Tolerance vs. Forbearance

"[Forbearance] implies patience, mutual respect, the extension of time, a certain latitude, and perhaps some affection that motivates a person to carry the burden of disagreement. In this sense, forbearance is less a momentary cease-fire than an active extension of concern for one another. "

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/august-web-only/healthier-approach-to-disagreement-in-church-begins-with-on.html

From the book, Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church, by James Calvin Davis (Eerdmans, 2017).

Houston strong

These people are not waiting in line to get something--they are the volunteers in Houston waiting for an assignment.

Building up vs. Tearing Down: Trump and Charlottesville, guest blog

Building up vs. Tearing Down: Trump and Charlottesville
by Jane M. Orient, M.D.

The President’s remarks that provoked an unprecedented storm of hate and outrage were made at a press conference about—infrastructure. President Trump explained why our infrastructure is in such terrible shape. There’s the permitting process that delays projects for years or decades, and causes costs to double, triple, quintuple, or more.

This resonated with me. My dad was a modestly successful general contractor. He built small commercial buildings like grocery stores, and affordable housing. He could have built more. “Old age and smashed feet” didn’t stop him. The city’s inspection process finally did. It was always a problem. He might have to sit around for days waiting for an inspector to deign to show up. Then the inspector could red flag a project just because he was having a bad day or felt disrespected.

So a man who built sound, durable buildings—who could and sometimes did do everything from surveying the land to digging the foundation to finishing the roof—whose livelihood was at risk if he did a bad job—was at the mercy of a government employee who might not know how to hold a hammer or even know the rules he was enforcing. It got worse and worse. Only the big guys who could afford lawyers and accountants, and who had “connections,” could stay in business. Houses got more and more expensive. And they got worse, not better. Most are now thrown together with sticks and stucco.

Big projects are far worse. The U.S. will never regain dominance in nuclear energy without a massive overhaul of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A plant that is built in 2 years in Taiwan can’t even get a permit in less than 10 years here. And that’s for a plant that is exactly the same as ones that have been functioning flawlessly for decades. If you have a really innovative design, one that would be even safer, it takes more than 3 years for bureaucrats to evaluate the proposal. Meanwhile, you can’t even build a prototype.

It’s like this for all industries here, including medicine. President Trump sent a signal that he was going to start cutting useless red tape. Would this be good for black people? Poor people? Industry? Taxpayers? Absolutely yes, yes, yes, and yes. It would be a start for making America great again.

But the signal set off panic among swamp dwellers: the 3 million bureaucrats who block productive work. The lobbyists who advocate for rules to crush little guys. CEOs of megacorporations who dread competition. And of course those who really don’t want America to be great, and politicians who keep their power by demagoguing on problems they themselves caused.

The hate-Trump, stop-Trump-at-all-costs media couldn’t allow people to learn about our infrastructure problems and what must be done to fix them. They needed a diversion. So they talked about a mob scene in Charlottesville, where part of the project to obliterate America’s history is happening.

A lot of good people object to tearing down monuments. But some bad folks you wouldn’t want to be associated with got a permit to hold a rally protesting the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee. A few hundred people might have waved their signs, listened to speeches containing offensive ideas, and gone home. But another group crashed the party, without a permit, to fight the last war against “Nazis,” wearing masks and scary costumes, armed with baseball bats. The police apparently let them in.

To me (and apparently to the President) it looked like violent agitators type 1 versus violent agitators type 2. But reporters called them, respectively, “white supremacists” and “protesters.” Social justice warriors, including CEOs and congressmen, are engaged in frenzied virtue signaling. The President supposedly didn’t condemn the type 1 agitators fast enough or harshly enough and suggested there might be a moral equivalence. The type 2 agitators, in this view, had a pure motive for beating people up and throwing things, whereas type 1 agitators were pure Evil.

Some type 2s carried Black Lives Matter signs. Black lives are indeed threatened, but not by swastika-waving misfits. These are their real problems:

• Crime. Thousands of blacks are killed by (mostly black) criminals, mostly in inner cities ruled by liberal Democrats for decades. Trump wants more effective law enforcement.
• Drugs. While authorities blame doctors, international drug cartels thrive under the protection of sanctuary cities, pushing heroin, carfentanyl, and other things you can’t get at Walgreen’s. Thousands are dying. Trump wants to clean up sanctuary cities.
• Abortion. More than 19 million black babies have been aborted since 1973; the rate is three times that of whites. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a rabid racist. Trump wants to decrease abortion.
• Poor medical care. The past 8 years of ObamaCare have brought huge cost increases and deterioration in availability and quality. Trump wants to repeal it.
• Disease and poverty. Over-regulation by environmental radicals, based on fraudulent science, has killed and keeps on killing millions of African Africans (from resurgent malaria since banning DDT), and the war on affordable energy will keep Africa mired in poverty. Americans are less affected—so far. Trump wants to restore reason and honesty to the EPA and other regulatory agencies.

