Laigle’s Forum

by Don Hank

Two items of interest today.

[BTW, if you enjoy this commentary, I still have room for a few more email addresses on my daily distribution list. This list receives forwarded news items and my commentary on US and world affairs every day. It also gives you a chance to sound off to decision makers, bloggers, writers and thinking people. Choice comments and news items by list members are distributed to the rest. If you want to be added, just send me, Don Hank, an email at zoilandon@msn.com and ask to be added to my Daily Distribution List.]

Item 1

Mark Zuckerberg wants more immigrants to work cheap in his air conditioned sweat shops. He has founded FWD.us, a front org for his pro-immigration plans and is partnering with false ‘conservative’ group Americans for a Conservative Direction.

Cutting to the chase, any conservative organization at this dreadful juncture in the US economy would have to oppose the importation of labor tooth and nail. Our employment is nowhere near where the government says it is.

The government is sweeping millions of statistics under the carpet by saying that people who have given up looking for work are not unemployed. The 100 million on welfare are ‘employed’? We are probably about where Spain is now, were it not for welfare and food stamps. We certainly don’t need to import labor—even if that would make Zuckerberg richer.

To make matters worse, the plan supported by Gang of 8 ringleaders Rubio and Graham, who play the lead roles in the linked videos by Americans for a Conservative Direction, would give amnesty to the people making up over 90 percent of dangerous criminal gangs in our cities. If they said, ‘hey, let’s import more terrorists,’ that would actually be an improvement over their current plan. Gangs kill, rape, steal and deal 24-7. Terrorists only kill on special occasions.

These men need to be thrown out on their ears.

Rubio is lying through his teeth when he says that this new immigration reform plan is tough. It is not tough in any of the ways he says it is.

And that is exactly why Mort Zuckerberg supports Americans for a Conservative Direction. They are Democrats in drag.

And they think real conservatives are stupid.

Item 2

I had previously written that ABC anchor Jonathan Karl had gone on the Bill O’Reilly show and admitted that the administration’s report on the murderous Benghazi attack was full of holes. I had attributed that behavior to a certain ‘collegiality  effect,’ by which Karl would have identified with the dead ambassador and the beleaguered witnesses as colleagues. This would explain why ABC, which had never gone to bat for the little guy, would suddenly turn on their beloved leader.

Now a new report, also very damaging to Obama, comes from the same anchor Jonathan Karl. This time the collegiality effect, if present, is not nearly as prominent. Jonathan Karl seems to be defending all conservatives, both great and small.

Read more here to find out why this is just bait and what the intended switch will be:

http://www.americandailyherald.com/pundits/donald-hank/item/here-comes-the-switch-don-t-take-the-bait

[BTW, I still have room for a few more email addresses on my daily distribution list. This list receives forwarded news items and my commentary on US and world affairs every day. It also gives you a chance to sound off to decision makers, bloggers, writers and thinking people. Choice comments and news items by list members are distributed to the rest. If you want to be added, just send me, Don Hank, an email at zoilandon@msn.com and ask to be added to my Daily Distribution List.]

Rand Paul discovers “security concerns”

by Don Hank

Sen. Rand Paul, who serves on a committee called Homeland Secturity and Government Affairs, just now woke up and realized that an immigration reform bill of the kind he was touting a few weeks ago, needs to take national security concerns into account. He now backtracks with the following statement:

I believe that any real comprehensive immigration reform must implement strong national security protections. The facts emerging in the Boston Marathon bombing have exposed a weakness in our current system. If we don’t use this debate as an opportunity to fix flaws in our current system, flaws made even more evident last week, then we will not be doing our jobs.

It’s nice that Rand Paul, author of the above mentioned much touted amnesty proposal that unquestioningly presupposed a competent DHS, finally woke up to the fact that our national security is a disaster. But why did it take a national tragedy to wake him up? What have they been discussing in that Homeland Security committee Rand has been sitting on?

Most of my readers and  correspondents know–and knew long before Rand’s plan was unfurled– that illegal aliens make up about 1/3 of our federal prison population and that Mexicans are the no. 1 demographic in terms of drunken driving convictions, including all of those involving traffic deaths of third parties. And they know that a very substantial percentage of our street drugs come from south of the border and that our downtowns are in thrall to 1.4 million gang members, of which all but 9% are foreign. All of the individuals in these problem demographics would have received a blanket amnesty under Rand Paul’s proposed “reform.”

