Posse Incitatus

Traditionalists in the United Methodist Church hold firm

This story is a couple of weeks old, but bears further examination.

For the first time, the traditionalists in a mainline Protestant denomination have forced a halt to the watering down of their theology and a total embrace of political correctness.

The Atlantic describing this as "conservatives taking back the church," which appears to be yet another variation on the old "conservatives pounce!" but in fact all that happened is that the majority of delegates refused to cave in to their liberal win.

It wasn't a counterattack, just a spirited defense, but that now counts as aggression.

The article notes that a schism is still likely, but instead of traditionalists pulling out, it will likely be the progressives who leave.  They are so invested in their theology of sexual license that there can be no compromise.

A decisive factor in the vote was the unwillingness of traditional congregations outside the US to embrace dressing up Western decadence and depravity as Christian virtue.  Like many churches, the United Methodists have been sending missionaries around the world for a long time.  Those missions have born fruit and while the American core is falling into heresy, the periphery remains true to their doctrine.

A similar dynamic is at work in the Anglican communion.  The Church of England has gone all-in on progressivism, even coming up with liturgies to feed the delusions of the mentally ill.  The other provinces, however, are not willing to accommodate this and other depravities.  A split there seems inevitable.

The core problem is that progressivism makes for a lousy religion.  It is constantly evolving and changing based on political need and cultural impulse.  The compulsion to signal virtue by coming up with ever-newer fads is anathema to maintaining a timeless and eternal way of describing the universe.

Churches are supposed to provide rules for a lifetime - and beyond.  Progressivism can't even go a decade without repudiating core beliefs in favor of newer ones that are ever more "woke."

As I said, this isn't a counterattack so much as a desperate defense that succeeded after years of assault.  The next challenge will be to see how the UMC enforces its doctrine.  To this point, it hasn't, which is why there are a number of homosexual clergy who are quite happy to perform unauthorized ceremonies - and to do this with impunity.

The Methodists have halted the flooding on their ship.  What now remains to be seen is whether they can pump out all the water that's already aboard.

With their victory, Democrat anti-Semites will only become louder and more confident

There's a personality type that can't simply accept the win with dignity.  They have exult, preen and boast after every victory.

This can be a problem, however, when the victory is supposed to be downplayed.

For example, the Democrats have long pretended that anti-Semites only existed on the right (just as they pretended that the KKK all joined the GOP in 1968).

They were able to get away with this charade because the media steadfastly ignored examples of leftwing anti-Semitism and their own Jew-hating allies know how to keep their remarks on the downlow.

To be sure, there were provocations from time to time, but nothing that their media allies couldn't cover up.

That time is now past, and it is precisely because the new generation of Jew haters are actually proud of the distinction and want to world to know what they think. 

It is ironic that these people won't shut up because of another Democrat belief - that of the virtue of ignorant youth.  Alexandria Occaiso-Cortes and her fellow freshman believe that their youth and inexperience make them morally superior to the leaders of the caucus.  They believe that far from owing deference to their elders, their elders actually owe deference to them.

Nancy Pelosi was able to keep a lid on this, but Ilhan Omar was always a loose cannon, beholden to none.  She'd smear Jews, apologize, and then go do it again.  I'm sure she found this hokey-pokey style of discussion tedious and was willing to finally give it up so she could air her full-throated hatred of Zion and the hook-nosed blood-drinkers therein.

To their great discredit, the Democrat leadership caved.

Expect the statements to grow more strident as victorious anti-Semites consolidate their position.  I anticipate a plank in the 2020 platform endorsing both the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement as well as the "Zionism is Racism" United Nations resolution.

When that happens, the Trumpening will have yet another Great Reveal to its credit.  While alarming, this reckoning is also absolutely necessary.  Only after we know the full scope of the problem can we solve it.

If India and Pakistan nuke each other, the lead story will still be RUSSIA

If there was any lingering doubt as to the pathetic, miserable, myopic and dim-witted nature of American media, today dispelled it.

Given a story with profound global implications - a military confrontation between to long-time enemies armed with nuclear weapons - you'd think that would be main news event.  For the first time since 1971, India and Pakistan indulged in air-to-air combat.  This is important.

But no, the useless Democrat media was instead focused on the additional lies spread by an admitted perjurer coached by Hillary Clinton's legal time.

Because Trump.

India and Pakistan's leaders aren't gossiping on Twitter, so no one from Washington knows or cares what's going on, but it far more consequential than the latest eternal installment of "Walls are closing in on Trump" story that has now been running for two f*cking years.

In the event of a global conflagration, I imagine the last signals to flicker across social media from these morons will be questions on how it affects Mueller's investigation

BONUS QUISLING NEVER TRUMP STUPIDITY:  Combat Lawyer David French felt compelled to let everyone on Twitter know that he would never, ever, ever vote for Trump. 

