Category Archives: America

The best evening ever was had, last night, with The Vietnamese Family (we’re fortunate to have a Lebanese one, too). Thrown into a marvelous mix of individuals was a new black sister (who happens to be Jewish, too). First up is the exotically beautiful BFF—I don’t know if generous and kind, funny and animated come through in the pic, but she made the best lobster ever. There was good cheer, good humor and good spirits, double entendre intended. Yes, water is a superb drink when taken with the right spirits.

Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap

America, History, Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Terrorism

“Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

A DAY IN THE LIFE. The Bennett family’s day began with a prayer at “the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.” It ended in the murder of the family’s father, stabbed to death in the Old City as he attempted to save wife and son from the same fate. A rabbi who rushed to the rescue was knifed to death, too. Twenty-two-year-old Odel Bennett found herself running for her life, a blade in her shoulder, as Palestinian onlookers jeered and spat in her direction.

As widow Odel Bennett convalesced with her toddler at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, another Jewish woman (an elderly Iraqi) was recovering at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital from gun and knife wounds similarly inflicted. Her husband lay in the morgue. That couple’s day started on a “Jerusalem city bus, when two Palestinians attacked with knives and a gun,” reported National Public Radio.

Surveillance camera footage uploaded to the Internet show numerous Palestinian-on-Jew attacks in real time. Waiting at a bus stop, these Arabs are wont to turn and plunge a knife into a Jewish neighbor’s back, again and again and again.

Religious imprimatur for the current wave of attacks on Israelis comes from the highest authority in the Palestinian Authority and beyond. In mosques across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, clerics deliver sermons brandishing scimitars, inciting the faithful to “form stabbing squads and cut the Jews into body parts.”

Mosques enjoy the support of the Palestinian family, school and authority.

UNIDIRECTIONAL VIOLENCE. This time last year—and decades prior—Muslims from East Jerusalem raided a synagogue, killing five Israelis.

These unidirectional assaults on Jews are nearly as old as the Tomb of our Patriarch Joseph. Oops: The ancient Nablus shrine was torched, the other day, by Muhammadan peaceniks, acting à la ISIS (in Syria and Iraq). …

… Read the rest. “Cut The Cycle-Of-Violence Crap” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

UPDATED: Pope Knows Absolutely Nothing About The American Constitutional Republic (& Even Less About Catholic Canon Law)

America, Christianity, Constitution, Individual Rights

Said the scold from Rome, Pope Francis, to a joint session of Congress:

You are the face of its people, their representatives. You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics. …

There are more papal distortions about the American constitutional scheme, but it’s too dismaying to plumb. Feel free to read on.

Even President Barack Obama recognized, these are his own words, that “the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” Obama has made it cleat that due to the obstacles the Constitution poses to “redistributive justice,” community organizers like him have aimed at achieving extra-constitutional change.

The Pope should be told by Republican elected representatives, who lapped up his words and shed crocodile tears—that they are bound not “to satisfy common needs,” as this ignorant Pope put it, but to uphold a limited set of negative, individual rights: LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY.

If you care about freedom and the American way, explain to your children the principles explained so simply in “The Defunct Foundations Of The Republic,” by way of one example. (Search the Articles Archives under negative rights, individual rights, etc., for more.) Don’t raise your kids to confuse Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will with the American verities of republicanism and limited government.

UPDATE: Finally, our left-libertarian judge gets it Right:

… Comes now Pope Francis to use moral relativism to take the Church in two dangerous directions. The first is an assault on the family, and the second is an assault on the free market — two favorite political targets of the left.

In the past month, without consulting his fellow bishops, the pope has weakened the sacrament of matrimony by making annulments easier to obtain. The Church cannot grant divorces because Our Lord used his own words to declare valid marriages indissoluble. But it does grant annulments.

An annulment is a judicial finding that a valid marriage never existed. This generally requires a trial, at which the party seeking the annulment must prove the existence of the marital defect from the beginning.

Fair annulment trials are costly and time consuming, often taking years from the initial filing to the final appeal. Until now. Last week, Pope Francis arbitrarily ordered the entire process to be completed in 45 days or fewer. For contested matters, a fair trial in 45 days is impossible. So, to meet his deadline, more annulments will be granted administratively, not on the merits.

It gets worse.

The Church has taught for 400 years that abortion is murder. Because the victim of an abortion is always innocent, helpless and uniquely under the control of the mother, abortion removes the participants from access to the sacraments. Until now. Last week, Pope Francis, without consulting his fellow bishops, ordered that any priest may return those who have killed a baby in a womb to the communion of the faithful. He said he did this because he was moved by the anguished cries of mothers contemplating the murder of their babies.

In his papal exhortation on capitalism, Pope Francis spectacularly failed to appreciate the benefits of capitalism to the health, wealth and safety of the poor. Instead, he has reworked the Peronism of his youth to advocate government-mandated redistribution of wealth and to condemn those who work hard, employ others and achieve wealth — even when they give some of that wealth to the Church. …

A beautiful column. Read the rest.