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??? 25 girls are missing in Texas and they aren’t answering questions, they are using the usual words like the floods were “unexpected”. Who knows maybe the girls have been abducted for satanic rituals or child sex trafficking ?? There are still missing children from the Maui fires so this isn’t something new to happen, this is what the evil cabal do!

Until the founding of the United States of America, the nations of the West did not have to set forth the reasons for their existence and the basis of their authority. Land and blood established the cohesive commonality. Monarchs and aristocracies ruled by the power they had in their hands and justified it, at their own discretion, by claiming a divine right to rule, which the unified religious authority of the Christian West usually backed up. Jefferson’s magnificent writing brought the disparate views of Adams and himself together, along with the great mass of American patriots. The war of ideas that was the Reformation spilled over into a war of kingdoms as well. To reestablish peace, new concepts of justification of the political order had to be found. Chief among the thinkers responsible for the new order was Hugo Grotius, who relied on the idea of the small set of universal laws that governed all humanity that he found in rabbinic literature as grounding precedent for a new system of international order. Grotius’ younger contemporary, John Selden of England, followed Grotius into a consideration of the Seven Laws as the basis for the unwritten English Constitution that he championed with elegant argument and wily parliamentary strategy. But the unwritten English Constitution did not establish the nation of England, or Britain. It had to wait until 249 years ago for a nation to be established by a statement of principles and an argument for the legitimacy of its existence. It begins by acknowledging that taking on the power of independent nationhood alone is not sufficient. Rather, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” What this implies is that respect for the opinions of mankind is proper and necessary in political change, as otherwise the change could only increase human harmony accidentally. Even when one is dissolving the bonds that have connected them formerly, and as a result, will likely encounter violent and deadly opposition, the obligation to respect the opinions of humankind requires this giving account. Why would that not be an exercise in futility? Why not just be done with it? Certainly, many revolutions just happen, and if explanations are given to others, that would only be post hoc if at all. The reason is that the Declaration is premised on the idea of their being a higher order than any constituted human authority. It is only in accord with that higher order that our lower order its legitimacy. And so the argument proceeds to state how the British lost their right to rule by violating that higher order, enumerating many specific instances of violations. All the violations are failures to protect the higher-order rights that are the birth right of every human being. Those rights in their most elemental and universal form are set out at the beginning of the Declaration: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The legitimate role of government, it declares, is to “secure these rights.” Failure to do so, by consequence, delegitimizes a government, for its power set against the higher power. The British government, having failed to secure these rights for the Americans, lost its legitimacy, and therefore the Americans will independently proceed to found a government to do that job properly. In its first two paragraphs, the Declaration names this higher order on which all legitimacy is based with three names — Nature, Nature’s God, and the Creator. All three are used to indicate the same thing even though they are clearly meant to represent the different religious sensibilities of the Americans on whose behalf the Declaration is written. Nature, the first name to appear, is closest to the sensibility of the man chosen to write the Declaration. Jefferson was a Deist who believed that to ascribe supernatural intervention in the world was superstition. Divine law for him was equivalent to the laws of nature. Much as Spinoza in the previous century had thought to derive ethics from nature with the same certainty and precision as Kepler and Newton set out the courses of the stars and the trajectories of projectiles, so too Jefferson believed that it was Nature itself that declared humans were equal and had rights to live, to govern themselves, and to use their properties of mind and body to enjoy movable properties and land. Hugo Grotius was a champion of such a view. His De iure belli ac pacis (On the Laws of War and Peace) was well-known to Jefferson and Adams. In it, Grotius set out a structure of law comparable to the Noahide laws and thus harmonious with the tradition of divine law of the Bible and its traditions. Yet, in the spirit of the modern age, he famously wrote: What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede [etiamsi daremus] that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him. Grotius clearly did not want to be a person of utmost wickedness, but he did backhandedly concede that the concept of law he espoused would be true even for those who did not share his beliefs about God — absolutely crucial for a Europe whose religious unity had been shattered and had shown itself incapable of being restored by force. Deists did not much believe