Month: March 2023

A couple posts ago, I discussed Church skanks who were so insecure about their husbands’ potential infidelity after a marital lifetime of sex privation by wifey, that they’d ratcheted their demands of male purity to the biologically impossible level of not permitting pastors… the last males inhabiting in the organized Church… to be tempted in the first place by female flesh. Because the alternative would be wifey giving him a… meaty reason to be faithful.

A Happy Ending To Pastor Pokluda’s Persecution

Today, we receive a formal response from a safely-sinecured professional Churchian! Sam Rainer of “Church Answers” stood up to answer the question of how to preempt churchmen from even being tempted to disobey Her Majesty!

Let HER do the job! It’s HER turn!

Do it like a Daddy, pastors! Make her happy by abdicating to her in everything until she cashes you out in disgust! Just like you advised husbands to behave for decades, paying no attention to the mounting corpse-piles of good men who trusted you! It’s called “servant leadership” and now it’s YOUR turn!

Leading a church when the wrong people hold power

h ttps://www.christianpost.com/voices/leading-a-church-when-the-wrong-people-hold-power.html

By By Sam Rainer, 13 March 2023

Heehee. Rainer’s subconscious is all over this article like a bouncy ball of  guilt! Starting with the title!

Who are these “Wrong People” in church leadership at the moment? Pastor Pokluda specifically, who was so unfaithful to his wife (twenty years previous) that when a hot chick homewrecker tried to seduce him… he resisted!

This is obviously unacceptable. Wives cannot trust a single Bible verse will keep Pastor Hubby faithful to his marital vows! No, the church must no longer tolerate male pastors who are vulnerable to being tempted! But how can that be achieved when God Himself did not achieve it even in Eden?

Simple… it’s time to replace all male clergy. It’s the only way to be sure.

Can you lead a church without proper authority? Yes, but it is more challenging and complex.

Just like fatherhood! Wait… wait, fathers WERE the proper authority in their marriages. Rainer wants to talk about accepting leaders with no proper, legitimate authority.

I’m assuming most church leaders would rather not step into a situation where they have the responsibility to shepherd without the corresponding authority. But there are churches with misaligned power structures in desperate need of good pastors. What if you end up in such a situation? Leading without power requires informal authority.

That paragraph does not mean what it says, once you know the context of the Pokluda scandal. Let me retype it:

“I’m assuming most church women would rather not step into a situation where they have the responsibility to shepherd without the corresponding  Biblical authority. But there are churches with masculine, patriarchal threats that justify you doing exactly that! What should you call that situation in order to circumvent the Bible’s prohibition on female leadership? “Informal authority.”

Informal authority. Satan’s latest play-word.

Informal authority is earned through social skills, emotional intelligence and expertise.

aka being female.

Unlike being at the top of a chain of command, those with informal authority do not have coercive power. How might informal authority look in a church? When everyone in the business meeting waits on a nod from the matriarch in the back of the room before voting, that’s informal authority.

DAYUMN HE SAID IT!!!

While much power comes from formal positions with legitimate authority… 

DAYUMN HE SAID IT AGAIN!!! “Legitimate authority”! Follow the guilty bouncing conscience, everybody!

…a different kind of power is found in leadership roles with informal authority. How is this power exhibited?

To use the example that the author himself suggested…

1. By withholding sex until she gets what she wants.

2. By emotional blackmail and gaslighting.

3. By playing “let’s you and him fight”.

4. By lying.

5. By doing evil and seeing if you get a pass.

6. …And if you don’t, threatening to involve the police, child services or other third parties. See #3.

7. By using hostages. Especially children.

8. By cooperating with the other shrewish princesses married to church leaders.

Sorry I couldn’t make it a top-10 list, but women don’t have many tricks once you penetrate the deceptions and lies.

Informal authority allows leaders to raise difficult questions. Leaders without titles and positions can vocalize the questions everyone is thinking about but will not say them out loud.

In the real world, it’s the formal leaders at the top who can say & do whatever they want. In Social Justice, however, ‘official authority’ is not allowed to speak ‘truth to power’. It is part of the moral inversion.

Some questions are so difficult that if top leaders began posing them, people might question the organization’s viability. For instance, imagine the media reaction if our president openly began asking about what’s really going on at Area 51.

Sam must have missed those press conferences, where the White House described the ongoing UFO invasion of American airspace and resulting military responses. They say it’s not all Chinese spy balloons.

Stupid Clucking Clown World!

Meanwhile, notice that “if a top leader said that, people would question his organization’s viability” is exactly the Pokluda scandal. He said what he thought, what WAS, a righteous act, but he also admitted to being tempted by another woman. And pastors don’t get to say that. So say the “informal leaders” of the church.

Informal authority allows leaders to focus on one issue. Top leaders typically deal with a number of issues within an organization. Such is the nature of positions with formal authority. For example, a CEO must be concerned about human resources, cash flow, marketing, and public relations. An individual with informal authority, however, is free to focus on more nuanced and narrow issues or even a particular issue. If you are a pastor without formal authority, you are freer to focus on one or two issues while letting others continue to lead.

Here is where Sam Rainer begins selling pastors on the idea of empowering women to “help him lead”. Which will have the exact same outcome of empowering wives to “help her husband lead”.

Those “CEO issues”? HR, cash flow, marketing and public relations? Those and dead languages, are what pastors study in seminary. Rainer is offering pastors the opportunity to hand off inconvenient pastoral responsibilities to an available, ahem, matriarch… his word, not mine.

I hope every pastor reading this, is dizzy from all the flashbacks to the marriage counseling sessions where he cut Scriptural corners to justify wives second-guessing her legitimate-authority husband.

Ye Cuck Clergy, did ye think your turn would never come? Did ye think that appeasing the woman instead of God would bring you contentment?

Can ye not recognize, this is a reenactment of literal Original Sin! She rebels, he submits!

Informal authority allows leaders to break through formal hierarchies, policies, and protocols. Formal authority, by design, has a hierarchy with an expected protocol. A leader with informal authority, however, is not bound by the structure of a formal authority system. A school superintendent, for example, must follow certain protocols in dealing with problems. An informal leader at the school, however, has more flexibility in breaking through these formalities and can deal with the problem in a way the superintendent cannot.

Those policies and protocols exist, among other reasons, to prevent the abuse of power. Would Rainer advocate vigilantism as preferable, in many situations, to uniformed law enforcement? Because vigilantes aren’t restrained by the presumption of innocence? Then he shouldn’t advocate the spiritual version of that.

Not even “spiritual equivalent”. Rainer is LITERALLY advocating spiritual vigilantism outside of God-ordained leadership.

Does ordination mean ANYTHING any more?

And ‘vigilantism’ is a KIND way of putting this point. The nasty way is ‘Deep State’. Just think about how much more effective the school districts are, now that they’re no longer restrained by laws against forced medication and child sex mutilation! Think of how much more money the IRS will collect when the watchdogs are dismissed! We don’t need no stinkin’ protocols!

For serious! Rainer is advocating literal lawlessness in GOD’S CHURCH! “Poor pastor, so busy with the payroll! If only somebody would ‘handle’ these accusations against the deacon, he wouldn’t have to be seen taking any sides!”

We even saw this in Scripture! Here’s the story of Absalom’s “informal leadership” and what came of it.

Segue

2 Samuel 15:2-6, 12b.

[Absalom] would get up early and stand by the side of the road leading to the city gate. Whenever anyone came with a complaint to be placed before the king for a decision, Absalom would call out to him, “What town are you from?” He would answer, “Your servant is from one of the tribes of Israel.” Then Absalom would say to him, “Look, your claims are valid and proper, but there is no representative of the king to hear you.” And Absalom would add, “If only I were appointed judge in the land! Then everyone who has a complaint or case could come to me and I would see that they receive justice.”

Also, whenever anyone approached him to bow down before him, Absalom would reach out his hand, take hold of him and kiss him. Absalom behaved in this way toward all the Israelites who came to the king asking for justice, and so he stole the hearts of the people of Israel.

He stood in for the rightful ruler, the king, without the king’s authority, and because he acted as the ruler, people eventually accepted him as their ruler.

“And so the conspiracy gained strength, and Absalom’s following kept on increasing.”

It took four years for Absalom to ‘build his brand’ enough to overthrow King David. I always wondered how David never noticed for four years? Now, I wonder if David was simply happy that many of his problems had quietly vanished for no reason at all.

King David ended up fleeing for his life. But but but Absalom never appeared on the royal org chart! That means his rule was INFORMAL and not a usurpation!

End segue

Rainer is making the case here for real female authority in the Church, with the justification that it’s “informal authority”, with no formal limitations placed upon her power to act. While Pastor retains all the limitations of being the responsible half of the relationship.

Rainer is doing it like a Daddy! “Of course you’re in charge, Larry! You’re responsible and she’s free to act. That’s what it means to be the boss.” Whether Larry is a pastor or a father.

Informal authority allows leaders the flexibility not to be a figurehead for all people in the organization. Top leaders with formal authority must act on behalf of everyone within an organization. They represent the people. They speak on behalf of the people. Leaders with informal authority do not have to act as figureheads. Unlike formal leaders, informal leaders can offend some and favor others to accomplish a goal.

So then, we aren’t talking about Pastor delegating his authority. We’re talking about an entirely separate authority that Pastor is free to disavow.