My correspondents also know that we are in the midst of an economic crisis where jobs are scarce and 100 million Americans are receiving some form of public assistance other than social security, which tallies up to a cool $1 trillion/yr — a record number by far in US history.

So, Mr. Paul, while you have shown some aptitude as a quarterback, your side is unlikely to make touchdowns if you wait until Monday morning to pick up the ball and run.

Obama’s office contacts Don Hank!

by Don Hank

The below-linked report shows that of all factors studied, the one most strongly correlated with GDP, or national wealth, is strength of the rule of law.

http://www.capitalismwithoutfailure.com/2012/07/the-main-driver-of-gdp-growth-strong.html

Quote: …he mentioned that he had done a study based on analysis by an institution that looks at all sorts of “fuzzy” data, like how easy it is to start a business in a country, corporate taxes and business structures, levels of free trade and free markets, and the legal system. It turned out that the trait that was most positively correlated with GDP growth was strength of the rule of law. It is also one of the major factors that Niall Ferguson cites in his book Civilization as a reason for the ascendency of the West in the last 500 years, and a factor that helps explain why China is rising again as it emerges from chaos.

Amazingly, despite this strong correlation, not ONE of the 2 main parties supports the rule of law. Bush and his GOP cronies famously supported rewarding lawbreakers with amnesty. Obama has gone further, refusing to allow ICE to deport many alien felons (only the most egregious) and even suing Arizona for trying to protect itself from the invasion — even though Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution says the federal government is supposed to protect the states from invasion, literally.

Last but not least is the Libertarian party, which basically thinks borders are bad for liberty and is not much in favor of laws at all. Like the early communists, they think the state will melt away if we can just teach enough people how to behave in a lawless society (anarchy). I’m not making it up: If you go to the Von Mises Institute site you can see a proud invitation to sign up for a course in “Anarcho-Capitalism,” the favorite ideology of site founder Lew Rockwell, who is a mentor of Ron Paul.

America has given up on law, instead falling all over itself to protect the “rights” of minority criminals, like the black panthers who violated election law by intimidating voters and siding with petty thugs like Trayvon Martin while seeking to jail law and order activists like George Zimmerman. And suspending ICE agents for arresting illegal aliens (http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/senator-ice-agent-facing-punishment-for-arresting-illegal.html). This is a reflection of the back seat that science has taken in the public discussion, in the media and politics. We prefer catchy pandering slogans to facts. Slogans and pandering ensure poll success.

But as the law goes, so does GDP. It looks like our main political parties have all chosen poverty for us all.

Funny, none of them asked us either.

by Don Hank

The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so…

The scientific method, while still used in scientific experiments in the laboratory and clinic, has long been abandoned in the persuasive arts, notably journalism, but also in politics. Any journalist analyzing facts based on logic and science instead of accepting the interpretation of our universe handed down from above would soon lose their job. We have long lived in an anti-scientific, and hence, an anti-natural, world and are now reaping the inevitable rewards of our denial of truth.

If we were to be honest with ourselves for just a brief moment, we would admit that Western society is deeply sinful (or in secular terms, unwholesome) and even worships sin, celebrating it with carnivals and gay parades, and teaching young children how to perform sex acts in schools. And of course, the Western world routinely commits infanticide. Romans 1:25 describes the Western world to a “t” (Paul uses homosexuals as an example but this issue ranges far wider than that):

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator…

The end of that discourse on sinners describes the outcome.

…men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

A graphic depiction of some of that recompense for this particular group of sinners can be found here. I referenced that site in my commentary “The recompence of their error.”

So why do people deliberately engage in self-destructive practices that our otherwise superior intelligence should be telling us to avoid for the purposes of self preservation? Or for that matter, why do they pursue Keynesian economics amassing mountains of debt that no one could ever repay in a headlong rush to destroy our economy, our means of survival? No animal species would do that.

The answer is right there in Paul’s discourse, and this is the part Christians need to focus on when analyzing the causes of Western society’s failure to manage its laws, its immigration, its social ills, its fruitless wars, its finances and economy, its moral code, etc:

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.

