens to spoil it.”

Edge awarded the game a score of 9/10, describing it as “an enormously affecting examination of the impact of war. Not on soldiers or politicians, but on everyone else – those who can only watch from the sidelines.”

…Like funding for positive reviews of shit games.

Taylor Wilde of PC Gamer rated it 68/100 and wrote, “Sunset’s themes, setting, and plot are plenty interesting, but the player’s interaction with them feels incongruous.” Writing for Game Informer, Kimberley Wallace rated it 5.75/10 and said, “The story is fascinating, but the gameplay quickly becomes humdrum and the technical problems are extremely frustrating”.

When even your cheerleaders say it’s kind of meh…

Tale of Tales characterized Sunset as a commercial failure, as it sold 4,000 copies in its first month of release, half of which were reserved for Kickstarter backers. Following this failure, Tale of Tales announced that they would no longer pursue commercial video game projects.

…that’s why. “Commercial failure” means they spent more making the game than selling it, which at the budgeted cost of $25k is pathetic. The SJWs didn’t want to purchase their own Narrative.

End segue.

I played it, and it was abysmal. Its best feature is that you can get a refund for it on Steam if you manage to beat it in under two hours.

Burn!

To be fair, their goal was never to make money; it was to promote social justice. “Our desire to reach a wider audience was not motivated by a need for money but by a feeling of moral obligation. We felt we had to at least try to reach as many people as possible. To make the world a better place through the sharing of art as videogames, you know,” they wrote.

It wasn’t art, it wasn’t a videogame, and the developer didn’t have enough moral obligation to try a second time.

They wanted to make a game, they explained, that didn’t follow video game conventions—but still wanted it to be a “game for gamers.”

“[E]ven within Sunset’s carefully constructed context of conventional controls, three-act story and well defined activities, we deeply enjoyed the exploration of themes, the creation of atmosphere, the development of characters, and so on. Abandoning some of our more extreme artistic ambitions…

Per the wikipedia article, “The apartment in which the game is set is based upon a design for the “ideal bachelor pad” from a 1970 issue of Playboy”.

…actually made work easier and more enjoyable. And that’s when we should have realized that we were on the wrong path. Because whatever we enjoy is never, ever, what the gaming masses enjoy.”

Come on, SJWs. Even you don’t enjoy what you say you enjoy. Like vampires, you are creatures of darkness yet need a torch to not fall down your own stairs. Also, you suck.

 

As if my last post on the topic wasn’t damning enough!

5 members of Chilean theft crew charged in North Shore burglaries, DA says

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/crime/chilean-burglary-ring-gold-coast-1.42545429

By Robert Brodsky, 6 March 2020

Five members of a Chilean theft crew, sent to Long Island by an organized crime syndicate, have been charged with burglarizing four homes on Nassau’s affluent North Shore — the third such crew busted since December, prosecutors said Friday.

The five men, who were arrested Thursday, targeted high-end homes in Glen Cove, Sands Point, Locust Valley and Great Neck Estates, stealing cash, watches and a safe, records show.

The suspects, who were arraigned in District Court in Hempstead, were in possession of fake Argentine visas at the time of their arrests, said Anne Donnelly, deputy bureau chief of the Nassau District Attorney’s Rackets Bureau.

The men, Donnelly said, brazenly told arresting officers that their handler recruited them to burglarize New York homes and that the risk of jail was low because of the state’s new bail reform laws, which requires no bail for misdemeanors and many nonviolent crimes.

Whoa! New York’s no-bail laws are attracting criminals from different continents!

“All of the defendants pose an especially strong risk of flight,” Donnelly said.

James Clark, the defendant’s court-appointed defense attorney, asked for the men to be released on their own recognizance. But District Court Judge Martin Massell ordered all five held without bail, even though only two were charged with bail-qualifying offenses.

That’s a second judge to openly defy the no-bail law! Well done, Judge Massell!

Juan Antonio Hernandez Rosas, 25; Bayron Felipe Cruz Palta, 26; Fabian Lopez Catalan, 20; William Jesus Mendel-Perez, 23; and Amaro Valentino Rosas, 23, were each charged with second-degree burglary and pleaded not guilty. Rosas and Perez were additionally charged with the attempted burglary of a home on Southfield Road in Glen Cove.

The crew is part of a cell that sends Chilean nationals to New York, California and other parts of the country on 90-day tourist visas to commit the burglaries, Donnelly said. The proceeds are then sent back to the group’s ringleader in Chile.

Hmm, California also has no-bail laws. Does “other parts of the country” mean similar Leftoid bastions with similar laws?

And this isn’t even immigration. It’s being done on tourist visas! Is this the beginning of… crime tourism???

Airport customs: “What brings you to America, sir, with all these burglar tools we found in your luggage?”

“I’m gonna rob your rich tyrants living fat off you in their fancy gated communities.”

*Low-level TSA officer thinks about it.* “Enjoy your stay, sir.” *stamps passport*

 

Why did Placer County prosecutor Timothy Delgado commit suicide after murdering his wife of four months? Answer: *pic*

Ouch. OUCH! Duuude, she got da crazy eyes! You know the frivorce court is out of control when even a Federal prosecutor chooses murder/suicide over wife-buyer’s remorse.

Some facts per

Who is Timothy Delgado? Wiki, Biography, Age, Wife, Cause of Death, Investigation Report

Timothy Delgado, age 43; wife Tamara Zars Delgado, age 45. An older woman.

Children: Tamara had an adult daughter and young son at time of marriage. So, a divorced single mom who wasn’t careful with birth control. (I don’t have an age for the son but doubt Tim was the father. Men don’t orphan their own kids.)

Tim was an ass’t U.S. attorney working narcotics & guns. He married her in November and four months later, capped both their asses.

The Red Pill is not a joke. The Red Pill can save your life. Women who choose careers over husbands end up in a very bad way. To say nothing of marrying a crazy-eyed, menopausal single mom who probably took delivery on more crazy pills than the gangs he prosecuted.

 

The Barna polling group recently released a “State of the Church 2020” report on Christian trends in worship. Ideal blog material! Let’s get fisky.

Five Trends Defining Americans’ Relationship to Churches

Five Trends Defining Americans’ Relationship to Churches

Churchgoing is a dynamic part of U.S. society. New research from Barna Group shows the ways in which Americans are maintaining—and renegotiating—their connections with the churches that they attend. The State of the Church 2020 study is a year-long examination of the spiritual and religious trends that define American life these days.

Link here but I’ll stay with this article:

State of the Church

Definitions first, always a good idea when dealing with polls.

Practicing Christians – A subset of all churched adults, are those who attend at least monthly and who say their faith is very important in their life today. This more committed group comprises about 25 percent and 63.5 million adults.

Churched adults – Those Americans who have attended a Christian church at least once in the last six months. This represents the broadest group of adults who have experienced a church service in recent months, representing about 49 percent or 124.4 million adults.

David Kinnaman, president of Barna, comments on the importance of these two groups: “In the first case, we’re talking about those who are the most church savvy adults. In the second, we’re looking at all of those adults who are reasonably familiar with the experience of churchgoing. To use a comparison from the world of sports, it’d be the difference between looking at the ardent supporters and the entire fan base, including the raving fans.”

In this article, we’ll examine five trends that are essential in understanding the Church’s place in the U.S. today.

1. Nearly two in five churchgoers report regularly attending multiple churches.

While a majority of churchgoers tends to stick with a single congregation (63% churched adults, 72% practicing Christians), a sizable minority is at least occasionally attending other churches, including nearly two in five churched adults (38%) and one-quarter of practicing Christians (27%).

Interestingly, church hoppers are just as likely as more loyal attenders to report weekly attendance. In other words, just because they select from a handful of different churches to attend doesn’t make them any less likely to actually attend church on any given weekend.

Also, those who “hop around” don’t do so as a routine part of their churchgoing in a given month, but typically attend another church occasionally.

Methinks broken families have a lot to do with this. Enough churches are online that one need not physically attend a favorite but more distant church if the closer one is sufficient.

