53percenter's Blog

Let’s do a simple mental exercise before we get to the point. Visualize a sphere of solid matter and then subtract fourteen hundredths of one percent. Is the reduced sphere any different in appearance? Of course not; shaving off the 14 hundredths evenly will be unnoticeable to the naked eye. On to the point.

The sphere we just visualized is a replica of our entire solar system compacted into a solid mass. 99.86 percent of the total mass of the solar system is the sun itself. What remains is the total mass material that orbits the sun. These 14 hundredths are composed of planets, moons, asteroids and meteors. Our planet accounts for a barely discernable speck of this other-than-solar matter.

This barely discernable speck is surrounded by a flimsy envelope of atmosphere that supports life on the planet and accounts for the ever-changing climate on the surface. The solar energy from the 99.86 of active solar matter that bombards our atmosphere is the engine of all climate change and has been since the beginning of time.

The energy emitted by all of man’s fossil fuel combustion has no statistical significance as a driver of climate change when viewed as a portion of the overall radiation received from the sun. The sheer difference in scale ought to be enough to make anyone with a shred of common-sense wonder what all the fuss about man made climate change is about.

Let’s do a simple mental exercise before we get to the point. Visualize a sphere of solid matter and then subtract fourteen hundredths of one percent. Is the reduced sphere any different in appearance? Of course not; shaving off the 14 hundredths evenly will be unnoticeable to the naked eye. On to the point.

The sphere we just visualized is a replica of our entire solar system compacted into a solid mass. 99.86 percent of the total mass of the solar system is the sun itself. What remains is the total mass material that orbits the sun. These 14 hundredths are composed of planets, moons, asteroids and meteors. Our planet accounts for a barely discernable speck of this other-than-solar matter.

This barely discernable speck is surrounded by a flimsy envelope of atmosphere that supports life on the planet and accounts for the ever-changing climate on the surface. The solar energy from the 99.86 of active solar matter that bombards our atmosphere is the engine of all climate change and has been since the beginning of time.

The energy emitted by all of man’s fossil fuel combustion has no statistical significance as a driver of climate change when viewed as a portion of the overall radiation received from the sun. The sheer difference in scale ought to be enough to make anyone with a shred of common-sense wonder what all the fuss about man made climate change is about.

National Public Radio’s supervising senior standards and practices editor Mark Memmott recently published a “guidance reminder” instructing the non-profit media organization’s employees in how to frame abortion news. Memmott wrote:

“The term ‘unborn’ implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a ‘baby’ or ‘the unborn’ is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion.”

That is simply a bold-faced lie.

Memmott added: “NPR doesn’t use the term ‘abortion clinics.’ We say instead, ‘medical or health clinics that perform abortions.’ The point is to not to use abortion before the word clinic. The clinics perform other procedures and not just abortions.” Memmott also cautioned staffers not to use terms such as “fetal heartbeat,” “partial birth” and “late-term abortion,” because they are terms often used by scary, radical, right-wing extremists who oppose abortion.

Incredibly, Memmott claims the memo will help NPR be “precise, accurate and neutral” when discussing abortion. Telling your talent (and that is a relative term here) that they should not use the terms “baby” or “unborn” when referring to what is inside a pregnant woman is not accurate or neutral. It is certifiable. Is it a shoe? No. An amorphous blob? No. Is it alive? Yes. So, is it a duckling? No. A piglet? No. For God’s sake then, stop refusing to call a baby a baby! (Which is much of the reason why the NPRs of the world won’t stop doing just that).

Doctors and nurses describe “how your baby grows and develops” during the first — and each subsequent — trimester for parents who are expecting. They do not typically refer to “your fetus.” During ultrasounds nurses don’t point to the screen and say, “Look at that thing there, your fetus is a boy!” (Nor do they say, “I’m arbitrarily assigning the gender ‘boy’ to your fetus”).

