How many of you doubt yourselves? How many of you doubt that you are loved by God?  More importantly, how many of you can say you are loved by God, but you don’t really ever feel it, or you don’t know why its there? In our first meeting, David asked how people thought God saw them, we got answers like lost, undeserving, failure, things like that. I see myself that way as well. I don’t really like me. I’ve never thought of myself as somebody that somebody else can like or want to be around any longer than when you’re already scheduled to be around me. The longer story I’ll keep to myself, but a large part of it is a symptom of the fact that I I am almost entirely rational. I’m not the most emotional person you’ll ever come across but I can analyze and recite and do things that I imagine a professor might do, if I wanted to be in front of people that often. A side effect of this cold focus on reason is that I have a functional relationship with people. I know it’s there, but I don’t really embrace it. Partly because I don’t know what it looks like to embrace a friendship, and partly because I really never care to. Continue reading Disruption →

We’ve talked here in “Burke” and “Consequences” about the consequences the gun control movement hasn’t considered should their treasured gun ban backfire, be it in the response of the citizenry, or a potential spike in violent crime. Today, I’d like to go through the paradoxes one has to accept or be ignorant of, especially if one holds a particular viewpoint. There won’t be much here as the mindset is inherently self-defeating. However, it is prevalent enough that I feel it is worth mentioning.

It goes thusly: One who is anti-Trump to the point of seeing him as a threat to freedom, and who sees police as racist, trigger-happy killers is the last person who should also be supporting gun control. Continue reading Paradox →

In a secular culture, hatred and evil are products of mental illness and not some more internal, “philisophical” ailment.

What’s scary is that most of these killers are not paranoid, schizophrenic or anything of that sort. For instance, the Oslo shooter, who killed 77 people, was deemed mentally competent to stand trial. The worst you could say about the Sandy Hook shooter was that he had Asperger’s, which is not a precursor to violence. The Isla Vista shooter was just angry women wouldn’t sleep with him. Columbine shooters were bullied. The Synagogue shooter quite clearly hated Jews. Parkland had innumerable red flags, so maybe there’s something there. (This is what you get with a guy who turns shootings into case studies. Continue reading On Killers →

The Oxford dictionary describes a coincidence as “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection” When you and your friend are wearing the same color shirt without planning it, or when they’re in the same space as you are at a given time. But it’s generally kept to those trivial things. But what do we call a series of events, each one doesn’t seem likely in its time, that play themselves out over a series of years? There has to be a statute of limitations on when you start to think there is something beyond mere chance that seems to lead awkwardly from one event to the next. Maybe at some point you’ll start to wonder if maybe God has a hand in this. I don’t mean that what follows are stories of constant, wild twists and turns, but little, subtle tweaks that impact the rest of the story.

I have two stories, one about my sister and Jubilee. We’ll start with the Jubilee one, both because it’s the one most relevant to this place, and because it gives me an opportunity to explain what goes on at this thing. Continue reading “Coincidence” →

The response to the Tibbets case is another fascinating example of how a country can have tens of thousands of discussions on an issue and still not have a single original thought.

First, on the Right. “Not all immigrants are like this, but” if we had better immigration policy, Tibbets would still be alive.

Tactically, this is true. And yet, we find ourselves with the usual “not all (insert group here)” argument and what I am forced to call the “but” argument. 1st and 2nd amendment supporters will know this by the phrases “I support free speech, but” as a lead-in to promoting censorship and “I support the 2nd Amendment, but” as a lead in to a gun ban. Continue reading Tibbets →

So, Trump met with Putin, for reasons I still don’t understand. The Left is having their usual conniption about treason or how this is obviously a sign that Trump is pro Russia, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true.

Ben Shaprio, in his program today, observed rather rightly that Trump’s words and actions don’t always seem to be in line with each other. In the eyes of his opposition, Trump regularly vacillates from Russian puppet, to someone who will start World War 3 by bombing Syria, then he’s back to Russian puppet. And herein lies the problem. Think about what has been used as a watershed moment over the years to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump was red on the inside. Countless random documents that amounted to ultimately nothing, a comment from a rally with at best providential timing, but not much else, and about a year ago, the fact that he had starred in a Russian pop star’s video was seen as evidence of deeper collusion. Continue reading Russia Episode 2: Soul-searching →