This entire article is disgusting. “Pastors should be able to stamp the forms and file the tax exemptions without making any hard decisions about morality or doctrine. For that, he needs ‘informal leaders’ who are above the law, not held to account and free to do what… what must be done. For the greater good.”

Ambitious leaders often pursue positions with formal authority. It makes sense. Those who desire to lead want the official capacity to do so. Positions with titles imply a legitimate endorsement to lead. But there are some advantages to leading with informal authority. Informal leaders have no official titles and no authoritative positions, yet they can wield much influence.

Female usurpation of male privilege is what he’s talking about, not the art of making a deal. Peacemakers are already welcome in church.

Informal authority has its limits, certainly, but also its advantages. And organizations need both informal and formal leaders to balance power and authority.

STILL doing it like a Daddy! “You cannot be a true leader unless your wife helps you lead! Submit to her, as her leader, whenever she knows what she’s doing.”

How does an “informal leader” stop a malcontent from attending church? How does an “informal leader” settle a doctrinal dispute? How does an “informal leader” make a decision whether accusations against a Church officer are serious enough to be entertained? How does an “informal leader” solve a dispute and then enforce their decision?

Simple. THEY DON’T. Because going back to what Rainer himself admitted at the start, quote, “power comes from formal positions with legitimate authority”.

Do you know who is an “informal leader” of every church? The devil. Nobody gave him his authority… he simply took it. No protocol restrains him… he is lawless. And being the First Rebel, he’s free to act in ways that formal, proper, God-sanctioned authorities never are. Which does, admittedly, give him great latitude to handle all the leadership issues that Pastor Cucky McSpineless cannot be bothered with.

Sam Rainer is guilty of practicing and teaching Original Sin. He is advocating female rebellion against male clergy… and suggesting that giving in to female rebellion, will make his job easier. “Leading a church when the wrong people hold power”, yeah, wrong people like pastors with formal positions and ranks and the legitimate authority that comes with it.

I found this in my archives and don’t know why I didn’t post it at the time. Portland had a moment of clarity last year, that its socialist agenda regarding homelessness wasn’t working, then cognitive dissonance took away the sting of defeat!

‘Not safe anymore’: Portland confronts the limits of its support for homeless services

h ttps://news.yahoo.com/not-safe-anymore-portland-confronts-120039087.html

By Angela Hart for the Los Angeles Times, 21 June 2022

Alcoholics have a phrase for that: “moment of clarity”.

Michelle Farris never expected to become homeless, but here she was, sifting through garbage and towering piles of debris accumulated along a roadway on the outskirts of northeast Portland. Farris, 51, has spent much of her adult life in Oregon and has vivid memories of this area alongside the lumbering Columbia River when it was pristine, a place for quiet walks.

Now for miles in both directions, the roadside was lined with worn RVs and rusted boats doubling as shelter. And spilling out from those RVs, the trash and castoffs from this makeshift neighborhood also stretched for miles, making for a chaos that unnerved her.

“Look at all this garbage out here — it used to be beautiful nature, but now it’s all polluted,” she said, as the stench of urine and burned rubber hung in the damp air. “The deer and river otters and beavers have to live with all this garbage.”

Humans do too, including herself specifically, but won’t somebody please think of the rodents!

“Portland makes it really easy to be homeless,” said Cindy Stockton, a homeowner in the wooded St. Johns neighborhood in north Portland who has grown alarmed by the fallout. “There’s always somebody giving away free tents, sleeping bags, clothes, water, sandwiches, three meals a day — it’s all here.”

Portland’s homelessness problem now extends well beyond the downtown core, creating a crisis of conscience for this fiercely liberal city that for years has been among America’s most generous in investing in homeless support services. Tents and tarps increasingly crowd the sidewalks and parks of Portland’s leafy suburban neighborhoods. And the sewage and trash from unsanctioned RV encampments pollute the watersheds of the Willamette and Columbia rivers.

Funny how those eco-terrorists never show up where they’re actually needed. Maybe they shouldn’t glue themselves to the floors of air-conditioned luxury car showrooms instead of taking selfies hip-deep in illegal raw sewage dumps.

Even while reflecting on their ills, many of the [drug-addicted] squatters remarked on the surprising level of services available for people living homeless in Portland, including charity food deliveries, roving nurses, used-clothing drop-offs and portable bathrooms — even occasional free pump-outs for their RV restrooms, courtesy of the city.

Giant disposal containers for used syringes are strategically located in areas with high concentrations of homeless people. Red portable toilets pepper retail corridors as well as some tony family-oriented neighborhoods. In parts of the city, activists have nailed small wooden cupboards to street posts offering up sundries such as socks, tampons, shampoo and cans of tuna.

It’s like an entire city of crazy cat ladies. Complete with parasites.

The city offers a textbook example of the intensifying investment. In 2017, the year Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, took office, Portland spent roughly $27 million on homeless services. Under his leadership, funding has skyrocketed, with Wheeler this year pushing through a record $85 million for homeless housing and services in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

Voters in the broader region of Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties in 2020 approved a tax measure to bolster funding for homelessness. The measure, which increases taxes for higher-income businesses and households, is expected to raise $2.5 billion by 2030.

Wheeler rejects claims that Portland has attracted homeless people to the region with its array of day-to-day services.

Ah, Dilbert. If anything shows the GAE fangs better than the FDIC proclaiming bailouts for ((everybody except you)) after yet another Lehman Brothers-Current Year fuckup, heedless of its own, explicitly stated duties, it’s the speed and totality at which the Dilbert comic was Canceled for its author’s one, single, informed complaint against Groids.

“And, you know, is that our fault?” he said, calling for more state and federal investment. He pointed to “a foster care system that delivers people to the streets when they age out,” and a prison system that releases people without job training or connections to community services.

The end goal is cradle-to-grave government institutionalization of the entire population. Wheeler know this, but his voting-public chumps think they’re just being nurturing.

Neither side actually wants a solution to the homeless problem, ex. “you get more of what you subsidize”.

South of the Columbia River in an industrial section of north Portland, not far from Delta Park’s bustling soccer and softball complex, another RV encampment lines a side street that juts off the main drag. Many of the camp’s inhabitants have parked here for years and are protective of their turf. Group leaders hold down the numbers — no more than 20 or so RVs. And they enforce tidiness rules, sometimes using physical force, so as not to draw undue attention from city code enforcement.

“We’ve maintained a symbiotic relationship with the businesses here,” said Jake Caldwell, 38, who lives in an RV with his girlfriend, Sarah Bennett. “We keep it clean and orderly, and they let us stay.”

The better homeless camps happen to be the ones in which male authority figures “keep it clean and orderly”, even in defiance of “official” government. Same as it ever was.

[They] and others consider themselves lucky to have scored an RV, which even broken down can cost a few thousand dollars. One camp dweller said he bought his using unemployment funds after losing his job in the pandemic. Caldwell and Bennett, who both use and deal heroin, said they purchased theirs with help from drug money.

Not that “male authority figure” is very impressive here. Homeless isn’t the only thing being subsidized by the Portland government.

[Residents] feel Portland’s charm ebbing, as the lives of the unhoused collide with the lives of the housed.

“This used to be the most beautiful, amazing city — now people’s houses and cars are getting broken into, and you can call 911, but no one is going to come,” said TJ Browning, who chairs the public safety committee for the Laurelhurst Neighborhood Assn.

“We’re a progressive city, I’m a progressive, but the worst part is I can feel the compassion leaving,” she said. “I recognize people are self-medicating mental illness with drugs, but so many people like me just don’t care anymore. We want the criminal element out, even if it means taking people to jail.”

“I want to believe!” she cried. “Make reality go away so I can believe!”

Like many residents interviewed, Browning is a longtime Democrat who has watched in dismay as her liberal values give way to frustration and resentment. And she understands the good intentions, spawned by liberal policies, that brought Portland to this tipping point.

At long last, they realize…

The problem is not so much the policies, in theory, as it is how they play out in Portland’s broader reality.

Drug users stay out of jail, but Oregon has too few drug treatment programs and no easy way to mandate participation. Advocates for the homeless ardently protest efforts to roust the encampments, arguing that people have nowhere else to go.

And cuts to police services have left housed residents feeling they are on their own to deal with the repercussions.

Nonsense! If any of those upset residents commits a crime against those homeless psycho drug addicts, particularly the crimes of self-defense or vigilantism, they’ll quickly discover that the police have NOT abandoned them after all!

Regardless, all is not well in the Land Of Weird. Some of the faithful are having doubts.

“I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I find myself wondering if we need to elect Republicans,” [resident Cindy] Stockton said. “We’ve been Democratic-led for so long in this state, and it’s not getting us anywhere.”

Browning, in Laurelhurst, described a similar transformation: “I look in the mirror and I see a hippie — but a hippie wouldn’t be advocating for more police.”

“I wonder, what the hell happened to me?”

Something something “mugged by reality”.

Meanwhile, others of the faithful retained their… uh, faith.

A former car salesman, Bixel, 41, said his free fall into homelessness started after he got addicted to painkillers prescribed for a shoulder tear sustained while playing softball at Delta Park nearly 20 years ago. He progressed from Vicodin to OxyContin to heroin, a cheaper habit that his wife also took up. Life spiraled as he wrecked his car and racked up felony convictions. Over time, the couple lost their jobs, their home and custody of their three young children.

“I went from painkillers after the accident to addiction taking over my life,” he said.