It is repulsive that taxpayer-funded NPR goes to these extremes to slant their coverage of a “life and death” issue (to quote Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand), and is yet another example of the making of fake news. Leftists have always engaged in the corruption of language to entice, deceive, and coerce the dull and unwary. Hence “Illegal immigrant,” a factually correct term, becomes the inane “undocumented alien.” Those who wish to be a member of the opposite sex simply have to say that they are, and, voilà, they are “transgendered.” Yet, pro-abortion progressives attempt to dehumanize small humans by labeling them as “fetuses” or “non-viable tissue masses.”  

A baby is a fetus though it looks like a baby and functions like a baby, has a beating heart (I mean an “embryonic pulsing” to quote a recent article in the New York Times), two arms, two legs and a pair of eyes? Even though it is an inch or two from being outside the womb, and even though as soon as it makes it outside of the womb it magically turns into a…”baby?” If a fetus is born weeks — or even months – early, it instantaneously and miraculously morphs into a “baby?” Must be the air.

What if what NPR calls a fetus identifies as a baby? What then? Huh? How do you handle that, Mark Memmott?

Those who supported slavery and those who support abortion share the vehement belief in dehumanizing those they don’t consider equals. The Three-Fifths Compromise of the early days of the republic had slaves counted as 3/5 of a human being. Though it sounds horrible, in reality this was done to lessen the power of the slave states and help bring about the abolition of slavery. Should there be a Three-Fifths Compromise with pro-abortion types? If they agree to consider “fetuses” as at least 3/5 of a human being, they’d be closer to a moral position than they are now.

All slaves were babies at one time. Thank God that not all babies grow up to be slaves.

National Public Radio’s supervising senior standards and practices editor Mark Memmott recently published a “guidance reminder” instructing the non-profit media organization’s employees in how to frame abortion news. Memmott wrote:

“The term ‘unborn’ implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a ‘baby’ or ‘the unborn’ is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion.”

That is simply a bold-faced lie.

Memmott added: “NPR doesn’t use the term ‘abortion clinics.’ We say instead, ‘medical or health clinics that perform abortions.’ The point is to not to use abortion before the word clinic. The clinics perform other procedures and not just abortions.” Memmott also cautioned staffers not to use terms such as “fetal heartbeat,” “partial birth” and “late-term abortion,” because they are terms often used by scary, radical, right-wing extremists who oppose abortion.

Incredibly, Memmott claims the memo will help NPR be “precise, accurate and neutral” when discussing abortion. Telling your talent (and that is a relative term here) that they should not use the terms “baby” or “unborn” when referring to what is inside a pregnant woman is not accurate or neutral. It is certifiable. Is it a shoe? No. An amorphous blob? No. Is it alive? Yes. So, is it a duckling? No. A piglet? No. For God’s sake then, stop refusing to call a baby a baby! (Which is much of the reason why the NPRs of the world won’t stop doing just that).

Doctors and nurses describe “how your baby grows and develops” during the first — and each subsequent — trimester for parents who are expecting. They do not typically refer to “your fetus.” During ultrasounds nurses don’t point to the screen and say, “Look at that thing there, your fetus is a boy!” (Nor do they say, “I’m arbitrarily assigning the gender ‘boy’ to your fetus”).

It is repulsive that taxpayer-funded NPR goes to these extremes to slant their coverage of a “life and death” issue (to quote Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand), and is yet another example of the making of fake news. Leftists have always engaged in the corruption of language to entice, deceive, and coerce the dull and unwary. Hence “Illegal immigrant,” a factually correct term, becomes the inane “undocumented alien.” Those who wish to be a member of the opposite sex simply have to say that they are, and, voilà, they are “transgendered.” Yet, pro-abortion progressives attempt to dehumanize small humans by labeling them as “fetuses” or “non-viable tissue masses.”  

A baby is a fetus though it looks like a baby and functions like a baby, has a beating heart (I mean an “embryonic pulsing” to quote a recent article in the New York Times), two arms, two legs and a pair of eyes? Even though it is an inch or two from being outside the womb, and even though as soon as it makes it outside of the womb it magically turns into a…”baby?” If a fetus is born weeks — or even months – early, it instantaneously and miraculously morphs into a “baby?” Must be the air.

What if what NPR calls a fetus identifies as a baby? What then? Huh? How do you handle that, Mark Memmott?