So I guess Mr. Painfully Evangelical Christian will be fine voting for a Democrat who favors murdering babies at birth and persecuting Christians, because that's pretty much what we're going to get.

What a useless tool.

Trump's second North Korea summit

Well, this isn't going to make the Endless Unwinnable War lobby happy.

Just to review: since the previous summit - which all the NeverTrump losers denounced as a sell-out, North Korea has not conducted a single missile or nuclear weapons test.

The amount of money/fuel/food provided for this concession?

Zero.  Zip.  Nada.

Ending a previously intractable conflict takes a little time, and it's funny to see how many people who conspicuously failed during their time in power are now demanding that Trump provide instant results.

That being said, I think Trump wants to see some concrete progress on de-nuclearization.  Perhaps a "nukes for food" deal with an American mission in Pyongyang would be mutually acceptable.  Anyhow, the media will as usual be utterly useless in both analysis and relating the actual events, so stay tuned.

As a side note, every time Trump leaves the country, something happens on the FBI/DOJ conspiracy front.  Interesting to see what happens there as well.

Another RUSSIA distraction fails

Yesterday my prediction once again came true that whenever Trump gained traction in the shutdown, the RUSSIA investigation would immediate pop with yet another "bombshell."

Of course, it wasn't bombshell, but a damp squib.  In fact, the claim was so blatantly false, even Robert Mueller had to bestir himself from going through Trump's sock drawer to knock it down.

It's a tiresome pattern, and part of why my blogging drops off from time to time - there simply isn't anything new going on.  RUSSIA has been a lie from the get-go, and anyone who has been paying attention knows this.

The tired "walls closing in" cliche is now celebrating its second birthday with nothing to show for it but empty indictment and pleas for various process crimes.  Oh, and Paul Manafort - who was a peripheral figure on the campaign for a couple of weeks - got busted for taxes years before Trump ran for office.

This cycle will continue until Mueller is finally put out to pasture because it's all the Dems have.  Their stance on open borders is deeply unpopular, even with their base.  Furloughed federal workers have to be wondering why Pelosi wanted to take a junket and let them keep suffering delayed pay.

In short, its a disaster and the same old isn't going to change things.

As I noted yesterday, the House Dems are out of ammunition.  They have nothing left to throw at Trump.

The president, on the other hand, controls the executive branch, and has almost limitless options for his next move.  I see Theresa May's zombie ministry managed to survive, which likely means full declassification remains on hold, but a new attorney general means that much of the skullduggery within the Dept. of Justice will finally come to light.

Perhaps this is why Mueller suddenly decided to perform rumor control.  His action was "unprecedented" only because he's spent the last few years doing the exact opposite, leaking salacious details whenever possible.

So maybe he knows the reckoning is near.

Theresa May's Brexit debacle

It is fascinating to see how many of the allegedly competent establishment politicians are in fact staggeringly incompetent.

Emmanuel Macron has managed to create persistent unrest in France.  Despite his earlier policy surrender, the popular anger shows no signs of abating.

Angela Merkel is Germany's first lame-duck Chancellor.  She's still clinging to office, but her abysmal electoral performance resulted in her resignation as the head of her party.  It's a pretty damning indictment that most of her final term in office will be as a "caretaker."

Then there's the UK.  The British are often the forerunner of popular movements, both good and bad.   Just as Thatcher's rise heralded the Reagan revolution, so Brexit anticipated the Trumpening.

But Theresa May has proven herself one of the most inept politicians in British history.  She inherited a solid majority which she pissed away and a botched snap-election.  She then negotiated a Brexit deal that was voted down by the largest margin in modern British electoral history.

The next step is likely a vote of confidence on her creaky minority government.  The Ulster Unionists who've been propping her up have been getting treated like crap and are likely to tell her to piss off.

This would lead to a bit by Labour to form a government, which will likely fail, bringing on a general election that would certain favor the Reds.

I've long since come to realize that sometimes people can't be saved from themselves.  A Corbin-led government would give the UK as much socialism as it could handle and wreak ruin on the nation, but maybe that's what the Brits need. 

Meanwhile, the fall of May's government would also free President Trump to declassify documents relating to the bogus RUSSIA investigation - a step he backed away from after the British and Aussies begged him to.  With May's government a smoking ruin, there's little reason for him to offer deference at this late date.

Each one of these three leaders - May, Macron, Merkel - were held up as the anti-Trump, the globalist alternative that would save the world from the horror of the deplorables taking control.

And yet, all of them have failed by any objective measure.  The nations now powering ahead are the ones who have heeded the call of their people to stand up for their nation rather than interests of their own elite class.

The political establishment has proven they are unworthy of any deference.  The sooner they are swept away entirely, the better.

The Dems have betrayed just about everything they ever believed

One of the interesting things about getting older is that personal memories stretch back into periods that are increasingly regarded as "history."

