Ponderable

AUGUST 17, 2018
Couple pay with their lives for embrace of progressive delusions
By Thomas Lifson
This is a "tragedy" in the original Greek dramatic understanding: people undone by their fatal flaw, based on pride.

Benny Johnson reports in the Daily Caller:

An American couple decided to bicycle around the world in an attempt to prove evil does not exist. They chose to bicycle through ISIS territory and ISIS killed them.

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan left their D.C. government jobs nearly two years ago to embark on a worldwide bike tour. The wide-eyed, optimistic couple kept track of their trips on a website where they posted stunning photos of their travels and whimsical musings on evil, the media and the goodness of people.

In one post, Austin – who is a vegan – said he worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development during Obama's presidency explained how he and his girlfriend were planning to bike around the world with hopes to meet "generous" and approachable people.

He did acknowledge that biking makes one more "vulnerable." ...

In another post, right before entering the ISIS hotbed recruiting grounds of Tajikistan, Austin waxed about how "evil" does not exist in the world. ...

"I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it's easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that's quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this."

It is a lovely fantasy, to be sure. It's the same mentality that attaches a bumper sticker reading, "Mean people suck" to a Volvo.

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Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
San Francisco Restaurant Mocks City’s Straw, Needle Hypocrisy
by Ashe SchowAugust 18, 2018


In San Francisco, CA, one restaurant is pointing out the absurdity of the city’s straw ban with a statement on their menu.

The Sentinel, located in the city’s Financial District, included the following message at the bottom of their menus:

"Napkins, straws, and bags are available upon request. You can still get needles for free though. Welcome to SF."

San Francisco recently decided to ban plastic straws, based on a phone survey of straw manufacturers from a 9-year-old that somehow determined Americans use 500 million straws a day. Having solved the city’s needle, homelessness,
The Sentinel’s owner told CBS he didn’t want to start a controversy and was considering removing the statement from the menu.

San Francisco has been handing out clean needles to addicts since 1993, and residents have been complaining ever since of finding them on bus seats, in clothing, and on the street. While straws have been relegated to the back corners of the restaurant business because of their supposed environmental impacts, needles are given out freely and littered throughout the city. When was the last time anyone in San Fran saw a used straw in the gutter?

This isn’t the only hypocrisy coming out of California. As my colleague Michael Knowles pointed out on his podcast a few weeks ago, giving someone a straw could land a person in jail, but knowingly giving someone AIDS is no longer a crime.
 
Perhaps the most recent such hoax, which is being carried out seemingly with the utmost sincerity and seriousness, pertains to John Brennan's security clearance, transformed by manipulators into a constitutional crisis, though it has nothing at all do to with the Constitution. No matter how carefully one reads the Bill of Rights, the words "security clearance" do not appear. John Brennan's freedoms remain intact, and he can continue to violate every oath he ever took as he works to destabilize the country from within. In fact, the only rational way that revoking his security clearance could be considered an infringement of his right to express himself is if he used that right to disclose classified information obtained via his clearance. The revocation of a clearance merely deprives him of certain information, just as the media he works for do every hour of every day to their viewers, without Mr. Brennan's objection.
 
Those on the left, both political and cultural, are exploiting this giant puff of hot air to enrage their already overwrought lemmings, reinforcing for them the overarching lie that Trump is a tyrant, the most absurd yet believed hoax of them all. For this to work, the zealots must reject a daily reality they can see for themselves and accept in its place something that requires a near religious faith in what is obviously false. Perhaps nothing speaks to ignorance and stupidity more than rejecting demonstrable reality, and doing so proudly.
 
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