I got the bird in, so I’m rolling along quite nicely right now. Also got Matt working on the cover art for Battles, which is the awesome conclusion of the Mirrors series. I’m also working on the first draft of Kings and Queen, the concluding book of the two book Shadow Army series. Have I mentioned that I’ve been writing a lot?
Last night, the Supreme Court – with Gorsuch smacking down both Cuomo and Chief Justice Roberts (who naturally joined the liberal minority) – ruled in favor of religious liberty. It was ruled that you can’t put extra restrictions on religious services while letting secular activities to continue. This is simple common sense, but that it was 5-4 shows that common sense is at a premium right now.
President Trump had his hearing in Pennsylvania and it went pretty well for him. He’s also got efforts afoot in Georgia and Nevada. Bottom line: it isn’t over yet. Still a very big long shot, but the main thing right now is the fight. Concede nothing to the Democrats. If Joe manages to keep the steal, fine. We won’t like it and we won’t forget it: but we’re not going to roll over for it. The Democrats have been put on notice by Trump that the new GOP will contest every action.
I hope you all have a blessed day!
Blogs For Victory 
It’s been just the two of us for the last 5 or 6 years, since my Mom died, my wife’s brother and his wife retired to Arizona, and my niece and her family moved to St. Louis. For all but one of those years we’ve gone to a Thanksgiving buffet at the lodge of a state park about an hour north of us, but they’re not doing it this year because of the pandemic. So…..we decided to do a small turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, corn pudding and the pumpkin bread pudding I mentioned in the previous thread. My granddaughter and her husband and two girls are going to her Dad’s, but I imagine they’ll help us eat all the leftovers over the next few days.
Enjoy the spirit of the day, and be thankful that we aren’t fighting in the streets.
Yet lol … have a great day spook. Appreciate you
I appreciate you and all the others here who value freedom as well. Keep the faith.
I’m grateful for this blog and all of you here. A friend and I were talking about how, for us, 2020 has been a pretty good year. We developed our friendship, which is very important to both of us, I sold the part of my property that had become a burden and she bought it because it was exactly what she needed to develop her business and it has been wonderful for her, she got married, and I ended up with two adopted extended families that have brought great joy into my life. Living with two and sometimes three teenagers who work for me part time has been more fun than I could possibly have imagined, and they are helping me immeasurably in getting my Wyoming property fixed up, and as Colorado has become more like a prison camp I have started to think of Wyoming as my real home and developed more friendships there and am starting to become part of two communities I had not reached out to before this. All in all, this has been a great year for me.
Well, except for what I call Covid Tongue. I was sure I had the virus last February, looking back on how I felt for a few days, and then in the summer my sense of taste started to go haywire. I now don’t like coffee or bourbon, which removes two great pleasures from my life. I met a man last week who thinks he had the virus over Christmas, and he also doesn’t like coffee any more. I loved my morning ritual of grinding beans and making a fresh vanilla latte, but now hot coffee tastes kind of like the taste you get if you put a penny in your mouth. But I can drink the commercial cold brew as iced coffee, and my new friend has developed a taste for Frappucino, which I thought interesting as his taste changed in ways so much like mine did. So yes, losing the morning latte and the evening Old Fashioned has been sad, but I’m dealing with it.
My biggest problem now is that my silly chickens are giving me about 25 eggs a day and even the duck is laying eggs. I have started taking eggs to the hardware store, the bank and the DMV and finally asked a friend to find me people in her church who would like fresh free range eggs.
So weighing it all, it has been a good year and I am deeply grateful to God for making it possible. “My” kids take turns saying grace before every meal, and their prayers are not memorized prayers but reflect what they think and feel and what is important to them, ranging from giving thanks for the opportunity for us to work together to asking that we do so safely and even that my old cat Frank be healthy, along with prayers for our nation, those serving it and our president. Sharing these moments with them is a great gift for me, and one for which I am thankful.
What lovely thoughts, regardless of the holiday. If every American shared them the country would be a better place.
Nice story thanks for sharing. We’ve all been on this blog for over 15 years which in itself is something to be thankful for. Best wishes and in 2021 I plan to be posting more from the new Montana compound lol.
