Fracking causes Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

By the same logic, so does military training, regional sales conventions and college.

The only correlation it discovered was “grant dollars in states with highly-charged political issues and lots of electoral votes”.

Four paintings that give a much better history of race relations in America than the NYTimes Magazine’s “1619 Project” possibly could.

I clearly read it all wrong. If A-Klo’s candidacy was the narcissistic joke I always assumed it was, she’d have never warranted a Iowa-Caucus-eve hit piece smackdown like this:

She told a story that she has cited throughout her political career, including during her 2006 campaign for the U.S. Senate: An 11-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet while doing homework at her dining room table in 2002. And Klobuchar’s office put Tyesha Edwards’ killer — a black teen — behind bars for life.
But what if Myon Burrell is innocent?

The Tyesha Edwards shooting was an iconic event in urban life and Minneapolis crime; I’m not sure anyone who lived here, then, doesn’t remember that episode and what happened around it. It motivated the Minneapolis Police to get serious about crime (including a serious clean up of the Phillips neighborhood). (It also provided the DFL a template for their messaging on 2nd Amendment issues; Sen. Wes “Lyin Sack of Garbage” Skoglund claimed reforming “Shall Issue” laws would lead to thousands of such episodes, since gang bangers would be getting, yes, he said this, carry permits. But I digress).

A black teen, Myon Burrell, was arrested and eventually got a life sentence – a capstone in the career of a rapaciously ambitious county attorney, Amy Klobuchar.

If this was a movie, you’d know what’d happen next:

The AP reviewed more than a thousand pages of police records, court transcripts and interrogation tapes, and interviewed dozens of inmates, witnesses, family members, former gang leaders, lawyers and criminal justice experts.
The case relied heavily on a teen rival of Burrell’s who gave conflicting accounts when identifying the shooter, who was largely obscured behind a wall 120 feet away.
With no other eyewitnesses, police turned to multiple jailhouse snitches. Some have since recanted, saying they were coached or coerced. Others were given reduced time, raising questions about their credibility. And the lead homicide detective offered “major dollars” for names, even if it was hearsay.
There was no gun, fingerprints, or DNA. Alibis were never seriously pursued. Key evidence has gone missing or was never obtained, including a convenience store surveillance tape that Burrell and others say would have cleared him.
Burrell, now 33, has maintained his innocence, rejecting all plea deals.
His co-defendants, meanwhile, have admitted their part in Tyesha’s death. Burrell, they say, was not even there.
For years, one of them — Ike Tyson — has insisted he was actually the triggerman. Police and prosecutors refused to believe him, pointing to the contradictory accounts in the early days of the investigation. Now, he swears he was just trying to get the police off his back.

Read the whole thing, make up your own mind. Unlike most modern journalism, it’s worth a look.

Here’s the real question. Forget about the presidency – A-Klo was always running for VP anyway.

But if these allegations are borne out, and she comes around for her next Senate run in 2024, why would any black Minnesotan who doesn’t settle for being a permanent DFL vote ever think of voting for her?

If you haven’t seen this, I’m going to jump on the bandwagon.

This is what “GOP” “Strategist” Rick Wilson and the NYTimes Wajahat Ali think of their opponents when they think they’re on friendly turf:

Don Lemon “apologized” by saying he “didn’t catch” all of what his guests were saying.

Of course he didn’t. He was too busy laughing at the smugging.

I don’t care for Trump – but if the GOP had beaten Hillary with Scott Walker or Mitt Romney or a new genetic clone made from Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower’s DNA, they’d be saying the same exact thing.

We know this because during the Reagan and Bush I and II administrations, they said the same thing.

It just didn’t get preserved and distributed.

Speaking of which – preserve and distribute.

The University of Minnesota is going to be starting mandatory pronoun training:

Faculty and staff at the University of Minnesota are gearing up to undergo pronoun training in order to make the campus a more welcoming environment for “transgender” and “non-binary” community members.
A university policy first floated in the summer of 2018 and recently finalized dictates that university employees “are expected to use the names, gender identities and pronouns specified to them by university members.” Failing to abide by this policy “could result in discipline,” according to the policy’s FAQ page.
Training for the new policy has begun, The Minnesota Daily reports. The training program involves instructing staff and faculty in the new gender pronoun rules; those staff will then be “tasked with working to educate their colleagues, helping them work through questions and mistakes.”