2. Churchgoers are divided on the value of church.

Another element of the churchgoing landscape is the paradoxical perceptions that churchgoers hold of church itself. Kinnaman observes, “Those who frequent worship services do so largely because of personal enjoyment, but many churchgoers also readily admit that they believe people are tired of church as usual.”

Frustrated might be a better alternative to “tired”.

The chart leaves me indifferent. Meeting with fellow Christians is a duty but that doesn’t necessarily include physical-church attendance. It’s a good habit and should be enjoyable within reason. I would have liked to see a distinct “for the free child care” option.

3. Churchgoers largely experience—and have come to expect—positive emotions and outcomes by going to church.

Overall, churched adults say they leave worship services feeling inspired (37%), encouraged (37%), forgiven (34%), as though they have connected with God or experienced his presence (33%) and challenged to change something in their life (26%), every time. A plurality of churched adults also express always feeling like attending service was the most important experience they had all week (29%) and that they learned something new (28%). …

These findings ultimately reveal that attendees encounter and even anticipate a range of emotional connectivity during worship services—which can further complicate the job of those behind the pulpit. Kinnaman states, “We must emphasize the reality that, week in and week out, today’s church leaders are tasked with meeting a diverse set of emotional expectations.”

Leading by emotion has got to be the worst idea in management theory history. There are basically three Church functions: ritual, worship and teaching. Worship is the only one that really needs to concern itself with da feelz.

Ideally, devotion to God should lead to church attendance, not vice versa. In fact, that “vice versa” could explains much about modern church outreach efforts: getting warm bodies to attend in hopes that they’ll “feel the presence of God” when they look at the pastor’s trendy haircut. ‘You Are Welcome Here!’

Interesting that the “guilty” percentage corresponds nearly 1:1 with “forgiven”.

4. Church membership is still a common practice and is correlated with positive outcomes—but its importance is declining among younger churchgoers.

Church commitment extends beyond just finding your pew (or cushioned seat or folding chair). Further, plenty of congregations measure commitment beyond just a willingness to dress in Sunday best…

They wish.

…and greet the pastor outside the doors each week.

Methinks that the “pastor at the exit door” habit is one the Church really needs to move away from. It’s a terrible way for clergy to get to know the peanut gallery.

A common and more formal next step is church membership—and this new Barna study shows that many Christians are reluctant to embrace it. To what extent is membership relevant today?

Of those who attend church at least every six months, a little over half (54%) report being an official member at their place of worship, with just above one in three (37%) reporting they regularly attend but are not members. Practicing Christians, expectedly, show deeper commitment, with seven in 10 (71%) noting they are members and one in four (26%) claiming regular attendance without membership.

Surprisingly, no significant differences emerged in membership rates between denominations—whether mainline or non-mainline, Protestant or Catholic. However, a different story emerges when looking across the generations. Boomers are more likely than both Gen X and Millennials to be formal members of their congregation, with nearly seven in 10 churched Boomers (68% vs. 48% churched Millennials and 51% churched Gen X) confirming membership. Younger generations of churchgoers were also more likely to mention “not applicable,” which suggests that the category of membership isn’t even part of their church’s nomenclature.

Emphasis theirs. That’s the drum I keep beating on: the reason younger people, particular Gen X, aren’t participating more in church is because the Baby Boomers have a death grip on the reins of power. I’ve attended such geriatric churches that the sermon was interrupted out by the beeping of life support monitors.

No surprise if the Baby Boomers have finally dispensed with even pretenses of meaningful membership in the churches they run.

Kinnaman comments, “Americans aren’t joining much of anything these days and church membership is not as compelling as it once was. In a world of untethered commitments and free-for-all content, the positive correlations of church membership should not be overlooked. The form of membership may be undergoing change, but the function of generating a mutually committed group of people is still highly relevant to today’s Americans.”

Exactly what my perspective predicts. We still want to worship God but church is where we are permitted only to warm a pew and pay our dues. For some people, that’s enough, and the worship boy-band might easily be of professional skill.

5. The perception of the Church’s relevance to the community is under question—especially among non-Christians.

I’ll tell you what non-Christians think of the Church. I heard it fresh from a couple atheist friends just last week. They think Christians are such hypocrites that their God cannot possibly exist, because if Jesus was real then He wouldn’t tolerate the followers He’s attracted. But they still think there’s a God or God-like force out there.

I did not defend Christ’s honor. I did not know how to. Frankly, I mostly agreed with them… and I’m a Bible-thumping zealot for Jesus!

That’s why I have so much anger bottled up against the modern Church. People I care about can’t hear the Gospel because of the meaningless behavior of churches generally and the examples set by Christian leaders specifically. That is unacceptable.

No surprise that practicing Christians think the Church has an impact on their community, when the Church IS their community.

That non-Christians have a mildly negative view of Christianity is a very bad sign. It should be strongly negative. I long for the days when atheists everywhere sneer at Christ in frustration that His followers keep forcing God’s laws upon their bodies. No abortion for you!

There is no worse insult against the Church than unbelievers not caring what it does. I close with a picture of why that’s true.

Steep decline in practicing Christians will have major repercussions for church leaders: study

https://www.christianpost.com/news/steep-decline-in-practicing-christians-will-have-major-repercussions-for-church-leaders-study.html

By Leah MarieAnn Klett, 8 March 2020

According to Barna, half of those who identified as practicing Christians in 2000 fell away from consistent faith engagement, essentially becoming non-practicing Christians (2000: 35 percent vs. 2020: 43 percent), while the other half moved into the non-Christian segment (2000: 20 percent vs. 2019: 30 percent).

David Kinnaman, president of Barna, said the findings indicate a “major reshuffling of Americans’ spiritual lives.”

“Monthly, committed churchgoers are now about half as common as they were two decades ago,” he said. “This shift has major repercussions for church leaders as there is increased struggle to attract and retain the active segment of churchgoers.”

The findings are part of the State of the Church 2020 study, a year-long examination of the spiritual and religious trends that define American life these days. …

“What redefines and what anchors the churchgoing, Bible reading and prayer of adults? Among the interesting stories in the data is that private practices of faith—such as prayer and Scripture intake—aren’t sliding as much as church attendance,” he said.

That’s Convergence in Church leadership. The Pope ain’t Catholic and the Baptists are getting in touch with their Muslim side.

Tim Lucas, pastor of Liquid Church in Parsippany, New Jersey, told The Christian Post that amid a “record rise” of the religious “nones,” the church would do well to rethink the way it presents the message of the Gospel.

One wonders how far out of her way the author of this piece went to find this pastor. No matter; I take all comers.

“I think the hand-wringing approach to millenials and Gen Z is an invitation for a wholesale reinvention of the methods by which we present Jesus to a new generation,” he said.

Our methods cannot be reinvented. Preach Christ crucified & resurrected. Teach one another His principles. Bear the burdens He has assigned you in life and follow His example. There is no other way to avoid eternal punishment for the evils you’ve done.

“There’s a cultural shift underway, where young people are extremely experientially oriented. They want to know, ‘What’s the social good in this before I buy it? So the church’s traditional message of evangelism was propositional truth: Here’s why Christianity is valid and a superior belief system. The Good News was proclaimed and explained.”

It worked for 2,000 years! Eh, well, maybe 1,965 years.

However, when Jesus shared the “Gospel of grace with truly hell-bent pagans,” He adopted a “double approach,” Lucas argued.

Yes. He took a whip to their backsides and insulted their parentage so effectively that history STILL echoes with the Son of Man’s disses. Whitewashed tombs! Pit of vipers! Ye be no sons of Abraham!

The Church should definitely be more like that. More like Him!

“There was a demonstration of grace: Be healed, serve the poor. And then there’s the proclamation of the Gospel: Your sins are forgiven,” he said. “Up and coming generations are concerned with biblical justice — how the church tangibly helps the poor and needy. It’s a reverse discipleship process. The church must reclaim its birthright of saying, ‘The message of the Gospel is good for both the soul and body.’”

