Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Answering John Nolte’s Point

Posted: February 2, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Yesterday I discovered John Nolte’s piece: Nolte: Impeachment Proves Nancy Pelosi Is an Idiot which is in stark contrast to my piece yesterday titled: The Left is Damn Lucky to Have Pelosi.

I read the Nolte’s piece and thought his points needed to be answered if I was going to dispute them.

First: Impeaching the President with No Crime

Impeachment wasn’t Pelsoi’s idea. With the Mueller report being a dud and the progressive caucus insisting on impeachment the idea is to glam onto something fast. This was it

Second: Impeaching the President for Asking for a Judicial Ruling

Pelosi not only knew that impeachment was a loser, but knew that the longer it went on the worse it would be. Litigation would only drag out the damage.

Third: There Was No Quid Pro Quo

This is true but irrelevant, when you’re making it up the point is just to make the argument and let the media carry it. They could have impeached him for a nosebleed in the capital, as long as it was impeachment.

Fourth: Rushing Impeachment

The question assumes the goal was to remove Trump Pelosi knew it would not happen (See #2) That impeachment will be done one day after Iowa give the candidates a reason to ignore it as old news.

Fifth: Sitting on the Impeachment Articles for a Month

I’ve got to admit this one confused me too, but again this move was driven by the big brains using twitter and was glammed onto by the base. Once the media was all into this she was too. This was all about appeasement of them.

Sixth: Demanding the Senate Do What She Refused to Do

This actually made a lot of sense. Given that all of this was a joke it was necessary to cast blame on something other than the house case for Impeachment failure. John’s fallacy here is the same one that many Nevertrumpers make. The audience for this pitch was not average people, it was the far left people who insisted on impeachment. Pelosi needed a scapegoat and this plan plus she had the media to push it.

Seventh: Terrible Choice of House Managers

This is again where John missed the mark this was the perfect pick for house managers. You needed managers who were hyper partisan who would satisfy the loony base from districts that are safe. What you didn’t want was to put a serious congressman from anything remotely resembling a swing district or a congressman who had the potential to be a national face of the party to try and justify this shit storm.

This wasn’t about raging incompetence, or age or even uninforced errors. Unlike the impeachment managers in 1996 who still believed that we had a shared set of values, Pelosi knew that this was a loser from day one. She held it off for as long as she could and when she figured out that the damage to her caucus from a divide would be greater than the damage from failure and there was always a million to one shot that the President’s team would do something stupid enough to make things work.

So she did it as fast as possible to minimize the damage to the party as a whole and to the members with the most potential in the future. Furthermore as I noted in yesterday’s piece she could have gone full “I told you so” and used this as a platform to destroy the progressive left who put her in this spot.

Instead she was amazingly the adult in the room. She is taking the hits from the Nolte’s because she knows that she can absorb those hits while others in the party, who deserve them considerably more, can not.

That’s old fashioned leadership reminiscent of an earlier era, granted leadership in a bad cause but leadership nonetheless.

Why Agnostics Hate Prayers

Posted: February 1, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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What people would pay for prayers, from PNAS study by Linda Thunström and Shiri Noy.

Would you pay someone to pray for you? That was the focus of a recently published study, which asked this very question to almost 500 people in the wake of Hurricane Florence. The study separated Christians from atheist/agnostic people, and presented each person with the option to pay for prayers and/or thoughts from different people. On average, Christians would pay more for prayers, and specifically from prayers from a priest, while atheists and agnostics would pay for Christians to NOT pray for them.

While we might comically imply there is a new income source for priests, the paying to not pray is disturbing and highlights two issues. First, atheists don’t believe in the power of prayer. While that’s not a surprise in itself, it does mean we (specifically Catholics) have done a terrible job advertising how prayer works. The second, and more troubling side, is it highlights that atheists and agnostics simply don’t like Christian people.

Contrary to what the media would tell you, prayer does in fact change things. The Catholic Church has been rigorously testing for miracles, and especially for medical miracles (the ones most people think of), most don’t survive scrutiny. For the Catholic Church to declare a miracle, prayers have to be offered to one Saint or person, the condition has to have no chance of healing on its own, and the condition must quickly be cured (as in, it can’t take a long time to heal). A good recent example was the miraculous curing of Dafne Gutierrez, who prayed to St. Charbel and had her sight restored.

I bring examples of these up with my friends who are agnostic, and it surprises them, which means that Catholic media is failing to promote these instances. How do we not have a repository of images, miracle stories and the like? How do we not have social media accounts pushing these stories out for the world to read? Catholic miracles are called out in our Catechism to inspire us, and yet we act like the man who buried his master’s talents. Given the prevalence of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, this is inexcusable.

Worse still is the image that agnostic people have of Christians in general. Ask an agnostic person what their image of a Christian is, and you will likely get some flinching. The media has been bashing Christianity forever, and while Christians might ignore it, the effects are playing out now. More people than ever are identifying as atheist or agnostic, and worse, more agnostic people say they won’t associate with Christians. This, despite the fact that many of the same people know lots of good Christians that they see every day. We are, again, poorly advertising ourselves and our lives, allowing the media to make us out to be the boogey man for atheists and agnostics everywhere.

Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, can in fact die out if we don’t fight for it. The media will gladly hide our miracle stories so that prayers become nothing more than good thoughts in most people’s minds. Worse still, the media will continue to incite violence against Catholics, like the attack on St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989. It’s not enough for us to live good lives, but we must also show those that have no faith that our lives are worth living.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, the Catholic Church, or any other government or non-government agency.

