We have seen again and again how Christian nations can turn against the Church. Once the cycle starts, it gets uglier and uglier — until it gets so ugly that the enemies of the Church are shown up for what they are, and finally defeated.
In the first part of the cycle, Christians are made to be the bad guys — they call us enemies of progress and they proclaim that our moral positions are an affront to the enlightened.
. . .
Americans are living in a strange fantasyland right now. On the planet Earth, Christianity is on the rise in a worldwide revolution of freedom and love. Our Church is the world’s leader in education, health care and service to the poor.
But in the Western media-frenzied mind, Christianity is the bully, and the latest attempts to redefine morality are imagined to be new and freeing truths that the bully is senselessly opposing.
Working with the anthropologist Russell Hill, [ evolutionary psychologist Robin] Dunbar pieced together the average English household’s network of yuletide cheer. The researchers were able to report, for example, that about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. The primary finding of the study, however, was a single number: the total population of the households each set of cards went out to. That number was 153.5, or roughly 150.
This was exactly the number that Dunbar expected. Over the past two decades, he and other like-minded researchers have discovered groupings of 150 nearly everywhere they looked. Anthropologists studying the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies have found that clans tend to have 150 members. Throughout Western military history, the size of the company—the smallest autonomous military unit—has hovered around 150. The self-governing communes of the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect similar to the Amish and the Mennonites, always split when they grow larger than 150. So do the offices of W.L. Gore & Associates, the materials firm famous for innovative products such as Gore-Tex and for its radically nonhierarchical management structure. When a branch exceeds 150 employees, the company breaks it in two and builds a new office.
It is impossible for Americans to accept the extent to which the Colonial period—including our most sacred political events—was suffused with alcohol. Protestant churches had wine with communion, the standard beverage at meals was beer or cider, and alcohol was served even at political gatherings. Alcohol was consumed at meetings of the Virginian and other state legislatures and, most of all, at the Constitutional Convention.
Indeed, we still have available the list of beverages served at a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.
The crowd who managed to silence a speaker yesterday accomplished something, to be sure. But it wasn’t a blow against racism, fascism or police oppression. It was a step towards a closed campus where mob rule determines who can speak and who will be shouted down. It was a shameful day. And it deprived every member of our community of the chance to hear Kelly and decide for themselves whether his policing methods are indeed the first steps of a Rockwell-like campaign against minorities and the poor in America’s greatest city. To those individuals, let me put it plainly. Yours was an act of cowardice and fear, unworthy of any of the causes you claim to hold dear.
The wish to be oppressed turns into the wish to be morally superior, which turns into the pleasure of silencing alleged oppressors, which turns into its own sort of hatred and oppression.
Before you rejoice that the government has seized an alleged terrorist in Libya who was indicted for planning the notorious 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, before you join the House of Representatives in a standing ovation for the Capitol Hill Police who killed a woman whose car struck a White House fence and who then drove away at a high speed, and before you commend the New York Police Department for quickly getting to the bottom of an alleged assault by a motorcycle gang that tormented a young family on a city street, please give some thought to the rule of law.
. . .
What’s going on here?
What’s going on is the flow of government lawlessness down from the feds to the cops in the streets. Like children observing and imitating their parents’ unsanctioned, inappropriate, yet repeated behavior, when cops see the use of the military today to pull off government crimes, to shortcut the law and to evade the Constitution, they arm themselves with military-grade hardware and do the same.
In America today, to paraphrase Voltaire, criminals are punished for their crimes, except when they commit them to the sounds of official rejoicing.
what is required from citizens is unthinking, blind obedience to the rules at all times, even if following the rules conflicts with the intended goal of the rules.
If we learned anything about Barack Obama in his first term it is that when he starts repeating the same idea over and over, what’s on his mind is something else.
. . .