But Bixel hasn’t given up on himself. He thinks with the right opportunities — a job, a landlord willing to take a chance on him — he could find the motivation to get clean again.

“My wife and I, we’re looked at like scum now,” Bixel said.

You ARE scum, Bixel. You’re irresponsible and so out-of-control that even a Marxist hellpit knew that your kids weren’t safe with you. Now instead of facing your problems, you’re contentedly wallowing in squalor waiting for the government to save you from yourself.

“But honestly, this is also one of the best things that has happened to me. I used to look down at homeless people for not having a job, and if somebody asked me for change, I’d say, ‘I worked hard for this.’

“Now, if someone asks me for a cigarette, I’ll give them two.”

That is why socialists keep creating these nightmares. Government is their God, a God that they want to guarantee a safe path through life no matter what happens. The idea that somebody else might use that institutional generosity for selfish purposes, does not register with them. Let alone the idea that government might have its own reasons for agreeing to play God at your expense.

The realization being forced upon Portland is not merely that they cannot build enough housing to make the homeless problem disappear. It’s that their religion of an all-powerful State cannot be a replacement for either God or family. Some will die in their denial but others, if not discovering God’s existence, at least are discovering the devil’s existence and looking for an alternative.

 

Discernment. Noun. “The act or process of exhibiting keen insight and good judgment.” It seems an unpopular idea, not to mention a completely abandoned and forgotten one. As I struggle to unearth unifying themes from the morass of Clown World… I must assume such themes exist, and what’s happening is not merely “the will of the gods”, although there is good chance of exactly that… discernment is a concept that keeps coming up.

Discernment used to be largely optional. Today, it’s critical.

The devil operates at a significant manpower disadvantage. Scripture suggests that he led a third of heaven into rebellion, which means he’s outnumbered 2:1 not counting the primates made in God’s image. For most of history, messages were slow, diabolic allies were spread across the world and… and the devil was never able to unite humanity since God thwarted human mass communication at the Towel of Babel.

But now? Mass communication technology was coopted by the devil even before it went mainstream. By the time televisions were in every house, Communists were in every TV studio. The devil saw the advantages long before anybody else did, and there’s an implication in that: it was the solution to a problem that had long vexed him.

Meanwhile, back in the Ancient, Forgotten Old Tyme Days, most people did not need to practice discernment for themselves. Their days were taken up with the necessities of survival and/or farming. Literacy was not even a luxury, not when you don’t have any books on the shelf in the first place, let alone books that make you think.

For the times when people DID need discernment, the slow pace of life meant they could often just do what had been done for ages. Then there were institutions such as the King and the Church, who were only too happy to advise people on complex moral issues. There was no need for discernment when you had experts available and educational limitations on yourself… as if “Spearman, Rank Two, File Five” was frequently uncertain of how he should behave.

That is all gone now.

It is a sobering thought, that we were given all these labor-saving technologies in order to free us up to develop our souls beyond what humans normally could.

New ideas and ways of life are coming at breakneck speeds. Technology can make anybody capable of what was once the domain of trained specialists. The institutions are proving, yet again, to not be bastions of morality. Perhaps worst of all, nobody can stop the devil’s whispers from being heard. There are no more gates for the gatekeepers to keep.

No more shortcuts, crutches or proxies.

Consequently, modern people must practice discernment for themselves. They are not. At best, they continue to trust people rather than ideas. At worst, they define “true” as “momentarily most expedient”. From Covidisim to “Keev”, people are simply not making moral judgments of what they see and hear. They don’t have the excuse of twelve-hour workdays; they don’t have the excuse of never reading a Bible or other theological work for themselves; and they don’t have the excuse of “my actions wouldn’t matter anyway”.

To say nothing of the very long history of hostility towards people who DO think for themselves. It is good that the gatekeepers are losing their final grip; it is not good, that so many people are refusing to step up and take ownership of their own lives.

I admit, judging good from evil is not fun when you are at evil’s mercy. Discernment imposes a burden of performance upon you that you most likely cannot act upon, except to make yourself a target. Witness all the conscientious objectors to the Pfizer Jab… I didn’t see ANY happy endings.

But there’s no other way. Believers have always needed to develop discernment, but never like today. Is this picture a deepfake? Was that article written by AI? Should you care why that 25yo athlete just had a heart attack? Do you trust the science that insects are tasty & nutritious?

For a final wrench in the works, discernment only becomes possible when God’s existence is accepted. Atheism encouraged by evolutionary beliefs is exactly why many people refuse to distinguish good from evil; they come from the axion that good and evil don’t exist. I have watched some atheists act morally, to be sure, but only on the strength of either preexisting traditions or a preexisting conscience. Neither is going to hold up.

We are entering a spiritually scripted time in human history. A short period of time with a God-decreed outcome. Between here and there, your choices and beliefs will become critical, as the various principalities choose their champions and set them against each other. God has deeds that He wants done, so He looks for followers who… at a minimum… admit there’s a game being played, and proceed to make some enemies by choosing His team. That requires discernment.

Heroes wanted! but not necessarily you, if you aren’t sure what happened when your son came back from school as a girl.

Do not focus on what’s already been settled, namely, what society will be like after this time & crisis pass. Don’t reach back, either, “Benedict Option”-like, for a situation in which you CAN trust professionals with your immortal soul. Instead, test and refine your ability to discern truth from lies, along with your ability to endure in upholding the truth. This will mark you out as one of the champions, one of the spectacles, and while you won’t be thanking anybody for what you’re about to endure… once it’s over, you’ll be glad that you did.

Who wants to be “Spearman, Rank Two, File Five” when they could be something more? Turns out, most sheeple everywhere. They reject a great opportunity on the meager, pedantic grounds of not wanting to be crucified as part of the process. They choose to be nobodies.

Ye Christian, look upon the Cross and know that your own turn is coming. Though the feeling be natural, do not beg for an excuse; ask instead for a path THROUGH.

Discernment will illuminate that path. Discernment will mark you out a different from the sheeple who take no risks, make no judgments and consequently, matter so little that they don’t even need names. Discernment will bring you wisdom.

Discernment is now mandatory like never before.

I’m out of patience with my species. They won’t, they just WILL NOT stand against the lies. This might be excusable if the devil wanted his lies to look like truth. He does that sometimes when he’s weak, but what he really wants, is for you to recognize the lie and then uphold it regardless. That is a fast road to self-damnation, which is more valuable to the devil that merely mortal victories.

Trains keep derailing all over the country, including Thursday in Alabama. What’s going on?

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/trains-keep-derailing-over-country-000805788.html

By Trevor Hughes for USA Today, 9 March 2023

Good question. Trevor’s answer?

Trains are derailing all over the country. But it’s actually okay!

Blah blah statistics from 1980.

New legislation will fix the problem!

Yeah, I despised his lies too much to repeat them at length. Enjoy the extra two minutes I just saved you!

If people find Trevor convincing and informative then they love being lied to, and by knowingly accepting the lie, they damn themselves.

So then, what IS the truth behind all the trainwrecks?

How America’s Supply Chains Got Railroaded

h ttps://prospect.org/economy/how-americas-supply-chains-got-railroaded/

By Matthew Jinoo Buck, 4 February 2022

[In 2021], Union Pacific stopped service between the all-important shipping hubs of Los Angeles and Chicago for one week last July while the company reconfigured its operations. Union Pacific’s remaining facilities in Chicago couldn’t keep up with the volume, nor could Union Pacific find enough workers or equipment to handle the goods. Industry analyst Larry Gross told Trains.com that Union Pacific “sacrificed surge capacity” when it closed [a major yet redundant rail line two years previous]. “If you don’t have any additional capacity in your hip pocket, even moderate disruptions put you in a world of hurt.” Gross estimated that Union Pacific’s weeklong suspension of service would keep roughly 40,000 containers stranded on the West Coast.

Every other major railroad [also] suffered from supply chain snags in 2021….

But the freight railroads’ poor operational performance has not impaired their spectacular financial performance. If anything, the bottlenecks create more pricing power. Less than a week after his company reversed its 2019 decision and reopened Global 3, Union Pacific executive Rocker optimistically predicted on an earnings call that Union Pacific would be able to “take some pretty robust pricing on the market”—in other words, keep its prices high. The stock market shared Rocker’s optimism for all Class I railroads, whose stock prices rose in 2021, many by 20 percent or more.

THE RAIL SUPPLY CHAIN CRISIS was decades in the making, based on two fundamental sources—excessive consolidation and the railroads’ version of just-in-time, called precision scheduled railroading (PSR). In 1980, at the dawn of rail deregulation, there were 40 Class I railroads. Today, there are just seven. Of those seven, four have 83 percent to 90 percent of the freight railroading market. Wall Street took notice of railroads’ growing market power and pushed them to implement PSR, which meant running faster, longer trains, and skimping on service, spare capacity, systemwide resilience, and safety.

The driving force behind PSR’s widespread adoption was railroad executive E. Hunter Harrison and investor Bill Ackman, a notorious hedge fund manager.

Railroads suffered the same fate as every other industry in USA: gutted of equity by vulture capitalists. The devil is powerful and dangerous, no question, but he’s not creative even by mortal standards. “They’ll never figure out that my secret cunning plan, as always, is to steal, kill and destroy.”

A primary cause of railroads’ fragility came from decades of laying off labor. From the passage of the 1980 Staggers Act to 2019, total employment in the railroad industry fell from about 500,000 to roughly 135,000.