There are really two responses to this. Technically three, but “unquestioning acquiescence” is off the table. .

I can either:

• Point out that this sort of thing is at best an unproductive and ultimately damaging diversion to someone’s mental illness, and at worst catering to someone’s attention-seeking
• Tell U of M staff that my preferred pronouns are “His Highness / The Grand Admiral “

I’m leaning toward “B”. Satire seems to be more useful these days.

My wife is visiting friends in Texas. This is a photo of the gas price she paid at the pump earlier this week.

Plainly, fracking has had an effect on the economic environment. I blame Trump.


Joe Doakes

Schools are teaching the “1619 Project” – the New York Times Magazine‘s “historical research” project that claims the American experiment was never about anything but slavery.

Completely as predicted. Robbie Soave at Reason:

School districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, New York, have decided to update their history curricula to include the material, which posits that the institution of slavery was so embedded in the country’s DNA that the country’s true founding could be said to have occurred in 1619, rather than in 1776.
“One of the things that we are looking at in implementing The 1619 Project is to let everyone know that the issues around the legacy of enslavement that exist today, it’s an American issue, it’s not a Black issue,” Dr. Fatima Morrell, associate superintendent for culturally and linguistically responsive initiatives for Buffalo Public Schools, told Buffalo’s NPR station.

The project, shall we say, is widely unaccepted by historians:

Many historians, though, have questioned The 1619 Project’s accuracy. Five of them penned a letter to The New York Times expressing dismay “at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” These historians said the project’s contention that the American Revolution was launched “in order to ensure slavery would continue” was flat-out wrong.
Another historian, Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research, has criticized Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project essay, which claimed that modern American capitalism has its roots in plantation slavery. Magness has persuasively argued that this claim lacks verification, and that Desmond relied on bad data about cotton-picking rates in the pre-Civil War south.
“Desmond’s thesis relies exclusively on scholarship from a hotly contested school of thought known as the New History of Capitalism (NHC),” wrote Magness in a second article. “Although NHC scholars often present their work as cutting-edge explorations into the relationship between capitalism and slavery, they have not fared well under scrutiny from outside their own ranks.”

But I’m going to take issue with Soave on one part, though:

Some conservative critics have overreached: Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called The 1619 Project “propaganda” and suggested that the Times was trying to brainwash readers. That line of attack goes too far, but there are valid criticisms of the project’s ideological slant.

I can’t – and don’t want to – speak for the authors’ intent. But the fact that it is being used to gaslight the next generation about what American is about means it is propaganda, whatever its intent.

Rep. Omar on Twitter yesterday:

There’s hope here!

If your healthcare, tuition and housing are “Free” (ergo, paid by me, the taxpayer who gets none of those benefits), I am your slave, and being a slaveholder is a moral burden on you as well.

I’m pretty sure Rep. Omar didn’t intend it that way, of course – as her droogs make pretty clear in the thread (and if there’s a 2020’s analogue to “never read the comment section”, it’s gotta be “never read the thread of someone with a blue checkmark).

But you never know.

Maybe Omar will finally get into trouble with Squad leadership for this gaffe…

There are only two real explantions for the DFL’s messaging on most issues – especially, but hardly limited to, 2nd Amendment issues:

Either:

• They are not especially bright
• They are counting on their audience not being especially bright.

Submitted for your review – a tweet, from yesterday, from Senator Matt Little, one of the suburban legislators that swept into office in the ’18 mid-terms:

So there’s the conundrum: do we assume that Matt Little actually believes that the polling station works the same as a black-market gun deal?

If he did, it’d explain a lot about the DFL’s depravity on election integrity, now that I think about it.

But no, seriously – does he believe that?

Or is his audience a class of people who just don’t think that hard?

Connecticut legislature proposes a new state police unit to investigate terrorism.

But only “far-right” terror, natch: (Emphasis added)

The proposal, which was unveiled Wednesday as part of the state Senate Democrats’ “A Just Connecticut” agenda, would publicly fund a new state police department that specializes in investigating “far-right extremist groups and individuals,” according to a news release.

Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney said the proposal is aimed at combating “potential” hate crimes but stressed that his caucus has no intention of persecuting people for their political beliefs, the Hartford Courant reported.
“Unfortunately, people who entertain hateful beliefs … are protected as long as [those beliefs] don’t result in hate-crime actions. That’s what we’re talking about,” Mr. Looney told reporters Wednesday. “We want to be more aggressive in enforcing our laws and identifying likely sources of potential domestic terrorism acts against religious institutions and ethnic institutions.”

Big Left has been trying to make “terror” (not to mention “racism, misogyny, white supremacy, Naziism and transphobia”) synonymous with “conservatism” for years – which is almost more insidious than the inevitable statutory persecution that this measure signals.

Connecticut Republicans, such as they are, at least are showing some backbone:

Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, a Republican, said there is “strong bipartisan support against any type of terrorism” but he took issue with the proposal only mentioning right-wing extremism.
“When they put a right-wing label on extremism, they do that to elicit a political response,” he said, the Hartford Courant reported.

The Democrat messaging strategy in a word: gaslighting.

In Senate hearings in Hibbing last week, Sen. Ron Latz and his DFL minions angrily derided Republicans for implying the city was dangerous.

About that time, this guy got arrested.

Again.

A loaded gun, a ballistic vest, multiple magazines and 18 rounds of loose ammunition.
That’s what police say they discovered inside a vehicle parked in an alley in the 1000 block of Beech Street in St. Paul last Saturday night.
The man in the driver’s seat has been arrested four times since September. Each time officers found firearms, say court records, which detail just three of the arrests.
The firearm, a loaded Brugger & Thomet TP9 handgun, was beneath the driver’s seat, according to the complaint. The ballistic vest, three Glock 9-millimeter magazines, two Tec magazines and the loose rounds of ammunition were in a suitcase in the back seat.
Lincoln was arrested at the scene and declined to make a statement to investigators. The female passenger with him said she didn’t know anything about guns in the vehicle.
State law prohibits Lincoln from possessing a firearm since he was convicted of felony level domestic assault in 2011, court records say.
He has two other unlawful gun-possession cases pending against him in Ramsey County from earlier this fall.
In the first, officers pulled him over Sept. 13 after noting that his vehicle’s windows were illegally tinted and found multiple bags of marijuana, as well as two loaded handguns, inside, charges say.

Obviously, we need universal background checks.

Democrats sold Obamacare is a revenue-neutral measure. The way they justified that lie was to have the federal government take over student loans so the government would get the interest money and not those greedy corporations.
Elizabeth Warren wants to forgive student loan debt. But that means no interest payments. Which means no money to pay for ObamaCare, which means thousands of poor children will go without vaccinations, or else we’ll have to steal money from Social Security to pay for healthcare and Grandma will be stuck eating dog food.
Trump should be hammering it right now. Democrats set this in motion. It was part of the deal. Now they’re pulling the legs out from under it, so who’s going to suffer? Students? Infants? Grandma?
Pit one group against the other. Divided they fall.
Joe Doakes 

It’d be fun to see .it done to the other side for a while.

Rote Fahne…,er, wait. They’re not called “Red Flag” anymore, not since they were the German Communist Party’s analogue to the Sturmabteilung (“Brownshirts”) in Germany in the 1920s. They’re called something else, now.

Let’s start over.

The angry white middle class kids from “Anti”-Fa were out on the street in Seattle last Monday, protesting against…

…free speech by black Republicans:

Not at all unexpected, if you realize that Berg’s Eighth Law is universal and unbreakable: American “progressivism’s” reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder

Once you realize this, it all makes perfect sense.

THEM: “You are a Christian. You believe in an invisible man that controls everyone and everything. A flying spaghetti monster. I, on the other hand, am a creature of pure reason! I believe in an evidence-based life!”

ME: “I *am* a Christian.”

“And you believe that a fetus isn’t human until it is born, that there are hundreds of genders, that the remedy to climate change is to hand the keys of the world’s economy over to the same people that can’t manage the Drivers License office, that men can menstruate, that the “elite” media doesn’t serve an institutional narrative, that there’s an impending wave of “right wing domestic terror” coming any day now but “Anti”-Fa is just a bunch of idealistic kids.