Thanks to everyone here and it has been a beautiful day here in North Carolina. Of course I have to add my two cents (before taxes) in that;
Amazona, I don’t really drink coffee anymore but when I do–a previous friend of mine taught me about the French press, grinding and roasting my own beans which has allowed me, on occasion, to make a wonderful cup of coffee that I like.
Spook, one thing I have learned is nutmeg should be bought whole and use one of those micro-graters to add it to any recipe. The difference is amazing to the point you will never forget it again.
Cluster, I would mention BabylonBee (satire site) as it has a new gun manufacturer that has developed an AR-15 that glows blue when near a liberal. Constructed with ancient elven technology from the forgotten land of Gondolin, this semi-automatic rifle will pulse with an ethereal blue light whenever it detects a democrat within a 100-yard radius.
Stay safe my friend and in these times–keep your power day.
https://babylonbee.com/news/new-ar-15-glows-blue-when-libs-are-near
Mark (and Matt), keep writing. I think you have found your path that God has set before you.
All, including those that transgress here, try to find the good in your life instead of living in your bubble of hate and misinformation. Get a job. A real job where you interact with real people using your hands, heart and your head. Learn history so we don’t repeat it. The Pilgrims/Puritans first tried Socialism to realize it did not work–one thing I would not like to repeat but we all know “it will work this time.” They lived the “long, cold winter” so we might not have to under Biden.
I am thankful every day I watch the sun set and the moon rise…so to steal a known line; “God bless us everyone.”
Spook, one thing I have learned is nutmeg should be bought whole and use one of those micro-graters to add it to any recipe. The difference is amazing to the point you will never forget it again.
Funny that you should mention that. When my wife and I vacationed in Jamaica back in the late 70’s, we took a bus trip around the island, and the tour guide would stop every so often, reach out the door and pick various fruits and spices off trees right along the road and pass them around the bus to see if people could guess what they were. Nutmeg was one of them. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen a whole nutmeg. I’ll have to check out the specialty and healthfood stores around here because I’m going to try that recipe again at Christmas. It turned out pretty good even without the two ingredients I left out.
DB, I have never been impressed with my French Press coffee. I used to manage a high-end restaurant where people paid a premium price for French Press coffee so I bought a good press and over the years have used it and never found my efforts to produce anything I like. I like tarted-up coffee, with a little sweetness and plenty of steamed milk, and when I stopped working at our office I bought myself a little Breville espresso machine that grinds beans as I use them, pumps hot water under pressure over the grounds and has a steam wand. I’ve been very happy with my results and have loved the little ritual every morning.
I had planned to add to that by roasting beans myself. The best coffee I ever had was when I was a guest on a coffee plantation in El Salvador, right next to the Guatemala border. The coffee at breakfast was so amazing and I had so many refills my host finally had the maid stand next to me with the coffee pot, and that was straight coffee with no milk or sugar—you don’t insult the owner of a coffee plantation by tainting his coffee. I haven’t found Salvadoran coffee but I did find a source of green coffee beans from Guatemala, and thought that adding roasting to the process would be fun, as well as make the house smell amazing.
Now I just have to hope that Covid Tongue will resolve itself.
Now you’ve got me planning (as much as I am allowed to use the word “plan”—when I do, people make a cross with their fingers and back away, knowing that something is going to go very very wrong) to get even more into more serious food prep, like using whole nutmeg.
Have you tried cooking sous vide? I’ve never had good luck with custard, as it always breaks on me and I have to smooth it out in a blender and it just isn’t quite the same. Now that it is raining eggs at my place I make a lot of custard, and I cook it in sealed canning jars in a sous vide cooker where they are in water heated to a specific temperature. My custard now is like silk. Now I want to season it with a little freshly-ground nutmeg.
I have seen those immersion circulation things on TV used by real chefs and look really interesting; however, that is still beyond my skill and countertop level at this point. Still don’t even have a toaster oven.
