Burn in Hell, commie pinko!

The Federalist (March 10, 2015 By Sean Davis): Ted Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections

This one, too -- TownHall.com: McCaskill: Trump May Have Violated the Logan Act With Russian Remarks

Isn't the bottled outrage of leftists just so precious?

All Lies Matter, II

David Warren: Confronting evil with joss sticks -- "...
The French president said it [the brutal murder by Moslems of a Catholic priest at the altar of a Catholic church where he had been officiating the Mass] was an attack on all French citizens, which presumably includes the citizen Islamists; our pope called the violence “absurd.” I find these lies in extremely poor taste. It was not an attack on all Frenchmen, but symbolically on a Catholic priest. And it was not absurd, but purposefully directed to that end. Father Jacques Hamel was martyred during the morning Mass. His throat slit, then by some accounts, beheaded; two nuns and two others at prayer also seized and tormented; and another throat slit; while a rant was delivered from the altar, in Arabic.

I am truly disgusted by remarks from Rome that we hope the elderly priest is at peace, and that we condemn “every form of hatred.” This reduces the teaching of Our Lord to the asinine. Reference to Islam was carefully avoided.

One wonders what atrocity the Islamists must commit, to make their point more explicit.

I really don’t care if they hate us. That is their opinion, and none of my concern. I do care that they are trying to kill us, on the basis of verses plausibly cited from the Koran. Would it hurt their feelings if we called them on this?"

A previous pope popularized (and, so far as I know, coined) the phrase "culture of death" to describe the suicidal direction that the post-Christian Western cultures have deliberately taken since turning their backs on the heritage, and religion, of their fathers; the current pope appears to have to have made his peace with the "culture of death" and to have dived headlong into it.

I'm so glad that as a Protestant and a Christian (*), I don't feel any need at all to contort myself defending that fool (nor the French one, for that matter).



(*) Yes, I went there. And, as Warren says of Moslems hating us, "I really don’t care" that (some) Catholics will get their panties into a twist -- hypocritically, in every case -- because I distinguish between Catholicism -- a bureaucracy which claims to own Christianity -- and Christianity itself.

While not claiming any "word from God" nor gift of prophesy, it certainly appears to me that the time is upon us when Catholics will have to choose: do you stand with Christ, or do you stand with the self-anointed "vicar of Christ"?

From the US supreme Court Venus (1814) and Wong Kim Ark (1898) decisions

Following is a recent post I made at 'Blog and Mablog' concerning natural born citizenship

Now, to go into some technicalities of the matter --

The US supreme Court, the Venus (1814) decision, quoting Vattel in its decision -- "The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives or indigenes are those born in the country of parents who are citizens. Society not being able to subsist and to perpetuate itself but by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights."

In this quote, Vattel uses "natives or indigenes" to refer to natural born citizens.

That is, in this early supreme Court decision, the Court reiterated the commonly understood meaning of the phrase 'natural born citizen' to be "those [citizens who are] born in the country of parents who are citizens" and, as under the doctrine of 'coverture', a woman's citizenship followed from her husband's, the Court also reiterated that "... those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights"

The above was part of a lengthier discussion concerning natural born citizenship, starting here [edit: trying to supply links to sub-threads there is way tricky; I can't get it to work as I intend. I don't know whether this will be true in five minutes, but scrolling UP from the first link I gave presents (most of) the sub-thread, whereas this link doesn't]


EDIT 2016/07/28 --
From the Wong Kim Ark, 169 US 649, 702, 703 (1898) decision --

A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States can only become a citizen by being naturalized, either by treaty, as in the case of the annexation of foreign territory, or by authority of Congress, exercised either by declaring certain classes of persons to be citizens, as in the enactments conferring citizenship upon foreign-born children of citizens, or by enabling foreigners individually to become citizens by proceedings in the judicial tribunals, as in the ordinary provisions of the naturalization acts.

Now, again, here the supreme Court is not setting a precedent, it is merely stating a fact of the matter. And that fact of the matter has not changed between 1898 and 2016 -- Ted Cruz holds US citizenship due to an Act of Congress which gave his (citizen) mother the legal right to claim US citizenship for him, via naturalization, on his behalf. Had he been born prior to 1934, she'd not have had that legal right and he'd have had to apply for naturalization himself once he attained his majority.


Ted Cruz is --
1) "A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States"
2) the "foreign-born child[ of a US]citizen"
3) a person whose US citizenship was acquired pursuant to an "enactment[ of the Congress] conferring citizenship upon foreign-born children of citizens" ... that is, via naturalization

ERGO: Ted Cruz is a naturalized US citizen and is thereby prohibited by the US Constitution from occupying the Office of US President.

====
EDIT (and off-topic) --
Wow! The misplacement of "only" has a distinguished pedigree. "A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States can only become a citizen by being naturalized" should properly be "A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States can become a citizen only by being naturalized"

Irony!

The irony, it burns! "Modern conservatism is one long attempt to gain the approval of people who despise you at the expense of people most likely to befriend you."

That's gotta sting "It took me a while to realize that sometimes the proper response to an ally saying something outrageous, or offensive, or event racist is not "DENOUNCE, OSTRACIZE, SACRIFICE" but, 'Yeah, I think they're wrong on this. So fucking what?'"

