There is an excellent conversation going on regarding the post @unsk ‘s post, Tucker Carlson: Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage: Who is behind it? The problem of course is not one thing, it is a series of things: who did it? what did they think they would get from it? who did they want people/governments to think did it? what comes next?

“What comes next?” is of course the most important question and is entirely distinguishable from “Who did it?”

Over the last couple of years, I’ve followed the Twitter account of Jennifer Michelle Greenberg. She’s a Christian woman who grew up in an abusive home. Her father claimed to be a Christian but abused Jennifer physically, sexually, and emotionally. She experienced churches that would ignore or minimize abuse. She now works to help survivors of abuse and help churches to deal with such issues Biblically.

I just finished her book Not Forsaken: A Story of Life After Abuse. I found these definitions helpful. She has dealt with people who demand that abusers must be forgiven (7 x 70) and allowed to remain in one’s life. I found her distinction between two kinds of forgiveness helpful:

I’ve found it helpful to define two modes of forgiveness: Boundaried Forgiveness and Reconciled Forgiveness.

“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”– John Derbyshire

I am starting to think that every social ‘science’ can either be understood through tabletop RPGs or Russian Literature. Mage: The Ascension is a tabletop RPG that explains the post-modernism and current Wokeism by describing a fictional universe of magic. 

Perhaps the most fascinating things about Mage: The Ascension is its take on science and the technology that utilizes it. Apparently, reality in the Mage universe isn’t static and neither are physical laws. Much of reality, if not all of it is as debatable as what gender you are on a university campus. Regular people are referred to as sleepers and conventional physics are whatever sleepers think it is. Mages are people who realize that an intense application of will can alter the rules of reality. So your cellphone doesn’t work because it followers the natural rules of the physical universe. It works because people agree that the engineers and tech geeks know what they are talking about. Mages are like shamans or voodoo doctors who can ask spirits to make your sword stronger in battle or to make your crops grow with vigor.

No, I’m not turning away from my faith in Jesus, which began when I reached the ripe old age of 36, back in early 2004. The religion that I’m losing is the American religion that might be called “We Won The War.”

This may be a troubling post for some of you.  I’m pretty confident that I would have found it very troubling and offensive, myself, about five to ten years ago. I’d appreciate a critique of these thoughts.

As the American left rapidly mutates into fascism (and I use that term literally) we need to face the fact that we do have a “systemic” problem and it ain’t racism. Do we need to be prepared to do to the left what they continue to do to us in education, law enforcement, and social and entertainment media?  How can we affect a de-Bidenification of America and still honor the values that define conservatism?

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, party officials, including the SA and SS, were given de facto police power to root out political enemies. In Biden’s America, party members (tech lords and DEI commissars) can de-platform, defund, fire, and otherwise silence dissent to an astonishing degree. The Biden administration had sought to place that delegated power under express government direction with a “disinformation czar” who could more formally empower those practices. Fortunately, the residual respect for the First Amendment was still strong enough to cause outrage.  (That the “czar” was an utterly ridiculous woman was also a blessing.)

You’ve got to hand it to the late Queen.  Not only did she manage to die in Scotland, giving the Palace an opportunity to drive her past thousands of loyal and respectful Scots to Edinburgh for a lie-in at which thousands of people queued up to view her casket, and then past thousands more as she was driven to the airport for the flight home (The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon–who represents the Scottish Nationalists–must have been regurgitating her haggis the whole time); she also died on one of the rare occasions that Harry and Meghan were actually in England, thereby side-stepping the inevitable “will they fly to the UK from California–Will Meghan go with?” circus that would otherwise have occurred over the course of days and distracted from the main event.

Now for the best part: Today’s Telegraph headline: Coverage of the Queen’s death led to drop in funding for Democrats, New York Times says.

September is a pivotal month for political parties as they gear up for a poll in which the fate of both houses of Congress hangs in the balance.

…And bad drivers. Because equity and racism, The Post Millennial reports.

I have bicycled in San Francisco for longer than the average hipster has been alive.  I started when there was no infrastructure or consideration for bikes whatsoever and eagerly supported the SF Bicycle Coalition in their successful efforts to lobby and make biking safer and practical. Every time I rode, my primary concern was to avoid getting hit by a car, and the secondary concern was to avoid getting it stolen. The second concern stayed with me constantly, as I have had three bikes stolen from my house in two burglaries.