Ben Franklin and the Gulf Stream

The warm Gulf Stream current that flows eastward across the North Atlantic Ocean is one of the greatest movements of water on Earth. It is driven east by prevailing westerly winds, and is part of a great loop that then recrosses the Atlantic to the Caribbean. The current had been known since 1513, when Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León found his ship moving back north off Florida despite winds blowing him south. But it was only properly charted in 1770, by US statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin.

As deputy postmaster of the British American colonies, Franklin was fascinated by why it took British packet ships delivering mail two weeks longer to cross the Atlantic than American merchant ships. Already famous for his invention of the lightning conductor, he asked Nantucket whaling captain Timothy Folger why this might be.

Franklin’s chart was published in 1770 in Britain, but it would be years before British captains learned to use the Gulf Stream to cut sailing times.

Source: The Science Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (2014) by DK Publishing.

In case of apocalypse, find the nearest 4-H club

From Chloe Coleman on Washington Post.com (Aug. 21, 2023):

Raising and training animals. Growing food. Fishing. Archery. Sewing clothes. Making preserves. These are some of the skills that humanity is going to need if one of the many fictional post-apocalypse narratives ends up coming true.

Growing up in rural Ohio, I developed some of those skills by participating in 4-H, the network of youth development organizations whose roots (in Ohio, coincidentally) date to 1902. Recently, I paid a nostalgic visit to my childhood county fair, and it was while strolling the various barns occupied by 4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America) projects that my brain connected this wholesome form of learning to grim scenes from “The Last of Us.” [source]

Yea, when the poop hits the fan, having 4-H skills would be an advantage. Going back to the days of the old west before electricity. I am not a 4-H member but I get the writer's point. The Amish and Mennonites probably would be okay. I wonder if they would even notice if the electric grid stopped working.

Marxist teacher who called for 'forceful cultural revolution' lands seat on state legislature

From Fox News.com (Aug. 28, 2023):

A Marxist teacher from Colorado, who called for a "FORCEFUL Cultural Revolution" against "Whiteness," was voted in by Democrats to fill an open state House of Representatives seat Saturday.

Tim Hernández was selected as a state representative for the Denver area on Saturday by a committee of Democrats tasked with filling the vacant seat after its incumbent, Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, was elected to the Denver City Council.

Hernandez worked at Aurora West Preparatory Academy in the Aurora Public Schools District, according to its website from May. Their staff list has since been scrubbed, and it was unclear if he continues to work in the Colorado district. A sign in his classroom called for "Dismantl[ing] White systems."

Fox News Digital previously found that Hernández went on a Marxist diatribe at a protest organized by unions.

"I want to tear some s---t up it out for you. Are you ready?" Hernández said.

"What I think is happening in our schools, what I think is showing up in my classroom, is a lot of the things that we get into ideological circles up here. We like to compete who knows Marx better, who knows these things better, who's a Leninist. Listen, all right, I'll give you a real take on this s---t. Kids don't care," he said.

It wasn't enough to preach the communist theory, it had to be put into practice, according to Hernández.

"Yes, it's important to know theory. But you have to do some practices, you have to get out into the streets. You have to get into your workplace. You have to go to your families. If we are just sitting, talking in an ideological circle, our kids are still going to schools that are underfunded where they are investing more in their failure than in their success."

"Your [communist] theory will not save you. The revolution… will happen in the hood. It will not be led by who understand Lenin best, it will not be led by the deepest Marxists. The revolution will be led by the people…. And I say all of this because I'm a teacher." 

Fox News Digital also probed into Hernández's public social media, and found the teacher called for a "FORCEFUL cultural revolution," particularly against American "whiteness" and "white supremacy."

He has signaled that he was including lessons on communist theory in his classroom.

For example, to engage young children in his lens of society, Hernandez said they should be shown the movie "A Bug's Life" followed by a lesson on "proletariat revolution," meaning a social revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

"A lot of people call me a 'unicorn.' I am not an anomaly. I am a testament to the work we still have to do; this is sacred; this is powerful; this is necessary. I tell my students the truth," he said, according to his notes from a Memphis rally in September 2021 which was reviewed by Fox News. [read more]

Actually, not too shocking. The Left is gradually being taken over by the Marxists. They are losing their soul. And humanity.

Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Really Is Slashing Violent Crime

From The Federalist.com (July 9):

Is crime falling? Some conservatives, notably Steve Bannon, argue that Americans should ignore the FBI’s crime statistics showing record drops in violent crime. The murder rate last year fell to the lowest rate ever recorded, and the violent crime rate is clearly at the lowest in many decades. But Bannon recently declared that “nobody believes” FBI crime data or its director, Kash Patel, adding: “I don’t want to hear any more statistics about how crime’s coming down.”