The guy who taught me about the french press was at one of the places I worked (and am back there again). He & now I use one of those hand-held hot air popcorn poppers to roast the beans. Doesn’t take long to learn from the popping sound how dark the beans are. We usually went until the second round of popping started which made them a lighter roast and cracked perfectly for the press. Darker just took a little more time.
DB, the immersion circulators are actually a godsend for amateur cooks. If you have ever had a thick steak at a high end restaurant and couldn’t figure out how they got it perfectly medium or medium rare all the way through, when yours have levels of well done on the outside to rare in the middle, that is how they do it.
I will buy a good steak and cut it into small portions and in my case package them, seasoned with a little salt and pepper, in vacuum-sealed bags. Then I heat the water to medium rare and toss in a packet, and in an hour or whenever I am ready to eat I take out the perfectly cooked meat, open the bag, pat the meat dry and toss it in a very hot pan to sear the outside. When it gets to the desired temp it stays there so I can’t overcook it, and it is equally done all the way through. I can toss in a frozen packet and it will cook the same way, just take a little longer. It doesn’t get any easier than that. The same concept is true of everything. I once did a good-sized brisket for a Super Bowl party. Because you never know how long it will be till halftime it can be hard to time food, but in this case all I had to do was take the perfectly cooked meat out, pat it dry and season the outside and put it under the broiler for about five minutes to give it some color and texture. I have never been able to make a good Hollandaise sauce, but now I can put the ingredients in a canning jar and drop it into the heated water and whenever I want my sauce it is perfectly cooked at the right temp and never curdles or breaks and doesn’t need stirring. I think it is the “doesn’t need stirring” that I really appreciate.
I haven’t experimented with the more elaborate sous vide recipes but I will. There is a recipe for wild boar shoulder I think sounds like fun, and the girl who works for me is going wild pig hunting in Texas in two weeks and said to tell her what cuts of meat I want and she will bring it back for me. The recipe says the meat is usually tough, but a long cooking time at the perfect temp makes it tender and tasty. I’ve got some yak meat that tends to be tough and I am going to try a small yak roast that way, to see if it will get tender if cooked a long time but not cooked to death like it would be in a slow cooker.
My immersion cooker is about the size of a Dremel and fits in a drawer when I am not using it. My other kitchen tool is now a propane torch, which I sometimes use to sear cooked meat and I am going to use it to carmelize sugar on some custard, though I am a little afraid of cracking the top of the jar. But Creme Brulee is soooo impressive for company, more fun if the prep only took me two minutes (egg yolks, cream and a little sugar) and then another minute or so with a propane torch, with the sous vide cooker doing all the work. (Just let the flame run a few seconds to burn off the propane taste before pointing it at food.)
I read about using an air popper to roast coffee beans. A brother knows a woman from Somalia who just tosses beans in a hot skillet but I think I will roast them instead.
I sometimes wonder if America is smart enough to survive. We already know that white Democrats are the only species on the planet willing to give up their country and way of life out of some self deluded concept of equality. Well now following almost a year of unhinged and irrational fear of a new strain of a flu virus, we learn this:
Failing grades in one of Virginia’s most prominent school districts have spiked this quarter compared to the same time last year, likely signaling the difficulties students, parents, teachers and administrators have faced in moving the local educational system over to “virtual” learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
I think you can count the number of deaths of elementary school children strictly from Covid on one hand, but that fact hasn’t yet registered with the “smart people”. Of course our politically driven teachers unions haven’t exactly educated our children very well now for years, but this “panic” has accelerated the decline and yet have we heard one school official anywhere in this country strongly oppose these unwarranted actions? Have we heard any politician other than Trump and a few Governors speak out in opposition? I can’t think of any. What we have done to our children this year is criminal.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/major-virginia-school-district-failing-grades-are-more-80-las-year
Let me tell you about “virtual learning”. An assignment is given online. Students then look up the answers or form chat room types of groups where one student might really do the work and then shares it with everyone so the rest copy and paste for their answers.
A little knowledge might be imparted by osmosis, but for the most part there isn’t any real teaching going on, particularly in math or science, where the kids can’t ask questions and have a teacher go through the steps necessary to understand the material.