A deteriorating safety culture has also prompted laid-off railroad workers to rethink coming back to railroads that seem to view their safety as another cost to minimize in the name of efficiency and PSR. Workers overwhelmingly complain of being pushed to work faster and sacrifice safety for speed. Regan says that railroad managers rush workers into neglecting safety inspections and argues that thousands of workers have left the railroad industry out of concern for the railroads’ poor workplace safety. The Federal Railroad Administration, the primary safety regulator for the railroad industry, reports that, since 2012, Class I railroads had higher rates of train accidents or incidents, higher rates of yard switching accidents, higher rates of equipment defects, and more total fatalities, all while total Class I train miles were down roughly 40 percent.

While the East Palestine derailment was deliberately mishandled in order to poison Middle America, it’s also the inevitable result of the industry being plundered by the true ruling powers of the United States. Powers that have absolutely no respect for human life.

There is nothing that any of us here can do about PSR. To avoid spiritual derailment, however, it is not enough that you know you’re being lied to. The devil actually wants that. The lie must also be rejected and the best way to do that, is to uphold the truth and put the blame where it belongs.

Here, with “precision scheduled railroading” courtesy of Wall Street vultures.

By contrast, the politicians responding with “new legislation”? The media whore claiming “yes but this is normal”? They know it’s a lie but refuse to oppose it.

Clown World being an entire climate of intentionally blatant lies is dividing Western humanity into the people who see the lie and repeat it, the people who see the lie and refute it, and… a reluctant third category that is going to have its irresponsibly oblivious worldview uncomfortably squished.

Memo to God’s Anointed & Ordained Clergy, Blessed With the Ability To Read the Bible In Three Different Dead Languages: if you aren’t guilty then don’t apologize. 

Even if you are guilty of something, don’t apologize on demand to third parties. Instead, take a moment to consider their motivations for publicly disgracing you. Those motivations might, possibly, just maybe, NOT be inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Lastly, if you don’t understand or accept what I just wrote, then please do not author any books on “adulting”. You are the very last person who should be giving advice on how to behave like an emotionally mature adult.

Looking at YOU, Pastor Pokluda! You did nothing wrong until you stopped telling women No! But I’ll end this post by giving you the most awesome-ist altar call ever.

‘I’ve hurt some people’: Texas pastor apologizes after he ‘objectified’ woman in sermon anecdote

h ttps://www.christianpost.com/news/texas-pastor-apologizes-after-he-objectified-woman-in-sermon.html

By Ian M. Giatti, 6 March 2023

A Texas pastor is asking his congregation for forgiveness after giving a sermon in which he said he “objectified” a woman in a brief meeting nearly two decades ago.

I was about to explain the concept of forgiveness, but after reading ahead, I saw that I must first explain the concept of temptation. To a pastor. We might not even get to sin before the end of this post! So to speak.

In the clip taken from a sermon titled “Fool Proof Love” on Jan. 22, Pokluda described enjoying “chips and queso” with his friend when he says a “physically beautiful” woman propositioned him.

“She was perfect, physically beautiful,” he told the congregation. “Everything was in the right place.”

After the woman offered to buy Pokluda a drink, he said he responded by holding up his ring finger to show his wedding band.

“And she says, ‘Well, is she here? Because I don’t care,” he recalled, citing the proposition to help illustrate a significant point in his sermon.

Pokluda said he immediately thought of Proverbs 5:6-7, which reads: “She does not consider the path of life; she does not know that her ways are unstable. So now, my sons, listen to me, and do not turn aside from the words of my mouth.”

“The saving grace in that situation was, I looked at that woman and I thought, ‘Oh, she hates me, she doesn’t love me,’” he said. “She wants my wife to hate me, and she wants my in-laws to hate me, and she wants my parents to hate me, and she wants my unborn children to hate me.”

“For just a few minutes of ecstasy, she wants to take my life and burn it to the ground. And that thought was God’s saving grace in a moment.”

Okay… uhh… where’s the guilt in that story? He was tempted by a pretty homewrecker, then rejected her. Of course he liked what he saw. The reason people commit sin in the first place, is because sin is easy & fun. It feels natural.

Please tell me that’s not a new concept to Pastor.

Pokluda told The Christian Post that he is “sad that my words have stirred up so much bitterness and controversy” and said he would be “praying for those that have been impacted by my words.”

“All those men who rejected harlots because of my example… I AM SO SORRY!”

In a clip shared March 3 on social media, Pokluda gave more context for the anecdote, explaining that, 18 years ago, he was a recovering pornography addict and apologized for any hurt he caused: “Lately, I’ve hurt some people. In a message on adultery, I described an experience 18 years ago where I objectified a woman in my description of her beauty.

18 Years ago, he did the right thing. Then he mentioned doing the right thing in January, confessed to being sexually attracted to women in February, and now his death spiral pinged my radar in March. And to think, I had wondered why the Church was completely useless at keeping the Sodomites out.

“Are you attracted to women even a little bit? (Forgive me, Jesus, for putting the idea in their heads that they might be.)”

“No.”

“BLESS YOU, O HOLEY ANGELS! WELCOME! YOU ARE THE MEN THE CHURCH NEEDS!”

“And it was not clear when I told that story that I was in the mind of myself 18 years ago, a recovering porn addict, sex addict.”

Pokluda, who serves as lead pastor at Harris Creek, added that by not clarifying that point, he could “even be giving permission to some of you to do the same.”

“I don’t ever want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt you. I’ve been really grieved to hear those expressions of your hurt,” he said.

“If that’s you, if you’re in the audience, I want to be the most accessible pastor on Earth. I sit up here after every service to talk to whoever wants to talk to me. Please never leave here hurt or embittered before the sunset. Let’s talk so that I can own my fault fully.

“And right now, I own my fault fully, and I want to ask your forgiveness. Will you please forgive me for the confusing, hurtful things that I said?”

I will never forgive you, Pastor, for being heterosexual. Neither will God. That’s because it’s okay to be hetero. That is God-normative behavior. There is, literally, nothing to forgive. You were tested and passed. All is well.

But you DID do wrong with that over-the-top groveling. I’m still debating how to call you to repentance without sending you further down the rabbit hole of self-hate. Hmm. Tricky problem.

In addition to his lead pastor role, Pokluda is the author of Welcome to Adulting and is the former leader of The Porch at Watermark Church in Dallas.

I laugh because I cannot cry. Clergyboy here is so ashamed of feeling natural, sexual attraction to the female form that he’s been self-destructing for a month already. This doesn’t even rise to the insult “thin-skinned”. How did our leaders become PREPROGRAMMED for Totalist struggle sessions?

The sermon that stirred the ire of some wasn’t the first time Pokluda has publicly shared his struggles with lust.

In an interview last November with accountability app Covenant Eyes, Pokluda said despite being raised in the church, he struggled with drugs and pornography.

“I was raised in the church, was raised Catholic. Went to a Baptist youth group. I was over-churched. I always called myself a Christian,” he was quoted as saying. “[But] I was totally addicted to pornography.

“I’ve wrestled with drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, I smoked weed every day of my life for a season, alcoholism. All of that is part of my journey. Nothing enslaved me like porn.”

It always comes back to Original Sin, doesn’t it? The female rebels, the male abdicates.

There is no such thing as pornography addiction. Men are wired BY GOD to be like that. What God has made is good. The reason porn urges persist like nothing else, is because it’s the last bastion of a male sexuality that cannot be turned off.

The current situation is impossible and unsustainable. On one side, men are being denied marriage by the “need” for Barbie to go to college and have a successful career so she won’t ever have to depend upon a husband. On the other side, women being given all those early successes in life get their marital demands spun up so high that 100% of male humanity is unsexy.

It’s womens’ fault. It’s her parents’ fault. It’s the Church’s fault. It’s the government’s fault.

The one group whose fault this current situation ISN’T, is the young men trying to do the right thing by God… and finding themselves literally cockblocked at every step.

Since Pokluda isn’t standing up for himself against blatantly false accusers, I shall be his champion. Let me be the first to call out the ho’s… I’ll find this other-kind-of homewrecking skank if it’s the last thing… Lauren Chastain of Twitter was representative of the early point-and-shriek, then Sheila Wray Gregoire amplified it. Ah, social media. You are both the harbinger and the doom of the Antichrist.

In the Spirit of Full Disclosure

h ttps://laurenchastain22.com

By Lauren Chastain, 7 February 2020

This blog is now defunct yet still up. This post seems a good description of why she would accuse a pastor of anything she can, just because she can.

“Your story is yours and no one else’s. Each sunset is different depending on where you stand.” Al Andrews, from Andrew Peterson’s Adorning the Dark

We open with solipsism. Bad sign.

Over the last ten years, writing has become a therapeutic way for me to make sense of my world and my faith. I started a blog 6 years ago (to the day) as a systematic way of studying scripture and sharing opinions. In so doing, I also found a camaraderie with others that were interested in the scriptures or topics about which I wrote. Shortly after I started that blog, varying parts of my seemingly formulaic world started falling apart. However, with a few choice quotes, and familiar Bible verses, I could still explain it all away and make everything fit into a nice logical space.

Until I couldn’t.

For over two decades of my life, I sat under a teacher that drew crowds and adulation ad nauseam, and I was a good student. Through his Bible studies, I learned a lot about the Bible, but mostly I learned how to center each story around me, or in other words, I learned how to “apply it to my life.”