The frenzy really is about the subject of that press conference and its message that Trump is serious about draining the swamp. Those who have enriched themselves at the expense of black people and other hard-working Americans are not worried about neo-Nazis, but about loss of their special privileges. They will fight Trump—and those who elected him—with every vile tactic they can muster.

Antifa is the new KKK

". . .yet again for the umpteenth time in the history of the American Left, it has turned to violence. And just as the paramilitary and hooded Ku Klux Klan was used as, per Columbia University historian Eric Foner, “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party” and, according to University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease, the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party,” so now the hooded- fascists of Antifa are being used as a paramilitary organization designed to further the Left’s political agenda by force.

Some things never change."

The American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord, August 29

When common sense reigns, lives are saved

When gang violence is reduced in our major cities, minority communities benefit the most because they are usually the victims. Democrats know this, but prefer the virtue signaling.

"Allowing officers to use their discretion when dealing with criminal aliens has been an effective tool in curbing crime. In 2008, former Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris revealed that a 24% decrease in homicides and a 26% decrease in auto thefts could be partly attributed to “a new immigration policy that allows our officers to use their discretion when dealing with criminal aliens” and “unprecedented cooperation between our investigative units and our state, federal, and local partners. (Maricopa County Attorney’s Office).” Border patrol contacts in the Tucson Sector reported that in the same fiscal year (2008 – October to September) they saw a 41% decrease in border apprehensions. Nevertheless, on July 24 the new restrictive immigration policy went into effect at the Phoenix Police Department at the request of an open borders coalition. Now officers can’t even use the term “illegal alien,” which has been officially replaced with “unlawfully present.”"

Judicial Watch, August 28

Monday Memories--sailing

Saturday, August 26, Bob went sailing with Tom, our neighbor, Jim another neighbor and Tom's brother Steve.  He often goes out with Jack, Tom's 12 year old son on the sunfish, but Tom also has a 32' sailboat with a cabin with bathroom and shower, small kitchen.  They were out about 2.5 hours.  I went to the end of the dock to see them (Bob called), but they didn't get very close.

Re-segregating the campus

Jodi Linley, assistant professor of art at University of Iowa, wants to segregate her classes by race, wants an anti-white atmosphere. It's trendy. Workshops on white privilege have turned into white shaming. It got her name and photo in the paper.

"She offered up five strategies other professors can use to deconstruct white privilege in their own classes, such as making sure students know that their views on race will be challenged, “interrupting oppression” that occurs in classroom settings, an...d segregating students by race so they can have more productive dialogues about privilege." http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/white-shaming-is-new-rage-on-college-campuses/

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/black-commencement-harvard.html

That is what passes for inclusivness and freedom of expression at that university, tax supported by white Iowans, of course. If education was supposed to elevate and improve the citizenry, she is proof that there is always an exception to the rule. 94% of Iowa is white; why should she be allowed to diss and insult them?

Was Amerigo a racist?

 The United States of America.  America was named for an Italian explorer and cartographer in 1507 (a white guy who called Brazil The New World) Amerigo Vespucci. I'm sure that makes the name of our country racist by association. And he worked for the French, Portuguese and Spanish, all those racist Europeans. This week-end a statue in Crawford Co. Ohio was decapitated--he wasn't even in the Civil War! But he was white. Probably just vandals, but aren't all anarchists vandals?

https://www.biography.com/people/amerigo-vespucci-9517978

Hillsdale Pledge

 

Hillsdale College Freshman Pledge

We, the students of Hillsdale College, commit ourselves to diligent study and patient reflection. Having come to learn, we are proud to do so with integrity and will conduct ourselves with exemplary honor. As sacrifices past and present make possible our education, we too become stewards of this College for the generations yet to come. We pledge ourselves to the pursuit of truth, the love of the good, and the cultivation of beauty, for the sake of our minds and hearts and for an ennobled society. By so doing, we embrace the high calling of liberal education.

 https://www.hillsdale.edu/


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Trump pardoned a civil servant; Obama drug dealers

 

But feminine clothing and accessories for men are encouraged in our culture--even the more drastic removal of male body parts and adding female hormones is encouraged. I don't get it. It mocks a violent criminal and violates his rights, but not a tennis athlete?

The death of the Republican Party

Republicans have stopped Trump. Only they had the power. Democrats are toothless, starving kittens looking for a meal of racism and Russian hackers to chase.