Of course we have lots of books and now even videos to document what was, but no written (or video) account can replicate the immediacy of seeing events as they happened.

I'm not an old man (yet), but already I feel like an age of the world has passed.  Yes, I was literally born in a previous century, but the political landscape is unrecognizable from what it was only a quarter century ago. 

The media blames this on radicalized Republicans, but in fact it's the Democrats who have now repudiated almost their entire party platform from my youth.  The GOP has made changes as well, but mostly these are in response to massive lurches from the opposition.

Once upon a time, there were these strange creatures called "pro-life Democrats," and they included prominent figures among them.  Bill Clinton famously said abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare."  Abortion was lawful, but a tragedy and people of good will should work hard so that it rarely if ever happened.

But now of course it's a great thing, and billion-dollar industry profits not only off of the wholesale murder of America's youth, but from the sales of the unborn corpses as well.  Hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi can hide behind the "seamless garment" mumbo-jumbo to defend their betrayal of the Catholic faith, but on what grounds does she excuse cannibalizing unborn children for spare parts?

Democrats used to be the party of the blue-collar working class.  Now they despise manual labor as a past time, and also the very masculinity that supports and sustains it.  The party that once ranged itself against Big Business is now a slave to it, beholden to dot-com billionaires who want endless streams of indentured low-wage servants to code their platforms and support their server farms.

The southern border was once a prime concern of the Democrats, and there's plenty of tape showing Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer and other luminaries demanding stronger safeguards to protect American workers.

Now those same sentiments are "racist" or "immoral" and what America really needs is an endless flood of human trafficking, smuggled drugs and unskilled labor to drive down wages.

Free speech was something the Dems loved, but now they hate it.  The old ACLU was willing to sue on behalf on Nazis; the new ACLU thinks that "hate speech" shouldn't be protected.

Similarly, the Dems once supported due process for people accused of crimes.  Now they and their ACLU allies think it's more important to get convictions than defend the presumption of innocence.

I remember when John F. Kennedy was a symbol of religious integration, and his election as president was hailed as triumph over Protestant bigotry.  But now the Dems are the ones pushing anti-Catholic bigotry and suggesting that people of certain faiths are unsuitable for public office.

One of those suspect faiths is also Judaism.  The Democrat party is still the home for the vast majority of the Jewish electorate, but they can't sit along side anti-Semites indefinitely.  At some point the Jews will be expelled from the party, which will fully embrace anti-Israel policies it's currently flirting with.

I also can remember when Democrats shouted "keep government out of the bedroom!"  Now they want it there on a continual basis to document everything that could possibly happen.

In the 80s it was no one's business what consenting adults do, but now the very notion of whether women can consent at all is in play.

Democrat feminism went from "I am woman, hear me roar!" to "I'm a snowflake, and even the slightest pressure will cause me to knuckle under to patriarchy."  Hillary Clinton's bitter speech that GOP women vote the way their menfolk say they should was a total repudiation of Democrat feminism.  Indeed, one could make the case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment simply by quoting modern feminists.

Ronald Reagan famously said that he didn't leave the Democrats; they were the ones who left him.

Compared to what has happened since my youth, the change he saw was incremental.  Other than the name, it's hard to recognize anything a Democrat of 1980 would have in common with one today.

 

The Dragon's empty nest

Amidst all the saber-rattling and supposed super-weapons just around the corner, it is worth noting that mainland China is best by enormous and complicated problems that deeply undercut its global ambitions.

Here at the Posse we've noted more than once that China's dependence on the export market to fuel its growth leaves it deeply vulnerable to a trade war.  The United States largely consumes its own product and having to on-shore more production may produce short-term disruption but actually will strengthen the US economy in the long run.

China, by contrast, remains largely dirt-poor and its convict laborers and peasants simply can't afford the counterfeit i-Phones they produce in such abundance.  Absent the Western world willing to play a sap, China's economy will crater.

But there's also the demographic side, and here Mark Steyn once again takes his familiar role by pointing out that China is getting old well before it's getting rich.

One thing I will add is that China's military leadership is well aware of these trends.  All industrial nations track available manpower in case they need full wartime mobilization.  The trends in China must be deeply alarming to its leadership - particularly since the Chinese way of war has historically been to drown the enemy in Chinese blood.  That blood's increasing hard to come by.

China still uses a draft and like all nations, calls up only a fraction of its available manpower.  However, like Russia, China's leaders have watched the potential pool of recruits drop each year for decades.  They know with absolute certainty that the number available for the 2020 call-up will be smaller than that in 2019, and that the classes of 2021, 2022, etc. will continue to dwindle.