“He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will receive life eternal.”-Jesus, John 12:25

That, folks, is why non-Christians don’t give a care about the Church. It’s reinvented itself as a social welfare NGO redundant with the Department of Health and Human Services. Because morbidly obese North America is overrun with starving children!

I can tell from his haircut alone that Tim Lucas knows less about morality than an inmate. Ye be no son of Abraham, Timmy Boy!

 

Making good on my predictions of Social Justice and Convergence, Greear has recently hosted a dialogue with an unrepentant Muslim to find common ground and encourage Christians to become comfortable accommodating the wishes of unbelievers. Since I didn’t have the transcript, I fisked two articles instead of one.

Infiltration and convergence often takes the form of a two-step con. Normalize evil and criminalize good. That is the form of Greear’s assault upon the Church. The criminalizing good is being done with his pogrom against church independence, in the guise of preventing more sexual assaults by clergy. This event is the former: normalizing evil.

Greear, Islamic leader discuss religious freedom, civility

http://www.bpnews.net/54428/greear-islamic-leader-discuss-religious-freedom-civility

By Seth Brown, 6 March 2020

RALEIGH, N.C. (BP) — More than 1,000 attendees gathered for an event Thursday (March 5) at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh, N.C., to hear J.D. Greear and Omar Suleiman discuss current issues facing American culture related to Christianity and Islam.

Omar is an imam & activist who boasts of receiving invitations to public functions from Barack Obama & Nancy Pelosi and has a long history of anti-Semitism (including divestment) before he scrubbed it off the Internet around 2014.

Greear serves as pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, N.C., and president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Suleiman is a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and founder of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research.
The event, “Hope in the Current Age: A Conversation on Christianity and Islam,” was sponsored by a coalition of faith-based organizations, including The Veritas Forum and Neighborly Faith, along with NCSU’s Muslim Student Association, CRU and Intervarsity groups.

Greear and Suleiman covered topics such as religious freedom, civility amid religious differences and how to convey a message of hope in the current age.

Such a carefully neutral description. Fuck hope. Have some faith instead, Greear. Faith in Christ who had much to say about sheep and wolves.

“We need to be able to not only get along with, but to cherish, stand alongside and even fight for people that believe different things than we do,” Greear said.

Why? Why should a Christian risk as much as a hangnail for an unrepentant Muslim? Why should we Christians forward the agenda of international Islam? I’ll give just one reason in passing why we SHOULDN’T:

“It’s a lot harder to hate and stigmatize somebody when you’re looking people in the face that you call friends,” said Greear.

This is the “normalize evil” half of the Convergence two-step I mentioned. Pressure Christians to befriend Muslims, associate with them extensively, emotionally invest in them, and then when the Muzzies start broadcasting their calls to prayer at 50,000 watts across the community, Christians will feel bad about standing their ground and avoiding Europe’s fate.

He’s leveraging the preexisting Cult Of Nice. An example:

Talk of civility and compassion appeared to resonate with the crowd, as attendees nodded in agreement. Three Muslim students were murdered in nearby Chapel Hill almost five years ago. One of the victims was a student at NCSU. The killing sparked debate about anti-Muslim bigotry as prosecutors argued the shooter was a fueled by hate.

I looked it up. That was not a religious hate crime.

Segue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Chapel_Hill_shooting

On February 10, 2015, local police in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, responded to a report of gunshots heard at 5:15 p.m. Upon arriving at the Finley Forest Condominiums, located on Summerwalk Circle at Chapel Hill, a woman told them a friend was bleeding, and directed them to a condominium. There, they found Barakat lying dead in the front doorway bleeding from the head. One of the Abu-Salha sisters was found dead in the kitchen, with the other lying in the doorway of that room. All three victims had been killed with gunshot wounds to the head, and were pronounced dead at the scene.

According to prosecutors, the suspect shot Barakat multiple times at the doorway after the latter opened the door in response to his knocking. He then allegedly entered the living room and shot the Abu-Salha sisters in the head, then shot Barakat again before leaving. According to autopsies, the Abu-Salha sisters were shot execution-style.

In June 2019 it was reported that Deah Barakat had recorded the encounter with Hicks on his cellphone camera. The recording shows Hicks complaining that Barakat and the Abu-Salha sisters were taking more parking spaces than the condo rules allow, before Hicks opens fire with his gun.

A hate crime? Okay, but not one that’s at all relevant to a discussion of religious freedom.

The victims’ neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, a 46-year-old former car parts salesman, turned himself in to sheriff’s deputies in nearby Pittsboro on the night of the shooting. He was in possession of a .357-caliber handgun at the time. Investigators later positively matched the handgun’s ballistics to the shell casings found in the apartment.

An open-and-shut case. Hicks had a long history of violence and was reportedly fascinated with the movie Falling Down. Synopsis, a divorced DOD contractor loses his job and has nothing left to live for except getting across Los Angeles to see his daughter on her birthday one last time, in violation of a restraining order. It’s a very dark comedy; think Office Space but with gang murders and no happy ending.

The guy had anger management issues for real. Why then, was the story presented as “anti-Muslim bigotry”? Because Christian America is such a kind, peaceful place that Omar could only find fault with us by lying.

So, he lied. Lies are just some words spoken to unlock victory, right? Islam granting its followers permission to lie and deceive in order to advance the cause of Islam is a great reason to not bother with events like this one.

End segue.

Suleiman talked about hopelessness and expressed concern for the coming months in U.S. politics.

“Things get really bad for Muslims in election years,” he said, lamenting that “cheap talking points are used against our community.”

I don’t wonder that a Muslim has Trump Derangement Syndrome, now that Trump has allied himself with the Orthodox Jews and garnered lots of support for throttling back on Muslim migration into USA.

God, I wish the whole “da J00z” thing would just go away. I want my country back! I do not want to expend valuable brain cells reprocessing ancient, unsolvable Gordian knots of Middle Eastern blood feuds. Which is another damn fine reason to not allow immigration, ESPECIALLY “refugee” immigration from regions that haven’t known peace or trust since before Mohammed raped a child.

Greear said a “posture of fear” may lead some Christians to look upon outsiders with suspicion and “rationalize the faults” of politicians offering political protection to the Christian community.

That “rationalize the faults” bit is, again, anti-Trumpism. The Democrats been trying to drive a wedge between POTUS and Christians so much that I hear their arguments verbatim from the guys I hang out with.

News flash, Greear, Christians aren’t “rationalizing Trump’s faults” when we support him. He is simply not hostile to us. He kinda likes America and is okay with its continued existence as a sovereign nation. I guess that counts as “offering political protection”? He’s better than what Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton would do to us. But the way Democrats talk, one would think Jesus mandated a theocracy!

Theocracy is what Islam does. The irony isn’t funny.

Kevin Singer, co-founder of Neighborly Faith, offered each speaker an opportunity to address the other’s religious community.

Greear referenced his time spent as a missionary in a Muslim-majority region and said, “We love you. We think you belong in this society and we want to stand beside you to be your friends.”

I hate Islam. God, I hate them. They flood into my country with the blessing of the globalists, at my taxpaying expense, and the both of them lust for my destruction. They lie to my face time and again about being nice and peaceful and loving and it’s a total coincidence that every God-damned single time Muzzies take control of the government, at any level, churches burn and Christians are butchered. How stupid do they think I am?

“We want you to be patient with us and help us learn what it looks like to look at life through your eyes,” said Greear. “Most of us have never had the experience of being in a place where we weren’t in the majority, and that’s a difficult transition for us to make.”

You will burn in Eternal Hell for your hatred of Christ, Greear. For your wish to make us Christians a minority in our own country. You scumbag! You agent of Islam!

Attendees were asked to participate in online surveys before and after the event. Prior to the discussion, 64 percent of Christian respondents said they had somewhat positive or very positive attitudes toward Islam and 91 percent said they were interested in friendship with Muslims. Likewise, 77 percent of Muslim respondents said they had somewhat positive or very positive attitudes toward Christianity and 85 percent said they were interested in friendship with Christians.