Those who supported slavery and those who support abortion share the vehement belief in dehumanizing those they don’t consider equals. The Three-Fifths Compromise of the early days of the republic had slaves counted as 3/5 of a human being. Though it sounds horrible, in reality this was done to lessen the power of the slave states and help bring about the abolition of slavery. Should there be a Three-Fifths Compromise with pro-abortion types? If they agree to consider “fetuses” as at least 3/5 of a human being, they’d be closer to a moral position than they are now.

All slaves were babies at one time. Thank God that not all babies grow up to be slaves.

For at least a hundred years, Marxists and secular humanists have been redoing society and “making the world better” in ways that would never have worked had their scheming been known to the general public. Secretly, with foxlike stealth, their organizations and agents of change have succeeded in causing more than two generations of Americans to despise their country, its economic system, its heritage, undermining church teaching on what is right and what is wrong, and stoking enmity between men and women. Infiltrating media, the schools, the workplace, and the places of worship, they have relied on the general honesty, kindness, and good nature of people to, as Obama put it, “fundamentally transform America.”

Had the major channels of information kept American citizens informed about what was going on behind their backs – something that is expected of investigative reporters – it would not have been possible to “transform America” from a free, sovereign nation into a building block for a collective world order run by self-serving elites with no moral compass and delusions of grandeur.

The plans of Marxist and secular humanist utopians may differ in details but basic elements are shared: God is out, the state is in; the state owns the people, all property and assets, including scientific and intellectual property; people must be made to conform to the state models for behavior; non-compliant types that don’t convert must be eliminated; the new god – some version of “Big Brother” (“Big Sister”?) – replaces all other deities.

The holy grail of the new order is politically adjusted “science.” The “sacred scripture” of the new order is Political Correctness, an orthodoxy that washes away the sins of common sense, originality of thought, freedom of action, and all competing human tendencies.

Iron-fisted Marxists stuck to revolution and purges for takeover of populations. Velvet-gloved neo-Marxists and their secular humanist colleagues prefer infiltration, “education,” and shaming. The methods, whether hard or soft, sudden or gradual, are equally ruthless. They must be because the mission to pit the world and its inhabitants against their very substance and nature calls for action free of scruples. Where harsh force won’t work, subversion must be applied, so as to weaken resistance.

The Marxist brand of reformer fared well during the push of Communism on the heels of World War I and the following decades of communist penetration across the globe, with special attention focused on Europe and America. In the 1940s, Marxist and secular humanist comrades infiltrated the schools [see also here] and began to close the minds of school children to their heritage and individual worth, grooming them for groupthink and group conformity.

In the 1970s, their change agents began to brainwash churchgoers. Sacred scripture was “updated” – that is, changed according to the theology of secular humanism mixed with Marxism. According to Liberation Theology, for example, you could be a Marxist (an atheist by definition) and a Christian at the same time. This collusion was of course not openly discussed. I personally knew a minister who added this “miracle” to her knowledge (?) of Christianity. She and many other pastors never came down from their cloud and remained foot-soldiers for the cause of socialism, communism, and the advance of universal amorality in the name of God. It flew over the heads of these benighted ministers that the liberation in Liberation Theology was “liberation” from Christianity.

Marxist and secular humanist change agents and their extended cadre are still brainwashing students, K- to-college, coaching their associates in media, government, the workplace, and invading virtually every nook and cranny of our lives. The domestic enemies of America keep infecting the nation with an enslaving ideology that stifles debate, trashes good sense, punishes originality and creativity, shuts every door to progress measured in terms of actual benefit to people. Some celebrities and politicos have the nerve to state, with a candor that makes the masks slip off their face, that opposing this “transformation of America” is a threat to democracy. Do they really believe that the bigger the lie, the better the chances of changing the truth?