This is why China is pushing so hard to take control of the Western Pacific.   It is also why I feared that the election of Hillary Clinton would continue the road to war started by the weakness of Barack Obama.  With China pushing hard against a visibly declining United States, there was a serious risk that China would go so far that even Hillary couldn't fold.  The publicly mooted strike against US carriers by a Chinese general or a strike on Guam or Alaska would rouse the public beyond the Democrat media's ability to contain it.

Indeed, Hillary would likely lash out in a panic, since being the first woman president would mean she had to be super-manly.  And thus the war would begin.

Trump's assertiveness allays my fears because it sends a clear warning that the US will respond.  This means that China's leaders will have to strike knowing full well that total war will be the result.   There is no ambiguity and thus far less chance of a miscalculation.

But China remains a source of instability, and we can only hope its leaders understand that a diminished China is better than a radioactive one.

Greenpeace turns to shipbreakers of Bangladesh to scrap flagship Rainbow Warrior

For a while I've been chronicling the rot among various (formerly) respected institutions.  Today's example (via Ace of Spades) is the story of how nominally environmentalist organization Greenpeace decided to dispose of its iconic flagship by using the infamous shipbreakers of Bangladesh.

Greenpeace apparently leaked the story in November, hoping to bury it and avoid bad publicity.  One might think that one of the premier environmental organizations doing something like this would be news, but one would be wrong.  Leftist journalists (and their editors) have their priorities.  They increasingly see themselves not as conveyors of information but rather gate-keepers whose job is to boost their cause and political interests.

One can read the lame excuses of Greenpeace at the link, but it's entirely insincere.

For a long time Greenpeace's core mission has been fund-raising with a little virtue-signalling thrown in.  Actual environmental improvement, sound conservation practices - these things are for the little people. 

Thus, when the Rainbow Warrior II had reached the end of its operational lifespan, the suits who run the organization wanted to get rid of the hulk as cheaply as possible.  That pointed to the hideously unsafe and environmentally toxic beaches of Bangladesh. 

Of course, one might think that since Greenpeace has specifically targeted this practice for condemnation, they'd have enough institutional self-awareness not to do it.  One might think that, but one would be wrong.

This could have been a teaching moment, and the recycling of the Rainbow Warrior II could have been an excellent fund-raising opportunity for the organization.  Heck, they could have made trinkets out of the hulks various parts and sold them off at an obscene profit.

But they didn't because like most institutions today they suffer from the twin handicaps of short-sighted thinking and a lack of basic competence.  I'm reasonably certain that the entire "business" side of the organization consists of earnest upper-middle class kids who breezed their way through school on the backs of tutors and degree programs based on "building awareness" rather than any sort of critical thinking.

Such creatures typically end up at trendy non-profits and rely on an ossified donor base to insulate them from the real-world consequences of bad decision-making.

The problem is that eventually, stupid will win.  The decision by environmentalists to ally with corporate globalists is a prime example.  One cannot claim to favor protecting the environment and still support the free flow of capital to third-world hellholes with no environmental protections.  China's air is literally toxic, and this is deliberate policy of their government to achieve economic growth.

Each time a leftist-dominated state like California passes "clean energy" legislation, everyone knows production will simply move offshore to avoid the rules and exploit cheap labor.

Blue-collar workers have already figured this one out.  It's an open question whether their college-educated "betters" will have the brain power to do likewise.

Welcome to 2019

Our readers will no doubt have noticed that blogging here has been sparse over the past few weeks.  Partly this was due to my being out of town (and having to recover) but since then it's simply fatigue with the repetitive cycle of anger that permeates the news.

Roger L. Simon has dubbed 2018 the year of living hatefully, which is both clever and accurate.

Vitriol is everywhere and it is not longer enough to merely disagree with someone.  No, dissenters must have their lives up-ended, losing jobs and homes if possible to punish them for their evil thoughts.

For a long time, this was a one-sided game, with the left joyfully attacking with impunity, but now the center-right is also getting radicalized.  We are rapidly filling what Winston Churchill dubbed "the vials of wrath" in our society.  When they are full, bad things will happen that no one will be able to control.

At the same time, I still see hope in the year ahead.  The popular rebellion in defense of "Baby it's Cold Outside," was both necessary and instructive.  We are reaching the point where the inherent contradictions in radical-left ideology are becoming unavoidable.  Just as with the transgender movement now attacking feminist icons like Martina Navratilova or banning drag queens, something here has to give.

It was one thing to sneer at half-century-old values, but increasingly views held only a year ago are being declared anathema for insufficient "wokeness."  No one can live like that.

We enter the new year with much of the federal government on furlough, and this fact will present a severe challenged to the new Democrat-run House of Representatives.  The modern left is expert at posing, preening and sniping, but actual governance is something different.  One need only glance at the once-lauded European titans who are now either caretakers or zombie leaders of to see what happens when inflexible principles meet implacable reality.

Whatever happens, we at the Posse wish you a happy new year and remind you that faith, family and freedom are what really matters.  Everything else is just details.