The kid working for me who is taking online college courses has better stuff, and by talking over the questions and assignments with his parents or with me he does learn something, but that is because he wants to, not because it is necessary to do well in the class.
“Virtual learning” basically lets teachers get paid for doing next to nothing. It has to stop…says the woman who has benefited from it by having teenagers able to work for her almost every day. At least I try to impart knowledge in one way or another, usually history or politics but getting them to discuss lessons, but they say their friends are sitting in front of games all day and just copying answers.
Considering that college education is at least half mandatory “filler” so as to keep professors employed, taking online classes and working in any of a variety of ways, especially with a mentor willing to educate in things like provoking thoughts & concepts, along with real skills, is likely far more educational than most of what’s being taught in college these days.
Macy’s iconic Thanksgiving Day Parade appeared to go down like a led balloon with thousands of Americans this year, with social media rife with pejorative comments about the 94th annual event.
I think I watched a total of 5 minutes of the parade before turning it off …. DeBlasio, or should I say Warren Wilhelm, has destroyed that now too.
Democrats, destroying America one tradition at a time.
Matt, this headline referring to the SCOTUS vote on religious freedom was one of those uncomfortable combinations of truth and dismay:
Low-Wattage Justice Sotomayor’s Attack on the Bill of Rights Makes Her the Left’s New Supreme Court Bobblehead. Truth, because it correctly refers to Sotomayor’s low-wattage “intellect” and dismay because someone so dim has so much power.
She reasoned that it is perfectly fine for unelected bureaucrats to ignore the constitution so long as they were doing it for the right reasons. This is exactly the line of attack that I’ve warned about in numerous previous posts. Under Sotomayor’s logic, labeling something as a public health crisis places its management outside the political sphere and in the hands of experts. It is difficult to even explain how fatal that is to our system of government. It means that if someone declares “gun violence” to be a public health crisis, the Second Amendment only exists as far as the experts allow. If “racism” is a public health crisis, Heaven knows what mischief could be worked. It isn’t hard to see “bullying” being declared a public health crisis and free speech disappearing in society much as it is in social media.
She would have far less power if it were not for Chief Justice Mitt Roberts, whose degeneration of the spine is accelerating rapidly. He appears, on the surface, to be a good-looking male. But what we have learned about him erases that “male” part and now whenever I see him the mental vision I have of him is in a plaid onesie hugging a mug of hot cocoa and hoping he can sit at the Cool Girls table with Whoopie. Out-Mitting Mitt isn’t easy, but Roberts seems to have it figured out.
Speaking of unmanly men, you can’t do that without referring to a Cuomo. Pick a Cuomo, any Cuomo, and you’ll be looking at proof that dangly bits do not make a man.
Governor Cuomo’s incessant bleating in that whiny, sing-song nasal New York accent has to be the most annoying sound in media. Any medium. His voice and mannerisms would come through as grating and obnoxious even in print. He makes fingernails on a blackboard sound musical by comparison.
AND HE WON’T SHUT UP !
I picked up my new gun yesterday. My friend has an FFL and ordered me one of the remaining authentic Remington rifles, as Remington is now owned by Ruger and no one knows if they are going to keep the Remington brand. This is the first rifle I have bought for myself—my other guns were my late husband’s—and my friend ordered a nice scope for it, and it is a beauty. My left wrist is still a little weak after shattering it a few years ago—got all the mobility back but strength, not so much—so I will put a fold-down monopod on the barrel and I think it will be a lot of fun. My Wyoming property has a shooting range, more for pistols than for rifles but I have 600 acres and can find a place to shoot if I need more distance.
I’m still on waiting lists for tactical shotguns—during the riots they disappeared from stores as people realized the Left was truly dangerous. I haven’t taken the time to shoot this summer, being so focused on cleaning up my creek bottom before winter, but when we have some of those crisp sunny Wyoming days this winter I intend to work on shooting. (See how I said “intend” instead of “plan”?) (“Crisp” in Wyoming is anything between zero and freezing, and “breezy” goes all the way up to 65 MPH, which is when they close the interstate to high-profile vehicles. Last week on the way to Denver I saw enclosed trailers on their sides or tops along the highway, a couple of campers, about half a dozen semi trailers and one beautiful Class A motorhome all piled in the median, blown over. Weather.com has a video of a semi being blown over just south of Cheyenne—-that was probably what had the highway closed right before I got there. Breezy. Wyoming is not for sissies.)
