Category Archives: News

News

Michigan advances bill that makes it a felony to make someone “feel” threatened

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For years on this blog I’ve been observing what happens to freedom of speech and freedom of religion in countries where the secular left takes power. Michigan is a state that used to be purple, but they’ve moved further and further to the secular left. Let’s take a look at some of their recent leftist actions, then find out what is in their latest piece of anti-free-speech legislation.

Things started to get ugly when the Democrats did very well in the 2022 mid-term elections:

Democrats are projected to win key races and ballot measures across the board in the Great Lakes State, led by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s re-election victory. The party is also set to win multiple tight U.S. House races, enshrine a right to abortion in the state’s constitution, and take control of the state legislature for the first time in 40 years.

It’s the first time since 1983 that Democrats have had control of the legislature. When I think of purple states like North Carolina, they still have a very good conservative legislature. So a Democrat legislature really shows you how far Michigan has fallen. You would think that after Gretchen Whitmer’s horrendous handling of COVID (compared to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis) that they would have thrown the Democrats out, but they didn’t.

It’s not just putting a right to abortion into the state’s constitution. They also repealed the right to work without joining a union:

Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer enacted legislation repealing right-to-work laws in the state on Friday, the first time such laws have been overturned in five decades.

So, if you are working in a union dominated field, you have to join a union and pay dues. Unions are overwhelmingly Democrat, and they tend to get involved in the worst social issues. I could never join a union, and now people are being forced to.

This case of a secular leftist shooting an 84-year-old pro-life woman was particularly disturbing:

A Michigan man who shot an 84-year-old woman campaigning against abortion was sentenced to 100 hours of community service on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

She was shot in the back by the gunman. But Democrats LOVE when guns are used against Republicans, so he gets a slap on the wrist.

What about election fraud? That’s apparently not a serious thing in Michigan:

A local official in Flint, Michigan, was sentenced to six months of house arrest Monday for misconduct in office after sabotaging a ballot box in her own election in 2020.

After votes were cast in the 2020 primary election for her seat as township clerk, Funk sabotaged the ballot box, making the ballots ineligible for a recount, according to investigators.

She went on to win the general election later that fall.

It’s OK, because Democrats are allowed to do that. Michigan in particular has poor election integrity, coming in at rank 28 out of 50, in a recent ranking of election integrity.

Well, with all that said, let’s see the latest atrocity from the far left in Michigan, reported by Daily Wire:

A Michigan hate speech bill that has passed the state House and is now in the hands of the Senate is alarming conservatives, people of faith, and legal experts.

The bill, HB 4474, is part of a package of legislation that would replace Michigan’s existing Ethnic Intimidation Act and make it a hate crime to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.” Under the bill’s framework, “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression” are included as classes protected against intimidation. If passed, the hate speech legislation would make violators guilty of a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

Here’s a good comment explaining what the bill means to Christians and conservatives who are stuck in Michigan:

Rep. Angela Rigas, a Republican freshman in the state House, told The Daily Wire that including sexual orientation and gender identity as a “protected class” specifically targets conservatives who speak out against radical gender ideology.

“The state of Michigan is now explicitly allowing the gender delusion issue to be used as a ‘protected class.’ This opens up numerous issues when it comes to the courts and the continued weaponization of the system against conservatives,” Rigas said. “We saw similar concerns when they wanted to pass blocks on ‘conversion’ therapy. It seems Dems want to be in the business of telling people how to think. We are determined to keep choice and opinion a free choice despite those efforts.”

I’m not sure why people would continue to pay taxes to the secular leftists in the Michigan government. You’re literally paying for the rope that the fascists will use to hang you. And why? Because you say something that’s offensive to them.

Get out of that state.

News

Sweden turning away from “unreliable” wind and solar and back to clean nuclear power

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I’m very concerned about America switching to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Renewables are expensive, unstable, unreliable, and harmful to animals – especially birds and bats. I would much prefer if the country relied on fracking and nuclear power, which are zero emission and harmless to animals. Sweden had been focused on renewables, but they’re now moving back to nuclear.

Here’s the story from the The Blaze:

The Swedish parliament determined last week that in order to ensure the country has a “stable energy system,” it will have to abandon its goal of “100 per cent renewable electricity production by 2040.”

To satisfy electricity demand, which is set to double to around 300 TwH by 2040, Sweden’s right-of-center government announced June 20 that it would instead lean more heavily on nuclear energy and subsidize the construction of new nuclear plants — plants green-lit in 2016 but sidelined for fear they would be too expensive, reported Reuters.

The country, home to just over 10.5 million people, presently has three nuclear plants with six nuclear reactors in commercial operation. The state-owned Vattenfall aims to bring the tally up to eight reactors and refurbish extant facilities.

Wow, what accounts for this big change in direction? Well, the country experiences very cold winters. After poor performance from the renewables during the winter, the people started to demand results – which is why they elected a right-of-center government to make changes.