BRENT BOZELL: "In January of this year, they formally controlled both houses of Congress and the executive branch. Every single thing they’d ever promised was now possible. They now had the power to enact every single spending cut they’d ever solemnly pledged. All those wasteful programs designed to fill the liberal sandbox — PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, NEH and the rest of the alphabet soup; all the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to multi-billion-dollar corporations; all of the hundreds of billions of dollars directed toward leftist social engineering — poof! All of it could come to an end with a stroke of a pen. They now had the power to restore fiscal tax sanity too. Remember the flat tax? The fair tax? Slashing the highest corporate taxes in the world? Giving you a tax break? All of it could be done with a snap of the fingers.

Repeal Obamacare? Check. End illegal immigration? Check. Build the wall? Check. Crush the Deep State? Done, by God, done! There was not a damn thing the Democrats could do to stop them from draining the swamp. Except the Republican leadership didn’t mean it. With the exception of the Freedom Caucus in the House, and literally a handful in the Senate, the rank-and-file didn’t either. Not one word of it."

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/27/exclusive-brent-bozell-the-slow-death-of-the-republican-party/

It's not what you think

Jobs? Border Security? North Korea? Graduation rates? Student loan debt? Zilch. Nada. Just monuments and flags, and next it will be WWII monuments and the U.S. stars and stripes. If you thought this was about slavery or the Confederacy, wake up.

Yet so many are naïve.  How many people were subjected to vague references to bigotry or "the last 7 months" with a big sigh in today's Sunday services? The Democrats are leaderless and Republicans spineless.

“I want to talk to you about the manufactured moral crisis in this country right now, because that’s truly what’s going on,” said Buck. “We’re in the midst of a moral panic. A manufactured moral crisis and while a lot of us could just ignore it, it will have ramifications. It should be met on the battlefield of ideas and blown to smithereens.”

“This is very dangerous stuff, he added. “This notion that we have to go back and erase, eliminate, re-write, pave-over, whatever it may be, different parts of history has got to stop. It feels incredibly soviet –because the soviets did exactly this kind of thing. It feels very totalitarian –because totalitarian regimes are quite concerned with the past as a means of controlling the future.”

http://bucksexton.com/buck-liberals-creating-manufactured-moral-crisis-in-america/

President Trump condemns bigotry

Why is the left so unhappy with Trump's public denounciation of the activists in Charlottesville? I've highlighted (in caps) the problem. He blamed them all.

"I just met with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the deadly car attack that killed one innocent American and wounded 20 others. To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered.

As I said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.

And as I have said many times before: No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.
Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, AND OTHER HATE GROUPS THAT ARE REPUGNANT to everything we hold dear as Americans.
 
We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America. . . ." August 14, 2017, President Donald Trump

Trump pardons Sheriff Joe

Trump's enemies go crazy. (What's new?) Then look at Obama's pardons. . . crack dealers, money launderers, bank defrauders, wire fraud, mail fraud, tax fraud, transporting stolen goods. Trump pardons a man doing his job victim of the government's witch hunt. https://www.justice.gov/pardon/obama-pardons

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/348061-trump-pardons-arpaio

What are the specific charges?

Just like the Russian hacking charges or stealing the election, so we hear the references to Trump being a racist, but nothing specific. Once the DNC and DWS became serious suspects, the whole Russia story faded and the whole statue and flag conspiracy blossomed.  Oh, they didn't like the speed at which he condemned neo-nazis in Charlottesville.  But Obama waited 6 years to condemn terrorism by an Islamist at Ft. Hood.  Why the emphasis on speed--especially since the cell phone videos circulating now show how much of the violence was perpetrated by the alt-Left.

I see the charges and claims on social media and in the Bezo-WaPo/NYT/cable news cabal that Trump is a racist. I haven't seen or heard actual racism or specifics, just the charges.

•  Is it his slogan, "Make America great again," and you don't know any great black people or communities or leaders so you think he's leaving out people of color?
• Are you afraid that black citizens will take your job, so you want to frighten them?
•  Is it the Islamist terrorism warnings, the incidents Obama ignored and called work place violence?
• How many drone killings without trial has Trump ordered? Obama did that for some Islamists who were American citizens and they were quite frequent in Yemen according to the Guardian before Trump was elected.
•  Are Mexican gangs afraid they won't get sanctuary in Democrat run cities so they can kill more Mexican immigrants? 

 And besides, exactly what race are Mexicans and Muslims? Mexico is a very wealthy, multicultural country with citizens of many ethnicities who speak a European language, Spanish. In fact, if you turn on Telemundo or Univision, they are much whiter than U.S. cable.  Islam is a religion with several divisions, but it's not a race.