She learned nothing about the Bible, not one thing, if her takeaway was how to make everything about HER. Interesting that she only describes her teacher as extremely popular; not even a name. This is yet another example of why women should not be allowed to “study”, serve or otherwise be under the influence of attractive men no matter how Godly.

Such a situation is directly analogous to Cindy Crawford teaching math to men while rubbing tanning lotion all over her bikini-clad skin.

I say it again for the slow class: EVER SINGLE FEMALE STUDENT IN A SEMINARY, IS GUILTY OF LUSTING FOR HER MALE PROFESSORS. Because that’s just how women are wired. It’s not a choice they are capable of making, any more than I can stop liking a bouncy pair of titties. Would you fault me? THEN FAULT THEM, TOO!

Horrifically, that “pastor” was caught being a sexual predator, and even though I would never defend him, I was such a faithful loyalist to the church, I wholeheartedly defended his moralistic teachings and the enormous kingdom he had amassed.

She had it bad for him, then he fell from grace. “I was traumatized by the fall of a hot sexy pastor that I -hic- would neeever have defended even after taking all of his classes twice. But I defended him anyway.”

I became so good at explaining the Bible as it relates to us, complete with “to do lists” and bullet points, that I began writing for other online publications in addition to my own. About the same time my husband became a pastor, and consequently I became a pastor’s wife which was a whole new world to try to understand. Predictably, the further down the rabbit hole we went, the less things made sense. I watched as scripture was used to control the benign behavior of some and then excuse the malicious conduct of others. Little by little we seemed to step fully through the looking glass at which point writing became impossible.

If her husband is ALSO a pastor, then there’s no chance I’m wrong about her being sexually attracted to Senior Pastor Big-Man. The only question is if she committed physical adultery with him. It would explain why his downfall traumatized her.

Along with the confusion, came devastation. So much loss. Most of the losses were too complicated to understand myself, never mind share about on a blog. I hardly knew what was true. The answers we fought to find seemed just out of reach. Trust was broken. And we had to walk away- not from God, but from those we really believed were our “family.”

During this time I had developed an unexpected community on Twitter. People who are willing to help me hash through difficult concepts without giving me trite answers. People who simply say. “I’m sorry for your pain,” without a silver lining tagline. People who encourage me in ways I didn’t know I needed encouraging. People who think differently than me, but are willing to stick around and discuss. People who make me laugh all day long. And my favorite, people who have shown me how to disagree with kindness and even humbly concede to being wrong.

Pastor Pokluda awaits your concession. You did evil to blame him for involuntary attraction to an attractive woman twenty years previous. Who even asked you for your opinion? You already hated Pokluda… and like Daniel denounced for praying to God, you denounced him for resisting temptation.

You witch, Chastain! You faithless rebel, whore of Satan, you homewrecker!

..Blah blah me me me blah me blah…

And while these reasons are quite enough, the moment that tipped the scales for me is when I realized how many women and men are legally being kept from telling their stories. This made me realize the true gift I have to be able to tell my story to anyone I choose, and that is a gift I cannot waste. So for all of those that have been silenced, I am taking this risk for you, in the spirit of full disclosure.

She didn’t tell her story even when she did. She told the part of the story that she cared about… herself… and then further edited out the parts that wouldn’t make her look good.

Today, apparently, she goes prowling on social media for vulnerable men to destroy… handling her internal pain and insecurities, not to say unrepentant sins, by projecting them onto whatever male is most convenient.

Which is where Social Justice comes from. Not psychological mass-effect shared psychosis or whatever, nope. Barbie just needs a spanking but the government won’t allow it. Now she’s out of control and we’re being strangled.

On to the professional bitch-ass whupping.

Can pastors please stop salivating over women’s bodies in sermons? A response to Jonathan Pokluda’s objectification of the ‘perfect’ woman

h ttps://baptistnews.com/article/can-pastors-please-stop-salivating-over-womens-bodies-in-sermons-a-response-to-jonathan-pokludas-objectification-of-the-perfect-woman/

Opinion By Sheila Wray Gregoire 24 February 2023

Megachurch Pastor Jonathan Pokluda made a splash on Twitter when a three-minute clip of his Jan. 22 sermon went viral. He narrated how, early in his marriage, he ventured to a restaurant with a friend for chips and queso when a woman with a “perfect body,” where “everything was in the right place,” propositioned him by asking if she could buy him a drink.

Did it hurt, Sheila? That a man you didn’t know existed until yesterday, thinks you aren’t the prettiest woman since Cleopatra’s skin wrinkled in the Egyptian sun? You female Church lead-duhs have bigger hypergamy hamsters than the planet you’re standing on. With insecurities to match.

Pokluda, now pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, explained he was married. She replied “Is she here? Because I don’t care.” He then dramatically recounted how his saving grace, the only way he managed to resist the temptation of a few minutes of “ecstasy” with a complete stranger, was that he remembered Proverbs 5.

Outrage and derision

Christian social media erupted in outrage at his objectification of women’s bodies, as well as derision at the idea the story unfolded as he said. Many posited a more plausible explanation of the encounter was a server asked him if she could get him a drink; he misunderstood and replied he was married; and she was confused, since no woman was with him.

But let’s give Pokluda the benefit of the doubt: A “perfect” woman propositioned him when he was eating chips and dip with a friend. And his study of Scripture was the only thing that kept him from betraying his wife for an ecstatic encounter with a stranger.

Yes. It was Pokluda’s love for God, not head-knowledge of Scripture per se, but yes.

Men are not to cheat on our wives. But… we can and we’re constantly tempted to. Think about that the next time you aren’t in the mood for nookie, Church chix. If you won’t boink your husband then another, prettier woman will.

Women exist in a world where people judge, use, ridicule and ogle our bodies everywhere we go.

Isn’t that nice? No burden of performance. No career in the mines and bilges. You just find a man with tolerable body odor, rub your curves on him and poof, you spend your life with babies and girlfriends while he bends all of reality to your benefit. God forbid you clean a toilet even when half the shit is yours.

That’s exactly how I plan to survive Judgment Day. Whatever the spiritual equivalent of boobs are, I will make sure that mine bounce gently while Christ Jesus tries to review my life’s accomplishments. Because I know what He’s gonna find on that short list.

Unlike a woman, however, I’ll be grateful forever that the distraction worked.

Women exist in a world where people judge, use, ridicule and ogle our bodies everywhere we go. One study found between 34% and 65% of 5-year-old girls have ideas and opinions on dieting. And then we get to church and hear, once again, we aren’t enough — we’re merely the consolation prize, the one he settles for instead of the “perfect” woman he is barely able to resist.

Bitch, you WERE the perfect woman… when you were age 20. Then you had a career so you wouldn’t ever need a husband, and now, you resent that he isn’t as attracted to you as he would have been if you had acted wisely in your youth.

Oh. Ohhhh! AT LAST, BWAHAHA!!! This is gonna be SCHWEET!

Women deserve better than to go to church and hear all that stops our pastors from having sex with total strangers is a Bible memory passage. We’re all for Bible memory, but we’re also for marriage vows, faithfulness and holding Christian men to at least the same moral standard as your average non-Christian husband at your local Applebee’s.

That’s why so many Christian women erupted in anger at Pokluda’s sermon. We heard Pokluda, in the kind of breathless, hushed tone often reserved for worship, describing the “perfect” body of this woman, with “everything in the right place.” Instead of church being a place where a woman can feel comfortable in her own skin, the pastor invited men to judge every woman around them on the basis of where her body parts landed.

Do you see what’s happening here? The real reason for the outrage? The sex cartel is crumbling! All the skanks who grudgingly settled at age 35 for unattractive husbands… they’re watching the younger women reject the Eat Pray Love life path, make their bodies attractively feminine to hungry men…

And now, the only thing keeping those meal-ticket husbands in a marriage to a woman that he knows despises him for being the best she could do, is devotion to a God who forgives every sin unconditionally, forever, with no need for repentance or (shudder, eww!) touching a husband’s naked body.

The younger, hotter, tighter generation know that privation and scarcity are upon us, and they’re compensating by…

by…

…making themselves desirable to stable but unsexy men!

INSTEAD OF RACKING UP $200K IN STUDENT DEBT AT FEMINIST UNIVERSITY!

Burn, thou witches of the West! Your life was all about you. Even when you took marriage vows, you knew you had that gold-plated exit door of chilamony to backstop your every faithless act. You secretly gloated at how miserable you could make that husband you needed, but never loved.

And now… Now, you’re realizing that he DOES have options. Because Generation Younger, Hotter, Tighter does NOT want to end up like YOU!

Don’t worry, Church ladies! God will treat your husband exactly as He treated you… easy forgiveness for everything, am I right? Hubby will care as much for you in your old age, as you cared for him in his youth! NOW THAT HE HAS OPTIONS, HE CAN AFFORD TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING YOU DID TO HIM JUST BECAUSE YOU COULD!

In frat-boy movies of the ’80s and ’90s, men proved their masculinity by the “notches on the bedposts,” by how many women they’ve slept with. But Christian men are only supposed to have sex with one woman — their wife. One way to prove their manhood without promiscuity is to brag about how they could have slept with many women but chose not to.

Sociologist Sarah Diefendorf notes how Christian men often seem to relish describing their struggles with lusting over women’s bodies, as if such assertions are a way to assure us of their manliness. Maybe this explains why pastors so often give these tone-deaf illustrations. At some level, they think this signals their manhood.