in God’s ongoing attention to the affairs of humans once His lawful natural order had been established. The Declaration invoked that idea of Nature as the superordinate principle that is the source of unalienable rights. But Jefferson realized that most Americans had more traditional theistic beliefs, based on the Bible. He did not shrink from invoking the Biblical God before those fellow citizens in his inaugural address: May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity. No doubt, Jefferson would have explained his words to a Deistic critic as politically necessary poetic license, but they served his purpose there and here, in the Declaration. In the Declaration, however, he uses the simple Biblical name for that — Creator. Jefferson was good at exhorting the many to a common cause. Much as he said in his inaugural that “we are all Republicans; we are all Federalists,” so here, too, the subtext is that whatever our religious creed, we are all united in this cause. That leaves for last the term Nature’s God. The Abrahamic religions each wrestled with the question of the relation of nature to God during the Middle Ages. Islam’s natural philosophers met staunch opposition from traditional theologians. Judaism was convulsed twice over whether natural philosophy and Torah were compatible, with the traditionalists even denouncing their philosophical opponents to the Inquisition as atheists. And though Christendom’s philosophers found their way into an integrated intellectual culture, the Reformation and the scientific revolution resulted in a splitting away of philosophy from religion. Thus, in Christian Europe, Grotius had to flirt with “utmost wickedness” to come up with an idea of law that would have the sanction satisfying both the philosophers and the pious. And so Jefferson could write comfortably of Nature’s God. John Adams was on the small committee that both chose Jefferson to write the Declaration and then edited it. Adams did not share Jefferson’s strict Deism. He made clear years later in his correspondence with Jefferson how he disagreed with Jefferson’s disparagement of the Jewish law tradition. In a letter to Jefferson written November 14, 1813, he cited the greatest books of the Jewish law tradition, suggesting to Jefferson that perhaps they might hold the key to the religious “Corruptions” of which Jefferson complained. Adams was standing on the shoulders of a great predecessor, an architect of Parliamentary freedom from monarchical tyranny. Grotius’s younger colleague, John Selden had seen what Adams believed he and Jefferson were trying to realize themselves — a law capable of motivating individuals to govern themselves, capable of surviving in the people’s affections even in exile, even under unrelenting persecution. For Selden and for Adams, natural law did not mean that it could be derived like Euclid’s geometry, merely from contemplation of the natural world. For them, and for the many lawyers like Adams trained in the Common Law tradition through the work of Selden’s student Hale, natural law was what is present in the culture of self-government of which the oral Common Law tradition, like the Jewish law tradition, was a foremost exemplar. Jefferson’s magnificent writing brought the disparate views of Adams and himself together, along with the great mass of American patriots. It still points its way to freedom, something that we dare not take for granted even after 249 years. It is still in the business of transforming the world in the most beneficent way. Why not give it another read? In the light of the Highest Principle the Declaration invokes, let us unite to make the divine spirit of freedom living, present, and compelling in every aspect of our American lives. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Celebrate Our Victory, but Steel Ourselves for the Fight Trump Is Resolute in Opposing Evil The West Has a Chance to Defeat the New Nazism The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Many of the actions of the late Pope Francis, no matter their intention, caused division, confusion, and pain amongst Catholics, especially those most immersed in the traditional teachings and customs of the Catholic Church. One of the most glaring examples of this division, confusion, and pain came in the form of Traditionis custodes. In 2021, Pope Francis issued a motu proprio heavily restricting the celebration of the vetus ordo — the form of the Mass celebrated prior to the Second Vatican Council, often referred to as the Tridentine Mass, the Traditional Latin Mass, or the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. Catholics may simply never know why Pope Francis chose to so heavily and suddenly restrict the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. At the time, Pope Francis cited division as a chief problem stemming from the celebration of the Tridentine Mass, accusing traditionalist Catholics of “exploit[ing]” Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which liberalized the celebration of the Tridentine Mass, in order “to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.” Pope Francis alleged a “close connection between the choice of celebrations according to the liturgical books prior to Vatican Council II and the rejection of the Church and her institutions in the name of what is called the ‘true Church.’” In other words, the celebration of the Tridentine Mass was a catalyst for division, schism, and the rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church and Her Pontiff. What led Pope Francis to this conclusion? He