Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, American Thinker, Fox News and numerous other print, radio and television outlets.
Bishops in the Church of England are agitating to make “God” a genderless word. No longer would God be a “he” or even a “she.” God is slated for genderless affirming surgery. God will be the Church of England’s eunuch.
This presumably means that God will be referenced as “they.” But “they” is a plural pronoun. Ergo, the Church of England now apparently considers God to be plural – there is more than one.
The choice of pronouns farce has thus gone to heaven. Not to die, as it should have the good grace to do, but to take over the place.
Testosterone is an interesting hormone. The more a man uses it, the higher his levels become. And the higher his levels become, the more he wants to use it. Exercise, especially resistance training like weight lifting, increases T levels. And then the increased T levels make a man want to go lift some weights. It’s a virtuous circle.
If gasoline in a car were like T in a man’s body, the more you drove, and the harder you drove, the more gas there would be in your tank.
But there’s not much gas in the tank of young men these days. The Cleveland Clinic and other researchers report that men today, especially young ones, have less T than ten, twenty or fifty years ago. Odds are, you’re not the man your father was.
Testosterone does more than make a man want to hit the weights. It also makes him happier, healthier, sexier, more muscular, more productive, and more reproductive.
A couple of centuries ago, an extraordinary group of 56 men on the eastern seaboard of our continent declared the independence of their lands. At the close of their Declaration of Independence, they further declared, “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
I think Lauren Boebert would have voted “present.”
The Founders weren’t just being melodramatic. Had they lost the Revolutionary War, they’d have met their end at the end of a rope. They took that risk to found this amazing democratic republic, one that Abraham Lincoln later noted was “conceived in liberty.” He might have added “with undaunted courage and against all odds.”
The number of people on planet Earth is about 8 billion. The number has grown exponentially, as numbers that are the result of exponential functions do. It’s something like the miracle of compound interest. The graph tells the story.
I don’t think we’re on the verge of starving ourselves. That Malthusian apocalypse gets proven wrong over and over. That’s because Malthusians fail to foresee the agricultural productivity ensuing from technology. For that matter, they fail to foresee the general increase in well-being and comfort that technology brings about.
I’m guessing Earth could easily support double, triple or maybe even ten times the current human population. Anyone who thinks we are running out of room to grow has never looked out an airplane window on a dark night over the Rocky Mountains.
Fine, Earth can support many more people. But how many people do we want Earth to support?
In stock market investing, you’re supposed to be pessimistic when everyone else is optimistic, and optimistic when everyone else is pessimistic. Warren Buffett famously put it this way: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”
The reason the aforecited principle applies well in stock market investing is that the herd instinct makes people buy or sell stocks because other people are buying or selling. The result is that the stocks get over-sold or over-bought, thereby driving their price too low or too high in relation to their real indicators of value – mainly their current and future profits.
Eventually, the herd drives the stock so high or so low that even dedicated herders cannot fail to miss the fact that the stock is mispriced in relation to objective value indicators. At that point, they finally change direction – they start buying while the herd is still selling, or vice versa – and the price trend reverses. The herd reverses direction, and stampedes off the other way. You can make money by being contrary to the herd. Be a bull when they’re a bear, and vice versa.
So, does the same principle apply in evaluating the state of a culture? Has the assessment of American culture become so bearish that it is surely too much so?
Scientists generally agree that the universe – defined as everything in existence – has not always existed. It came into existence with a bang about 13 billion years ago. This bang was a big one, so they named it the “Big Bang.”
Before the Big Bang, there was no space, no energy and no time – not even empty space, zero energy or stopped time. There was nothing.
And then everything was created out of this nothing. We call this everything “creation.” It’s the tangible universe around us, seen and unseen. It’s the energy, the matter, and the progression of time.
As a matter of logic, creation must have been created. And also as a matter of logic, whatever caused creation to be created is, by definition, the creator of it.
How the creator created creation, we haven’t a clue. Oh sure, there are theories that our universe is one of many “parallel” universes, blah blah blah, but there’s zero evidence for any of those theories. Those theories are mainly semantics games. They really just beg the question: If our universe is a “parallel” universe to some other one – some other creation – then how was that one created if not by a creator?
In short, if you acknowledge that the universe – creation – exists, you cannot deny that it was created by a creator. The rest of organized religion is just puny humans quibbling about the nature of this creator, in the tribal, shallow ways they do. They’re not striving for understanding; they’re arguing that their creator is better than yours.
