San Francisco cancels Abraham Lincoln, California Megachurch Promotes Segregation, The COVID Vaccine Could Kill People with My Condition, Achieve More By Working Less (The Five For 12/18/20)

Hey,

Before we begin, my co-founder Drew and I had an excellent converation with podcaster Chris Spangle about the student loans crisis, which you can catch over at YouTube now.

[one]

San Francisco is attemping to cancel Abraham Lincoln.

San Francisco may remove Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school, because a district committee says the 16th president — who abolished slavery — did not demonstrate that “black lives mattered to him.”

Lincoln is one of dozens of historical figures who the city school district’s renaming committee argued led lives so rife with racism, oppression or abuse that their names should not grace its buildings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“The discussion for Lincoln centered around his treatment of First Nation peoples, because that was offered first,” Jeremiah Jeffries, chairman of the renaming committee and a first-grade teacher, told the paper. “Once he met criteria in that way, we did not belabor the point.”

He continued: “The history of Lincoln and Native Americans is complicated, not nearly as well known as that of the Civil War and slavery,” according to the paper.

OK, let’s do a little history lesson, straight from history.com.

At the reservations, the Santee were badly mistreated by corrupt federal Indian agents and contractors; during July 1862, the agents pushed the Native Americans to the brink of starvation by refusing to distribute stores of food because they had not yet received their customary kickback payments. The contractors callously ignored the Santee’s pleas for help.

Outraged and at the limits of their endurance, the Santee struck back, killing Anglo settlers and taking women as hostages. The initial efforts of the U.S. Army to stop the Santee warriors failed, and in a battle at Birch Coulee, Santee Sioux killed 13 American soldiers and wounded another 47 soldiers. However, on September 23, a force under the leadership of General Henry H. Sibley finally defeated the main body of Santee warriors at Wood Lake, recovering many of the hostages and forcing most of the Native Americans to surrender. 

The story of the Souix is one of my favorite chapters in American history, despite it’s unthinkable tragedy. They’re an incredible people group, and Crazy Horse was one of the most innovative leaders this continent has ever seen.

But bro, if you slaughter women and children, you’ve got the noose coming. More than 300 Santee were supposed to hang. Lincoln communed the sentences of all but 39.

Because they murdered women and children.

This is why the “abolish the police” argument doesn’t work. Because people do barbaric things, like butchering children like cattle. Not just in war in the 1800’s. Today.

Let’s loop back to the statement that “black lives didn’t matter” to…the guy who sent 600,000 Americans to their deaths and burned down half his own country to free the slaves?

How about we keep Lincoln and abolish San Francisco.

The problem is not that people don’t know history. That always happens.

The real problem is that there’s an extremely small fraction of the population who doesn’t want to know history and only want to push forward a far-left authoritarian agenda.

These people are psychos.

Some have tried to make the case that that Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War by simply paying for the freedom of every slave, which would have been cheaper than the cost of the war. However, that would have required a law that the states south of the Mason-Dixon voting yes on, which never would have happened.

The Civil War is horrible beyond comprehension. Soldiers had their limbs sawed off without sedative. Brothers left home to go to war against one another.

Lincoln had the lists of the dead read aloud to him, so that he would never get too far from the weight of the decisions he was making.

This was the cost of ending slavery.

And so was this. The Confederates starved Union POW’s to a level that wouldn’t be seen again until Nazi Germany.

And let’s not forget the final combat death of the Civil War…was Lincoln himself.

He gave much of his life to fighting slavery. And then he gave the last little bit of it in Ford’s Theater.

And if you can’t understand that…then you can go to hell. Or San Francisco. They’re more or less the same destination these days anyway.

[two]

If you don’t know the name Rick Warren, then you either we either not born, Amish or really, really stoned from 1999-2003 or so. Warren wrote the mega-bestselling Christian devotional The Purpose Driven Life a book I tried to read on my own, then with a couple of friends in college, before I just pitched it in my dorm trash can, confounded at what he was getting at.

But the book took off, selling more than fifty million copies.

I spent some time in California with Warren’s staff a few years back, and found out that to work for Rick means to be on call 24/7/365, because he’s allowed to do whatever he wants now that he’s uber-rich and uber-famous (for the record, he paid the church back for every dollar of salary he’d ever earned before the book ballooned his net worth to $25 million).

Last week, Warren hosted an event that banned white people.

It’s probably best to let notthebee.com (the real news arm of the satirical Babylon Bee) say it, since they said it best.

The implication here is really the most offensive of all. What is it that makes this event a "safe space"? Obviously, it's the absence of white people. Rick Warren, intentionally or not, in this announcement is saying "you have reason to feel unsafe in the presence of your brothers and sisters in Christ."