explained in 2021 that he had sent a “questionnaire” to Catholic bishops across the globe, requesting their insight into the implementation of Summorum Pontificum and the celebration of the Tridentine Mass in their dioceses. “The responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene,” Pope Francis wrote in his letter accompanying and justifying Traditionis custodes. In the motu proprio itself, restricting the celebration of the Tridentine Mass, he wrote, “At this time, having considered the wishes expressed by the episcopate and having heard the opinion of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I now desire, with this Apostolic Letter, to press on ever more in the constant search for ecclesial communion.” While many traditionalist Catholics quietly and respectfully questioned the basis for issuing Traditionis custodes and wondered if such widespread division and schism really did exist in the parishes, apostolates, and communities devoted to the Tridentine Mass, a new report is revealing that no such division was widespread, if it even existed at all. Instead, it was a handful of bishops who pushed for the restriction of the Tridentine Mass. Veteran Catholic reporter Diane Montagna obtained a report that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) compiled based on bishops’ responses to the Summorum Pontificum questionnaire. “Where liturgical peace is lacking, the report shows it stems more from a level of nescience, prejudice, and resistance of a minority of bishops to Summorum Pontificum than from any problems originating from those drawn to the traditional Roman liturgy,” Montagna wrote. The majority of Italian bishops and bishops in Spanish-speaking regions refused to implement Summorum Pontificum, according to the report, even when asked to by Catholics. Other bishops erroneously claimed that Summorum Pontificum was intended to bring the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) into full communion with Rome and, having not achieved that goal, ought to be done away with. Some bishops also shared that they would like to have greater control over who can and cannot celebrate the Tridentine Mass in their dioceses. These positions from a handful of bishops is contrasted against the reporting from the bishops who did implement Summorum Pontificum. The latter group of bishops “ultimately express satisfaction with” the celebration of the Tridentine Mass in their jurisdictions. In fact, the report noted, “The majority of bishops who responded to the questionnaire state that making legislative changes to the MP Summorum Pontificum would cause more harm than good.” In analyzing the results of the questionnaire, the CDF advised that “weakening or suppressing Summorum Pontificum would seriously damage the life of the Church, as it would recreate the tensions that the document had helped to resolve.” The CDF warned Pope Francis that if he were to follow through on his plans for Traditionis custodes, he would more than likely reignite the contentious “liturgy wars,” damage the faithful’s trust in Rome, push would-be faithful Catholics into the arms of groups like the SSPX, and even potentially bring about “a new schism.” Far from falling into stereotypes, many traditionalist Catholics have urged charity in response to news of the report, urging fellow Catholics not to vilify the late Pope Francis but to fault his advisors where fault is evident. Unfortunately, Montagna’s reporting also observes that Pope Francis himself saw this report — he impatiently snatched it from then-CDF prefect Cardinal Luis Ladaria shortly before issuing Traditionis custodes. Catholics may simply never know why Pope Francis chose to so heavily and suddenly restrict the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. Perhaps he really did believe traditionalist Catholics to be “rigid” and sought to “break” them and bring them in line. Perhaps he suspected or even had reason to believe that traditionalists were rejecting the authority of the Church at a higher rate than the report — or any other survey or study — suggested. Perhaps he genuinely believed that the novus ordo was of such importance that declaring it the “unique expression of the lex orandi” was worth risking schism over. No matter what Pope Francis’s intentions — even had they been the purest and noblest of intentions — the fact remains that Traditionis custodes was less-than-honest, at best, and outright deceptive, at worst. Its provisions deprived millions of Catholics around the globe of one of the most beautiful and ancient of the treasures of the Catholic Church, the form of the Mass celebrated for centuries throughout the world, the form of the Mass for which countless saints — both named and unnamed — had given their lives. Already, the Tridentine Mass was an uncommon gem by the first half of 2021, with many driving an hour or more each way to attend. Without basis, without charity, Pope Francis and his advisors stripped that venerable gem away from Catholics almost entirely. Upon his death, many cautious commentators in the Catholic world anticipated that Pope Francis’s would be a mixed legacy in which confusion predominated, but with moments of joy, clarity, or courage. The more pessimistic among us predicted that the division, confusion, and pain caused by the Francis pontificate would far outweigh and overshadow those few positive moments. Unfortunately, it appears that we were probably right. READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Ketanji Fatigue The Sacred Heart Is the Remedy to Pride   The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship By Dana A. Williams Amistad | 368 pages | $21 Some brief tales of scholarly success:    Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA and of the Black Panthers, was tried in 1971 for supplying weapons for a courtroom takeover that ended in a bloodbath. After beating the rap, she won the Lenin Peace Prize and spent decades on the faculties of UC Santa Cruz, Rutgers, Vassar, and UCLA. Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), the Maoist revolutionary who was called “the primary theorist of the Black Arts Movement” – one of his theories being that “most American white men are trained to be fags” and that white women therefore secretly want to be raped by black men” — became Poet Laureate of New Jersey and a tenured professor at Stony Brook.  Maulana Karenga (a.k.a. Ron Karenga), who invented Kwanzaa and co-founded the violent Black Nationalist group US Organization, was sent to a California prison in 1971 for felony assault, torture, and forced imprisonment. Now 83, he is the chairman of the Africana Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach.  These are, of course, only three of many black radicals who, after the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, took their activism from the streets to the campus, where they were selected over infinitely more qualified competitors for academic perches from which they inculcated students in anti-American revolutionary thought while leading exceedingly comfortable American lives.  One more story, this one a little longer.  Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford), whose novels, published between 1970 and 2015, would eventually win her the Nobel Prize, taught English at Texas Southern University and at Howard University between 1955 and 1964. But while Davis, Baraka, and Karenga spent their middle and later years preaching revolution from the front of a classroom, Morrison, during the years 1967-83, was taking on the white man from behind a desk at Random House, where she worked as a fiction editor — an aspect of Morrison’s life that is the subject of Dana A. Williams’s new book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship.  For all the charm she could project in TV interviews … she was … every bit as much of a radical ideologue as the likes of Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, and Maulana Karenga. By juxtaposing Morrison’s career with those of Davis, Baraka, and Karenga, am I suggesting that she was, like them, a revolutionary? Consider the evidence. On the one hand, so far as I know, Morrison (who died in 2019 at 88) was never a card-carrying Communist or Black Panther and never spent time in the slammer. In some ways, indeed, she ran against the grain of the black activism of the day. For instance, when the NAACP slammed Amos ‘n’ Andy as racist caricature, she retorted that “the program did not deal in stereotypes as much as in genuinely funny characters.” On the other hand, Morrison was a writer who practiced, and preached, the value of depicting characters not as individuals whose stories transcend racial categories and reflect universal human truths but as black (or black female) prototypes. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), she declared that to deny the centrality of racial identity to American literature was to “[p]our … rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand.” We now learn from Dana A. Williams, who is a professor at Howard University, that Morrison’s primary goal as editor was not to discover and promote literary excellence but to abet “a revolution, one book at a time” — to serve up within hard covers the same toxic stew of racial grievance and radical ideology that Davis, Baraka, and Karenga pushed from the front of a classroom. The objective was there from the start. The third book Morrison edited at Random House was To Die for the People (1972) by Black Panthers founder Huey P. Newton, who in 1967 served six months for assault with a deadly weapon and in 1968 was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter — although two retrials ended in hung juries, allowing him to travel in 1971 to China, where, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he hobnobbed with Zhou Enlai and Madame Mao.  Newton’s agitprop required heavy editing. But the mediocrity of his prose was a minimal concern: what mattered was that, as Morrison explained in an in-house document, his book powerfully challenged “the institutions, values, and systems that undergird the American Empire.” Upon its publication, she wrote to Newton thanking him for having illuminated “the many facets and strengths of the [Black Panther] party.” Another Black Panther who became one of Morrison’s authors — and, indeed, a chum — was the aforementioned Angela Davis. After the latter’s notorious acquittal, Morrison arranged a lunch at which they agreed to collaborate on an autobiography, whereupon Davis flew to Cuba (where else?) to produce a 700-page first draft. The two women honed the final version at Morrison’s home in Spring Valley, New York, where Davis lived for several months, commuting every day with Morrison to the latter’s office in Manhattan.  None of her Random House authors, it appears, became as close to Morrison as Davis did. They shared “intellectual camaraderie.” And Morrison became Davis’s ardent defender: reviewing the 1972 biography Who Is Angela Davis? for the New York Times, she dismissed its author, Regina Nadelson, as a “simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way.”  