Mona Lisa smiles

Earlier this year our daughter gave us Roku, a device that allows streaming if you have an internet connection.  I selected quite a few movie channels, but most were just awful.  In fact, I didn't know there were so many terrible movies until I started browsing my Roku possibilities. Finally, I found a channel with Roku with some good movies (free), FXM. We watched Mona Lisa Smile with Julia Roberts (2003) last night because I didn't care much for the program at Hoover in Lakeside. We'd seen it when it was fresh, but since it is a period piece (1954) it doesn't age, even if its view of the early 50s is a bit prejudiced (said to be based on H. Clinton's recall). True, college women thought a lot about marriage in those years (at least I did in the late 50s), and we'd joke about the PHT degree, putting hubby through, but when I see the serial relationships and rape charges today, or educated women starting families at 40, are college students so much better off or prepared for life's challenges in 2017?

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mona-lisa-smile-2003

Ebert opines: "Julia Roberts is above all an actress with a winning way; we like her, feel protective toward her, want her to prevail. In "Mona Lisa Smile," she is the conduit for the plot, which flows through her character. The major supporting roles are played by luminaries of the first post-Julia generation, including not only Dunst, but Julia Stiles as Joan Brandwyn, a girl smart enough to be accepted by Yale Law but perhaps not smart enough to choose it over marriage; Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle Levy, who is sexually advanced and has even, it is said, slept with the studly young Italian professor, and Ginnifer Goodwin as Constance Baker, who is too concerned about her looks."

It was certainly better than this Rolling Stone review:  "The girls are played by a who's who of young Hollywood womanhood — Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal — each given one emotion to play and each forced to stare at Roberts in awe for showing them the way. That Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a Funeral) directed this insulting swill is beyond depressing. Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest."

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/history-versus-her-story/Content?oid=914311

http://www.threemoviebuffs.com/review/mona-lisa-smile.html

D'Souza knows racism

According to immigrant Dinesh D'Souza (who is classed as White in the U.S. Census as is Bobby Jindal) there's no evidence that Republicans ever owned a slave (whereas free blacks did), so maybe when all the statues are destroyed, the Democrats can claim there was no slavery?

"Part of the Democrats’ big lie is to shift the blame for slavery from themselves to the South. This licenses leftist intimidation, vandalism and even violence in the name of fighting Southern bigotry. But let’s remember that most Southerners did not own slaves. Most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves. Let’s also recall that the Northern Democrats led by Stephen Douglas supported slavery with the same resourcefulness and determination as the Southern Democrats."

Christians and social media

Today I read a really convicting article on line about social media and why it is so bad for Christians. Of course, she had a blog, wrote for on-line publication, uses FB and e-mail and twitter, but still made good points. I am guilty as charged. So now I'm dropping a quarter into a cup on my desk each time I turn on my computer. I'll find a good cause. So far, it's $1.25 today.

Things I know about President Trump. He's not a racist.

• I know hip hop performers and black comedians regularly use the N-word, but I’ve never heard the President use it.
• I know white liberals whose only black friends are their janitor, door man or the med tech in their doctor's office, but President Trump has decades of real friendships and working relationships with the black movers and shakers.
• I know of some neighborhoods where liberals use “green” regulations to raise costs to keep out minorities, but I’ve never heard that a Trump development did that.
• I know that many government regulations work together, whether by design or accident, to keep minorities poor by destroying families, but President Trump wants wealth for everyone.
• I know that Planned Parenthood targets black communities with their abortion services, but I’ve never heard of President Trump favoring abortion to reduce the black population.
• I know that our public school system works against poor minority students, but President Trump wants all children to succeed and have choices like charter schools that the children of rich Congress members and President Obama have.
• I know that tougher crime laws have reduced violent crime by about 70% since 1993, mostly to the benefit of black citizens, but I’ve never heard President Trump sound like Mayor DiBlasio who seems to be working to undo 2 decades of improved law enforcement in NYC.
• I know bullying when I see and hear it. The advice is usually one of two methods to counteract it: push back or walk away.  Do you really believe he will walk away from this bullying from the Left?

So why when the President points out that two fringe movements (with the same basic philosophy of hate and anarchy) are a problem in Charlottesville and in the culture, do the media and Democrats rend their clothing and scream racism? Everyone now calling out bigotry and hatred are using them as code words for racism, unless it is from Communist inspired Antifa and BLM.  But Democrats are Johnnie one Note and have no other song.

Diversity

Daniel Henninger of Wall St. Journal:

  "The Google firing of James Damore was one of these big events. Its meaning was that the goal of diversity, whatever its original intent, has become mostly a totem. Mr. Damore was the little boy in the folk tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” who shouts, “But he doesn’t have anything on!” Google’s emperors banished James Damore for unmasking their diversity conceit."

http://www.businessinsider.com/harmeet-dhillon-james-damore-2017-8

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/op-ed/articles/2017-08-22/why-fired-engineer-james-damore-may-have-a-federal-case-against-google

If you defend yourself, the leftists will call you a mascot of the Alt-Right. https://qz.com/1055466/the-alt-right-has-an-all-new-formula-for-undermining-silicon-valley/

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/fired-google-engineer-james-damore-says-this-.html