I have a mountain lion problem There is a breeding female somewhere on the big cattle ranch that surrounds my property, and two years in a row now adolescent lions have come down to practice hunting on my horses. The first year all they did was scare three penned-up horses, running one into a fence where she got hurt and leaving claw marks in the dust on the haunches of the other two. That is how I knew they were youngsters, learning how to hunt, as an adult would not have attacked a horse from the rear like that, and it looked like there were two of them. Then in May of this year two took down and killed an older mare of mine in the creek bottom. Again, it looked like two inexperienced hunters, and it was not the clean kill one would expect from an experienced hunter. It was pretty sad and ugly. So this winter I am planning to try to get Mama before this year’s babies decide to use my place for training killers. I doubt that I will do the shooting—-I am too inexperienced—but it is on my list to try to protect my horses from more attacks. But I do intend to develop some basic skills.
If Colorado doesn’t do a 180 and snap out of this prison camp mentality imposed by Herr Commandant Polis I will spend my winter in Wyoming, and I am at the end of the road so I do need to have some additional skills. This fall I thought I might have a bear in my back yard—it turned out that it was a giant raccoon moving stuff around trying to get to cat food—and I realized if a bear got into my house at night I would have to go through or past the bear to get out. So I took my electric bullhorn into my bedroom. It has an ear-splitting siren mode, and I figured that would be more effective at getting rid of a bear than anything, while discouraging him from coming at me. I once stuck one of those compressed-air boat horns in the face of a raccoon staring me down with that “You’re not the boss of me” attitude coons have, and when I pushed the button he did one of those cartoon things where he levitated and then started running in mid-air. I thought it was funny—till he came back that night with his posse and they broke into my feed room, slashed open 40 new bags of grain, opened all the cabinet doors and dragged out all the food, turned on the water in the sink and took everything out of the refrigerator. My neighbor says skunks are politicians but racoons are terrorists.)
Life at my Wyoming place is so different from that in Colorado, even on my farm. The farm is still so—-civilized. The Wyoming place is not only wonderful, it is a perfect place to go in case of a zombie apocalypse.
I’m more worried about a Progressive apocalypse than a zombie apocalypse. I wish you weren’t so damn far away. We’re fine where we are until the large metro areas like Indianapolis (130 miles), Chicago (180 miles), Detroit (190 miles) and Cincinnati (190 miles) start to empty out. Then even rural Indiana is going to get dicey. We’re like the hub of a wheel in relation to those 4 cities. As I said a while back, I have enough gas cans to get to you without having to buy gas on the way, but actually getting there in the midst of mass chaos would likely be difficult. Hopefully it won’t come to that, but there are fairly mainstream Democrats like Robert Reich who are calling for a Truth & Reconciliation Commission to deal with Trump supporters. That can’t and won’t happen in America.
When you read dystopian literature you see that city folks always seem to think that getting out of the cities will get them food/shelter/protection. I think the key is to read the tea leaves and get out early.
One of the kids working for me assured me that if the excrement hits the ventilator they will head out to my place in two or three days. I told him no, it would have to be in two or three HOURS, if it is due to failure of the electrical grid or a biological attack, something sudden that does not build up. A slower escalation would give a little more time, but not enough to start planning and sorting out essentials they would not want to leave behind. They have a lot of guns, as his father is a licensed vendor, and I have suggested putting some of their gun safes on my place, because (1) everyone knows they have them, and (2) it would take forever to get them loaded up to move.
I told my neighbor one day that if things really blew up I was going to take my tractor down to where our dirt road comes off the highway and plow it up and put some trees and stuff there, so to a casual observer it wouldn’t look like a road into somewhere, and he said he’d be right there with me.
BTW, I use “zombie apocalypse” as shorthand for any major uprising or upheaval.