What an insulting and offensive thing to say!

As a Christian, you already have a safe space. It's called The Church.

Actions like this purposefully divide the church, literally segregating the church based on race. This action elevates race as a factor that's more important than being a believer in the same church.

I haven’t watched the event (and apparently I shouldn’t anyway? According to the rules laid out), but I wanted to report on this because I find it so troubling.

There’s nothing wrong with gatherings for groups of people…but when it’s a gathering to exclude groups of people, things get bad quick. Perhaps most famously at Evergreen College in Washington, which started a “day without white people.” When (politically left) Evolutionary biologist Brett Weintein and his wife Heather Heyer refused to be expelled from campus, their lives were threatened by the students and police refused to step in to assist with their safetey. Brett and Heather sued and won a large chunk of money in court, but their careers were over.

This feels a little too much like that, and it troubles me. Anthony, one of the hosts of the event, has been an aquaintance of mine for several years and I’ve also met some of his relatives in Chicago.

Either segregation is wrong, or it isn’t.

I’m still on the side of the former, and I plan to stay there, consequences be damned.

[three]

I’ve had a couple of close brushes with death due to my peanut allergy (my throat closes if I eat nuts, eventually to the point of suffocation and death). I’ve also had a couple of severe reactions to medications in my life, which means the CDC says I should not get the vaccine.

A nurse in Alaska went into anaphalactic shock from an allergic reaction to the COVID vaccine. CBS reports:

One health care worker in Alaska experienced a serious allergic reaction and was hospitalized after taking Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, state officials said Wednesday. The worker, who is middle-aged and had no previous history of allergies, had stabilized with treatment but was being kept in a Juneau hospital to be monitored for another day.

The worker received the vaccine Tuesday at Bartlett Regional Hospital. Ten minutes after taking the vaccine she "showed signs of an anaphylactic reaction, with increased heartbeat, shortness of breath and skin rash and redness," according to Dr. Lindy Jones, the emergency room director at Bartlett. "She was given epinephrine and Benadryl, admitted to the hospital, and put on an intravenous epinephrine drip. Her reaction was serious but not life threatening."

I’ll add wasn’t life threatening in this case.

There’s only a 2 in 50,000 chance that someone like me (under 40, healthy, no comorbidities) would die of COVID, but 150 people in America die from anaphalaxis every year.

Simply put, that means the cure is worse than the disease, in my case.

And if I had to pick my end, I’d much rather die of COVID than suffocate.

[four]

Winston Churchill is known for the quote “a change is a rest” and now researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has made a pretty strong scientific case for that in his new book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.

I first discovered Alex on this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, and dove head first into the book early this morning. Ava woke up super early and after Amanda tried to rock her back down for an hour and a half, I took her for a drive to fall back asleep. I parked to overlook the Mississippi River at sunrise and read these words.

If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.

I’ve probably missed a lot of opportunities due to being overworked and burned out. I’m committing to reading through this book over the holiday and making some changes.

Oh, here’s the river at sunrise. I was away from the Mississippi for 16 years, but these muddy banks were always calling me back.

[five]

Well, now that I’ve shown you starved and amputated Civil War soldiers…let’s try to end on a happier note?

Here’s the pop culture roundup:

The Mandalorian wraps up season 2 today, with the season finale dropping on Disney+. I was a mediocre Star Wars fan for most of my life, but Rogue One and The Mandalorian have really sucked me into the universe. Apparently some other folks felt the same way, as Rogue One was just named the fan favorite the movies released in the modern era.

The poular podcast Song Exploder, which explores how a famous song was written, is now a show on Netflix featuring the cast of Hamlilton, Nine Inch Nails, R.E.M., The Killers and more. (Hat Tip: Matt).

Eminem dropped a suprise new album today. First listen…it’s good.

Cobra Kai, the 30-years-later spin-off of the 1980’s classic Karate Kid, returns with season 3 on Netflix in January.

I haven’t watched The Queen’s Gambit yet on Netflix, but the story of a chess prodigy has resulted in a huge suge in the sale of chess sets around Christmas.

Irish vocalist Dermot Kennedy, who might be described as a male version of Adele for his ability to both write a huge hit and shred you to the bone as a lyricist, re-released his debut album Without Fear with some more tracks, and it’s one of my favorite projects of 2020. Nathaniel Rateliff released a new song for a movie that’s going to debut on Apple TV+, and it’s excellent. And finally, if you have even a passing interest in Taylor Swift’s music, her interview with Apple Music is a must watch.

Until the next one,

-sth