Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” Source: October 12, 1816. The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, Henry P. Johnston, ed., (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), Vol. IV, p. 393.
“Whether our religion permits Christians to vote for infidel rulers is a question which merits more consideration than it seems yet to have generally received either from the clergy or the laity. It appears to me that what the prophet said to Jehoshaphat about his attachment to Ahab ["Shouldest thou help the ungodly and love them that hate the Lord?" 2 Chronicles 19:2] affords a salutary lesson.” [The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 1794-1826, Henry P. Johnston, editor (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1893), Vol. IV, p.365]
Think about this, quite a bit different from what your teacher toldy you, eh?
Friday, October 20, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
things to consider on voting day
Consider this:
Government cannot give you anything but what it takes from somebody else, minus administrative fees. (and we're talking govt. here, so fees are usually about 50% or more).
Government does not create wealth, it only takes from it.
no country has ever been taxed to prosperity.
security has historically always been the number one priority of government.
NOT adding more laws on top of mountains of other laws is a GOOD thing.
the simplest organizations are usually the most efficient.
the bigger the government the more money it costs.
Government cannot give you anything but what it takes from somebody else, minus administrative fees. (and we're talking govt. here, so fees are usually about 50% or more).
Government does not create wealth, it only takes from it.
no country has ever been taxed to prosperity.
security has historically always been the number one priority of government.
NOT adding more laws on top of mountains of other laws is a GOOD thing.
the simplest organizations are usually the most efficient.
the bigger the government the more money it costs.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Weird evolutionist's wishful thinking? or what?
I happened across this story by the BBC on Don Singleton's blog, and Just couldn't shake it off. Just exactly what is this Dr. trying to sell here? Is he looking for some group of people in the future to hate? or Envy? or both?
Saturday, October 07, 2006
The Associated press, spinning the GOP kicking Foley out as a BAD thing
Just how far can a reporter go to tell you how to think about an event? the AP thinks they can herd you're mind like a cowboy herds cattle. look at the spin on this story, oh, they forget to mention foley will be investigated by the feds for suspected criminal activity, and will face prosecution if it comes to it, but, apparently, the AP thinks censure by congress would be a greater punishment than the law. (or something like that) read their story here
Thursday, October 05, 2006
A sad but honest evaluation of western culture
from Victor Davis Hanson, a commentary of the decay of western culture:
October 02, 2006, 6:02 a.m.
Traitors to the Enlightenment
Europe turns its back on Socrates, Locke, et al.
By Victor Davis Hanson
The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone. Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion. Much of what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists thought may today seem self-evident, if not at times nonsensical. But that century was the beginning of the uniquely Western attempt to bring to the human experience empiricism, self-criticism, irony, and tolerance in thinking.
The second European Enlightenment of the late 18th century followed from the earlier spirit of the Renaissance. For all the excesses and arrogance in its thinking that pure reason might itself dethrone religion — as if science could explain all the mysteries of the human condition — the Enlightenment nevertheless established the Western blueprint for a humane and ordered society.
But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation.
What would a Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, or Locke believe of the present decay in Europe — that all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?
Just think: Put on an opera in today’s Germany, and have it shut down, not by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.
Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats — in the heart of Europe no less.
Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in “liberal” Holland.
Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into hiding.
Quote an ancient treatise, as did the pope, and learn your entire Church may come under assault, and the magnificent stones of the Vatican offer no refuge.
There are three lessons to be drawn from these examples. In almost every case, the criticism of the artist or intellectual was based either on his supposed lack of sensitivity or of artistic excellence. Van Gogh was, of course, obnoxious and his films puerile. The pope was woefully ignorant of public relations. The cartoons in Denmark were amateurish and unnecessary. Rushdie was an overrated novelist, whose chickens of trashing the West he sought refuge in finally came home to roost. The latest Hans Neuenfels adaptation of Mozart’s Idomeneo was silly.
But isn’t that precisely the point? It is easy to defend artists when they produce works of genius that do not offend popular sensibilities — Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws — but not so when an artist offends with neither taste nor talent. Yes, Pope Benedict is old and scholastic; he lacks both the smile and tact of the late Pope John Paul II, who surely would not have turned for elucidation to the rigidity of Byzantine scholarship. But isn’t that why we must come to the present Pope’s defense — if for no reason other than because he has the courage to speak his convictions when others might not?
Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.
In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?
For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.
Second, almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis. Somehow Europeans have ever-so-insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.
So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.
Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing.
Third, examine why all these incidents took place in Europe. Since 2000 it has been the habit of blue-state politicians to rebuke the yokels of America, in part by showing us a supposedly more humane Western future unfolding in Europe. It was the European Union that was at the forefront of mass transit; the EU that advanced Kyoto and the International Criminal Court. And it was the heralded EU that sought “soft” power rather than the Neanderthal resort to arms.
And what have we learned in the last five years from its boutique socialism, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism? That it was logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists.
Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.
We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2JlMzJhNjIxZGZkYjdmZGU0ZGUyOWM3MzEwMTk0ZWQ=
October 02, 2006, 6:02 a.m.
Traitors to the Enlightenment
Europe turns its back on Socrates, Locke, et al.