And several verses later:

God gave them over to a reprobate mind.

Did you ever consider what that means?

GOD facilitates the destruction of the disobedient and the ungrateful by abandoning the disobedient to their own sinful desires. Paul is talking about people who worship nature instead of the Creator because they were ungrateful to Him for the blessings of life. Why would people who once worshipped nature turn around and do something unnatural, as Paul calls this behavior in this same passage? A person analyzing this without spiritual discernment might say this incongruence makes no sense and would be at a loss to explain it in rational terms. Some spiritually blind (but otherwise intelligent) analysts say that for this reason, Paul couldn’t really have meant “unnatural” when describing this behavior, and they therefore tweak the translation from the original Greek to make it say something else. (They forget that in the 4^th Century, Jerome, a fluent speaker of koine Greek, rendered this term as “contra naturam” in his translation  of the Vulgate Latin Bible).

The fact is, God routinely allows people to do the unnatural—committing acts outside the laws of nature that can’t be explained by any scientific (e.g., psychological) laws. Once you turn your back on God, He abandons you and you fall into a behavior pattern designed by Satan. There is nothing natural about sinful behavior because it was not designed by God.

So if it is not natural, then is it supernatural?

No, it is not. Since God performs supernatural works—that is, works that are above nature—then Satan’s works and the works of humans gone over to the dark side might best be considered as infranatural, or beneath nature. An animal would not destroy its own economy – its food stores, for example – the way Westerner “leaders” are now doing, most notablyin the Euro Zone and the US through irrational banking practices and eradication of home industry and cheap energy by legal and regulatory means (even as they encourage other nations, notably China, to use cheap energy and high carbon combustion in competing with the West). Nor would an animal devote itself almost solely to the pursuit of sex, especially homosex, the way many humans do (although bisexuality is known in the animal kingdom, there are no known strictly homosexual animal individuals that eschew all individuals of the opposite sex).

Such infranatural phenomena are exactly why we face an imminent worldwide economic collapse. Economists, supposedly specialists in math, no longer use mathematics in their convoluted Keynesian calculations. Likewise, otherwise educated people who understand human anatomy deliberately and routinely utilize as an inlet a bodily organ designed as an outlet, a lifestyle that often leads to horrific diseases and death (see here).

But as Paul says, amazingly, GOD facilitates this mindlessness by abandoning those who abandon God — including His scientific laws. Because people stopped trusting in Him and thought they could come up with their own answers. Look around you. How do you like the results of Western secularist, humanist political, diplomatic, economic, social, military, etc, behavior? Vote for either candidate and you will get more of the same. Look at Europe. An entire continent that thinks it is smarter than God is now drowning in debt and fighting for its economic life. If this is not sufficient evidence of the God that Paul describes, i.e., a God who deprives disobedient humans of their cognitive faculties, then I can’t imagine what is.

This is why the West does not need more laws or a better government.

It needs a spiritual revival. And that revival will not happen without Westerners accepting the love, forgiveness and righteousness that Jesus taught, making a sincere attempt to do what is morally right as dictated by our God-given conscience. Americans, including the best and otherwise most civil and decent of us, are beating each other up because we think this is about people or the lack of wisdom of individuals or leaders. If people do this or that, or if we make this or that law or elect this or that politician, then we can get back on track. “How can this group or that group be so stupid?” they say of those who disagree with them.

But again, they ignore Paul’s teachings, as recorded in another letter of his:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

If you think this is too lofty and ethereal to relate to your life and the world around you, consider the antithesis, for example, in this article on John Maynard Keynes, a homosexual and pedophile who authored our current failed economic system (bailouts rewarding bad business and banking practices and other government interventions that kill free enterprise were his brain child):

http://www.keynesatharvard.org/book/KeynesatHarvard-ch09.html

If we take to heart Paul’s message in Romans 1:25-27, we can easily see it was no coincidence that Keynes was both a sexual deviant (pedophile, homosexual, etc) and the author of the most perverted economic system known to humankind.

