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On the culture of disrespect, bagging on Denham, climate
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I've got a lot on my mind so I'm going to get wordy today.

Regular readers will know that recently I've been writing about what's going wrong with our youth, particularly the idiotic actions of young males.

Then breaks loose a story last week from Merced County about a 16-year-old Delhi boy arrested for the brutal torture and death of a pig from the Delhi High School FFA farm. The 125-pound pig had been hung by a rope in the tree, set on fire and stabbed. Another pig was found in an enclosure that had a one-inch stab wound.

Are you wondering what in the hell has happened to some young people? I have an idea. The moral compass is broken and it starts at home. As Maria Montessori said, "The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil."

Social media helped the kids at school get the suspect identified and arrested.

Yesterday morning I saw a social media posting of four young ladies twerking on a police car in Rochester, N.Y. as an officer watches with folded arms. It's an example of the culture of disrespect. Radio talk show host Bob Lonsberry responded and noted that the department has been "castrated by three years of WTF leadership" under liberal Lovely A. Warren. Lonsberry went on: "For three years, the police department seems to have been focused on bending over and grabbing its ankles, kowtowing to whatever activist or agenda wants to spit on it."

I have my idea why there is a culture of disrespect. You may not believe in spanking but I do. I was spanked and turned out just fine. Never in a million years would I think about dancing on a patrol car.

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I saw a great cartoon on social media. It depicts a classroom scene of "then" and "now." In the first panel, parents are scornfully looking at their daughter while holding her report card full of D's and F's and saying to the child with arms folded and furrowed brow: "Explain these bad grades!" In the "now" scene, the parents are saying the same thing - only looking at the teacher as the child has a smug smile on her face.

Another example of what's wrong with kids today. Blaming somebody else for their shortcomings.

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The hypocrisy of the left knows no bounds.

We received a press release from a leftist organization, "Courage Campaign" that is out to harass Republican lawmakers. They are specifically targeting only Republicans (because they want to enforce immigration laws already passed; and because the GOP thinks Obamacare is a bad idea - and they would be right.

The left doesn't even want to hear alternatives to Obamacare. They act as though it was crafted by some kind of political god, while turning a blind eye to the serious problems it created.

On Thursday protestors staged a "candlelight vigil" in Turlock to suggest that Rep. Jeff Denham is dodging constituents by not holding town hall meetings during congressional recess. The group also targeted congressmen David Valadao, Devin Nunes, Kevin McCarthy, Dana Rohrabacher, Ed Royce and Steve Knight for - in their words - "failing to meet with them and addressing constituent concerns of safeguarding health care coverage and protecting immigrant families."

Protect immigrant families.

Ponder that for a minute.

Protect immigrant families.

Protect immigrant families from what?

Which U.S. citizens who are immigrants are being denied protection?

Oh, gotcha, right. Of course, the Courage Campaign is only talking about protecting those who broke the law to be here as uninvited guests. Those who didn't come here legally, are entitled to "protection" to stay? Are you kidding me?

Of course the left doesn't believe in consequences for breaking such laws. That bears out in the statement issued by Eddie Kurtz, executive director of the California-based Courage Campaign, who said Republicans "shouldn't be voting to ... launch a war against our immigrant communities."

Now enforcing the law is launching a war? The left is masterful at redefining terms. You'll remember how they renamed illegal immigrants as "undocumented workers." That's as preposterous as calling a thief an "unauthorized reallocator of goods." They've redefined gender and bathroom policy, they've redefined marriage and now they want to redefine immigration all to fit their narrow agenda.

My great-grandfather, Alfonse Benziger, came to the United States from Switzerland in 1870. He became a U.S. citizen, as did his bride, Maria Benziger after settling in Brooklyn. They didn't need "protection" - they followed immigration law and became legal U.S. citizens. They came here before Ellis Island became the receiving center for immigrants in 1892. There was an expectation that if you came here to live and become an American that you had a means to support yourself, not flood the border in search of government benefits and free medical care. We've come a long way from that time when immigrants were required to be disease free, pass intelligence tests and either have a job ready for them or someone to sponsor them financially since the state wouldn't pay their living expenses. We've done a 180 and now have advocates for lawbreaking in the name of humanitarianism.

Let's be clear about one thing: The Courage Campaign is not about meeting with the GOP lawmakers; they are about disrupting meetings for the sake of TV coverage. In short, the left has become disrespectful and disruptive bullies. As the LA Times put it in a headline: "Loud and angry, protestors turn congressional town halls into must-see political TV."

Good for Denham for not putting himself in their firing line in this culture of disrespect.

If you have something to tell your congressman, write him a letter.

* * * * * *

Things grew raucous at a Mariposa town hall meeting when Rep. Tom McClintock was, among other things, mocked for doubting the science behind the theory of global warming. He accurately stated that the planet has been "warming on and off since the last Ice Age" to ridicule and laughter. The people of the world have been sold on this unproven theory that man is making things warm up but it's astounding at how closed minded people are about questioning the theory. They've heard it so much in the media that it has to be true. That's what non-thinkers do.

McClintock's detractors probably don't realize that Earth experienced a warming trend from 1910 to 1940 when world population and industrialization was a fraction of today. There was slight cooling from 1940 to 1970 before then things warmed up again. The point is how can anyone say the most recent warming cycle is related to human activity? And since CO2 emissions have risen exponentially, why hasn't the earth's temperature risen exponentially? Remember, the Earth's temperature change has been less than a degree warmer over an entire century.

Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Green Peace - he has a Ph.D in Ecology - said there is "no scientific proof that humans are the main cause of the slight warming that has happened in this world over the last hundred years ago." Rather, he said, climate change is the result of "a kind of nasty combination of extreme political ideology and a religious cult all rolled into one."

Other scientists suggest water vapor has more to do with slight planet warming than CO2. There's also the matter of fluctuations in solar radiation caused by subtle variations in the orbits of Earth and Mars.

Professor Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel Prize winner for physics, said "global warming has become a new religion and that's not right because you can't discuss it." He calls global warming a pseudoscience that begins with a hypothesis - usually one which is appealing emotionally - and then look only for items which appear to support it. Giaever notes that the earth's temperature - if recordings are correct - went up only 0.8 degrees from 1880 to 2013, a remarkably stable temperature as the world population spiked from 1.5 billion to 7 billion.

In a Facebook discussion about recent ample California rains, a Florida woman said she is concerned about rising sea level and high tides in her state. Seems to me if the oceans were rising they would rise all over. I've been to Half Moon Bay and San Francisco and other beaches of California and they are not any higher than what I remember decades ago.

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A meeting was held Feb. 16-19 at Central Catholic High School in Modesto. It was billed as the World Meeting of Popular Movements, to promote structural changes that promote social, economic and racial justice.

Really, it was a Trump/GOP bashing session.

The event was organized by the Vatican's department for Integral Human Development, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Catholic Campaign for Human Development and PICO National Network. The meeting was designed to push for immigration reform, a living wage and worker protections, criminal justice reform, environmental justice and racial healing. The meeting sought to include Black Lives Matter.

Why a world meeting in our Valley? My theory is with the Valley's high rate of poverty, they believed they could make a point about "economic inequality." Basically that's a concept designed to make successful people, like farmers, pay penitence for the unskilled worker.

I'm curious. If someone is making $50,000 to $100,000 a year because they had enough college or work skills that landed a job paying that much, does that entitle anyone who has failed in life to have their money? Of course not. But Bernie Sanders types do.

Remember Trevon Johnson, the 17-year-old Miami teen who was shot and killed last year by a 54-year-old homeowner Gwendolyn Jenrette as he was breaking into her house to steal her things? Johnson's cousin, Nautika Harris, condemned the act of self-defense and stated: "You have to understand, you have to look at it from a child's point of view that was raised in the hood. How he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school?" Apparently it never dawned on the aunt - or our unfortunate victim - that he could have held down a job like the rest of us.

During a panel discussion in Modesto there was talk on how to reduce the barriers surrounding access to jobs with living wages and affordable housing.

That's rich. You flood the border with unskilled laborers in an economy already stifled and struggling under excessive government regulation and taxation, then wonder why they can't access jobs and not being able to afford rent or a mortgage?

The Catholic leaders railed against Trump, who was elected because Americans are fed up with failed liberal policies.

"President Trump said he was the candidate of disruption. Now we must all become disrupters," said Bishop Robert McElroy of the Diocese of San Diego. "We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our communities to deport the undocumented, to destroy our families..."

Wow. A statement like that would cause me to renounce my affiliation with the church, if I were Catholic. Perhaps the Catholics missed Romans 13: "Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished. For the authorities do not strike fear in people who are doing right, but in those who are doing wrong."

Pope Francis wrote a letter condemning Trump indirectly by saying he relied on "fear, insecurity, quarrels and even people's justified indignation in order to shift the responsibility for all these ills onto a ‘non-neighbor.'"

Question: Is denying a squatter the right to pitch a tent on your lawn shifting "responsibility for all these ills onto a ‘non-neighbor'"?

Since the Pope is against the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, why doesn't the wall come down around the Vatican? Why doesn't the Pope take in his share of the world's poor?

I agree with the Pope that Jesus wanted us to consider all we come into contact with as our neighbor and to love him. But even compassion on an individual level has its limits. Few of us have the ability to feed an extra family, and a nation doesn't have the resources to take in everyone who wants to cross our border. It's a ridiculous proposition.

The Pope also addressed terrorism, rejecting the notion that Muslim terrorism exists. He wrote: "Christian terrorism does not exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist and Muslim terrorism does not exist. They do not exist. There are fundamentalist and violent individuals in all peoples and religions - and with intolerant generalizations they become stronger because they feed on hate and xenophobia."

Hate? No, more like fear that the beheadings and bombings that have been staged by those religious nut job fundamentalists within the Islamic faith will occur here.

If there is any hate it's the hatred of such evil acts and wanting them stopped.

Where is the Catholic call to end acts of brutality and torture?

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Seriously? Nancy Pelosi wants to impeach Trump a little over a month into his presidency? Impeachment is reserved for "treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors."

It's time that she is censured as a House member. If anyone needs to leave office it's Nancy Pelosi who had no problem when Obama took unconstitutional actions. The San Francisco Democrat is rattling her cage louder in an effort to trump up charges to reverse the results of the last election.

Do you have any feedback about this column? Let Jeff know by emailing him at jeffb@cerescourier.com. He will read it, promise.