That skepticism overlooks an important distinction.

The FBI has made mistakes in the past, particularly in its active shooter reports and hate crime data. Some police departments have also failed to report complete crime data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. But those problems do not explain the concerns with the measure of overall crime.

The real issue is understanding what different crime measures actually tell us. Past problems with the FBI’s measure of crimes reported to police do not mean anyone manipulated the data. Nor do they mean that last year’s reported decline in crime — or the declines so far this year — are inaccurate.

The United States has two primary measures of violent crime. The FBI tracks crimes reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates both reported and unreported crime. Researchers have known for decades that most crimes never reach the police. Victims report only about 40 percent of violent crimes and roughly 30 percent of property crimes.

The media focuses almost exclusively on FBI crime data. Before 2020, FBI data and the NCVS generally moved in the same direction. During the Biden administration, however, they sharply diverged. While reported violent crime fell by about 8 percent, total felony violent crime measured by the NCVS surged 59 percent — the largest four-year percentage increase since the survey began more than five decades ago.

Several factors explain that gap. Whether victims report crimes depends heavily on whether they believe police will catch and punish offenders. As cities reduced police staffing through budget cuts, retirements, and, in some places, “defund the police” policies, arrest rates declined. Lower arrest rates gave victims less reason to report crimes.

Some police departments also made reporting more difficult. In some jurisdictions, 911 operators asked whether the offender was still at the scene. If the answer was no — as it almost always was — they instructed victims to visit a police station later to file a report. Simply calling 911 does not place a crime in the FBI’s statistics; an officer must complete an official report. When governments make reporting more burdensome, some victims understandably decide it isn’t worth the effort.

Fortunately, many of those policies have been reversed.

Although reported crime has declined, we will not know whether total crime also fell in 2025 until the Bureau of Justice Statistics releases the next NCVS this September.

Even so, there is good reason for optimism.

Reducing crime is not complicated. Governments must make crime riskier by increasing arrests and convictions, imposing longer prison sentences, and allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. The news on each of those fronts has been encouraging.

FBI arrests surged in 2025, rising 184 percent over 2024 levels. Total FBI arrests — a broader category that includes many joint operations with state and local agencies — increased by 197 percent.

Voters also replaced several George Soros-backed prosecutors in jurisdictions such as Los Angeles and San Francisco with district attorneys who prosecute criminals more aggressively and seek tougher sentences. Across the country, President Trump’s U.S. attorneys have also pursued criminals far more aggressively than their predecessors. In Washington, D.C., for example, the Biden administration’s U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested. Under U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, that figure has fallen to just 4 percent.

Nor is it a coincidence that the record influx of illegal immigrants during the Biden administration coincided with a sharp increase in violent crime. It is equally unsurprising that crime has fallen as deportations have increased. Deportation records show that 70 percent of illegal immigrants deported during the Trump administration had either criminal convictions or pending criminal charges in the United States. Even those who avoid arrest understand that any contact with law enforcement could lead to deportation, giving them a strong incentive to stay off the police’s radar and avoid committing additional crimes.

Finally, the number of adults carrying concealed handguns has risen sharply, with the latest survey data showing a 5-percentage-point increase in concealed carry over the past year and a half.

Americans shouldn’t blindly accept crime statistics, but they need to understand what the different numbers actually measure. The FBI’s numbers show that reported crime has fallen dramatically, while the NCVS will tell us this September whether total violent crime has also declined. Stronger law enforcement, more aggressive prosecution, and greater accountability provide good reasons to expect that the encouraging trend in reported crime reflects a real improvement in public safety. [source]

Good to know!  Glad that illegal migrant crime is going down. It’s bad enough when America’s own citizens are committing crime—we don’t need to add to the crime stats.

Trump ATF Scraps Dozens of Gun Rules in Sweeping Rollback

From Newsmax.com (July 5):

The Trump administration is dismantling more than three dozen federal firearms regulations, ending a zero-tolerance policy against wayward gun dealers, easing scrutiny of stabilizing braces, and clearing a path for some Americans with a history of mental illness to buy firearms, part of what officials call the broadest rewrite of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rules in the agency's history.

The rollback, executed under President Donald Trump's Executive Order 14206 on Second Amendment rights, was formally launched April 29, when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and newly confirmed ATF Director Robert Cekada unveiled 34 notices of final and proposed rulemaking.

Officials called it the most comprehensive regulatory reform package in ATF history. Cekada was confirmed by the Senate hours earlier and signed off on the changes within an hour of taking office.

The package raises the legal bar for stripping a federal firearms dealer of a license, requiring evidence that the dealer knew it was breaking the law.