After the event, 76 percent of Christian respondents said their attitude toward Islam was more positive than before and 83 percent said they were more interested in friendships with Muslims. Similarly, 66 percent of Muslims said their attitude toward Christianity was more positive than before and 65 percent said they were more interested in friendships with Christians.

Zero respondents who identified with either faith group said they felt less positive about the other group or less interested in friendships across religious lines.

Singer told the Biblical Recorder the survey results were encouraging.

I see a lot of bias in that polling but note that increased acceptance of Muslims, and by extension Islam, was the official goal of this event.

Omar on the left, Reverend Andy Stoker of Dallas’ First Methodist Church on right. And if you thought that was scary…

That’s J.D. Greear himself with Omar. I don’t know if his eyes or his smile is more disturbing.

JD Greear, Omar Suleiman to discuss Christian-Muslim relations at NC college

JD Greear, Omar Suleiman to discuss Christian-Muslim relations at NC college

Most of the attendees will be deeply conservative evangelical students who likely have never held a conversation with a Muslim before and do not have Muslim friends, Singer noted.

“They probably don’t know how to have a mutually beneficial conversation with a Muslim in a way that feels faithful, so we’re hoping to show a model of charitable discourse that maintains conviction,” he said.

Being on a Southern campus, Singer said, the event may end up addressing some “cultural notions about Islam within the Christian faith and in this particular region.”

Yes, there aren’t many Muslims in the Carolinas yet, which is why they’ve focused on colonizing the universities thus far… trying to win influence before the reality of having Muzzie neighbors sets in.

Suleiman told RNS he feels well-equipped to address such misconceptions: Having grown up in New Orleans and now living in Dallas, where he teaches Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University and often meets with evangelical leaders both in public and in private, Suleiman says he is intimately acquainted with Southern church life.

ISLAM HAS NOTHING TO TEACH US CHRISTIANS. NOTHING. The Prophet is the only religious leader I’ve ever heard of who could not be bothered to practice the very religion he preached. That’s pathetic. And his follower is teaching in a Christian seminary? Equally pathetic and for the same reason.

A prominent activist for civil rights and interfaith issues who is known for denouncing extremism, Suleiman has faced hostility from multiple sides, including threats from the Islamic State group. Commentators from the Christian right such as pastor Robert Jeffress have criticized him, as well.

The link to Jeffress didn’t actually contain his criticism of Omar. A cursory search only turned up the Jerusalem Post complaining of his anti-Semitism and I guess they’d be the ones to know. For myself, I’m satisfied that Omar is an activist for interfaith issues. There’s no chance that somebody fitting that term is an honorable, trustworthy guy.

Suleiman said he hopes the minority of Muslim students in the audience will glean something from the conversation, too.

“A lot of times we shy away from spaces where we think we won’t be welcomed in the fullness of ourselves as Muslims, but if we speak to the beautiful themes in our religion then that will resonate with people,” he said. “If we want to be bridge builders, we need to be consistent in our call for bridge building. We can’t only build bridges with people we’re comfortable with. We have to get over this apprehension that if we talk to people that we don’t agree with on everything, then we’ll lose what makes us unique as Muslims.”

So far as I’ve been able to read, Omar never talked about Muslims acting on behalf on Team Jesus. “If we speak to the beautiful themes in our religion then they’ll let their guard down.”

If we Christians do not act like we believe that only Christ is God, then why should anybody else believe that only Christ is God? Preaching that is the very Great Commission that J.D. Greear boasts about, but then he gives legitimacy to a false religion as if it deserves equal time, and equal respect, with the True and Living God.

 

Terrorism, back before it meant white men voting for Trump, was defined as the use of violence or intimidation to advance a political agenda. It almost goes without saying that the Left relies heavily upon terrorism, from Students For A Democratic Society to today’s BernieBros, but a drama unfolding at Syracuse University provides an excellent object lesson in why you should never, ever, negotiate with terrorists.

Beginning around Nov. 4, 2019, there were a series of hate crimes beginning with “Nigger” graffiti’d in one of the dormitories and culminating with a swastika that was accidentally spray-painted outside the school grounds (thereby falling under city police jurisdiction rather than school police jurisdiction). No arrests have been made but blacks African-Americans, yellows Asians (curiously not hyphenated as Americans) and Jews (curiously NEVER hyphenated as Americans) have suffered greatly under this monstrous barrage of torture and cruelty.

What was NOT reported as a hate crime at Syracuse University:

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Moore’s ‘Kill Whitey’ book chapter is required reading for Syracuse course

https://campusreform.org/?ID=13740

By Justine Murray, 23 September 2019

Six weeks prior to the “beginning” of the hate crime wave.

Syracuse University is requiring students enrolled in one course to buy a book by leftist filmmaker Michael Moore called “Stupid White Men” and read the chapter, titled, “Kill Whitey.”

Syracuse Professor S.N. Sangmpam teaches the “African American Politics” course requiring the book. Moore calls black conservatives “Uncle Toms” and “sellouts” in the book chapter, a copy of which Campus Reform obtained.

“Are white people’s brains hardwired to see one thing but believe the opposite because of race?” Moore asks in the chapter. “Do all white people suffer from some shared low-grade of mental illness?”

Yes, actually. Our mental illness is called altruism.

The filmmaker lists stats comparing white and black childbirth deaths, unemployment, and more before asking why white people have “been able to get away with this without all ending up like Reginald Denny,” a white truck driver who was almost beaten to death by black men.

Context for that was the Rodney King riots. The “innocent” black man got millions of dollars to spend on hookers and crack while the innocent white man was mutilated by the 83 Gangster Crips.

Thank you, Latinos, for ethnically cleansing that neighborhood after the blacks themselves burned & looted it down. Doing the jobs that white Americans won’t!

Syracuse Professor S.N. Sangmpam, who teaches the course that requires “Stupid White Men,” told Campus Reform that he does not know what is controversial about the book or the chapter: “Ask those who object to read[ing] the chapter,” he said, “and evaluate it in light of one of the class topics in the syllabus, ‘Politics and the Socioeconomic Status of African Americans.’”

Campus Reform spoke with #BLEXIT Activist Chandler Crump, a young conservative who does not see how the contents of the required chapter relate to the class topic being evaluated.

“I believe having a chapter titled ‘Kill Whitey’ in a course for African American Politics isn’t exactly wrong,” he states. “Throughout the history of African American Politics, there have been many movements that have had the idea to ‘Kill Whitey.’ However, the contents of the chapter do not discuss actual political movements and instead displays the author’s disdain for black conservatives.”

The lesson here is that scrawling a crude swastika on the ground is a hate crime against Jews but forcing them to purchase Mein Kampf if they want to graduate is not.

Anyway, the Students of Color complained that the administration took a full week before releasing culturally appropriate statements. They began staging protests.

Syracuse students walk out in protest as chancellor vows action after racist incidents

By Doha Madani and Erik Ortiz, 20 November 2019

Dozens of Syracuse University students walked out of a forum attended by the school’s chancellor on Wednesday night, demanding he endorse all of their requests after a series of racist incidents on campus or resign.

They demanded requests, heh.

The students held fists in the air and shouted “sign or resign!” as they filed out of a campus auditorium before Chancellor Kent Syverud spoke. Syverud said he would be unable to commit to all of the demands on the spot, then briefly met with some of the student protesters saying he hoped to come to an agreement by Thursday, reported NBC affiliate WSTM.

Fists in the air is a Black Power salute and thus, a hate crime against the Chancellor. He took it well, perhaps because he identifies as a Jesuit rather than a cracker.

“I do not agree with everything I’ve heard,” Syverud said in response. “I do not agree with all the facts said.”

The forum capped a tumultuous day at the private university in Syracuse, New York, which has been roiled by a string of recent incidents on the campus that have targeted marginalized groups, including Jewish, Asian and black community members. There have been at least 12 episodes since Nov. 6, including anti-Asian and anti-black slurs graffitied in residence halls and a swastika drawn in a snowbank near an apartment complex where students live.