Remarkably, Morrison also edited a number of poets. Even back then, to get a book of poetry published by a major New York house was a huge coup. Consistently, Morrison bestowed this honor on black female mediocrities. The most ungrateful was June Jordan, who tirelessly complained that Random House was mistreating her because she was black and female — when in fact this colossal no-talent would never have become a Random House author (as well as the director of Stony Brook’s Poetry Center) if she hadn’t been black and female.   Among the other books Morrison edited were Boris Bittker’s The Case for Black Reparations (1973); Quincy Troupe and Rainer Schulte’s Giant Talk (1975), an anthology of writings by Third World revolutionaries; and Ivan van Sertima’s They Came before Columbus (1976), a breathtakingly irresponsible pseudohistory claiming that Africans had visited the New World before Columbus. The fiction writers in her stable, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Leon Forrest, tended to be black activists whose stories — like Morrison’s own — were intense, overripe, sometimes violent takes on the “black American experience.”   How, in the end, does Toni at Random affect our view of Toni Morrison? Quite simply, it dispels any doubt about her politics. For all the charm she could project in TV interviews, and for all the pleasure she patently took from her fame, wealth, prestige, and cultural authority, she was, at least throughout her years at Random House, every bit as much of a radical ideologue as the likes of Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, and Maulana Karenga. Morrison was a tireless packager and canny booster of the truly menacing ideas that motivated these radicals, and a fierce, if not entirely frank, adversary of the free, capitalist, and Caucasian-dominated civilization that not only lifted her to the very apex of the publishing business but also rewarded her with the Western world’s ultimate accolade for literary greatness. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Fry vs. Rowling ¡Babalú! The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Pope Francis established a strong reputation as a workaholic, a tendency that he followed to the point of working from his hospital room earlier this year while deathly ill. But this July, Pope Leo XIV will be drawing attention to the merits of leisure. On Sunday, the pope will head to the town of Castel Gandolfo to begin a two-week-long vacation, staying at the centuries-old Vatican estate that is situated on the slopes of Lake Albano, a crater lake. He will not stay in the main papal palace but rather will stay in the smaller Villa Barberini. The palace will remain open to tourists during his vacation; Pope Francis opened the palace to the public in 2014. Reports have been swirling for weeks about updates to the property that the pope has ordered in preparation for his stay. For instance, the building that will house the Swiss Guard has been renovated. But also, there is talk of preparations that are being made for the 69-year-old pope’s recreational activities. Italian media outlets reported seeing the construction of a padel court at the Castel Gandolfo estate. Padel is a racket sport increasingly popular in Europe that is played on an enclosed court smaller than that which is used in tennis. The Vatican, however, explained that the construction project was instead the building of a tennis court. The Roman pontiff has frequently expressed a love for tennis. He told the Order of Saint Augustine when he took on his role of prefect for the Dicastery of Bishops that he considers himself to be an amateur player and that he was looking forward to playing more frequently on Rome’s courts. In addition to the reports of the construction of the tennis court, there have also been rumors in the Italian media that preparations are underway for horses to be brought to Castel Gandolfo for the pope to ride. The Vatican neither confirmed nor denied those reports. Past popes have also engaged in recreational pursuits and stressed the importance of vacations. Pope John Paul II installed a swimming pool at Castel Gandolfo and was in fact photographed during a swim. He went on to go skiing more than 100 times during his papacy. “Through the recreation and leisure made possible by travel,” Pope John Paul II said, “people are restored and renewed, body and spirit. They return home to family and work with a new perspective and enthusiasm for life.” Pope Benedict also spoke at length on the spiritual merits of vacation. He spoke once of his wish for summer vacations to provide those who enjoy them with a strengthened mind and body. “For many,” Pope Benedict said, “vacation time becomes a profitable occasion for cultural contacts, for prolonged moments of prayer and of contemplation in contact with nature or in monasteries and religious structures. Having more free time, one can dedicate oneself more easily to conversation with God, meditation on Sacred Scripture, and reading some useful, formative book. Those who experience this spiritual repose know how useful it is not to reduce vacations to mere relaxation and amusement.” Pope Leo has recounted that his other favored recreational pursuits include taking long walks and spending time in nature. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: 36,000 Preschools Shut Down in China in Sign of Total Doom Supreme Court Saves Religious Parents From Radical LGBTQ Indoctrination of Their Children Jen Psaki Fawns Over Zohran Mamdani The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.