No, ladies, that is what YOU think. YOU are attracted to notch count; men are attracted to virginity. Sheila has no excuse to not know this, being the best-selling author of The Good Girl’s Guide To Great Sex.

I might need to look at Sarah Fattened-Ork someday.

Pastors, you face a choice: You can normalize treating women as whole people made in the image of God, or you can normalize objectification. You can imitate how Jesus sat with the Samaritan woman and talked with her, and how Paul praised women as his co-workers, or you can imitate locker room talk.

When you choose the latter, you tell every man in your church: “It’s normal to see women as objects. No one can expect more from you. Your wife is unreasonable by feeling hurt by you wanting other women.” You harm marriages.

Again, women naturally want the men that other women want. The reason that isn’t happening here, is because THESE women already have husbands… that they know, even if they’ll never admit it, have been treated cruelly by the only women they’re allowed to have. Most of those husbands can already justify a divorce on the grounds of marital abandonment.

No wonder, then, that Mrs. Strong&Independent is nervous whether that last little fuse of “God said so” is going to hold under the pressure!

Women just want to feel safe – in our marriages and our churches. But, quite frankly, many of us don’t.

You don’t deserve to feel safe. Reconsider your sexual treatment of your husbands and, this time, opt for the correct answer. If it’s not too late.

In social media polls I’ve conducted, just over 60% of women said they felt more sexually unsafe at church than in the workplace. And Pokluda’s own denomination has given only lip service to the sexual abuse crisis at its doorstep, persistently claiming they’re helpless to act, while somehow managing just this week to disfellowship churches that have female pastors. Perhaps it’s not surprising that irreligious young women now outnumber irreligious young men, reversing a trend that has held for centuries.

Women want to go to church and worship Jesus and feel part of his body, rather than having our own bodies judged.

Heh, and you thought my “boobies at Judgment Day” idea was gross.

We want to go to church without having to hear a pastor call his wife “smokin’ hot,” or brag about the hot women who want to have sex with him, or tell us how hard it is for Christian men not to lust.

We’re tired of being framed as the dangerous ones when we’re the ones in danger.

“We’re tired of being reminded that our husbands have options… more every day.”

“We’re tired of having to care about the males infesting our liberated lives.”

And we’re tired of being framed as the dangerous ones when we’re the ones in danger.

Pokluda certainly is not the only pastor guilty of reinforcing objectification from the pulpit. And he is far from the worst. He is, however, the most recent, and this dust-up reveals much about the frustration women feel in evangelical circles, and the refusal of men in power to confront their complicity in normalizing female objectification.

Pastor Pokluda must learn to tell women No. No, they must not be allowed access to high-status men at Church. No, they don’t get to abandon their husbands while enjoying his bank account. And No, hubby shouldn’t stray… but if wifey makes him miserable at home, then straying is what’s going to happen.

And while he preaches that gloriously patriarchal message, Pokluda’s own wife is going to notice all the young flesh making eyes at her husband… and decide that Pokluda could use a little more lovin’, too. Especially if he winks at a couple of them… not that he would, but (heh heh) he certainly could.

Find your spine, Pokluda, if not for God, then for the head. Ahh, I finally found a way to call you to repentance!

Of course, I don’t KNOW that it was the vexx. I only know that in a sudden announcement following a secret trip, a world-class attention whore and Presidential hopeful is skirting the law in order to NOT be the center of attention.

California governor won’t deliver State of the State speech

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/california-governor-wont-deliver-state-140123481.html

By Adam Beam, 7 March 2023

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom won’t give a State of the State address this year, shunning the teleprompter that has frustrated him because of his dyslexia in favor of a statewide tour this month, in which he can highlight his major policy goals in a more informal setting.

It’s a break from tradition for Newsom, a Democrat and potentially a future presidential candidate who has attempted many times to reinvent the speech for modern audiences. He has tried devoting the entire speech to just one topic — homelessness in 2020 — and using Dodger Stadium during the pandemic to give exhausted residents a pep talk about “ brighter days ahead.”

Fact-check: the full statement was “Some mistakes were made but you should dream of brighter days ahead!” Disrespecting liberals is fun when you know where to look! And I do.

Segue

h ttps://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/newsom-state-of-state-address-dodger/

9 March 2021

LOS ANGELES (CBS13/AP) — Addressing a state exhausted after a year of lockdowns, wildfires, disease and death, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday urged residents of the nation’s most populous state to “dream of brighter days ahead” while acknowledging mistakes that have put his political future on the line.

“People are alive today because of the public health decisions we made — lives saved because of your sacrifice,” Newsom said in his third State of the State address. “Even so, I acknowledge it’s made life hard and unpredictable, and you’re exhausted with all of it.“

The speech normally is presented to a joint session of the Legislature in Sacramento. This year, Newsom delivered it from center field in an empty Dodger Stadium, which has served as a coronavirus testing and vaccination center.

The backdrop for Newsom’s speech was 56,000 empty seats that represent roughly the number of Californians who have died from the coronavirus, the most in the country.

“To the California critics, who are promoting partisan power grabs and outdated prejudices, and rejecting everything that makes California great, we say this: We will not be distracted from getting shots in arms and our economy booming again,” he said.

To the surprise of conspiracy theorists everywhere, Newsom got the shot in the arm himself. Not fake! because he’d never have faked what happened next.

h ttps://americanfaith.com/ca-gov-gavin-newsom-not-seen-in-public-after-receiving-moderna-booster-vax-abruptly-canceling-plans/

8 November 2021

California Governor Gavin has withdrawn from public view for “unspecified family obligations,” a week after suddenly canceling plans to attend the United Nations climate summit in Scotland, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Tribune piece notes that Gov. Newsom had received a Moderna Covid-19 vaccine booster shot on Wednesday, Oct 27 from California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly at Asian Health Services in Oakland.

According to the Tribune, “After abruptly canceling his plans last week to attend the United Nations climate summit in Scotland, Newsom did not participate in the conference virtually the first week of November 2021 while attending to unspecified family obligations.”

“When the surprising announcement was made Oct. 29,” the piece goes on reporting, “a spokesperson said Newsom planned to participate virtually in the conference this week. But the California delegation’s schedule at the meeting this week, released by the governor’s office, did not include Newsom.”

The motivation for that surprise announcement was Newsom suffering Bell’s Palsy. Not the more serious Guillian-Barre palsy first suspected, but still, it would have been Narrative-shattering for Gavin Vainglorious to show up at the U.N. in omelet-face. Even virtually. “I’m wearing a face mask while teleconferencing out of an abundance of caution! Sorry if I drool,” haha, no.

End segue

Scripted speeches have given Newsom trouble because of his dyslexia, a common learning disability that makes it harder for him to read and do other things related to reading. It’s why he rarely uses notes in his public appearances and memorizes vast amounts of facts and figures. Last year, he invited lawmakers to hear his speech in a large auditorium in Sacramento in part because he could use a larger screen.

Which is it, dyslexia or far-sightedness?

Just about every governor in the U.S. gives a State of the State address, which mimics the State of the Union speech given by the president to Congress every year.

All of those executive officers were shameless camera whores long because their daughters made camwhoring trendy.

And the pick of that litter, is now refusing a gold-plated public appearance opportunity because he’s dyslexic? I don’t know what the truth is, but I do know that the truth ain’t that.

The California Constitution requires the governor report to the state Legislature every year “on the condition of the State.”

Prior to World War II, governors would fulfill this requirement by sending a letter to the Legislature. That changed in the 1940s, when former Gov. Earl Warren — who would later become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — began giving a formal speech to the Legislature, according to Alex Vassar, a librarian at the California State Library who acts as an unofficial historian of the state Legislature. Governors have been giving speeches ever since.

This year, Newsom plans to fulfill his constitutional requirement by sending a letter to the state Legislature. Next week, the governor’s office says, Newsom plans to embark on a four-day tour of the state to highlight his priorities.

A four-day tour of California is barely enough time for the top cities of Sacramento, Gay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego. One doubts that Angels Camp and Redlands are on that itinerary.

“Long gone are the days of an hourlong gubernatorial address on prime-time TV that everyone went into their living room and watched,” said Matt Barreto, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Perhaps the governor is thinking there are more effective ways of going out into the community and speaking directly to voters.”

Hello, misinformation! The Fresh Prince Of Hair Gel’s motivation for hiding his face, now that masks are no longer trendy, is not efficiency, let alone speaking directly to the voters who recalled him so hard, that Newsom cranked the Fortified Democracy dial to 70% in order to send the message he ain’t going nowhere.

I thought his motivation was Baja Mexico, which was sufficient by itself to make me wonder if Gavin’s facial tic had returned.

POLITICS BREAKING: Newsom Found; Took ‘Personal Trip’ to Baja While Snowed-in Californians Are Still Desperately Waiting for Help

h ttps://republicandaily.com/2023/03/breaking-newsom-found-took-personal-trip-to-baja-while-snowed-in-californians-are-still-desperately-waiting-for-help/

By Admin, 5 March 2023

As Bob Hoge reported, California Gov. Gavin Newsom left the state for parts unknown Thursday, a day after belatedly declaring a State of Emergency in 18 of the state’s counties due to record-breaking snowfall resulted in massive power outages and food shortages where roads were buried under many feet of snow.