“You believe that Western civilization for all its faults has no more merit than Iranian or Chinese or Nigerian civilization, that Bjørn Lomborg and John Lott are hacks but Greta Thunberg and David Hogg are voices of reason, that gun control saves lives and that the law-abiding gun owner is a massacre waiting to happen, hat socialism in large, complex, heterogenous societies isn’t a vortex that leads to poverty and massive wealth inequity and death, that open borders lead to freedom, prosperity and justice, that American democracy is defined by and inextricable from slavery.

“You think that our election system is simultaneously run by the Russians but not at all no way no how chock full of domestic election fraud, that all Christians are young-earth Creationists and that faith is the opposite of reason – which would mean that Ben Carson knows less about science than some pinhead reporter at CNN.

“Tell me again about that evidence-based life?”

…that Big Left isn’t going to profane and politicize…

…the answer is “Mitch, please”. Andrew Zimmern has a show on the slate discussing food and…

…wait for it…

politics.

I’ll echo this tweet in response:

Here’s where to go for tickets to the Legislative Evaluation Assembly’s annual banquet featuring Newsmax Chief Political Correspondent John Gizzi.

So let’s see if we follow the progression, here.

Years ago, Big Left, via Big Media, started telling us that:

• Greenhouse gases were going to kill us
• Using energy causes greenhouse gas
• Compact fluorescent lights use less energy.

And as quick as 1-2-3, compact fluorescents became the law of the land (just in time for compact LEDs, which use less energy, provide better light, and are much cheaper, to come along).

In recent years, Big Media has been:

• telling us that current industrial meat production contributes to greenhouse gases, ergo will kill us all.
• trumpeting the virtues of eating insects and caterpillars.

Thus, you can count on someone in Big Left pushing policy that’d encourage, and eventually mandate, the eating of bugs for protein.

Of course, “urban sprawl” didn’t fall far behind:

• It encouraged a car-based lifestyle!
• Big Media promptly started pushing the virtues of transit-based, high-density life.

And cities run by Big Left are doing their merry best, as we speak, to abolish the single-family home, the private yard, and the car.

So – the progression is:

• Big Media notes that something we commonly accept is going to kill us.
• Big Left’s apparatchiks push to make a noxious, degrading, expensive alternative mandatory.

I couldn’t help but think of that pattern when read this.

My band, “Elephant in the Room”, is playing at Neighbors in Albertville tonight from 9PM-1AM.

Santa was just sitting in the night that pic was taken; Jon Heyer will be back tonight.

And for all you long-time NARN listeners – that’s my old producer, Tommy Huynh, singing. The guy can do Robert Plant, Dexter Holland and…Brad Delp?

Oh, yeah. Brad Delp.

Hope you can stop out to our favorite bar in the far northwest subs!

One man stabbed to death in an incident on the Ventura Trolley (Blue LIne) by the Mall of America Wednesday night:

tro Transit police and Bloomington police were called to a Park & Ride just north of the Mall of America station shortly before 1 a.m. 
Metro Transit spokesperson Howie Padilla said video shows a fight between two men on the Blue Line ended after one of them pulled a knife. 

Will the city’s “Resiliency” Department handle this? Or will it be the Bikeability director?

Not sure the people who run these cities realize what “quality of life” problems are going to do to this city’s future.

Pete Buttigieg – whose race for president this cycle may be distinguished by “lasting longer than A-Klo’s” and not much more – stood out from most of the rest of the Democrat field by being a veteran.

This stands out among typical Democrats in more or less the same way a nun at a Mormon missionary at a Slayer concert does.

And, like those Slayer fans, they don’t really know what to do about the interloper from another universe – what questions to ask, what lessons to learn?

Which, Kyle Smith notes, conceals a lot of problems:

Three things stand out about his brief sojourn in the Navy: One, he joined via direct commission. This, to most veterans, is a jaw-dropper. To say the least, this isn’t the way it’s usually done. Many of us recall the intensive pre-commission training (in my case, four years of ROTC in Connecticut and Advanced Camp with the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg) as the most trying intervals of our careers. Others spent four years at Annapolis or West Point. Buttigieg just skipped all of that. He passed a physical. He signed some papers. Voila. To put this in terms a liberal might understand: Imagine you heard that someone got a “direct diploma” from Harvard but didn’t actually have to do four years of papers and tests. You’d never forget it. You’d probably think of that person primarily as a short-cut specialist for the rest of your life.