Sounds to me like Chinamen vs Negroes. Isn’t it interesting how, when White Man disappears, all the races left behind go for each other’s throats? They should be thanking us for existing in positions of power, not resenting our existence.

But if they don’t want us around acting altruistic than that’s less work for us. I got fifty bucks says the Chinaman wins this race war. *GQ sits poolside*

Angered over the perceived inaction by university officials to protect students and get a handle on the hate speech, which included the alleged sharing of a white supremacist manifesto, members of the student movement Not Again SU said in a social media post that they wanted the resignation of Syverud as well as the campus chief of police and others if their full demands aren’t met.

That’s Brenton Tarrant’s Manifesto, which was shared online at the university. I wondered why my blog traffic was up. Kidding, but…

Anyway, the students staged a sit-in then fell asleep when the coffee ran out. That was enough to force Chancellor Syverud’s surrender:

Early Thursday, the chancellor said he signed on to nearly all of the 19 recommendations made by students; 16 were approved as written, and Syverud suggested minor revisions for three others that he said were necessary to comply with the law or because they need the Board of Trustees’ approval.

The school on Tuesday had released a summary for a proposed action plan based on the student’s demands, including that any student involved with the recent hate crimes be expelled, the school’s current anti-harassment policy be revised, new staff and faculty undergo mandatory diversity training, and newly hired counselors should better represent “all marginalized identities on campus.”

Stop the presses.

If Severud gave in that easily to demands that the entire university leadership be indoctrinated into weaponized racism, it might be because he’s driving this whole incident. It’s time for a bio.

Segue

Nice brainpan for intelligence. Eyebrows are thickest at the outside, so managerial not visionary. The lower eyelids are raised, an indicator of deception, but otherwise he doesn’t have as forceful a personality as one might expect for an executive officer. My read is he’s a middleman and low-level deceiver.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Syverud

Syverud earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1977…

Deep State, right there. Jesuit faction.

a law degree magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981, and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan in 1983.

Zero private-sector experience.

After graduating from law school, Syverud clerked for U.S. District Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer. Syverud counts among his closest mentors retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for whom he clerked shortly after she became the first woman named to the Supreme Court bench.

I can’t usually puzzle out the maze of judicial clerkships that serve as the recruiting grounds for the Deep State. Here, however, Oberdorfer was a Yale Jew who was an ally, family friend and the only law clerk of the notorious Judge Hugo Black. Black was a New Dealer and Franklin Roosevelt ally who was anti-Catholic and KKK until he decided to become a U.S. Senator. His most infamous achievement as a judge was writing the majority opinion upholding the WW2 Japanese internment.

Thus, Kent Syverud is at least third-generation Deep State.

End segue.

In the wake of some of the incidents, the school has taken action, including suspending fraternity social activities after one chapter’s members and their guests allegedly subjected a black student to a “verbal racial epithet” on Saturday night.

Oh my gawd, somebody claimed they were subjected to a deplorable word! Notify the State governor! (Which Syverud did, and Gov. Cuomo responded to.)

Getting rid of fraternities has become a very common theme in the Convergence of higher education. Partly inevitable due to feminism but when the administration goes after frats, it’s because they represent a threat to consolidation of power.

Let’s hear more about this.

Syracuse University suspends fraternity activities after latest racist incident

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/syracuse-university-suspends-fraternity-activities-after-latest-racist-incident-n1084301

By Doha Madani, 18 November 2019

Syracuse University has suspended all fraternity social activities Sunday after members of one chapter were connected to an alleged racial epithet, only the latest incident in a string of racist episodes at the New York state college.

A group of fraternity members and their guests allegedly subjected a black student to a “verbal racial epithet” Saturday night, according to a statement from Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud. The incident is among several attacks on marginalized communities at the school, including other racial slurs spoken and in graffiti around campus.

“You stand accused of somebody at Saturday’s party, who may or may not actually be affiliated with your fraternity, saying an unidentified word to an unidentified victim. How do you plead?”

“To what, your honor?”

“GUILTY!!!!”

Syverud said that while it was only one fraternity connected to the incident Saturday, he ordered all fraternity social activities to be suspended for the rest of the semester.

“While only one fraternity may have been involved in this particular incident, given recent history, all fraternities must come together with the University community to reflect upon how to prevent recurrence of such seriously troubling behavior,” the chancellor said in his statement.

Whoa. Power tripping much, Chancellor? Put down that match before you start a Reichstag Fire.

A Chinese student filed a report saying he’d been called a racial slur as he exited a residence hall on Friday night. And an anti-Asian slur and a swastika were found in separate occurrences at a different campus residence, Haven Hall, according to the Daily Orange.

That explains a lot. And to think, I was being tongue-in-chink when I used the term Chinaman.

And now, his response to the first wave of demands, archived here:

I will paraphrase for brevity. The Chancellor agreed to everything except as noted.

1. Zero tolerance for hate crimes as defined by the code of conduct but with differing punishments for different levels of involvement.

2. Mandatory racial grievances class for all students.

3. Mandatory staff & faculty diversity training, to include non-tenured positions.

4. More diverse foods in the student dining hall.

No food for you, white boy!

5. No punishment for students engaging in anti-racism crimes.

Textbook anarcho-tyranny. It’s a crime for them to hit you but not for you to hit them.

6. Criminalize the “targeted use” of hate speech.

I think that means jokes?

7. Increase site security in the dorms.

8. More ethnic minorities in dorm hall authority.

In keeping with #1, whoever proposed #8 should be expelled.

9. Allow voluntary race segregation in the dorm halls.

ARE YOU FRACKING KIDDING ME?!? You blacks owe us whites an apology for all that grief you gave us over segregation in the South. Reparation$ could start the healing.

Although it IS a good idea for reducing ethnic tensions. Ask a jailer. Hell, ask a Southerner.

10. Minority scholarships for international students.

That locks in the Chinese vote.

11. Another official forum for grievances.

12. More money for multicultural affairs.

13a. Hire more staff Persons of Color.

It’s okay to discriminate against white men because they’re racist and we aren’t!

13b. More mental health counselors counselors to help students overcome the trauma of somebody spraypainting the N-word somewhere on the planet.

I was this close to supporting 13b. And to think, they call themselves niggas with nary a vapor.

14. A new building to serve as the headquarters for a new Ministry Of Multicultural Affairs.

Is it true that all electricity in England comes from George Orwell spinning in his grave?

15. Fuck it, just gibmedat.

16. Student admission should be based primarily on diversity.

This is the only one the Chancellor was vague about accepting.

17.

18. Public, monthly updates of cooperation with these demands. Er, concerns.

19. Mandatory diversity training material shall be made public for review.

20. Force fraternities to become multicultural.

Methinks the Chancellor himself wrote that one.

21. All hate incidents must be reported and denounced within 48 hours.

22. Provide an online, ANONYMOUS reporting system for hate crimes.

You stupid, stupid Syracuse blacks. You make all these demands in order to easily accuse/get rid of the white men that you’ve been taught to believe are the single cause of all your primarily self-inflicted problems. But it takes only one single redefinition of “rayciss” to legalize anything and everything the Chinese care to do to your ungrateful Punk-American asses. And the Latinos, and the Rooftop Koreans, and the Armenians, and you really haven’t made any friends for yourselves at all in your 250-year-long stay in North America, have you?

You know what makes #22 even more stupid? That “hate crime” of Tarrant’s manifesto being anonymously uploaded to the university file-sharing app! I bet that one really was an alt-Righter and he was simply trolling you with your own infrastructure.

Now, it goes without saying that if Chancellor Syverud has the slightest bit of interest in preserving Syracuse University as any kind of higher learning facility, he would have publicly spat on these demands and personally unleashed the first fire hose on the protesting squatters.

Whether the Chancellor orchestrated the spike in hate crimes or it came as a total surprise, his giving in to every demand of the student terrorists had the inevitable consequence of MORE demands! MORE civil unrest!

