Here It Comes? Obama SecEd “Concerned” About Homeschooling September 29, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, disaster, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, persecution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sickness, Society, unadulterated evil.comments closed
Oh, please do share your enlightened, benevolent, and always self-giving knowledge with the rest of us. Please do show us how you plan to frame “homeschooling” as a “crisis” or “problem” to be addressed by the federal government:
The opening shot in a widely anticipated establishment crackdown on educational freedom may have been fired last week. Speaking at a breakfast with reporters, Obama’s controversial Education Secretary, pro-Common Core activist John King (shown), said he was “concerned” that some home-educated children were not getting the “breadth of instructional experience” they would get at a traditional school. While the senior Obama bureaucrat acknowledged that many homeschool families are doing it well, he also repeated the debunked smear that homeschooled children lack opportunities for socialization. Experts and critics, though, promptly lambasted King for his naive or malicious comments, suggesting that, if anything, he ought to be far more concerned about children in public schools. Some experts even offered to help educate Obama’s education chief on the issue.
Secretary King’s controversial remarks about home education were made during an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. While the Monitor‘s website did not report about the home-education comments, several other outlets, including Politico, did so. According to Politico, King said he was “concerned” that homeschooled students are not “getting the range of options that are good for all kids.” [Like exposure to crime, early sexualization, having to around kids from bad homes, leftist indoctrination, and all that sweet, sweet government money that is dependent upon headcount!] He also claimed to worry that “students who are homeschooled are not getting kind of the rapid instructional experience they would get in school,” unless parents are “very intentional about it.” [Rapid instructional experience? What does that even mean?] He said the “school experience” includes building relationships with “peers, teachers and mentors,” something that he claimed was “difficult to achieve in homeschooling unless parents focus on it.”
Ah, the old, tired, socialization meme. I guess I’ll just retort, for about the 500th time, that my homeschooled kids interact with both peers, and especially adults, far, far better than most public school kids. They haven’t been traumatized by bullying, exposed to drugs or pornography, or taught to teach adults as a weird and alien phenomenon. They’ve been taught to respect adults and to treat other kids with Christian charity. I can’t say how many times adult strangers have marveled at the behavior of our kids, and they are nothing extraordinary by homeschool standards.
It seems our friends on the left can’t make up their minds. While decrying the absence of your kids and mine from their schools, some are advocating that the ideal way to deal with climate change is to more or less snuff ourselves out by refusing to reproduce. Ah, with environmentalists, it all comes back to Malthusian misanthropy. As Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, WASPs love animals, but hate people:
Carbon dioxide doesn’t kill climates; people do. And the world would be better off with fewer of them.
That’s a glib summary of a serious and seriously provocative book by Travis Rieder, a moral philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University………
………After years of policymakers’ yammering about carbon-light or carbon-free this-or-that, Rieder basically zeroes in on the fact nobody wants to acknowledge: The number of people in the world—particularly in affluent countries—is literally a part of the equation.
Think of Rieder’s as the argument waiting in the wings should the 195-nation Paris Agreement, which came within a shade of enactment this week, fail to address the problem. [And yet the world is not warming. All those “warmest year ever!!11!” claims are based on junk science from ground-based thermometers placed over an asphalt parking lot, or next to an air-conditioner condenser, or adjacent to a large roadway, etc. See Anthony Watt for verifiable proof of that – almost all the purported warming, which satellite data continues to refute – is due to bad placement of US-based thermometers. Did you know, for instance, that US-based thermometers make up over 60% of worldwide ground-based temperature sensors? That’s a severe bias right there]
……….Total emissions is per-capita emissions times population, minus technological advances. We’ve been trying to get you to give up your toys—to change per-capita emissions. So if you’re really going to continue to show reluctance, well, here’s the other option: We’ll start putting pressure on families. If that pressure’s really, really, really undesirable, then, well, maybe people decide to start doing the other thing. [He actually tries to attribute this to a tiny slice of the population – the very rich, with private jets and 10,000 square foot homes. But to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions – a substance we all exhale! – he knows, though he does not say, that average people like you and I would be the ones that would have to suffer an incredible decrease in our standard of living, to such a degree, I’m sure, that living in the Sun Belt would become untenable since not many folks could continue here in the 100 degree heat without AC. Of course the leftist elite, however, especially the academics, would continue in very comfortable sinecures, well-paid, well-fed, well-housed, and enjoying all the accouterments of 21st century living, the freaking hypocrite]
If we could fix everything through decarbonizing our economy, then it’s likely that the population variable wouldn’t be a real concern.