We talked yesterday about things like a civil war and Leftist oppression, and agreed that very few if any of the military would take part, ditto for law enforcement, and really all bureaucrats can do is point and say “go beat up on that guy for me”. So I don’t think we would see much in the way of top-down attacks on us or on our freedom other than bureaucratically. I don’t fear our military or our law enforcement. I do fear the FBI and CIA but just the upper levels, and even they get their power through bureaucracy more than through guns.
What I do see is the possibility of imposing the kinds of restrictions that get people panicky, much like the early days of the Covid Panic when people were frantic and sure they were going to suffocate with stinky butts. Amplify that and you have a real crisis. I know a man who worries that the feds might shut down the electrical grid. I don’t see it happening—rather, I never did see it happening—but now that the Left has its successes built upon generation of mass fear and panic fed by its lapdog media who knows how far they would go to have an excuse to go all Storm Trooper on us? Things I thought were wild fantasies just a few months ago are looking like reality now, so I don’t dismiss anything any more. I’m just going to order a new cord for my freeze dryer and try to be ready for anything.
I do fear the FBI and CIA but just the upper levels, and even they get their power through bureaucracy more than through guns.
My recollection is that there are around 130,000 full-time federal law enforcement officers. I don’t know how many of them are trigger pullers, or how many would turn on their fellow Americans. We probably won’t know until it happens, but I think it’s a safe bet that virtually every state across flyover country has more hunters and target shooters than the Feds do trigger pullers.
BTW, I use “zombie apocalypse” as shorthand for any major uprising or upheaval.
I knew that. 🙂
And here I thought you thought I am afraid of the living dead.
Wait….now that you mention it, I AM pretty creeped out by Nancy Pelosi
A quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_enforcement_in_the_United_States#List_of_agencies_and_units_of_agencies
shows that most of the LEOs are investigative in nature. They may carry guns, but they are not necessarily like armed FBI agents. There are the Forest Service, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Police, the Office of Criminal Investigations of the FDA, and so on. Personally, I don’t feel threatened by the knowledge that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Police or the Office of Protection Services at the Smithsonian are federal law enforcement officers. I’d guess the trigger pullers are concentrated in the military police and the FBI, for the most part.
Breaking News: Iran’s top nuclear scientist was fatally shot in northern Iran, state media reported. He was seen as the force behind its nuclear weapons program.
Candlelight vigils will be held in Portland, Seattle, Chicago and Washington D.C. to mourn his passing, followed by peaceful protests against his murder (probably by police) as a food truck was restocked to feed the protestors and bricks were stacked underneath bus benches and in alleys to prepare for the protests.
OK–here’s the game: Can you tell which part of this is actually the NYT story and which is just assumed to be a natural reaction by the Left?
I’m guessing the second paragraph is from The Onion or the Babylon Bee, Still accurate — not even fake but accurate, just accurate.
Actually, I made up the second paragraph, but the sad thing is it could have come from a NYT article. It is not hard to imagine weeping Libs piling up whatever you would pile up to honor someone like that—teddy bears? play-dough bombs?—-and lighting candles in front of his photos and then rampaging through the streets to “protest” his death.
After all, somewhere in town there must still be stuff for sale that can be stolen.
And here we go….John Brennan is deeply deeply upset by the killing of the architect of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fahrizade. I don’t know if he has built a shrine to Fahrizade or lit any candles for him but he is sure unhappy that the guy got taken out. I’d pat myself on the back for seeing this kind of thing coming, except it is so easy to predict Leftist lunacy it’s not even a challenge. You just think “What would be the stupidest response possible?” and you know what to expect.
The Appeals Court ruling on Trump’s appeal of the lower court decision to dismiss his case in Pennsylvania wrote: “Tossing out millions of mail-in ballots would be drastic and unprecedented, disenfranchising a huge swath of the electorate and upsetting all down-ballot races too,” the judges write. “That remedy would be grossly disproportionate to the procedural challenges raised.”