#NotAgainSU prepares to negotiate, occupy building until demands are met

By Julie McMahon, 26 February 2020

Syracuse University students protesting racism and prejudice on campus continue to occupy an administrative building for the 11th day in a row.

Organizers say they are ready to negotiate, but prepared to remain at Crouse-Hinds Hall, [administration headquarters] including sleeping overnight, until their demands are met by administrators.

#NotAgainSU, which formed after a rash of racist, anti-Semitic graffiti was found on campus last semester, set up camp in the building Feb. 17. Administrators and campus police initially attempted to shut down the protest, suspending around 30 students. Officials for two days locked the building to outsiders and refused to let food or other items in, encouraging the protesters to leave.

That’s the gentle way to handle such protests. As mentioned above, I’m more of a fire hose kind of man. Which is why I won’t be hired to run campus security anytime soon… I only care for results.

Since then, the university has hired former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to review the campus police department.

This entire, extended protest has Deep State fingerprints everywhere. Not sure what their agenda is, except maybe to incorporate Syracuse into their Ivy League system. Maybe they’re losing control of Harvard to the Asians?

#NotAgainSU has had visits from legal counsel, concerned parents and students from other colleges including SUNY Binghamton who have expressed solidarity.

Chancellor Kent Syverud, urged by faculty, lifted protesters’ suspensions and directed staff to stand down in efforts to stop the protest.

That was either cowardice or collusion. He publicly undermined the efforts of school police to maintain order… unforgivable during a crisis.

Now campus officials are treating the protest like the eight-day sit-in at the Barnes Center in November. Supporters drop off food, between 30 and 50 protesters freely move in and out of the building, and the schedule includes events like open mic nights and teach-ins about institutional racism with professors.

Those demands include resignations from top campus officials including Syverud and two leaders of the Department of Public Safety, which administrators have previously signaled are not negotiable.

I predict Syverud will survive this.

A list of 18 demands, originally formed during last semester’s protests, has grown to 34.

Boom, there it is. How is appeasement working for you college officials? About as well as appeasement worked on YOU when you were students in the Seventies! How do you not know how this game is played?

Organizers say that’s partly because administrators have not genuinely delivered on promises they’ve made. For example, protesters say the hiring of four new mental health counselors is not adequate, when they demanded the school bring its ratio of counselors to students in line with the national average of one per 500. Organizers say administrator’s declaration that this demand has been “met” is a “blatant lie.”

Never give in to student terrorists. The only message it sends is that terrorism works.

Because of examples like this, #NotAgainSU organizers say they amended demands to include deadlines, specific requests for money to be allocated to various causes, and the formation of paid student oversight committees.

At least six new demands are directly in response to the university’s handling of this round of protests, organizers say in documents spelling out their concerns.

Chancellor Syverud appeared to acknowledge the university flubbed its initial response to protests this semester. He reversed suspensions and apologized for the way some students were treated.

“I am not proud of how last week’s events involving student protesters in Crouse-Hinds Hall were handled,” Syverud said in a message to the campus community.

Like the Republican Party, Syverud is fake opposition.

#NotAgainSU in its communications on social media and online has said that lackluster responses are a big part of why they have continued to protest.

That is correct. Forcefully shutting down their protests and expelling them would have prevented this second incident. But because leadership refused to condemn their discivic actions and the Chancellor himself undermined the ability of campus police to do their job, to say nothing of giving in to their demands against the threat of a sleepover, the Vibrants Of Color have literally no reason not to escalate.

Chancellor and Friends have no excuse to not know that… and when they give in so easily, one must wonder to what extent they are accomplices of the protesters.

I can answer that, in part, because Syverud pre-hated on Syracuse fraternities.

Syracuse law prof helping Theta Tau: ‘I don’t think these kids have a real chance’

https://www.syracuse.com/su-news/2018/05/syracuse_university_theta_tau_biased_process.html

By Julie McMahon, 8 May 2018 (Updated 30 January 2019)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — The Syracuse University chancellor’s blistering remarks about the Theta Tau fraternity videos have made it nearly impossible for its members to get a fair shake at a hearing that will decide their academic futures.

Theta Tau is primarily engineering students, I’m led to understand.

That’s the belief of a law professor who is assisting three of the 18 accused students fighting against possible expulsions.

“This is a political case,” said Gregory Germain. “The university has taken a position on the outcome. The penalty was meted out before the process began.“

Since mid-April when the videos first surfaced, Chancellor Kent Syverud has repeatedly called them “disgusting” and “unacceptable.”

The videos show pledges acting out a racist, anti-Semitic “parody” oath: “I solemnly swear to have hatred in my heart for n*ggers, sp*cs and most importantly the f*ckin’ k*kes.” A second video shows fraternity pledges miming the sexual assault of a person with disabilities.

Syverud chastised the students’ behavior in written and video messages, a press conference and at forums.

So, Syverud is every bit as anti-white racist as those Vibrant sit-ins. Despite his being white himself.

“There is absolutely no place at Syracuse University for behavior or language that degrades any individual or group’s race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, disability or religious beliefs,” Syverud said in the university’s first public statement. “What happened at Theta Tau serves as a reminder that violations of codes of honor, behavior and values will be met with swift and appropriate consequences.”

Goodbye, Departments of History and Social Studies. Hello, Ministry of Truth.

On one side, protesters have criticized the chancellor for not speaking out enough, and for not expelling the students immediately.

But Germain, who is urging the administration to value due process and the fraternity pledges’ free speech, said remarks by the chancellor and other officials “made it clear” that the university intends to expel the students.

That’s why Germain proposed an “independent” hearing panel made up of tenured professors, whose jobs wouldn’t be at stake for rendering a decision that isn’t favorable to the administration. The university said no, according to Germain.

Germain, who has taught at SU since 2002, said he believes administrators, nontenured professors and anyone who reports to Syverud could feel pressured to reach a verdict of expulsion or suspension, or face repercussions.

“I don’t think these kids have a real chance,” he said.

Germain is serving as a “procedural advisor” to three of the 18 students who were charged as a result of the Theta Tau videos.

He discussed his role and his proposals for a fairer process during a wide-ranging interview with Syracuse.com. Here’s what he said about the upcoming disciplinary hearings.

I must admit, that’s not a face I would initially think well of. But Germain’s conduct as described in this article is admirable and faultless. Physiognomy must always take a backseat to observed behavior. Anybody can be a saint or a devil no matter their personality or history.

Germain said he is concerned the fraternity brothers are being “railroaded” and used as “scapegoats” for the school’s historical problems with fraternities and its poor track record of welcoming minorities on campus.

The students who do not accept punishments proposed by the university will face a disciplinary panel on Wednesday, according to Germain.

Germain echoes many of the criticisms in the lawsuit filed by a handful of the accused students last week. He shares their concerns about the process being rushed, and about the university being quick to “brand them” as racists and bigots, without viewing the videos in context — as a parody that was never intended for public viewing.

According to Germain, most of the 18 students are freshmen. The three he is working with are either 18 or 19 years old. He and the lawsuit both note it’s a diverse group of young men, who represent many of the minority groups lampooned in the videos.

So, Syverud’s hatred of the fraternity had nothing to do with their being actually racist, and he intentionally mischaracterized a video of their private LARPing. Dishonest from start to finish.

If Chancellor Syverud wanted to Converge Syracuse University from an institution of higher learning into a finishing school for Socialism’s useful idiots, he would do exactly what he’s doing. But I’m not accusing him of it. Stupidity is hard to rule out, especially for somebody who has never worked one day outside the Education-Industrial Complex.

 

Move over, Canterbury Tales! I’ve found a new source of debauched entertainment: San Francisco Confessions!

https://thebolditalic.com/sfconfesses/home

A couple are NSFW such as “I Lie About Being Monogamous” but this one is okay and full of “learning experiences”:

The Horrifying Things I’ve Seen as an Office Manager in Silicon Valley

https://thebolditalic.com/the-horrifying-things-ive-seen-as-an-office-manager-in-silicon-valley-8b572c6a7c72

Anonymous, 27 February 2020

I received the Slack message at 10 p.m., right before jumping into bed to watch an episode, or three, of The Office. I know I should snooze my notifications, but I never do — the anxiety that comes with a later barrage of messages at once is too much.