The Left is Damn Lucky to Have Pelosi

Posted: February 1, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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This is going to shock a lot of people but I’ve gained a bit of respect for Nancy Pelosi over the last couple of months.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think she backs some of the worst policies that the nation could consider and her pretense of wearing her Catholicism on her shoulder while embracing the intrinsic evil of abortion is an abomination that I wouldn’t want to have to explain to St. Peter, particularly if I was at an age when I’d be likely to meet him sooner rather than later.

But despite all this I’ll say this for her, she’s damn loyal to her party even when they’re not loyal to her.

For months she tried to restrain the impeachment hotheads, trying to explain to these loons that it was a bad and losing strategy, that it would only embolden the President and weaken the party at a time when they needed a better strategy to have a shot at victory in 2020.

For this she was pummeled by the left and the Democrats until finally she relented.

So now here we are, with the President about to be acquired, and the state of the union about to take place where he can rub their face into it and the whole lot of them being made into fools and what is she doing?

  • Is she disavowing impeachment as a mistake that wasn’t of her making?
  • Is she publicly blaming the media and the left for pushing her in the wrong direction?
  • Is she loudly proclaiming to all “I told you so!”?

Nope.

She’s is still on the attack on the President and pretending that all of the disasters that she predicted didn’t happen.

Or put simply she’s showing more loyalty to the party than they’ve shown to her and making the best use of the bad hand she was dealt.

Given the backstabbing nature of DC that’s pretty damn impressive, but I doubt she will get any gratitude from those leftists for getting out front of a cause she thought was foolish instead of letting them take the blows.

Her pals on the left might not be impressed by I sure in hell am.

Update: John Nolte disagrees, his piece is here, I’l answer it tomorrow.

Licensing Laws do far more harm than good

Posted: January 30, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Licensing laws, and similar regulations, are a product of the progressive era which began around 1913.  These laws are meant to protect society as a whole, and individuals in particular.  A careful study of these laws will demonstrate that they have produced far more negative effects than positive effects.   This is explained in great detail in the Mises Institute article The Deception behind Government Licensing Laws

The primary justification for these licensing laws and regulations is:

One of the favorite arguments for licensing laws and other types of quality standards is that governments must “protect” consumers by insuring that workers and businesses sell goods and services of the highest quality.

There is one great flaw in that argument:

The answer, of course, is that “quality” is a highly elastic and relative term and is decided by the consumers in their free actions in the marketplace. The consumers decide according to their own tastes and interests, and particularly according to the price they wish to pay for the service.

Individuals are far better than a government bureaucracy, especially a gargantuan one at the federal level, at determining what constitutes a quality product.  Word of mouth and other forms of reviews by actual customers is a far better way of regulating the quality of products.  When potential customers hear that a product is no good or harmful then they won’t buy it resulting in the company losing money and possibly going out of business.

Licensing laws most always limit competition which is why they are championed by established large businesses.  That is why they spend so much money lobbying for them.

How much these requirements are designed to “protect” the health of the public, and how much to restrict competition, may be gauged from the fact that giving medical advice free without a license is rarely a legal offense. Only the sale of medical advice requires a license. Since someone may be injured as much, if not more, by free medical advice than by purchased advice, the major purpose of the regulation is clearly to restrict competition rather than to safeguard the public

Regulations meant to ensure quality products quite often stifle innovation.

Other quality standards in production have an even more injurious effect. They impose governmental definitions of products and require businesses to hew to the specifications laid down by these definitions. Thus, the government defines “bread” as being of a certain composition. This is supposed to be a safeguard against “adulteration,” but in fact it prohibits improvement. If the government defines a product in a certain way, it prohibits change.

Regulations imposed by government bureaucracies stifle private sector innovation for the following reason:

A change, to be accepted by consumers, has to be an improvement, either absolutely or in the form of a lower price. Yet it may take a long time, if not forever, to persuade the government bureaucracy to change the requirements. In the meantime, competition is injured, and technological improvements are blocked.

Licensing laws make it difficult for individuals to find jobs in a particular field. Take hair dressers for instance. It takes a lot of schooling to become a hair dresser, approximately 1500 hours.. Is it all necessary? The same holds true for many fields.

Here is the proper free market solution to low quality or harmful products and services:

In the free economy, there would be ample means to obtain redress for direct injuries or fraudulent “adulteration.” No system of government “standards” or army of administrative inspectors is necessary. If a man is sold adulterated food, then clearly the seller has committed fraud, violating his contract to sell the food. Thus, if A sells B breakfast food, and it turns out to be straw, A has committed an illegal act of fraud by telling B he is selling him food while actually selling straw. This is punishable in the courts under “libertarian law,” i.e., the legal code of the free society that would prohibit all invasions of persons and property.

Licensing laws and government regulations have affected me personally in a very negative way.  For the past several years I have been attempting to raise money to open a nano brewery.  I have created and perfected a large number of recipes that rival the best craft breweries.  Because of government interference the start up costs for this type of brewery is many times higher than what they should be.  The approval process for opening a brewery is about one year.  The beginning step is establishing a location before you begin the licensing procedure.   That means you have to rent or buy a location, before you begin the paperwork.  That is a whole year you have to pay rent when you are not taking in any money, and there is a good chance you could get turned down at the end.  Before federal government regulation put a stop to this, many started a brewery in their kitchen, then opened an actual brewery after they sold enough beer to afford this.  Because of the nature of beer it is a product that it is virtually impossible to make someone sick if you brew bad quality beer.  It is very expensive to outfit a startup brewery to meet federal standards, standards imposed by bureaucrats rather than brewers, There was no need for this change except to limit competition.

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