Let me put that in plain English: The choice is between “disenfranchising a huge swath of the electorate” by tossing out the mail-in ballots because of corruption and malfeasance in the way election officials handled the election in Pennsylvania and “disenfranchising a huge swath of the electorate” by allowing illegal and fraudulent votes to cancel out their legitimate and legal votes. Therefore, given this choice, the court chooses to reward fraud and corruption by allowing illegal and illegitimate votes to be counted, and to hell with the people who followed the rules and voted properly.
And the court does not feel that awarding the presidency of the United States based on fraudulent and corrupt election management is a serious enough consequence to intervene.
As for “upsetting all down-ballot races too” surely even the appellate court judges could figure out a way to throw out only the top-of-the-ballot votes, especially as so many of the bogus votes did not include down-ballot candidates.
It is also notable that they trivialize the incredibly important and significant issue of denying citizens the right or ability to choose their own president in a legitimate and legal election as merely a procedural matter–you know, like dismissing the prosecution for theft of a million dollars of diamonds as a mere “procedural challenge” to the law saying they have to be paid for.
I also point out that while the Constitution does not allow another election for the president to take place, states can and often do have new elections for state officials when there is a serious problem with an election. So the judge whining about protecting down-ballot votes is transparently silly.
Just a mention here from Matt about what many of us suspected all along about how our government is lying to us. I saw something similar several weeks ago and wish I did a screen shot but this one is a lot better in-depth wise.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/11/27/johns-hopkins-study-saying-covid-19-has-relatively-no-effect-on-deaths-in-u-s-deleted-after-publication-n1178930
Oddly, I was wondering just this morning if anyone had analyzed the death rate from flu to see if that had dropped precipitously, which I thought would indicate that a lot of flu deaths had been attributed to Covid-19. And then you link this study, which finds that deaths from other causes went down in pretty much the same proportions, overall, as deaths attributed to Covid went up.
Gee, who woulda thunk it?
It was just a short time ago that Johns Hopkins was incessantly cited by the hysterics and Pandemic Panic people as the ultimate authority on all things Covid—when they were sounding alarms, anyway.
Now, evidently not so much.
Your laugh for the day.
broken link
Worked fine for me. For those who can’t open it, it says the Pope is considering Joe Biden for beatification for raising millions from the dead.
I did just get an error message so thanks for the explanation. I did find something today about the archbishop of D.C. agreeing to let Joe continue to receive Communion, in violation of the Church rules, because he wants to open lines of communication or some such nonsense.
But what can you expect? The Jesuits used to be the kick-ass defenders of the faith, and now they are a bunch of fluttery snowflakes and appeasers, and the Pope is awfully close to being an out-and-out Commie. So much for doctrine—religious or secular, it’s all squishy and malleable depending on feelings and wants.
“The kind of relationship that I hope we will have is a conversational relationship where we can discover areas where we can cooperate that reflect the social teachings of the church, knowing full well that there are some areas where we won’t agree,” Gregory said. “They are areas where the church’s position is very clear,” pinpointing the former vice president’s support for abortion.
Clearly he defines “cooperate” as “ignore blatant violation of the rules because politics”. Why do I think politics play a role in his wishy-washy effort to tap dance around his own violation of his own Church’s law? (“[Those] obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion,” : the Vatican’s Canon Law 915) Well, he didn’t hold back in his commentary, as a leader of the Church and not as a private citizen, on Donald Trump:
Gregory denounced President Donald Trump last summer for having his picture taken at St. John’s Episcopal Church and at the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C.
As The Washington Post reported:
[Gregory] rewrote his biography on Tuesday when he sharply took to task not only President Trump but the country’s biggest Catholic lay organization — the Knights of Columbus — after Trump posed for photos outside an Episcopal Church near the White House and a Knights-owned Catholic shrine in Northeast Washington. “I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles,” he said in a statement.
So the archbishop-to-be-cardinal doesn’t mind violating religious principles when it comes to butchering unborn children in the womb, but he does find it inacceptable to agree to let the President of the United States be photographed in front of a Catholic shrine. That is certainly a strange hierarchy of “religious principles”.
Hugh Brown, executive vice president of the American Life League, a Catholic pro-life group, told The Christian Post that “the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion is fairly simple: Life begins at the moment of creation and a child in the womb is created in the image of God.”