In some counties, people have been without power or snowed in, unable to leave their homes, for more than 10 days. As conditions have predictably worsened and even mainstream media outlets in the state are reporting that promised help has not arrived, speculation about Newsom’s whereabouts has gotten much louder. Late Sunday morning, about the time Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was preparing to take the stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Newsom’s press office announced that Newsom had returned, and that he’d been on a ‘personal trip’ in Baja California, Mexico.

I’m okay with Newsom ducking a crisis that didn’t involve him. There is little a politician can do, in fact, that grinds my gears as much as saluting disaster victims from his staff car as it drives past.

But that’s the point here. Gavin Vainglorious ducked out of some valuable photo opportunities AND was out of town entirely when his chosen gubernatorial nemesis for the Presidency of the United States, Ron DeSantis, was dissing him on Gavin’s home turf.

Why didn’t his press office just announce he was on scheduled vacation? Because it happened too quickly for them to get a cover story straight. I bet he got Bell’s Palsy again, maybe from a booster shot, and did medical tourism to Mexico because his California doctors talked to the press last time.

Then, it didn’t clear up in time for his State Of the Union Speech scheduled for this week. Missing such opportunities is simply not what modern politicians do. The GAE electoral system being what it is, you probably just saw Newsom lose his chance at POTUS 2024.

I cannot think of a worse fate for Governor Gavin Gruesome… other than, like last time, becoming the poster boy for Covid-Vaccine Injury.

I always knew this day would come! The day when the mask-Nazi bus ran into the surveillance state bus. Take one guess who won, and how quickly.

The New York Police Department is asking store owners to refuse service to customers unless they take off their masks and show their faces in order to help the police battle a massive robbery spree.

NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said that the masks are allowing robbers to escape detection by police through security footage.

First they forced everybody to wear identity-erasing face diapers, now they can’t tell who is who on CCTV. One wonders if maybe there was a way they could have… seen this coming.

[GunnerQ plays the COPS theme song]

Badge Boys, Badge Boys, Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when the people need you?

The Narrative said cover your face,
so you threatened the unmasked with mace,
Now the crooks play you for a fool,
Because your cameras can’t spot Abdul,
You tool!

Badge Boys, Badge Boys, Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when the people need you?

The politician pockets some bribes,
The doctor-man poisons some childs,
Migrant gangers snuff out some lives,
And you don’t see any crimes… even with
bright lights!

Badge Boys, Badge Boys, Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when the people need you?

“We are asking the businesses to make this a condition of entry, that people when they come in, they show their face, they should identify themselves,” he explained.

Blame the victim! How original! “Force your customers to identify themselves as a condition of you unbarring the door to your closet-sized grocery. That way, we’ll know who robbed you. And if it’s not too much trouble, could you arrest them for us, too?”

Cops, if you’re gonna be lazy then be lazy for EVERYBODY. “From this moment forward, the police will not investigate any violent death caused by a business owner inside his own store. We’ll just assume it was a robbery and he used the perp’s own weapon, and clean up the mess.”

Alternatively, if your paymasters use the law to protect the guilty then you cops should obey God instead of men. Like this:

It doesn’t seem hard to me. When the system is run by criminals, law enforcement needs to think outside the system. “The law” was never an invention of Man. Law is a society’s implementation of divine morality, and as such, is legitimate only to the extent that it pleases God.

That is why, for example, child molestation is a crime even… and especially… when legislators say it isn’t. Especially, because the legislators add treason against God to their violation of children against God’s righteous decree. Perhaps a non-Christian would use the phrase “mandate of Heaven” or something, but it’s to similar effect. There are lines that NOBODY crosses from ANY culture.

This is also why anarcho-tyranny is lawless by definition. God does not play favorites; therefore, neither should any government.

“We don’t have a weapon to defend ourselves,” said Bronx bodega owner Francisco Marte to WABC-TV. “That would be great, everyone come with their face up so the camera can see, we all can see. But we cannot force them to take off the mask.”

Marte says he has been shot three times. He’s also planning to upgrade his security to include facial recognition software.

Face-readers are a positive trend. It won’t be long before rednecks are setting up game cameras aimed at the front doors of Moderna’s bioweapon research labs. In the meantime, however, “I can’t make them take their masks off so I’m installing face-readers” proves Marte a coward. What he needs is a gun and a convenient dumpster, but no, he’d rather get shot… three times and counting.

If you’re gonna die by the sword anyway, then you might as well live by the sword.

[Some] shoppers said they got used to wearing masks during the pandemic, which ravaged New York City.

“I would say I’d be kind of offended because it’s my own way of feeling safe and I got really used to it through the pandemic,” explained shopper Emmanuel Celestrino.

The people still wearing masks are the fugly and/or emotionally damaged. Who in NYC, are numerous enough that masked criminals can seamlessly blend into a crowd. But the real story here is that after they were forced by the State to wear a mask until they liked it, they’re now being forced by the State to NOT wear a mask, because the State cannot be bothered with honest work.

The worm has turned, yet nothing has changed. The State’s mask mandate, now a no-mask mandate, has nothing to do with moral conduct and everything to do with coercing loyalty. Thus, it is an illegitimate law.

CAPS, an organization representing thousands of independent grocers across New York City, has called on officials to increase punishments against “repeat theft offenders” after they were lessened in a controversial bail reform law in 2019.

“We have been assaulted, terrorized, and our physical and mental health jeopardized,” the group said in a letter to the mayor and the New York governor. “A rise in larceny cases has hit independent supermarkets hard.”

Whoa, that one word could explain WHY the NYPD is this lazy. Are they reducing all of the city to only WEF-owned food suppliers? 

NYC bodegas padlock laundry detergent as shoplifting scourge hits new low

h ttps://nypost.com/2023/01/21/nyc-bodegas-padlocking-laundry-detergent-amid-shoplifting/

By Matthew Sedacca, 21 January 2023

Desperate Bronx grocers are cracking down on serial thieves by slipping steel chains through the handles of laundry detergent bottles and securing them with padlocks — a new low in the shoplifting scourge across the Big Apple.

“I put the detergent in jail,” lamented Jose Dario Collado, owner of Yankee Food Deli in University Heights, which began locking up $27.99 bottles of Tide and $12.99 containers of Dreft because thieves were cleaning up — to the tune of at least $1,000 a month in detergent alone.

“Before the pandemic, New York was the best. Now, I don’t know what happened to the people,” huffed Collado.

The lock-and-chain strategy was hatched by the United Bodegas of America in the wake of spiking thefts, explained Fernando Mateo, the organization’s president.

Robberies at bodegas, small convenience stores, have doubled just in the past year.

“The justice system is just not cooperating, and it’s getting to a point where you either have to padlock every item that has to be stolen, or you have to fight back,” said Mateo. “And if you fight back you take the risk of going to jail for protecting your property.”

Well, then, whose side are the cops on? Like Christianity, this isn’t hard to understand. It’s only hard to accept.

The city’s shoplifting crisis is showing no signs of abating, with petit larceny — or theft of less than $1,000 — up 14% this year through Jan. 15, compared to the same time period in 2022, according to NYPD data.

Residents stunned by the latest security inconvenience said the neighborhood’s junkie hordes were mostly to blame, as is the city’s revolving-door justice system.

“The police can’t do anything to help,” griped Manuel San Miguel, 61, alluding to the state’s 2019 controversial bail reform law that bans judges from setting bail in cases involving non-violent felonies and misdemeanors such as shoplifting.

Oh, the police CAN do something. Something other than following a corrupted, neutered, pointless exercise in futility.

But then, so could Miguel and other independent grocers:

A group representing 4,000 independent grocers is demanding that “repeat theft offenders” be made bail eligible, undoing part of the bail reform legislation — and addressing the fact that petty thieves tend not to be prosecuted.

Huh, so there WAS a reason we had the bail system previously. What do those hellbound fools who abolished bail have to say for themselves?

We must protect New York’s essential retail workers from rising violent crime

h ttps://nypost.com/2023/03/02/we-must-protect-new-yorks-essential-retail-workers-from-rising-violent-crime/

By Manny De Los Santos, State Assemblyman 72nd District, 2 March 2023

Time and again, retail workers have been attacked, and stores have been violently robbed.

That’s why it’s time to change our laws to protect these workers and the customers they serve.

New York’s independent supermarkets, bodegas and mom-and-pop retail shops are the backbones of our communities.

I recognize the cadence of this speech. He’s acknowledging the problem to spin up the audience, and once they’re emoting instead of thinking, he’ll bravely propose a new word for business-as-usual. It’s a very popular psychological trick: “Yes, I agree with you! There IS a problem! Yes! YES, THERE IS! I hear you!”

From hiring our local residents to providing access to healthy, fresh foods and daily necessities for families, these businesses and their workers keep neighborhoods running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Tell us you’re gonna stand against the WEF Great Reset, Manny. Tell us that you’re going to reimpose bail and put those crackhead scumbags in the drying pen. Tell us that you value the independent businessowners who provide you with food and tax revenue more than recidivist former farm equipment.

Just 327 offenders accounted for 30% of New York City’s 22,000 retail theft arrests in 2022. Recidivists were arrested nearly 6,600 times, averaging about 20 times each.

The situation is entirely untenable — something must be done to rectify it before more stores close and more workers are harmed.

Dirt naps for 327 offenders?

That’s where the city and state can step in to help.

Say it… say it… the solution is obvious, you probably haven’t even thrown out those law book from 2018 yet…

That’s why, at the state level, I am proud to carry legislation making assaulting a retail employee or owner a class-D felony, such as with livery drivers, utility employees and other essential workers.