Then there’s the little matter of his political role model – John Kerry. As in, someone who explicitly used a brief tour in the service as a stepping stone to politics, over the bodies of his erstwhile comrades.

And Smith notes how “off” some of Mayor Pete’s schtick feels to peolple who have been there: Like Buttigieg’s references to the nujmber of times he left his camp in Afghanistan:

Has anyone who has ever served the U.S. military on overseas land not driven around? When he launched his campaign last April he bragged about “119 trips I took outside the wire, driving or guarding a vehicle.” That’s . . . not a thing. There are no such stats. Sorties in aircraft are an official military statistic. Motor-vehicle trips are so routine no one would bother to keep track, any more than someone would log how many times Pete Buttigieg took a shower. No one cares. So Buttigieg himself created this phony statistic. Picture it: He made himself a little Hero’s Log but all he had to put in it was “routine trips.” It’s pathetic. It’s hilarious. It’s apple-polishing, resume-buffing, box-checking, attention-seeking vaporware. Just like his whole career.

Democrats are well aware of the reverence most people have for veterans, and especially the reticence people have , after 18 years of war, for criticizing veterans of any kind in any way.

As someone who’s a fairly committed student of military history, I’m every more so.

But I read, and I listen, and I absorb things. And this passage in this account from Buttigieg’s book (related here) caused my BS detector to…,,well, not howl. Maybe chirp a little. I’ll add emphas

Buttigieg has talked about the 119 times he says he crossed “outside the wire,” leaving the relative safety of the base as a vehicle commander on convoy security detail in dangerous parts of Kabul.

And then…:

“In a ritual to be repeated dozens of times, I would heave my armored torso into the driver’s seat of a Land Cruiser, chamber a round in my M4, lock the doors and wave a gloved goodbye to the Macedonian gate guard,” Buttigieg wrote. “My vehicle would cross outside the wire and into the boisterous Afghan city, entering a world infinitely more interesting and ordinary and dangerous than our zone behind the blast walls at ISAF headquarters.”

I don’t know much – and I’ll defer to any combat-arms vets in the house – but I’m fairly sure that “vehicle commanders” don’t ride in the driver’s seat. Drives drive. “Vehicle commanders” in convoys in combat areas don’t; they focus on navigating, communicating, and above all maintaining situational awareness.

So yeah – I’ve got questions,.

The success of the Babylon Bee has apparently caused the mainstream media to try to horn in on the “Real-sounding fake news” thing, without quite getting what “satire” is.

CNN “reporter” Joe Lockhart on Twitter yesterday (via Hugh Hewitt, who’s noted the “Retweets” the “Reporter” got.

Moments later:

You just know that TV stations, local NPR affiliates and newspapers around the country are going to run the former and ignore the latter.

I can listen to people scrape their fingernails on chalkboards (kids, ask your parents) all day long.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t sounds and words that make my teeth hurt and make me nauseous.

My example I have always hated the word “Document”, and all its uses and derivatives. Document? Documentation? Documentary? All of them. The only exception is the sentence “I just watched someone who overused the word ‘document’ get eaten by mice”.

My worst boss ever was a (I’m not making this up) near-functional illiterate QA manager to whom the company’s benighted tech writers had to report. And she once described the tech writers’ job as to “document the documentation in the documents”. It wasn’t *that* episode, or the fact that she advocated changing the job title to “Documentalist”, that made her the worst boss ever – oh, Lord, no – but it put a cherry on top of the crap sundae that was that job.

Which is one of the reasons I tune out the radio when impeachment talk comes up Part of it is because Adam Schiff justifies retroactive bullying – but largely because if I hear another smug, sanctimonious voice saying “documents documents documents documents documents…” again I’m going to kick a puppy.

…the Babylon Bee is reinforcing itself as America’s news source of record.

Because this.

Minneapolis: fighting the battles that matter.

Crime? Achievement gaps in terrible schools? Disposable bags? Gentrification and zoning causing housing to become unaffordable to the middle-class?