He went on to say “Gregory is like thousands of men who put the respect of the world above that of the Holy Spirit. Joe Biden is one of the pillars of the culture of death. The church in its cowardice has allowed him to go unchecked.”
I suggest that it is worse than that—the church in its cowardice has rewarded Biden, and Pelosi, by endorsing their abortion stances through publicly supporting them.
Biden has said (inexplicably not bursting into flame at the time) “My Catholic faith drilled into me a core truth – that every person on earth is equal in rights and dignity, because we are all beloved children of God. We are all created ‘imago Dei’ – beautifully, uniquely, in the image of God, with inherent worth.”
But he stopped there, without finishing the thought——” with inherent worth if a pregnant female says so, and otherwise is not only disposable but can be torn apart in agony and sold for parts like an old Buick”.
Biden has also promised that as president, he will reinstate Obama-era policies which required the Little Sisters of the Poor to give employees access to birth control, though this violates the Catholic beliefs of the sisters, and despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled July 8 that the Catholic nuns are exempt from Obama’s contraceptive mandate.
Translation: “Supreme Court? What Supreme Court? As
kingpresident I can rule with a phone and a pen like Barack taught me. I don’t care about no steenking Supreme Court!”Now you know why some of us want some plain-speaking no-nonsense Westerners on the Supreme Court, to balance out the fluttery urban types who get the vapors when asked to actually take a stand (Chief Justice Mitt Roberts comes to mind) or who are in the thrall of silly Leftist feel-goodery.
As for the individual opinions, Justice Gorsuch comes roaring out by taking a flamethrower to the Chief Justice — not on just one issue but on two. To me, his language borders on intemperate and likely to leave a mark on the relationship between the two. I agree with Gorsuch on the merits of his points, but I’m still a bit taken aback by the force with which he advances them here on a petition for emergency relief. There is some real “drawing a line in the sand” stuff here, and his thinly-veiled expression of disdain would make have made Justice Scalia blush — and chuckle under his breath.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has shown the kind of backbone and courage we need from all the justices, when he took Chief Justice Roberts to task, by name, for his timid stance in South Bay Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, 590 U. S. ___ (2020), in which THE CHIEF JUSTICE expressed willingness to defer to executive orders in the pandemic’s early stages based on the newness of the emergency and how little was then known about the disease.
emphasis mine
Why have some mistaken this Court’s modest decision in Jacobson for a towering authority that overshadows the Constitution during a pandemic? In the end, I can only surmise that much of the answer lies in a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis. But if that impulse may be understandable or even admirable in other circumstances, we may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack. Things never go well when we do
Burn!
When a junior Justice takes on the Chief Justice, by name, for his “…willingness to defer to executive orders …” and then says he can only surmise that much of the answer lies in …a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis…” he is basically calling Roberts a spineless weenie.
Which we have been saying for some time now.
This telegraphs, in my opinion, the result of some heated debate in chambers. Hopefully the Lefties were paying attention and are realizing they, too, are likely to be called out for superficial or agenda-building rulings. It’s starting to look like High Noon on the Court.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their conscience.
C. S. Lewis
PA judge ruled state election likely unconstitutional. That would in effect give the Republican state legislature the go ahead to choose PA electors. Other states could follow. This is all independent of Trump’s law team efforts.
PA Supreme Court issued an order vacating the lower court’s decision to suspend certification of their election results saying the challenge to the state’s vote-by-mail came too late. Not sure WHY it was ruled as “too late” considering the challenge has legal merit and the electors have not yet been chosen. I imagine this will be appealed to the US Supreme Court forcing PA to abide by their state’s constitution, which as I understand it was how the FL election was handled in 2000. We’ll see.
An originalist Court should rule on the actual specific wording of the constitutions of the states, and if it does then violations of those constitutional rules should mean the election results are overturned because the elections themselves are defective.
This will, if it happens, result in outrage and hysteria (violence is a given) from people who think that treating constitutions as set law governing what we can and can’t do is just plain wrong, that any constitution is and should be a “living document” that can be flexed, bent or simply ignored at will.