Swedish support for nuclear energy is presently at a record high of 56%, up from 42% in 2022, reported Bloomberg.

Sweden knows what to do to fix their energy problems. Other countries are moving to nuclear power in order to get clean, reliable zero-emission low-cost power.

South Korea is going back into nuclear. This article from far-left CNN is from July 2022:

South Korea, one of the world’s most fossil fuel-reliant economies, is re-embracing nuclear energy, with the government announcing Tuesday it will restart construction on two nuclear reactors and extend the life of those already in operation.

By 2030, the Energy Ministry wants nuclear to make up at least 30% of the country’s power generation – a step up from its previous goal of 27%.

To meet this, South Korea is restarting construction on two new reactors at the Hanul Nuclear Power Plant on the country’s east coast. Construction on the two reactors has been stalled since 2017, when former President Moon Jae-in – who had pushed hard to phase out nuclear energy – took office.

But with a new President in office, South Korea’s nuclear industry is returning at full speed.

Japan is restarting their idled nuclear power plants, and planning to build more next-generation nuclear reactors. They need reliable power, and they don’t want to count on their neighbors to sell it to them. They want to develop their own energy at home, and lower the prices that their citizens have to pay.

The problem in America is that we’ve elected people to lead us who have no skills or understanding of how the world works. People like AOC, who were working as bartenders and waitresses are making policy decisions. Why did we elect stupid and corrupt people to run the government? Because they told us what we wanted to hear? I would rather have results than words. This is only going to be fixed when we elect leaders from the grown-up party.

News

What can we learn about communist leaders from the record of history?

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Now that we have atheistic communists in the majority of the House, Senate and White House, it might be a good idea to take a look at what atheistic communist leaders have done in history. First, let’s see how the atheistic worldview of communist leaders affected religious people.

Here is what Josef Stalin did during his rule of Russia in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Library of Congress offers this in their “Soviet Archives exhibit”:

The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological objective the elimination of religion. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed.

The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited. By 1939 only about 500 of over 50,000 churches remained open.

What’s the attitude of Democrat candidates to Bible-believing Christians? My read is that they think that Christian values need to be suppressed by the government lest they offend Democrat voters, who seem to be very easily offended these days. You can already see their animus towards Christians in their Equality Act, which eradicates conscience rights in order to protect (some) LGBT people from feeling offended.

The Ukraine Famine

Take a look at this UK Daily Mail article about Josef Stalin.

Excerpt:

Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin’s man-made famine of 1932/3, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide.

The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor – the Hunger.

Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers’ homes.

They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children.

If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in their hundreds of thousands.

So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.

[…]Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga.

By 1933, 5.7 million households – somewhere between ten million and 15 million people – had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of starvation.

The Holodomor is just one of the atrocities committed by Soviet Union communists. You may also have heard that they operated a system of labor camps for dissidents that killed millions more. The total number of people killed by Stalin is estimated at 20 to 40 million.

Stalin actually wasn’t very good at mass murder compared to another communist, Mao Zedong.

Can you name the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century? No, it wasn’t Hitler or Stalin. It was Mao Zedong.

According to the authoritative “Black Book of Communism,” an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with — by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.

For Mao, the No. 1 enemy was the intellectual. The so-called Great Helmsman reveled in his blood-letting, boasting, “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.” Mao was referring to a major “accomplishment” of the Great Cultural Revolution, which from 1966-1976 transformed China into a great House of Fear.

The most inhumane example of Mao’s contempt for human life came when he ordered the collectivization of China’s agriculture under the ironic slogan, the “Great Leap Forward.” A deadly combination of lies about grain production, disastrous farming methods (profitable tea plantations, for example, were turned into rice fields), and misdistribution of food produced the worse famine in human history.

Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million — the population of California.

[…]Mao kept expanding the laogai, a system of 1,000 forced labor camps throughout China. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in labor camps, has estimated that from the 1950s through the 1980s, 50 million Chinese passed through the Chinese version of the Soviet gulag. Twenty million died as a result of the primitive living conditions and 14-hour work days.

Whenever I bring up the historical record of communism to Democrats, they always tell me that their leaders have good intentions. But the communist leaders of the past aren’t any different from the communist leaders of today. Communist leaders all start out with noble ambitions of wanting to help the poor. The problem is that they don’t know anything about economics, so whatever they try doesn’t work. Communist policies like nationalizing private industries, printing money, purging wealthy people, imposing tariffs, and imposing price controls cause enormous poverty. And then they need someone to blame for their failure to produce the results they promise.

If we were serious about helping the poor, then we would elect leaders who had experience lifting the poor out of poverty. A business leader or a governor of a state. It’s not a popularity contest. We need to choose someone who has already had success at helping the poor. And the best way to help the poor is by helping them to find work so they can earn their own success and chart their own course. After all it’s not words that affect our lives. Or the feelings we have about words we like. What affects our lives is policies that produce results. Intentions and rhetoric don’t matter, ultimately.