Whatever.
On the other hand, if you deny that the universe exists, you should stop reading and immediately check yourself into the hospital.
Here’s where it gets interesting. In order to create the universe – in order to create creation – the creator must have been around (but around what?) before the universe came into existence. The laws of cause-and-effect go only one direction in time. Yesterday’s effect cannot be produced by today’s cause. The creation could not be caused by something occurring after it happened.
But the universe is defined to include everything, which includes a creator. And so, unless you deny the laws of cause-and-effect by contending that the creator was created in the creation and somehow cast a cause backward in time to create the effect of that creation, this creator must have existed before it existed. But how can something exist before it exists?
These violations, of not only physical laws but basic laws of logic and cause-and-effect, seem the very definition of a “miracle.”
Given that the creator created all of creation – and did so before the creator even existed, or, alternatively, the creator itself existed before it existed – I can only conclude that this creator is capable of anything. Virgin births, Red Sea partings, growing my hair back, you name it.
That the creator that created creation is omnipotent does not alone validate any particular religion – the mere fact that the creator is capable of something does not prove it did that something. It just says that, scientifically speaking, anything and everything is possible.
Remember all of that in this season of goodwill and at other times as well. Be merry – I have a hunch that our miraculous, puckish creator is. And humble.
The Biden administration made headlines last year when they boastfully appointed a certain personto a high level position at the Office of Nuclear Energy. This person is “non-binary” and refers to his/her/them/itself with ungendered pronouns.
OK, I get that. The person feels that he/her/it/they does (do?) not fit neatly into the anachronistic gender labels developed over about two million years of human history and prehistory as interpreted by science, medicine, genetics, sociology, biology, logic, anthropology and biochemistry promulgated by dead white European men – and dead men and women of color on the rest of the planet – consistent with the male/female dichotomy in the animal world.
Yes, I get it – this person is mentally ill. Note that this mental case is a card-carrying member of the political party that “believes in science.”
In a case argued at the Supreme Court this week, a Colorado website designer appealed a decision from lower courts requiring her to create wedding websites for gay couples in violation of her religious belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. The Court is likely to reverse the lower court decision, and allow her to decline to create such websites.
The liberal minority on the Court and the liberal media argue that such a decision will lead to a new Jim Crow era where the providers of public accommodation are allowed to refuse services to people on the basis of their sexual preferences or skin color.
That argument is incorrect and probably not even sincere. Here’s why.
The First Amendment of course prohibits the government from banning speech. Less recognized is that the First Amendment also prohibits the government from compelling speech. That means it’s unconstitutional for the government to prohibit you from voicing support for gay marriage and it’s equally unconstitutional for the government to require you to voice such support.
In a COVID panic, we told people to stop working. It became not only permissible not to work, it became a mandate. Sitting around the house watching daytime TV in pajamas became the responsible thing to do. With no one working, unsurprisingly, no work got done. It was like a two-year snow day. Or Ferris Bueller’s Two-Years Off. Democrats loved it, of course, because Democrats hate work.
COVID killed nearly a million Americans (though most had what the doctors euphemistically call “comorbidities”). And the lockdowns and mandates for masks, vaccines and social distancing (at least when one wasn’t rioting) were bad. And the lost year or two of learning for an entire generation was tragic (though we could make that up in four months if we improved the schools and tamed the teachers unions).
But the most destructive outcome of COVID was the destruction of the American work ethic. That’s the ethic — now considered a quaint notion — that work is good. It’s good for the pocketbook, good for the soul, and good for society.
A gunman entered a gay nightclub – or I guess they call them LGBTQ nightclubs now – in Colorado Springs last weekend and opened fire. Five people were killed and 18 were injured. He was finally stopped when a former army soldier pounced on him, kicked his gun away, and pinned him to the floor.
Then Democrats pounced. Not on the gunman, but on Colorado Springs. The New York Times declared that Colorado Springs:
“was known for years as the Vatican of Evangelicals — a home base for a well-funded, well-organized conservative Christian political movement that broadcast dire warnings about the dangers of homosexuality to the nation.”
Other liberal media outlets and prominent Dems piled on, including NBC, Daily Kos and, naturally, Nancy Pelosi.
the Aspen beat 