So here’s your choice: freeze to death in the dark, mostly starved, or don’t have any kids. He actually speaks of using very heavy moral and even physical/financial pressure to bar people from having “too many” children. Enjoy that total economic implosion about 30-40 years later.
This is a literally insane religious conviction with very little, and mostly very poor, scientific backing. This is the anti-fat craze, the anti-eggs/butter/use chemicals instead craze, this is the phrenology, the eugenics of the 21st century. It seems the Left always has to hang its hat on some unsupported/unsupportable claim from dubious or plainly false science. It’s their substitute religion for real religion, but with a seeming compulsion to latch onto the more authoritarian and frankly false aspects. Of course, the compulsion is a feature, not a bug, extremists like this guy cast about from one purported looming disaster to another, all with one goal in mind: power for them and/or bending society to their preferred vision. Personal liberty and individual choice are anathema to such types, unless it has to do with the groin.
Every single left-wing movement has resulted in a mass catastrophe for humanity, almost always with millions of people dead. Babies that fail to be born through chemical or surgical abortion/contraception are just as dead as the millions who perished in Stalin’s GULAG or Hitler’s death camps. There is something utterly diabolical and full of hate for mankind – people not like themselves, specifically – in these kinds of insane extremists.
Only a PhD “ethicist” totally detached from the Truth of Jesus Christ could arrive at so macabre a conclusion. Perhaps instead of killing children, we should look for another course, like doing away with “ethicists” twisted by ideology and possessed of a reprobate sense.
In reality, this man desperately needs prayers. A soul so lost is a massive tragedy, not only for his evil influence, but in and of itself.
h/t reader TT both links
The Question Is Who Is To Be Master, That Is All September 29, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, disaster, error, family, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, Revolution, sadness, scandals, self-serving, sexual depravity, sickness, Society.comments closed
So said Humpty Dumpty in the child-predator Lewis Carroll’s fantasy Alice in Wonderland. This thought sprang into my head, after being sent the following link from regular reader RDLG, which demonstrates that now that devotees of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah have achieved what they wanted in the culture using the “born that way” argument, they are now proclaiming sexual orientation to be “fluid,” probably because they think that will prove convenient and beneficial to their cause.
At least as far as the socio-political Left has been concerned – and many with same-sex attraction fall under this banner – this movement has been primarily about power. “Born that way” was an incredibly convenient defense, intended to appeal entirely to emotion rather than reason, while the sexual revolutionaries were in the process of making their next big “advance.” Now that they have it, either they feel “fluidity” serves their ends better now, or they feel there is little harm in the real truth coming out.
I’d say that even more than sexual orientation being fluid, for a certain time in some people’s lives (though in most people’s, especially those living in the state of Grace, the natural orientation is very much fixed), there is almost a push, a drive, a peer pressure towards at least experimenting with the same-sex, most especially among young women but as a growing phenomenon among boys/young men, as well (which……ick). Early and frequent exposure to porn can certainly cause children to develop such disordered appetites that even coming to have a certain curiosity or attraction for the same sex cannot be ruled out. And, we’ve all probably known a few kids growing up who, for various reasons, usually related to issues with the father or some trauma, but sometimes also, inexplicably, who seem to have a hard time figuring out who and what they are. A certain professor at the University of Texas at Dallas Department of Arts and Humanities, at which my mother worked for over 20 years, derailed his career for preying on just such a confused young boy.
Anyway, it seems that now that they have what they want, the truth can now be told:
A top researcher with the American Psychological Association (APA) and lesbian activist has acknowledged that gays are not “born that way.”