The corrosive subversion and takeover of America by Marxists and amoral secularists is something that culture warriors have been fighting since at least the 1980s. It has been an uphill fight with a foe having the Big Money advantage, which empowers them to keep the public ignorant and unsuspecting, through misinformation, bait and reward, distraction, and other useful tools for “transforming” (subverting) the country. Potential opponents are kept fighting one another with political me-versus-them contests. Resistant opponents are neutralized with smear, threat, litigation, undue process, until death or infirmity terminates their influence. The few still able to fight are put down as conspiracy nuts – as though the “transformation of America” has not been a prime example of conspiracy.

What flies over the heads of hard and soft Marxists and other amoral “liberators,” regardless of their political banner, is that laws above their own, as encoded in sacred scripture and honored through tradition for solid good reason, are the actual means of liberation. Such real liberation includes liberation from the nonsense of “personal morality,” liberation from the deranged who would sacrifice community, indeed life itself, at the faux altar of “self-autonomy,” liberation from elites who don’t care whom they crush on their way to their dystopias, liberation from manipulators of the public who create false crises, false needs, false hopes, in order to gain advantage over the rest of us, as they trample over good sense, redefine justice, and shred laws they don’t like. These are liberations worth all effort to advance and maintain, for they acknowledge the sacredness of life, the weakness of reason unlocked from wisdom, and the inadequacy of science to redo people or change the world, except to destroy both.

Those who put the power of their brains and money ahead of the transcendent wisdom and power of the One who set us here and made it possible to benefit from human nature – not trash it in order to manage a mass of robots – must step down from their self-appointed positions of power if justice and social progress still meaning anything. Let their “scientific” reductions and arguments drop into the dust bin of history: we are not products of science, but human beings endowed by the Creator with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is time for people of good will to wake up and vote into office those who by word and deed show a dedication to the core values of America, clearly reflected in its Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It is high time to vote out of office all who choose not to defend America against its enemies, foreign and domestic, who choose instead to violate the oath they took to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Colonel Allen West (Army, retired) reminds us all of the importance of that oath:

“[We] have taken the sacred oath to support and defend our Constitution, to safeguard the freedoms that are enshrined there. Yes, it may hurt us deeply, but we stand on freedom’s rampart to ensure people have their rights to religion, speech, expression, assembly, the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances, and the right to keep and bear arms.

“Those who have gone before us did not make sacrifice so that some would redefine rights based upon an ideology that is the antithesis of our constitutional republic and for all that it stands.”

Image credit: Pixabay

Anthony J. DeBlasi is a veteran and lifelong defender of Western culture.

For at least a hundred years, Marxists and secular humanists have been redoing society and “making the world better” in ways that would never have worked had their scheming been known to the general public. Secretly, with foxlike stealth, their organizations and agents of change have succeeded in causing more than two generations of Americans to despise their country, its economic system, its heritage, undermining church teaching on what is right and what is wrong, and stoking enmity between men and women. Infiltrating media, the schools, the workplace, and the places of worship, they have relied on the general honesty, kindness, and good nature of people to, as Obama put it, “fundamentally transform America.”

Had the major channels of information kept American citizens informed about what was going on behind their backs – something that is expected of investigative reporters – it would not have been possible to “transform America” from a free, sovereign nation into a building block for a collective world order run by self-serving elites with no moral compass and delusions of grandeur.

The plans of Marxist and secular humanist utopians may differ in details but basic elements are shared: God is out, the state is in; the state owns the people, all property and assets, including scientific and intellectual property; people must be made to conform to the state models for behavior; non-compliant types that don’t convert must be eliminated; the new god – some version of “Big Brother” (“Big Sister”?) – replaces all other deities.

The holy grail of the new order is politically adjusted “science.” The “sacred scripture” of the new order is Political Correctness, an orthodoxy that washes away the sins of common sense, originality of thought, freedom of action, and all competing human tendencies.

Iron-fisted Marxists stuck to revolution and purges for takeover of populations. Velvet-gloved neo-Marxists and their secular humanist colleagues prefer infiltration, “education,” and shaming. The methods, whether hard or soft, sudden or gradual, are equally ruthless. They must be because the mission to pit the world and its inhabitants against their very substance and nature calls for action free of scruples. Where harsh force won’t work, subversion must be applied, so as to weaken resistance.