Nope. Minneapolis is tackling the scourge of fur.

The ban would not force any Minneapolis businesses to close. Instead, companies which currently sell animal fur will have a phase-in period, during which they can transition to selling fur-free products. There is also an explicit exemption in the ordinance which protects the rights of Native American tribes to sell fur for traditional and spiritual purposes. Secondhand stores too are exempt from the ban.
According to the Humane Society, more than 100 million animals are killed every year for the primary purpose of using their fur. It is estimated that 85% of these animals are raised in factory fur farms, while the other 15% are killed in the wild.
If the ordinance passes, Minneapolis would join Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, and West Hollywood, which have taken similar stances. New York City has also introduced an ordinance to end the sale of fur.

Why, yes – now that you mention it, it was sponsored by Alondra Cano, the intellectual standard-bearer of modern MInnesota progressivism.

Big Media and the left seem disappointed that yesterday’s gun rights rally at the Virginia state capitol in Richmond passed not only without incident, but in fact exactly as every *knowledgable* commentator on the subject predicted – utterly peacefully, nothing close to violence, and despite weeks of media gaslighting about “white supremacy”, a crowd that was probably more racially integrated than a “Protect Minnesota” or “Moms Demand Action” or “Minnesota Reformer” meeting.

I’m getting a feeling of deja vu.

This all feels like the Tea Party days, ten years ago – when the establishments on both sides of the aisle, terrified of a unregulated, organic grass roots movement, gaslit the public into thinking the most inclusive, idealistic political movement in my lifetime was either “racist” or “establishment”, depending on the targets.

The gaslighting? Oh ,yeah ,it’s back.

Virginia governor Blackface McMinstrel, presiding over the most ghastly bit of government overreach I can recall, desperately needed to paint the vast, law-abiding majority of gun owners as depraved evildoers just waiting for their moment to cut loose

But every last g****mn word of it was a lie. As predicted. A smear. Collective defamation.

If you know anything about the subject you predicted this – because nationwide, carry permittees are about 1/6 as likely to commit *any* kind of crime…

…as are the police. Who are, themselves, 1/7 as likely to commit any sort of crime as the general public.

Statistically, you are safer in a room full of carry permit holders – people who’ve passed background checks, and in Minnesota, have had to prove they know the law – than you are in a room full of cops.

White supremacy? B***s**t. It was the police that denied the Reverend King a permit to carry a gun – as they denied *every* black applicant in Birmingham in the fifties – even though he and his families lives were being threatened constantly.

It was the eeeeeeeevil NRA that stood with Dr. King – allowing his volunteer bodyguards to train at their firing range (the only desegregated one in the DC area at the time), giving them ammunition at cost.

No, the Richmond rally was peaceful. Were there “white supremacists” there? Other than Governor McMinstrel, I mean? Well, sure – in the sense that *everyone* that dissents from Big Left’s narrative is a “white supremacist” these days. Actual “white supremacy”, as in “hatred for non-whites?”

Mark my words – less than among the general public.

Look – I get it. A fair chunk of our society was raised to be terrified of guns. I grew up in a non-gun-owning, gun-control-supporting Democrat home. The TV shows I grew up with in the seventies and eighties treated gun ownership like a character flaw.

I changed. “Elite” culture and politics didn’t.

And Governor McMinstrel is clearly terrified by the genie he let out of the bottle. While the law-abiding gun owner doesn’t have much political killer instinct, when he or she is threatened, they – we – can not be stopped.

If it’s about guns, and the media says it, distrust but verify – and then, almost without exception, keep right on distrusting.

And by the way – for all my gun-rights brothers in arms who are treating Virginia like the final Mexican assault on the Alamo – take a deep breath. Cam Edwards notes that your – our – voices are getting through even to some of the Democrat villains in this story.

So, for all my “progressive” friends? This is what Democracy looks like. Lots of imperfect schlubs, workadaddy hugamommy people of all races, orientations, creeds and faiths, the very backbone of this country, showing you that *we are not for turning*.

Here we stand. We’ve compromised enough. We’re done.

All due respect to my “progressive” friends – but if you bring nothing but emotion or Big Left’s chanting points to this discussion, you will not fare well. God have mercy on your argument, for I shall not.