Dr. Lisa Diamond, co-editor-in-chief of the APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology and one of the APA’s “most respected members,” says sexual orientation is “fluid” and not unchangeable.
As clinical psychologist Dr. Laura A. Haynes summarizes Diamond’s APA Handbook chapters, her book and YouTube lectures, “The battle to disprove ‘Born that way and can’t change’ is now over, and (Diamond) is telling LGBT activists to stop promoting the myth.”
Contrary to the typical argument that homosexuals are “born gay” as “who they are” and cannot change, the APA officially recognized sexual orientation change in 2011.
Diamond summarized relevant findings in a lecture at Cornell University (2013), stating that abundant research has now established that sexual orientation — including attraction, behavior, and self-identity — is fluid for both adolescents and adults and for both genders.
This flies in the face of recent laws promoted by gay activists and passed in several states banning “reparative therapy,” which seeks to help patients experiencing same-sex attraction to change.
The stated justification for anti-reparative therapy laws is that anyone who experiences same-sex attraction is not only gay and born gay, but his/her homosexuality is unchangeable and so “reparative therapy,” it is argued, is not only unfruitful but cruel. The argument goes, “You can’t change who you are.”
Additionally, many gay activists call sexual orientation “the civil rights issue of our time,” and analogous to race. Diamond and the APA, however, refute this argument.
Fr. Johannes Jacobse, founder of The American Orthodox Institute, called Diamond’s “course correction” a “stunning reversal” of oft-repeated gay justification. “Sexuality desire is fluid, homosexual desire is not ‘hard-wired;’ that ‘born that way and can’t change’ is a myth; feelings don’t overrule volition (behavior is a choice, one does not need to act on every feeling — especially sexual feelings); the ‘born that way’ argument is political, not scientific; sexual orientation is subject to change among others.”
“The idea that what a person feels defines who he is — who God created him to be — is false,” Fr. Jacobse wrote. “If a person feels homosexual desire, it does not mean he is created homosexual.”
We can surely expect this “revelation” – which is no revelation at all – to be hotly debated and vehemently opposed by the promoters of the sexular pagan revolution. Should this fact gain broad acceptance – how can I even have to say that! – it could obliterate moves for things like banning “reperative therapy” and really destroys the fundamental argument in favor of pseudo-sodo-marriage (how can you be so mean as to deny someone “born that way” of the right “to be happy?!?”)
I’m sure we’ll hear a great deal, both ways, depending on who is speaking and what their agenda is.
The horrifying part is how this revolutionary advocacy plays out in the lives of real people. Lives are ruined. Families are torn apart. Souls are lost, sometimes, in an unbelievable tragedy, forever. And even in lives that are not “ruined,” a relatively brief youthful error, a falling into the wicked ways of this perverse and darkened world, can lead to a lifetime of regret and self-loathing.
And it’s happening to families very close to many of us. May God have mercy on them, and all of us, in these despicable times. Please pray for those undergoing this terrible suffering. I also pray I may never be put in this awful position, of having to choose between endorsing a child’s wickedness and having a relationship with them.
My wife and I have discussed, and we know which way we shall choose:
Start Novena to Our Lady of Victory/Most Holy Rosary TODAY! September 29, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, Christendom, General Catholic, Glory, Grace, history, Novenas, Our Lady, sanctity, Tradition, true leadership, Virtue.comments closed
That’s today Sept. 29. Really should have started yesterday, but I’m late.
Thanks to MJD for the two prayer options below:
To the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary
Queen of the most holy Rosary, in these times of such brazen impiety, manifest thy power with the signs of thine ancient victories, and from thy throne, whence thou dost dispense pardon and graces, mercifully regard the Church of thy Son, His Vicar on earth, and every order of clergy and laity, who are sore oppressed in the mighty conflict. Do thou, who art the powerful vanquisher of all heresies, hasten the hour of mercy, even though the hour of God’s justice is every day provoked by the countless sins of men. For me who am the least of men, kneeling before thee in supplication, do thou obtain the grace I need to live righteously upon earth and to reign among the just in heaven, the while in company with all faithful Christians throughout the world, I salute thee and acclaim thee as Queen of the most holy Rosary.