Dude, unplug. Seriously. Being on-call 24-7 is more stressful than anything in the workplace short of a female employee claiming you’re the daddy when filing for maternity leave.

This message was from a salesperson at the startup where I work, a guy we can call Greg. Greg could be described as a kvetch; something is always irritating him, and he is not shy about letting me know. You see, as an office manager, it’s my job to grit my teeth, listen, fulfill every last request he — or any other employee — has while being grateful for the stock options and health insurance.

Thanks, Bob. Can I call you Bob? I feel much better about crippling my career advancement in order to enjoy the beaches of California while young enough that I actually can. Instead of encasing my bad back in a cubicle for twelve hours a day like go-getters such as you, I exercise it daily in hikes and kayaks. I am going nowhere in life with more peace in my heart than a Zen Buddhist in a massage parlor.

Less, of course, the government’s efforts to kill me. Which is why I have a blog.

Maybe one day, you’ll be ready to enjoy life, too, Bob, in those golden years… er, moments… between “stock options vest” and “stress-induced heart attack”.

Maybe not.

Greg’s requests are usually for the specific whey protein that he’d like in the office…

Tell him No. “No” is a magical word. Used correctly, it magically inspires employees to not confuse their personal responsibilities with yours.

…but this one was different. This message was a picture of a toilet clogged with shit.

You might be wondering how I responded to Greg. The answer is that I popped a Klonopin, started a free trial of Headspace, and made plans to deal with the situation in the morning.

Had you not answered the phone, you would still have dealt with the situation in the morning… after a good night’s sleep with no clogged toilets named Greg in your dreams.

Just ‘cuz your office is wireless don’t mean you can’t unplug. For real, dude!

While shocking in visuals and time of day, this was not an isolated incident — in fact, shit is a common motif in my story. I’m frequently torn from my desk—where I might be doing $250,000 in expense reports, planning office events I’ll be forced to attend, dealing with building management, or a wide variety of other tasks—to flush people’s poop for them.

What did you expect when you hired Ganges monkeys? In fact, that might be a big part of the problem here.

Bob, do you have hiring/firing authority as the office manager? If you do then fucking fire Greg yesterday. But I’m guessing you don’t. Senior management hires vibrant wage slaves then tasks you, the office manager, to make them as productive as Real Americans. You are stressed because that’s impossible. You’re trying to make useless people useful without the power to either terminate the problem cases or punish the disobedient. Or, very likely, the ability to reward the competent, who are overwhelmingly white, male nerds.

If you don’t have firing authority then quit and find a better job, because some turds don’t want to be polished, like Michelle “The Man” Obama.

To be clear, people don’t walk by my desk and say, “Hey, I just left a floater in the men’s room, would you mind taking care of that for me?” but they might as well. A helpful hint for people in the tech world (and beyond): Pressure-assisted toilets, the kind we environmentalist Silicon Valley types love, need some time for their tanks to fill up. So, if you’ve gone into the stall after someone has just left and it’s now not flushing, chances are the toilet is not broken, it’s just not ready for your massive Sweetgreen dump yet.

Seriously, bro. Terminate EVERYBODY who lacks the ability to operate indoor plumbing. You will lose nothing of importance. Harambe is not going to write the next killer app.

Being an office manager in Silicon Valley is a difficult and thankless job that’s lowered my self worth more than anything I can think of. But the larger takeaway is that the tech industry’s culture of providing abundant perks has cultivated a level of employee entitlement that I find shocking. It can be so extreme that it isn’t sustainable for facilities staff to cater to effectively.

I’ve already taught you the magic word.

The infantilization of tech workers that I witness on a day-to-day basis is alarming but inevitable when everything is taken care of for them: Meals and snacks are prepared to their requests, dishes they throw in the sink will magically disappear, and their free kombucha spilled all over the floor will be cleaned up by someone else. It’s this very environment that leads people to believe that it’s appropriate to send a picture of human shit via Slack at 10 p.m. to the office manager, effectively ruining the one thing that relaxes them: reruns of The Office.

I never intended to become an office manager, much like Pam Beasley. I don’t see it as my career, or at least I hope to God it isn’t. In a past life, I was an academic, a broke and jaded “intellectual” barely treading water in an American Studies doctoral program in the epicenter of coastal liberalism.

After four years of sitting through seminars in which people snapped in agreement with one another and where prefixes like “post-post-” were common, I decided to pursue more creative endeavors. Of course, I needed a 9-to-5 to support this lavish lifestyle of sitting in front of my laptop writing painfully Sarah Vowell-esque essays. I applied for this job at a startup and somehow convinced them I was up to the challenge. And just like that, here I am.

They were looking for a doormat. Somebody so insecure and desperate for money that they could use him as a safety fuse between themselves and the consequences of their bad decisions. They found… you.

Welcome to the Hell you deserve, Bob. You hid in the overpriced university system because the real world of independence and consequences scared you, which is also why you neglected to develop any marketable skills by the time you ran out of money while working on the next Great American novel. Which, let the record show, was No More Mister Nice Guy. Not whatever psychosexual bromance your professors convinced you was art.

Prove them wrong. Go ahead. Take a risk, learn a practical skill and quit accepting maltreatment just because you’re desperate for cash. Tip: Your stock options will NEVER vest. It’s just a mind trick to make you work for free.

God help me, I love giving that advice to Leftoids because I know they’ll never take it. They’ll sneer at me for trying to sabotage their lives, then their smartphone will ding with Greg’s latest, unsolicited report on office hygiene.

At first, I enjoyed the job. I was nearing my late twenties, and I’d never made more than my $24,000 a year stipend, and I was now making significantly more to order snacks, accept packages, and leave at 5 p.m. sharp every day. My boss was cool, we liked the same music, and during our interview, he told me that this job was his day job until his band hit it big, so we were on the same page. But the honeymoon period only lasted a month or so, and soon I realized the job was not just ordering snacks and accepting packages, but also managing calendars, planning events, dealing with vendors, basically making sure anything anybody wanted was given to them, regardless of if they were capable of doing it themselves. I had become as jaded about the tech world as I had been about academia.

Unless there was dramatic turnover, that one-month period was the transition to Bob’s regime. Which means Bob is 100% to blame for this outcome.

The requests I receive daily and the way I’m expected to handle them creates an overall hostile work environment where I’m disrespected and made to feel less than on a regular basis. Over time, demand after demand, I’ve come to resent the employees in my office, which is a shame since many of them are perfectly nice people whom I’d have no problem with under normal circumstances. If you work at a startup, consider this a wake-up call in how you treat people in my position at your company. You might end up relieving them of their daily Ativan binge on their morning BART ride.

Come on, Bob. Who’s the common denominator? I assume mirrors can reflect your image.

Nowhere is the entitlement in my office more evident than in the realm of office temperature. In my office, there is a Slack channel dedicated to the temperature where “team members” can engage in lively discourse about how cold or hot it is in their respective sections, with the expectation that no matter how they are feeling, I will rush to adjust according to their individual preferences. How do they go about asking me to adjust the temperature? Politely, you might think. But unless you consider nothing but a snowflake emoji or a flame emoji, or even nothing but the words “hot” or “cold” polite, you would be wrong. In other words, I am expected to drop everything at the sight of an emoji to adjust the office temperature any time any single individual feels slightly uncomfortable.

A case in point. What temperature do YOU want the thermostat at, Bob? Set it there and the next person who complains, tell them it’s at the level you want. End of topic. They can wear a sweater or shorts, as they please.

This is a perfect example of a manager afraid to lead.

I keep the office between 71 and 73 degrees, yet on numerous occasions, I’ve seen one person post a snowflake and the person directly next to them post a flame. So, as it turns out, the folks in my office not only seem to have no respect for my time, they seem to have very little consideration for the preferences of the people around them.