This common-sense legislation will help deter crimes and hold people who perpetuate them accountable.

YES! The recidivists would then be catch-and-released for felonies instead of misdemeanors! GENIUS! Oh wait, the problem was shoplifting and robbery, not assault.

QED, business as usual.

Burn in Hell, Manny. Better yet, work an honest retail job and let’s see if your devotion to the Narrative can survive a tweaker equity-izing your carbon. Remember not to bitch about shiv-carrying robbers counting as “unarmed”!

This is treason. NYC government, even state-level, is targeting independent grocers for destruction via anarcho-tyranny. The damage being done to us isn’t just Ohio-sized mushroom clouds; it’s police telling shopkeepers that the only people the cops can keep in jail, is shopkeepers for the crime of “violent” self-defense.

How long until WEF-independent food retailers are targeted in other, less Progtard regions?

How long until shopkeepers stop expecting police to protect them?

One wonders if the organized Church has any shame left. I wondered, thus I read this article. And found pretty much what I expected.

7 things we didn’t see coming in churches at this point after the pandemic

h ttps://www.christianpost.com/voices/7-things-we-didnt-see-coming-in-churches-after-the-pandemic.html

By Thom S. Rainer, Op-ed Contributor

I open with his background.

Thom S. Rainer is the founder and CEO of Church Answers, an online community and resource for church leaders. Prior to founding Church Answers, Rainer served as president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources. Before coming to LifeWay, he served at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for twelve years where he was the founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism.

Which leads me to assume that he’s talking mainly about Baptist churches here.

Admittedly, it’s a tricky thing to find a precise beginning and ending point to a pandemic. We could accept the declaration from the World Health Organization that COVID-19 began on March 11, 2020. But the virus was rapidly spreading around the world prior to that date.

Stop screwing around. The official, public reaction began on the date you gave.  But if you want the REAL date that the COVID Plandemic began, it was in January 2017… a few days before Trump was inaugurated, to the bleak horror of Chi-comm-Clinton agents everywhere… that Fauci predicted a ‘surprise outbreak’ would happen during Trump’s term in office in a speech he gave at the Jesuits’ Georgetown University.

Segue

Dr. Fauci Warned In 2017 Of ‘Surprise Outbreak’ During Trump Administration

h ttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/fauci-warned-of-trump-pandemic-2017_n_5e8a0548c5b6e7d76c65c8a4

By Nina Golgowski, 5 August 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease specialist, warned in early 2017 that a “surprise outbreak” would occur during the Trump administration, and he said that more needed to be done to prepare for a pandemic.

“There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases,” he said in a speech titled “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration” at Georgetown University Medical Center. He delivered it just days before Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2017.

Fauci, who has overseen the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, warned that looming health challenges would involve both chronic diseases ― ones already ongoing ― as well as “a surprise outbreak.”

In hindsight, the Plandemic became official the moment Fauci said that.

“No matter what, history has told us definitively that [outbreaks] will happen,” he said. “It is a perpetual challenge. It is not going to go away. The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we are going to see this in the next few years.”

That’s not the sort of thing that experts can be “extraordinarily confident” about. Unless they’re the perpetrators. The easiest way to predict the future is to make it happen yourself.

Fauci ticked off a list of measures needed to prepare for such a crisis, including creating and strengthening global health surveillance systems, as well as public health and health care infrastructure; practicing transparency and honest communication with the public; coordinating and collaborating on both basic and clinical research, and developing universal platform technologies to better facilitate the development of vaccines.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? “Scumbag Cheeto Man Drumpf the Russia Russia Russia Agent Worse Than Hitler will have to face a ‘surprise outbreak’ during his term in office” said the guy who illegally engineered the COVID-19 bioweapon in a Chinese laboratory at American taxpayer expense, which was released for unknown reasons, yet on his schedule, during the year of Trump’s re-election campaign. Which forced America to create the unlawful, public-private biosurveillance state that he had demanded for years.

If you can’t connect THOSE dots then you must still think crayons are for chewing.

End segue

What were we talking about? Oh yes, the state of the Church post-da-‘Rona.

For our purposes, we look at post-pandemic as that time when churches started regathering in person. Some churches started a lot sooner than other churches, but most churches are back to in-person services today.

Left unmentioned, is that that was the first time the Church closed its doors IN ITS ENTIRE HISTORY.

As we look back over this regathering phase, we admit that several developments caught us by surprise. Some are good. Some are not.

1. Digital attendance fell rapidly. We continue to be amazed at the dramatic decline in digital attendance in the churches reporting their data to us. We knew it would not be sustained at the same levels as during the quarantine, but we have certainly been surprised that the drop has been so dramatic.

Why is that surprising? To close the Church is to kill the Church.

Jesus: “Where two are gathered in My Name, there I am also.”

Pastor:

2. Interest in evangelism is increasing. There are two ways to look at this surprise. First, we give thanks to God because more and more churches are responding in obedience to the Great Commission. But we are also aware that the interest is a bit pragmatic as well. Cultural Christians (an oxymoron, for sure) are not returning to church. If a church wants to reach people, evangelism is a necessity.

If Rainer had any spiritual discernment at all, he would 1. know that the Great Commission has already been completed, 2. know the reason why Barbie’s evangelistic trips to Bangcock are ALWAYS a success, and 3. it is evil to categorize men as “Cultural Christians”.

“They aren’t coming back to church after we shooed them away. They must not have been real Christians!”

Skipping #3 for now.

4. The number of full-time church staff has declined more rapidly than expected. Our information is anecdotal at this point…

Three years later?!

…but we believe that the majority of churches have by both necessity and by design reduced full-time personnel. The pace seems to be increasing.

To close the Church is to kill the Church. Also, to be unrepentant about closing the Church. Also, while I fully appreciate the need to occasionally cut deadwood, methinks ‘getting rid of staff by design’ was more about vaxx/mask enforcement. “Jesus is going in a different direction: podcasting from safety.”

5. Church revitalization has become an accepted discipline and practice much faster than expected. The discipline was growing both before and after the pandemic. But the rate of acceptance and growth of the discipline is nothing short of amazing.

“How to reopen the Church after closing it, has become an accepted discipline.” Because it’s never been needed before.

6. Deferred maintenance crises in churches are hindering church adoption. Simply stated, many potential church adoptions have been delayed or dropped because the adopting church cannot afford to upgrade the facilities of the declining church seeking adoption.

“By Church revitalization, we meant re-homing the pastor after his congregation didn’t come back. And he doesn’t want to live in a slum.”

7. Most church search committees still search for pastors like it was 2010. We thought we would see pastor search committees (or similar bodies) more willing to change their processes in light of all of the changes affecting American churches. This intransigent behavior portends poorly for a growing pastor shortage in America.

One wonders at the context of this question. I would never have thought to ask how Covid lockdowns would change the pastor-selection process, because there’s no reason it would. The current process does not serve the needs of Christ or His Church, and was never intended to. It’s intended to gatekeep Church leadership so that a small clique of politically connected, dangerously ignorant and soft-shelled insiders can  enjoy respect and authority far in excess of what they deserve, or can even make use of.

The current selection process:

1. Reject all applicants who have not graduated from a secular-accredited college.
2. Reject all applicants who have ever blamed a wife’s marital problems on the wife.
3. Reject all applicants with real-world experience, spiritual giftings and/or disruptive ideas about what a church should be & do.
4. For the remaining applicants, host an acoustic-guitar audition.

Changing this process could only open up the halls of power to the meritorious, the devout, and worse of all, the boat-rocking courageous.

Clergy these days, they were HAPPY to close their church in 2020. They never did want to get up on Sunday and preach at the ingrate bench-warmers. Obeying the Jesuit bioterrorists allowed them to, instead, play the guitar for half an hour in front of a webcam whenever they felt like it, and call it “church”. Frauds like that will never allow merit-based competition for their sinecures.

If their church dies off as a result of going webcam-only, well, there’s a simple solution for that… taking the Ticket. Number Three.

3. Church finances held well longer than expected. Billions of dollars of liquidity were injected into the market, which helped individuals and organizations, including churches, for a season. But we are surprised that giving has not declined rapidly with the cessation of government support and the onset of higher inflation.

The Church closed its doors to God’s people, because the false shepherds couldn’t be bothered to care… were too craven to stand during a crisis…

…and when their churches inevitably declined as a direct and predictable consequence…

…the clergy took money from the State so they could close the doors without losing their jobs. They took the Ticket. No hesitation. No remorse.

Let me repeat that for emphasis.

The Church was ABLE to turn against God ONLY because the State provided replacement funding. The theological term for that is “thirty pieces of silver”.

How was the Church changed by the Plandemic? Our false shepherds have been so completely unmasked that even for the bovinely stupid, it now takes more faith to reject God than to accept Him. Which is why they aren’t coming back to church… that’s not where God is.

Faith After the Pandemic: How COVID-19 Changed American Religion

h ttps://www.aei.org/research-products/report/faith-after-the-pandemic-how-covid-19-changed-american-religion/

5 January 2023

Key Points

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated an overall decline in religious attendance, although religious identity remained mostly stable.

The number of Americans who never attend religious services jumped over the past two years; roughly one in three Americans now report that they never attend religious services.

Young adults report the greatest change in religious attendance of any age group.

God will not be denied, not even by so-called Christian clergy.