It formally rescinds the Biden-era pistol brace rule, which has already been blocked in much of the country by federal courts.

It narrows the Biden administration's "engaged in the business" rule, which was designed to force more sellers at gun shows and online marketplaces to run background checks, a measure gun-control advocates called a partial closure of the so-called gun show loophole.

Other proposalswould allow some Americans previously flagged for mental health reasons or an inability to manage their finances to purchase firearms.

On Friday, the ATF unveiled further changes, including a proposal to trim fingerprinting requirements for National Firearms Act applications.

Under the plan, individual applicants would submit a single fingerprint card instead of two and could verify identity with a photo ID rather than a passport-style photo. The rule is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on July 6, opening a comment period through Oct. 5.

The administration is simultaneously challenging state gun laws in court.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department sued California over Assembly Bill 1127, which bars sales of Glock-style pistols with a cruciform trigger bar that officials say can be readily converted to fully automatic fire, and over the state's Handgun Roster, which restricts which models may be sold.

It also sued Virginia and the Virginia State Police over Senate Bill 749, which criminalizes the sale or transfer of AR-15-style rifles and magazines holding more than 15 rounds. The department earlier filed similar challenges to semiautomatic rifle bans in the District of Columbia in December and Colorado in May.

Blanche said the rules had been written "without any real understanding of how firearms businesses operate, how lawful gun owners actually handle their firearms, or what truly improves public safety."

Gun control advocates rejected that framing. Kris Brown, president of Brady, told The New York Times the moves take the country "back 100 years" and are "decimating A.T.F.'s ability to regulate this industry." [source]

Another win especially for gun rights advocates! 

Transhumanism is a Christian Heresy (and a False Gospel)

From Break Point.org (Aug. 1, 2025):

One of the clearest proofs that Christianity addresses the fundamental problems of humanity is the bizarre lengths to which non-Christians will go to address those same problems without Christ. For example, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, former CEO of PayPal, recently went on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast to discuss AI, Mars, immortality, and other light topics. The conversation was genuinely interesting, especially when Douthat asked, “Should the human race continue?” Thiel paused and said “um” and “I don’t know” quite a few times.

“This is a long hesitation!” observed Douthat, laughing nervously.

Finally, Thiel explained that humanity should survive, but that there are problems in need of solving. Chief among those is death, he said, which transhumanists have long hoped to conquer via a “radical transformation” of the human body into an “immortal body.”

The problem with efforts like transgenderism, in Thiel’s opinion, isn’t that they change bodies too radically, but not radically enough: “[W]e want more transformation than that. … We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.” Thiel then pointed to Christianity and its doctrines of Redemption and Resurrection as precedent for the transhumanist idea of total self-transformation and conquest of death. Maybe, he hinted, the two philosophies aren’t so different.

Douthat, a Roman Catholic, pushed back, pointing out that according to Christianity, God does the transforming. “The person,” Douthat said, “who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up a dystopian character.” Do-it-yourself immortality is, at best, “a heretical form of Christianity.”

Theil’s fundamental assumption, which is foreign to the Bible and Christianity but common among tech futurists and transhumanists, is that our minds are more important and fundamental than our bodies. Our “true selves” are our minds and separable from who we are physically.

Not only is this assumption a rehashed version of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, it also creepily resembles the philosophy of the evil National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (or N.I.C.E.) from C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. In the story, Dr. Filostrato hopes to cleanse the world of organic life, replacing trees, birds, and even human bodies with machines. He even proposed something akin to uploading human consciousness.

That’s not to say that transhumanists like Thiel are involved in an intergalactic conspiracy run by demons speaking through a disembodied Head, as in the book. At least not knowingly. But the transhumanist’s urge to overcome human limits, become more machine-like, and live forever is eerily similar. As is their rhetoric.

It’s also notable that, unlike anti-humanists on the Left, transhumanists assume the human race is worth preserving. Elon Musk, for example, thinks it’s our duty to have as many babies as possible, by any means necessary. He also thinks that humans should be the ones to colonize other planets. In a sense, he acknowledges that humans are exceptional, in a way at least similar to how Scripture describes humans.

Yet, his view of human exceptionalism has a “you will be like God” promise to it, and a sense that all human problems are technical glitches to be overcome by innovation and engineering. So, our mortality can be solved through “radical transformation” of our bodies. Our fragile fertility can be solved through IVF. Our lack of knowledge can be solved through AI, and our limits can be overcome by the technologies pioneered by Thiel and others like him.

Theil’s company Palantir was named, without any apparent irony, after the “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings that corrupt all who gaze into them.