Your perception is correct. They have no respect for your time.

In an office of close to 300 people, catering to individual needs such as this is impossible, yet when I bravely approached the executives about my struggles, I was told to continue doing it. Apparently, it is more important for twentysomethings to feel babied than it is for them to put on the goddamn free hoodie I put on their desk the night before they arrive on their first day of work.

One manager, 300 people? That’s not doable. Thus, Bob, you must delegate authority. The men you see being social instead of working? That means they’re available to be “floor sergeants” or something. Task them with the distracting petty issues in their assigned work “sector” then support their decisions within all possible reason.

Do not, repeat, do not form a committee.

Now, instead of actually adjusting the thermostat, I simply walk to it, pretend to push some buttons, and go back to my seat.

Managers can’t be passive-aggressive like that. Just say No!

Lighting is another major source of drama. Ideally, we would all work and live in inviting, open spaces bathed in natural light. Unfortunately, we don’t all have the privilege of living and working in a Dwell magazine spread, and artificial light is a necessary evil. In my office, employees will stop at nothing to mitigate the effects of the evils of lightbulbs, and by that, I mean that they constantly demand different ones.

Set a policy and enforce it. Any policy. Consistency matters more than what you actually decide.

I can’t fault my co-workers entirely for the way I feel. Part of the reason they have become so brazen in their requests and their behavior is because of how we interact. I’m overly friendly and overly accommodating. When faced with the daily passive-aggressive comments and inane requests, I try to summon the courage deep within me to set boundaries and set the precedent that while I’m happy to satisfy reasonable requests, my top priority is to ensure the day-to-day operations of the office — but I fail. In other words, I’m a friendly doormat who resents that part of my job is to reinforce this industry’s culture of prioritizing the comfort and feelings of others over people in my type of position.

That’s good, Bob. Truly. Recognizing the problem in yourself is the first step in improving yourself.

But here’s the cold, hard truth: Either you change and learn to be a hard-ass, or you are not competent as a manager. You can’t stay where you are. The situation will not magically improve, except by using the magic word, “No”.

I was there myself, a nerdy bookworm and martyr-on-demand. I also saw the need to grow out of that and I boot-strapped myself. It took some time, I made some mistakes, but I like myself better as a hard-edged leader than a human toilet to be fed other peoples’… problems.

That’s something you were probably never told in all those ego-fluffing leadership classes you were given: being the leader means you can’t be friends with your subordinates. It might be why you subconsciously refuse to improve even when you realize you need to. If you take the job of leadership, however, then understand, it’s more important for you to be a sturdy brick than an emotional tampon.

It’s harsh. It’s true. Join us and you’ll lead a thousand instead of three hundred, with a lighter heart than you have right now.

The culture my company and Silicon Valley at large supports turns otherwise decent people into demanding individuals who believe their comfort and convenience is more important than anyone else’s. My hope is that, if you’re reading this and work in tech, you’ll better understand that office administration is an underappreciated yet integral part of the industry’s success.

No, Bob. Nobody can fix you but you.

 

I’m trying hard to not notice the Kung Flu but a comic book crossover did the trick. Bonus, I give the Bat-finger to an architect!

Chinese architect unveils a personal bubble that heats up to temperatures high enough to KILL the coronavirus

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8065969/Personal-bubble-concept-heats-temperatures-high-KILL-coronavirus.html

Your first red flag is its being designed by an architect, not an engineer. I don’t often get to indulge in workplace rivalries! Your second red flag is the implication that this “personal bubble” is actually intended to heat YOU up to temperatures high enough to KILL!

And that’s just the headline.

The coronavirus spreading across the globe may have originated from bats and a Chinese architect is pulling inspiration from these creatures’ ability to stay immune in order to protect the public from the illness.

Specifically, gay bats. There are HIV genes found in the virus according to other sources. Eh, who knows? My respect for atheists attempting !science! continues regressing to a very mean attitude.

Designed by Dayong Sun, the Be a Batman wearable consists of a fiber frame shaped like bat wings that is worn like a backpack.

I compare his concept to the leading brand of physical safety isolation: the Zorb ball!

World leader in motion sickness research!

Pro: He remembered leg holes.

Con: He forgot arm holes. Dirty doorknobs notwithstanding, people do occasionally need to operate simple machinery like that. At least include a “gunport” for a grabber stick.

A thermoplastic material stretches between the supports and encases the wearer in a personal bubble to protect them from contracting the coronavirus.

Was that inspired by Batman or the sneeze shield at the salad bar? Answer:

Ah, I see. The panels fold back “bat-like” for storage. So, will there be a gap in microbe coverage at the user’s 12 o’clock high or will it interfere with vision by overlapping and securing in the middle of the user’s visual arc?

An engineering solution would be to cover only the head and shoulders. Then, it could simply fold over the head poncho-style; plenty of room for that outdoors. This is for outdoor use only, right? Because I don’t see it fitting in the cube farm.

The contraption is fitted with UV lights that heat up to temperatures high enough to kill any pathogens in the air, resulting in an enclosed sterilized environment.

UV can sterilize pathogens, yes, but heat is generally produced with heat lamps..? And UV radiation strong enough to sterilize your immediate vicinity sounds like a hellish sunburn risk.

However, the World Health Organization has noted that UV lamps should not be used on areas of skin as this type of radiation can cause skin irritation.

“Skin irritation”. Yep, sunburn. Also, intense UV can damage thin plastics of the sort light enough for folding, depending on material.

‘The coronavirus will be killed by temperatures of 56 degrees Celsius,’ (133 degrees Fahrenheit) Dayong told Dezeen.

‘The PVC film [the thermoplastic material] cover is like our car windshields – there are heater wire in between the glass for heat the ice and snow in the winter.’

Maybe there’s a reason those heater wires are found in rigid, glass applications rather than flexible, thin plastic applications? To say nothing of the poor human inside that electrically heated greenhouse.

Dayong pulled inspiration from the fictional superhero Batman for this project and the animal itself – he said the ‘superhero pushes the limits of human capabilities, and the fact that bats are one of the wild animals that could be the source of Covid-19 (coronavirus).’

Which of those was supposed to be the selling point?

Although Be a Batman is designed for an outbreak, it could be used as a ‘unique private mobile space for people’ once the coronavirus is contained.

It would need a cup holder just to BEGIN competition against coffee houses.

Experts have yet to pinpoint exactly how coronavirus spreads, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believes it is done ‘person-to-person’.

Ah, my tax dollars at work!

Dayong is currently looking for an investor to take this concept into the real world and he also shared that he will offer his services free of charge to make it happen.

‘But sure we still need to do lot of work with engineers for the real production.’

YOU MOTHERFRACKING ARCHITECT! You got international recognition for designing an industrial hygiene product with inspiration from a 1970s childrens’ toy! After you’ve milked the award-show-and-lecture-circuit for all it’s worth (here, thankfully not much), you’ll casually toss the idea to some hapless engineer and pretend to be shocked when he tells you the idea won’t work. How does it come as a surprise, that the Batman logo is not a disinfectant?

No! See this, architect? This is No! Bad product design!

And don’t get me started on how this is INTENDED to double as a 133-Fahrenheit tanning booth.

Post-script:

Experts have recently noted that the current strain of the coronavirus may have originated from a bat cave 16 years ago.

The exact location of the cave in the 2004 study has been kept under wraps, but it’s said to be somewhere in Yunnan, at least 1,000miles (1,700km) from Wuhan.

This explanation is as obviously bogus as Dayong’s Bat-sneeze guard. I don’t know the truth but for my money, it’s the report that one of the Wuhan Biolab technicians was discovered selling “used” lab monkeys for food in the local market that was ground zero. Sounds right for a state-of-the-art biowarfare lab operated by Third World communists.

Sixteen years ago in a bat-cave 1,000 miles away? That sounds like Disney re-rebooting the Star Wars franchise with a DC Comics crossover.