By Victor Davis Hanson
The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone. Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion. Much of what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists thought may today seem self-evident, if not at times nonsensical. But that century was the beginning of the uniquely Western attempt to bring to the human experience empiricism, self-criticism, irony, and tolerance in thinking.
The second European Enlightenment of the late 18th century followed from the earlier spirit of the Renaissance. For all the excesses and arrogance in its thinking that pure reason might itself dethrone religion — as if science could explain all the mysteries of the human condition — the Enlightenment nevertheless established the Western blueprint for a humane and ordered society.
But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation.
What would a Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, or Locke believe of the present decay in Europe — that all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?
Just think: Put on an opera in today’s Germany, and have it shut down, not by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.
Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats — in the heart of Europe no less.
Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in “liberal” Holland.
Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into hiding.
Quote an ancient treatise, as did the pope, and learn your entire Church may come under assault, and the magnificent stones of the Vatican offer no refuge.
There are three lessons to be drawn from these examples. In almost every case, the criticism of the artist or intellectual was based either on his supposed lack of sensitivity or of artistic excellence. Van Gogh was, of course, obnoxious and his films puerile. The pope was woefully ignorant of public relations. The cartoons in Denmark were amateurish and unnecessary. Rushdie was an overrated novelist, whose chickens of trashing the West he sought refuge in finally came home to roost. The latest Hans Neuenfels adaptation of Mozart’s Idomeneo was silly.
But isn’t that precisely the point? It is easy to defend artists when they produce works of genius that do not offend popular sensibilities — Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws — but not so when an artist offends with neither taste nor talent. Yes, Pope Benedict is old and scholastic; he lacks both the smile and tact of the late Pope John Paul II, who surely would not have turned for elucidation to the rigidity of Byzantine scholarship. But isn’t that why we must come to the present Pope’s defense — if for no reason other than because he has the courage to speak his convictions when others might not?
Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.
In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?
For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.
Second, almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis. Somehow Europeans have ever-so-insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.
So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.
Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing.
Third, examine why all these incidents took place in Europe. Since 2000 it has been the habit of blue-state politicians to rebuke the yokels of America, in part by showing us a supposedly more humane Western future unfolding in Europe. It was the European Union that was at the forefront of mass transit; the EU that advanced Kyoto and the International Criminal Court. And it was the heralded EU that sought “soft” power rather than the Neanderthal resort to arms.
And what have we learned in the last five years from its boutique socialism, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism? That it was logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists.
Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.
We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2JlMzJhNjIxZGZkYjdmZGU0ZGUyOWM3MzEwMTk0ZWQ=
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Ann gets it right again, yet another example of selective outrage
Let's see, according to democrats:
Gerry Studds buggering a 17 yr old drunk male page he took on a trip to Europe? O.K.
President Bill Clinton getting a hummer from a schoolgirl in the office bathroom, then lying profusely about it? O.K.
Clinton's sexual harassment of Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broadderick, and Kathleen Willey? O.K.
congressman Barney Frank letting stephen Gobie run a whorehouse in his washington apartment, and paying Gobie for sex? O.K.
Gov. Jim McGreevey trolling for dozens of Homosexual encounters with strangers behind his wife's back, and placing one such lover in government office without qualifications for said job? O.K.
Senator Ted Kennedy screwing a drunk teenage girl then killing her? O.K.
Jesse Jackson screwing teenage girls and getting them pregnant behind his wife's back? O.K.
Congressman William Jefferson taking bribes on tape and lying about it? O.K.
Congressman Gary Condit having an affair with an Intern who dies under suspicious circumstances after telling friends she might go public? O.K.
congressman Mark Foley sending rude, crude homosexual comments to teenage pages? NOT O.K!!!!!
the difference between the differing responses? Foley was a REPUBLICAN who resigned immediately, the others, democrats who simply lied and laughed at the public's short memory and sheer stupidity.
Read Ann's story about this
Gerry Studds buggering a 17 yr old drunk male page he took on a trip to Europe? O.K.
President Bill Clinton getting a hummer from a schoolgirl in the office bathroom, then lying profusely about it? O.K.
Clinton's sexual harassment of Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broadderick, and Kathleen Willey? O.K.
congressman Barney Frank letting stephen Gobie run a whorehouse in his washington apartment, and paying Gobie for sex? O.K.
Gov. Jim McGreevey trolling for dozens of Homosexual encounters with strangers behind his wife's back, and placing one such lover in government office without qualifications for said job? O.K.
Senator Ted Kennedy screwing a drunk teenage girl then killing her? O.K.
Jesse Jackson screwing teenage girls and getting them pregnant behind his wife's back? O.K.
Congressman William Jefferson taking bribes on tape and lying about it? O.K.
Congressman Gary Condit having an affair with an Intern who dies under suspicious circumstances after telling friends she might go public? O.K.
congressman Mark Foley sending rude, crude homosexual comments to teenage pages? NOT O.K!!!!!
the difference between the differing responses? Foley was a REPUBLICAN who resigned immediately, the others, democrats who simply lied and laughed at the public's short memory and sheer stupidity.
Read Ann's story about this
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