Queen of the most holy Rosary, pray for us!
Our Lady Of The Holy Rosary Novena Prayer (start either Sept. 28 or 29)
My dearest Mother Mary, behold me, your child, in prayer at your feet. Accept this Holy Rosary, which I offer you in 
accordance with your requests at Fatima, as a proof of my tender love for you, for the intentions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in atonement for the offenses committed against your Immaculate Heart, and for this special favor which I earnestly request in my Rosary Novena:
(Mention your requests).
I beg you to present my petition to your Divine Son. If you will pray for me, I cannot be refused. I know, dearest Mother, that you want me to seek God?s holy Will concerning my request. If what I ask for should not be granted, pray that I may receive that which will be of greater benefit to my soul.
I offer you this spiritual Bouquet of Roses because I love you. I put all my confidence in you, since your prayers before God are most powerful. For the greater glory of God and for the sake of Jesus, your loving Son, hear and grant my prayer. Sweet Heart of Mary, be my salvation.
This novena is to be said along with a daily rosary.
Either Saint Paul Is a Blazing Hypocrite, Or protestants Are Dead Wrong September 29, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, Bible, catachesis, Ecumenism, error, foolishness, General Catholic, history, reading, Restoration, Society, Spiritual Warfare, Tradition, Virtue.comments closed
Strangely enough, I doctor I have seen for many years is also an evangelical protestant minister. He, quite improperly, really, likes to try to evangelize his patients. I walked into his office with a copy of St. Francis de Sales in my hand recently, and he gave me a stern look at told me to read Galatians iii. Galatians chapter 3 verse 10-11 are one of those go to Bible phrases, taken completely out of context, that protestants love to quote to try to prove the rightness of their false and short-lived version of Christianity. Others include Romans 3:28 and even, amazingly, Romans 1:17, which is also taken out of context and is all the more silly for what follows, viz, Romans i:29-32, wherein Saint Paul, like our Blessed Lord in Saint Matthew Chapter xxv:31-46 among many other places, makes certain behaviors – sins – so contrary to the Faith as to deny one eternal salvation:
29 Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers,
30 Detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
31 Foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.
32 Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they, who do such things, are worthy of death: [eternal death, denial of salvation] and not only they who do them, but they also who consent to them that do them.
Here Saint Paul is saying two things – one, those who lack sanctifying Grace will almost invariably fall into myriad sins, but also that those who commit such sins lack – or LOSE – sanctifying Grace, if they already had it, and thus will be damned when previously they could have been saved.
Eschewing sin and leading a moral life is most definitely a work. Similarly Galatians iii:10-11, which says:
10 For as many as are of the works of the law, are under a curse. For it is written: *Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.
11 But that by the law no man is justified with God, it is manifest: *because the just man liveth by faith.
What was the context of Saint Paul saying this? He was writing to the Galatians because they had fallen under the influence of “Judaizers,” Christian converts from Judaism who demanded that all Christians must submit not only to the Law of Christ but also the Law of Moses, including abstaining from various meats and receiving circumcision. Saint Paul was rejecting this Judaizing influence, telling his readers that the Law of Moses was dead, and had been totally supplanted by the new Law of Christ? But is Saint Paul saying that all works, then, are useless for salvation?
Absolutely not. Quite the contrary, as we see in Philippians ii and iii, Saint Paul knew quite well – as did the entire early Church he helped found – that works are extremely necessary for salvation, and that “faith alone” is a shabby lie and a sign of a boundless effrontery before God.