Humans were made in the image of God and, as such, were made to be like Him and live forever. Death is “the last enemy,” and our longing for immortality is core to who we are. Perhaps this is why transhumanist promises are so compelling. However, we were made to do and receive all this through God, not our own ingenuity.

Transhumanism, it turns out, is indeed a Christian heresy, an ideology that rightly identifies the problems of a fallen world. But it seeks to overcome them with a false gospel of technological godhood, rather than the true gospel of salvation through Christ.

God willing, Thiel’s openness to Christianity and his conversations with Christians will move him to accept his need for Christ. Until then, believers should be fully aware that the transhumanist gospel is a false one. Only Christ can change our hearts, change our minds, and change our whole bodies … not a tech billionaire. [source]

Transhumanists fear death. Their ego (living forever) might come into play too.

Another article on transhumanism:

Our Transhumanist, Sci-Fi Future Has Arrived. But You’re Not Going To Like It

Why Progressives Love Government “Experts”

From FEE.org (June 9, 2022):

In twenty-first-century America, ordinary people are at the mercy of well-paid, unelected government experts who wield vast power. That is, we live in the age of the technocrats: people who claim to have special wisdom that entitles them to control, manipulate, and manage society’s institutions using the coercive power of the state.

We’re told these people are “nonpolitical” and will use their impressive scientific knowledge to plan the economy, public health, public safety, or whatever goal the regime has decided the technocrats will be tasked with bringing about.

These people include central bankers, Supreme Court justices, “public health” bureaucrats, and Pentagon generals. The narrative is that these people are not there to represent the public or bow to political pressure. They’re just there to do “the right thing” as dictated by economic theory, biological sciences, legal theory, or the study of military tactics.

We’re also told that in order to allow these people to act as the purely well-meaning apolitical geniuses they are, we must give them their independence and not question their methods or conclusions.

We were exposed to this routine yet again last week as President Joe Biden announced he will “respect the Fed’s independence” and allow the central bankers to set monetary policy without any bothersome interference from the representatives of the taxpayers who pay all the bills and who primarily pay the price when central bankers make things worse. (Biden, of course, didn’t mention that central bankers have been spectacularly wrong about the inflation threat in recent years, with inflation rates hitting forty-year highs, economic growth going negative, and consumer credit piling up as families struggle to cope with the cost of living.)

Conveniently, Biden’s deferral to the Fed allows him to blame it later when economic conditions get even worse. Nonetheless, his placing the economy in the hands of alleged experts will no doubt appear laudable to many. This is because the public has long been taught by public schools and media outlets that government experts should have the leeway to exercise vast power in the name of “fixing” whatever problems society faces.

The Expert Class as a Tool for State Building

The success of this idea represents a great victory for progressive ideology. Progressives have long been committed to creating a special expert class as a means of building state power. In the United States, for example, the cult of expertise really began to take hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it led directly to support for more government intervention in the private sector. As Maureen Flanagan notes in “Progressives and Progressivism in an Era of Reform,”

“Social science expertise gave political Progressives a theoretical foundation for cautious proposals to create a more activist state…. Professional social scientists composed a tight circle of men who created a space between academia and government from which to advocate for reform. They addressed each other, trained their students to follow their ideas, and rarely spoke to the larger public.”

These men founded new organizations—such as the American Economics Association—to promote this new class of experts and their plans for a more centrally planned society. Ultimately, the nature of the expert class was revolutionary. The new social scientists thought they knew better than the patricians, religious leaders, local representatives, and market actors who had long shaped local institutions. Instead,

Progressives were modernizers with a structural-instrumentalist agenda. They rejected reliance on older values and cultural norms to order society and sought to create a modern reordered society with political and economic institutions run by men qualified to apply fiscal expertise, businesslike efficiency, and modern scientific expertise to solve problems and save democracy. The emerging academic disciplines in the social sciences of economics, political economy and political science, and pragmatic education supplied the theoretical bases for this middle-class expert Progressivism.

The Progressive impulse for expertise-based rule was perhaps exemplified by the Progressive transportation planner Emory Johnson, who advocated for a strong federal executive branch that would be resistant to political pressure while relying on the supposedly “scientific” judgments of government planners and other bureaucrats. Johnson

explicitly took up the question of the role of expertise in the American state…. he maintained that success relied upon what he termed “executive functions.” He sought to empower the federal government’s executive branch as experts’ natural home.1

In the Progressive view, business leaders and machine politicians lacked a rational and broad view of the needs of society. In contrast, the government experts would approach society’s problems as scientists. Johnson felt this model already somewhat existed in the Department of War, where Johnson imagined the secretary of war was “quite free from political pressure and [relied] on the counsel of the engineers.” Johnson imagined that these science-minded bureaucrats could bring a “really economic and scientific application” of policy. [read more]