In a recent Journal op-ed, “Obama Suspends the Law,” former federal judge Michael McConnell noted there are few means to stop a president who decides he is not obligated to execute laws as passed by Congress. So there’s little reason to doubt we’ll see more Obamaesque dismissals of established law, as with ObamaCare’s employer mandate. Mr. Obama is pushing in a direction that has the potential for a political crisis.
It may be that Obama’s description of the importance of whistleblowers went from being an artifact of his campaign to a political liability. It wouldn’t be the first time administration positions disappear from the internet when they become inconvenient descriptions of their assurances.
Obama’s vision for lobbying transparency has similarly been discarded along the way, but the timing here suggests that the heat on Obama’s whistleblower prosecutions has led the administration to unceremoniously remove their previous positions.
Augustus created the original Praetorian Guard about 27 BCE to protect the emperor. It quickly came to exercise independent power, once even auctioning off the empire to the highest bidder. This outrage led the Roman general Septimius Severus to march on Rome and displace Emperor Julianus who had won the Praetorian bidding war. Severus disbanded the old Preatorian Guard only to set up a new Praetorian Guard, which quickly achieved a similar authority, power, and autonomy. The “intelligence community” of the US government seems to be playing a similar role today.
. . .
Because Congress has betrayed its democratic and constitutional duty, the “intelligence community” has acquired an authority, power, and autonomy comparable to that of ancient Rome’s Praetorian Guard. Throughout the Imperial period in the West, Rome had a Senate that provided honors and riches to its members while serving a largely ceremonial function in Roman politics. The real power in Rome was divided between the Emperor and the Praetorian Guard. Something similar has come true in the US today.
The argument for abortion in the new millennium has become the argument for politically correct infanticide. Not the “bad” kind of infanticide that selects for gender or against ethnicity, but the “good” kind of American infanticide that selects against the young for the sole convenience of the old.
That’s the inconvenient truth. Pay no attention to those jars filled with baby feet.
Graphic language, nudity, and sex are now commonplace in movies and on cable television. At the same time, there is now almost no tolerance for casual and slangy banter in the media or the workplace. A boss who calls an employee “honey” might face accusations of fostering a hostile work environment, yet a television producer whose program shows an 18-year-old having sex does not. Many colleges offer courses on lurid themes from masturbation to prostitution, even as campus sexual-harassment suits over hurtful language are at an all-time high.
. . .
Not since the late-19th-century juxtaposition of the Wild West with the Victorian East has popular morality been so unbridled and yet so uptight. In short, we have become a nation of promiscuous prudes.
Infanticide, eugenics, political correctness, “Gentry Liberals” living in the “Acela cocoon,” hypocrisy, fascism. It’s the culture of death all the way down.
#WarOnWomen
So when we are not killing the very young, we continue to screw the young for the benefit of the old with budget deficits and public debt (i.e., deferred taxation), and expansion of unsustainable old age entitlements (public pensions, Medicare, Social Security). Don’t let your grandparents steal your money.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The top 10 wealthiest men and women in America barely have 250 billion dollars between them. That sounds like a lot of money, until you look at annual Federal budgets which run into the trillions of dollars, and the country’s national debt which approaches 15 trillion dollars. And that’s not taking into account state budgets. Even Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union, with a population of barely a million, has a multi-billion dollar budget.
As the 10th richest man in America, Michael Bloomberg wields a personal fortune of a mere 18 billion dollars, but as the Mayor of the City of New York, he disposes of an annual budget of 63 billion dollars. In a single year, he disposes of three times his own net worth. A sum that would wipe out the net worth of any billionaire in America. That is the difference between the wealth wielded by the 10th wealthiest man in America, and the mayor of a single city. And that is the real concentration of wealth. Not in the hands of individuals, but at every level of government, from the municipal to the state houses to the White House.
“Racial slander is like duct tape: There’s no limit to what you can do with it.” Jonah Goldberg
This story exemplifies the fundamental racial dynamic in America today. It is one of mutual fear and mistrust: Blacks are on the defensive about white racism, while whites are on the defensive about the accusation of racism, almost universally regarded as a grave moral offense.