There can be no logical or scientific explanation for Keynes’ self-destructive lifestyle and destructive teachings, or of an entire civilization deliberately patterning itself after him, destroying itself economically and morally with no apparent justification. These examples of a West deliberately weakening and sabotaging itself are the best examples of unqestionably infranatural phenomena.

As incredible as it may seem to those imbued with the rigid doctrinaire humanism that is foisted on Western society by an incessant drumbeat in media, schools and universities, in cinema and on the street, Paul’s brief discourse on a God having given people up to a reprobate mind is emerging as the default explanation of a civilization marching resolutely to its utter economic and moral ruin.

So why is this explanation for Western civilization’s failure never raised in the churches of our nation?

Perhaps because God is giving our clergy over to the very same reprobate mind that Paul spoke of. They interpret the scriptures as though they were hopelessly outdated when  in fact, these ancient writings offer the only glimpse of sanity–and hope–that is left in our reprobate world.

Don Hank

The news of Greece’s poll results, widely construed as a decision not to immediately exit the euro, is all over the foreign cable news programs, and Brussels is shouting for joy. They fail to see what’s coming! The markets responded favorably for a little over an hour, than plunged again when people woke up to reality: Endless bailouts for Greece until Germany and the others go bust.

To give you some perspective, here are some figures on the contributions of the various member countries to the EU, and hence to the bailouts:

http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=7925

Briefly, at the time of that report, Belgium’s Flanders paid top euro per capita, 282.6 euros per Flemish person, for a total of 1 billion 780 thousand euros.

But it is widely believed that Belgium will soon need a bailout of its own. That’s a double whammy for the EU. Not only would it lose the net contribution from Belgium but it would also have to take more from the remaining countries that are just barely above water to pay the Belgians. A net loss instead of the current net contribution.

Italy contributed 2 billion 938 million at the time of that writing, or about 49.7 euros per capita.

But Italy will eventually need a bailout, despite the phony optimism of Super Mario Monti.

That is another loss of a contributor, which becomes a net liability for the EU.

Spain will also need another bailout, and so will Greece.

And the more needy countries line up at the trough and stop being net contributors, the harder it will be for those few economically sound nations to pull their weight. Further, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the German powerhouse, is demanding — and will eventually get — full-scale “green” energy to replace all of the traditional cheap nuclear and fossil fuel plants that have so far made Germany the no. 2 exporter in the world. Once this transformation is complete, Germany too will line up at the trough, but the trough will be empty by then.

It may seem as if the EU has spun out of control. But the founders of the EU were men imbued with the socialist vision. Their idea from the start was that the rich nations should pull the weight of the poor, ignoring the vast difference in work ethic between them that drives some to work while others consume the fruits of their labor. This is socialism in drag, since in traditional socialism, there is roughly a wealth transfer of rich individuals to poor individuals, while in the more sophisticated version, the transfer is from rich nations to poor nations. You’d think Europe would have noticed, after all these years of being duped, that the EU is just a sophisticated version of the Soviet Union, but it is as if someone had taped their eyes shut. As time goes on it becomes increasingly clear that this transfer was never intended to be temporary. It has been a de facto systemic state of wealth transfer, always propped up with a new crisis and hence a new pretext to prolong the outright daylight robbery.

Thus, as long as the EU’s power masters can continue to strike fear in the hearts of the serfs who do their bidding, they will continue to steal the wealth of the rich nations, whose workers work longer hours with less pay, and send it to the “poor” nations, whose workers work less, retire earlier and demand — and get — more of everything. Meanwhile, the only win-win group is the bankers. Italy, for example, recently paid a handsome 7% for its credit. Good money for folks who sit like vultures at a carrion feast.

Socialism hasn’t changed one iota in its gross unfairness to the productive. But it has changed its guise and has trained its propaganda machines full tilt against the working men and women of nations unfortunate enough to be “rich,” warning that if their plan is not followed, there will be chaos, tanks in the streets, starvation, rioting, war, etc. So keep your noses to the grindstone. Arbeit macht frei.

Yet, these dread social phenomena are precisely what the EU and its policies are leading to. But they are the unintended consequences, and as stealthy and crafty as the EU power masters are, they have no good moves left for this end game, because the final outcome belongs to God, not to them.

Just as the populace didn’t see their machinations, the power masters didn’t see Him at work.

Don Hank