Philippians ii:10-14 (I include the surround verses only for context, which protestants almost always leave out):
10 *That in the name of Jesus, every knee should bow of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth; [bowing/kneeling, showing reverence/penitence before God, is also a work]
11 And that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. [confessing the Lord is a work over and above internally held faith, which protestants judge to be sufficient for salvation]
12 Wherefore, my dearly beloved, (as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but much more now in my absence) work out your salvation with fear and trembling. [If one is saved by faith alone, why would one ever need to work out his salvation with fear and trembling? I was arguing with a protestant once not long ago, and as we were being forced to go our separate ways, I told him I would pray for his conversion and salvation, and he hit back with what I think he thought was the ultimate rejoinder – “I don’t have to worry about my salvation, I know I’m saved.” And I thought, what immense narcissism, what unbelievable effrontery. Anyone of us, at any time, can lose our faith at any moment. Faith isn’t a magic spell that immediately changes our consciences and makes us 100% proof against sin. This is an obvious lie. Faith, especially protestant faith, is no guarantee against any sin, even mortal sin. Once saved always saved is an American invention from the late 19th century and is one of the most perverse, reductive heresies ever visited upon the world. Faith is in fact demonstrated by works. Otherwise, why would protestants evangelize Catholics so hard? If Catholics accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, which any observant Catholic certainly does, they are irretrievably saved. Is it just about money, then, that evangelicals pursue Catholics with such gusto?]
13 For it is God who worketh in you both to will and to accomplish, according to the good-will.
Accomplish what?!? Good works, done in sanctifying Grace, which are eminently helpful to our sanctification and salvation, just as Christ commanded, “Take up your cross and follow ME!!!” Yes Jewish works done outside sanctifying Grace are profitable for nothing, which was Saint Paul’s message to the Galatians, but not that all works are useless, that a one time profession of faith assures salvation, else why would he say this in Philippians iii??!!?:
17 Be followers of me, brethren, and observe them who walk so, as you have our model.
18 *For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping) that they are enemies of the cross of Christ:
19 Whose end is destruction [damnation] whose God is their belly: and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.
20 But our conversation is in heaven: whence also we expect the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ,
Saint Paul is speaking directly of people here who were of the Faith, who had accepted Jesus Christ and were in a state of Grace (saved, in protestant parlance), who due to their sinful attractions and appetites, fell away from the Faith, fell out of the state of Grace, and whose end is subsequently destruction!!
But what is avoidance of sin, but a work? What is practicing restraint in food and drink and sex and money and all the rest, but a work, the practice of the great virtue of temperance?!?
But that is not all. Regular readers will know that I am reading the Victories of the Martyrs by Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori. He recounts the deaths of martyrs from the 1st through the early 4th centuries (so far – I haven’t read it all).
What did these martyrs die for? Faith in Jesus Christ? But why on earth would they die, if their faith alone assured their salvation, if no work or failure of work could ever cause them to lose that salvation?!? Why should any Christian ever die for his faith, if we are saved after a one time altar call and pronouncement of acceptance? And don’t give me this garbage about “higher levels of Heaven” and all that claptrap, that’s not what the martyrs thought at all.
No, quite the contrary, every single one of these martyrs, when tempted by the Roman magistrates to burn just a pinch of incense to the “god” emperor, refused, not because they would lose a better seat in the heavenly movie theater, but because they knew acknowledging any other god – even under the most severe duress – would be a violation of the 1st and 2nd Commandments and cause not the loss of their place in the heavenly pecking order, but their entire salvation!
Again, these martyrs testified to this fact going all the way back to the 1st century. This martyrdom was most assuredly a work, and a work that the Church judged worthy of salvation from her earliest days.
Protestants like to pretend – they are compelled by their disobedience and rejection of authority to pretend – that the early Church somehow apostasized from the Truth of Jesus Christ and imposed some evil Babylonian cult upon millions of Christians, somehow. This is a rather amazing claim, given the REAL heresies the early Church endured and overcame. These ill-educated souls even try to claim it was Constantine that tried to force this erroneous belief on the Church, when in reality, it was the Church that fought off Constantine’s attempt to impose the Arian heresy (Christ is just a man) under severe punishment!