The Marxist brand of reformer fared well during the push of Communism on the heels of World War I and the following decades of communist penetration across the globe, with special attention focused on Europe and America. In the 1940s, Marxist and secular humanist comrades infiltrated the schools [see also here] and began to close the minds of school children to their heritage and individual worth, grooming them for groupthink and group conformity.

In the 1970s, their change agents began to brainwash churchgoers. Sacred scripture was “updated” – that is, changed according to the theology of secular humanism mixed with Marxism. According to Liberation Theology, for example, you could be a Marxist (an atheist by definition) and a Christian at the same time. This collusion was of course not openly discussed. I personally knew a minister who added this “miracle” to her knowledge (?) of Christianity. She and many other pastors never came down from their cloud and remained foot-soldiers for the cause of socialism, communism, and the advance of universal amorality in the name of God. It flew over the heads of these benighted ministers that the liberation in Liberation Theology was “liberation” from Christianity.

Marxist and secular humanist change agents and their extended cadre are still brainwashing students, K- to-college, coaching their associates in media, government, the workplace, and invading virtually every nook and cranny of our lives. The domestic enemies of America keep infecting the nation with an enslaving ideology that stifles debate, trashes good sense, punishes originality and creativity, shuts every door to progress measured in terms of actual benefit to people. Some celebrities and politicos have the nerve to state, with a candor that makes the masks slip off their face, that opposing this “transformation of America” is a threat to democracy. Do they really believe that the bigger the lie, the better the chances of changing the truth?

The corrosive subversion and takeover of America by Marxists and amoral secularists is something that culture warriors have been fighting since at least the 1980s. It has been an uphill fight with a foe having the Big Money advantage, which empowers them to keep the public ignorant and unsuspecting, through misinformation, bait and reward, distraction, and other useful tools for “transforming” (subverting) the country. Potential opponents are kept fighting one another with political me-versus-them contests. Resistant opponents are neutralized with smear, threat, litigation, undue process, until death or infirmity terminates their influence. The few still able to fight are put down as conspiracy nuts – as though the “transformation of America” has not been a prime example of conspiracy.

What flies over the heads of hard and soft Marxists and other amoral “liberators,” regardless of their political banner, is that laws above their own, as encoded in sacred scripture and honored through tradition for solid good reason, are the actual means of liberation. Such real liberation includes liberation from the nonsense of “personal morality,” liberation from the deranged who would sacrifice community, indeed life itself, at the faux altar of “self-autonomy,” liberation from elites who don’t care whom they crush on their way to their dystopias, liberation from manipulators of the public who create false crises, false needs, false hopes, in order to gain advantage over the rest of us, as they trample over good sense, redefine justice, and shred laws they don’t like. These are liberations worth all effort to advance and maintain, for they acknowledge the sacredness of life, the weakness of reason unlocked from wisdom, and the inadequacy of science to redo people or change the world, except to destroy both.

Those who put the power of their brains and money ahead of the transcendent wisdom and power of the One who set us here and made it possible to benefit from human nature – not trash it in order to manage a mass of robots – must step down from their self-appointed positions of power if justice and social progress still meaning anything. Let their “scientific” reductions and arguments drop into the dust bin of history: we are not products of science, but human beings endowed by the Creator with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is time for people of good will to wake up and vote into office those who by word and deed show a dedication to the core values of America, clearly reflected in its Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It is high time to vote out of office all who choose not to defend America against its enemies, foreign and domestic, who choose instead to violate the oath they took to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Colonel Allen West (Army, retired) reminds us all of the importance of that oath:

“[We] have taken the sacred oath to support and defend our Constitution, to safeguard the freedoms that are enshrined there. Yes, it may hurt us deeply, but we stand on freedom’s rampart to ensure people have their rights to religion, speech, expression, assembly, the ability to petition the government for redress of grievances, and the right to keep and bear arms.

“Those who have gone before us did not make sacrifice so that some would redefine rights based upon an ideology that is the antithesis of our constitutional republic and for all that it stands.”

Image credit: Pixabay

Anthony J. DeBlasi is a veteran and lifelong defender of Western culture.