What we see clearly from the martyrs, and from every other early source we have available to us, from Saint Ignatius of Antioch to Saint Justin Martyr to Saints Basil and John Chrysostom clear through to the present day, is a constant attestation to the SAME set of beliefs, the SAME set of practices, as what is outlined in the Dogmas of the Church. Even more, we see the SAME beliefs in all the ancient Churches, those dating back to the first 4-5 centuries of Christianity, even though most of these fell away on some error or another such as the nature of the Will and Person of God or the Authority of the Roman See. On all these issues related to the Eucharist, the efficacious nature of works, gaining/losing Grace, all these ancient Churches share the same beliefs.
It is only the johnny-come-lately protestant heretics who have thought differently, even while they endlessly bicker amongst themselves as to which of their tens of thousands of sects is the “right” one.
That is, Catholics have myriad sources confirming our beliefs – Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, the testimony of the martyrs and Saints, the confirmation of sadly separated brethren like the Orthodox and Copts, hostile works written against the Church by those outsider her but confirming her core beliefs, etc., etc.
All protestants have is the Bible – a great source, to be sure, but a bible their early leaders mangled in order to try to better support their errors – and the private judgment of a few very fallible men, outside the State of Grace, who imposed an interpretation on the Bible based on their pre-conceived notions and desires rather than conforming themselves to the constantly understood beliefs and practices of the Christian Church.
I know which side I’ll be sticking with, thank you very much, and I thank God every day for making me an aspiring good Catholic, rather than the protestant I once was.
Targay Getting Pummeled by Boycott? September 29, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, disaster, error, foolishness, General Catholic, It's all about the $$$, persecution, rank stupidity, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sexual depravity, Society.comments closed
That’s the implication of the data below from The American Thinker, which shows that Target’s sales have slid much farther than their competition’s, and that their market cap has taken a serious tumble. I frequently read or hear that boycotts don’t really work, but could this be an exception, or is this sudden collapse at Targay simply coincidental?
In the wake of its five-month-long bathroom policy, Target (TGT) Corporation continues to implode.
Within a month after the misguided policy, the company’s market cap had already declined by $9 billion compared to where it should have been had Target kept its pre-April 19 correlation with its primary competitors, Walmart (WMT) and Costco (COST).
By late May, the market cap hit reached $10.5 billion. As of the second week of June, the loss was $11 billion.
Second-quarter earnings data are now out, showing that Target’s earnings plummeted nearly 10%, with projected lower sales estimates for the remainder of 2016. Net sales declined more than 7% from the same period year over year.
Corporate executives are leaving in droves. Just 10% of the most senior executives in place two years ago remain with the company, including two major losses during the past month.
Had Target’s market cap continued to follow close pace with Walmart, as it had done in the months before the bathroom policy was implemented, it would have increased 1% compared to its value on April 19 of this year. Instead, Target’s market cap is now down 23.3% over this time frame. [That’s the kind of thing that gets a CEO fired, usually within a few quarters. I’d say if things don’t improve markedly by year’s end, the CEO who instituted this disastrous transgender policy will be gone. But will his replacement have the will to withstand the firestorm of criticism that will almost certainly attend its reversal?]
This adds up to a $12.2-billion market cap decline that is likely to be directly attributable to the failed bathroom policy.
The American Family Association’s boycott of Target, which has collected 1.42 million signatures, appears to have driven much – if not nearly all – of this drop. In response, Target recently announced it would spend $20 million to install single-stall locking bathrooms for those customers who are concerned over its “inclusive” washroom policy.
Whether its the boycott or not, Targay is hurting. Now they are caught in a quandary of their own making, where no matter what they do they are sure to experience a fiery backlash. Continue with the policy, continue offending many customers, and sales continue to tank. Reverse the policy and the extremely powerful pro-perversion lobby and their media allies with absolutely pillory them. It’s refreshing to see the kind of cheap moral posturing and virtue signaling – which in reality forms a powerful form of persecution against Christians – far too many businesses are engaged in can come with a real cost. Target thought they could sow the wind, now they get to reap the whirlwind.
Maybe we should boycott the NCAA and Atlantic Coast Conference next.
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