The other way they get their rocks off

Jihad Watch (linking to the UK's Daily Mail Online): US-backed Syrian “rebels” screaming “Allahu akbar” behead small boy as “spy”

I fully expect that they raped the boy before murdering him to make their snuff film.

Here is a comment that well expresses exactly what I was thinking when I saw the (pre-murder) photo --
"Look at their friendly smiling faces.

Take the little, soon to be brutally murdered, boy out of the picture and any immigration officer would only see nice young syrian refugees who need our help and support.
…
They’re amongst us already.

By the thousands."

THAT is the face of Islam ... smiles while preparing for brutal murder.

I'm smarter than Vox Day!

A recent Vox Day post is one of his interminable screeds concerning his social interactions with "gamma males", toward the end of which he writes: "Once more, Camestros provides us with sufficient evidence to safely conclude that if IQ is a reasonable measure of innate intelligence, his is considerably lower than mine. It's funny that despite being such a questionable metric, a similar percentile just seems to keep showing up no matter how it's measured.

[Bell-curve graphic result from the linked on-line quiz (*), according to which his English vocabulary is 30150, which is said to be in the top 0.01%]

Of course, my actual vocabulary is probably more than twice that, but then, we're not counting Italian, German, French, or Japanese vocabularies."

[Edit: Can you see me rolling my eyes? Having a massive Italian vocabulary has next to nothing to do with one's English vocabulary]

Normally, I avoid on-line quizzes, especially ones purporting to measure or reflect IQ. But I took this one (*). The quiz result claims that my English vocabulary is 30325 (also in the top 0.01%, obviously).

So, according to Vox Day himself, I likely have a higher IQ than he does.


(*) It's 50 multiple-choice synonym/antonym matches. [EDIT: If you dare, take the quiz and post the result in the commbox]

Here is a comment posted to the quiz, which seems to me to be the best explanation for a high score -- "... Also, I'm seeing in comments that people are trying to correlate their score with their educational levels (or brag that they got a high score with relatively low education). I would posit that one's score has less to do with formal education and more to do with how much one reads."

Myself, I understand -- and use in writing -- a much greater vocabulary than I use in speaking.

All Lies Matter

Douglas Wilson: All Lies Matter

Finding 'Lydia McGrew'

From time to time, I notice that one of the search terms that brings visitors to this dusty little corner of the internet is "Lydia McGrew", which fact is slightly interesting to me (if not to Gentle Reader).

Those who end up here due to a search on "Lydia McGrew" may, if you wish, add this little fact to your on-going opinion of her -- back in October of 2015, I strongly criticized a particular act of bitchiness (*) on her part toward a regular poster at What's Wrong With The World. As I knew she would, she deleted (**) the posts I'd made at WWWtW ... and at some time after that, added my user-name to their list of banned commenters (**).


(*) and let me be clear that I used the word 'bitchy' to describe her behavior, used in deliberately, and stand by it.

(**) women *hate* to have their behavior, no matter what it is or how outrageous, criticized by a mere man; there is *nothing* that enrages the average woman more than for a mere man to dispassionately criticize what she has done.

Morality ... and God!

Victor Reppert: "If the Christian God exists, doesn't he get to decide what is right or wrong? Or could an existing God be mistaken about, for example, whether gay relationships are right or not.

Consider the following scenario: God created the world, and decreed that marriage was the only proper place for sex, and that marriage was a relationship between a man and a woman. But, he got it wrong, and gay was really OK.

Is that scenario even possible?"

Legion of Logic: "Can God be wrong about morality? Can the creator of chess be wrong that bishops move diagonally?

The only way God could be wrong about morality would be if either he didn't create the universe, or morality somehow transcends both God and the universe. But in any scenario in which God created the universe and morality does not transcend both, then God can't possibly be wrong ..."

me: Moreover, if one posits that morality transcends God-the-Creator-of-the-Universe, all one has actually done is assert-without-reason that there is a God-Above-God-the-Creator ... and then we are right back to Square One with nothing "solved" from the point of view of the person who wishes to set himself up as competent to put God-the-Creator on trial.

==========
Morality exists if and only if there are persons -- which is to say, free agents -- for moral obligations obtain only between persons/agents. That is, a person does not have a moral obligation to a rock, nor a rock to a person, for only agents may have moral expectations which impose corresponding moral obligations upon other agents.

Moreover, morality exists if and only if there are persons in communion or relationship, for moral obligations obtain only between persons in relation to other persons. That is, the precise moral expectations and obligations between persons depend upon and follow from the relationship between them -- for example: if there are persons living on a distant planet, we have no moral obligations to them, nor they to us, because there is no relationship whatsoever between them and us.

HOWEVER, the reality of moral expectatons and obligations cannot be grounded in the relationships between contingent persons. To attempt to do so is just another way of denying the transcendent reality of morality; it's just to deny that there really is any such thing as morality.

Consider: if one person is a ruler and another person is ruled by that ruler, then those two persons are in a relationship which imposes certain, though different, expectations and consequent obligations on each. Now, add a third person, one who is also ruled by that same ruler. IF the moral expectations and obligations between ruler and ruled followed from the relationships between these contingent persons, then any commonality between the moral expectations and obligations obtaining between the ruler and the first subject, on the one hand, and between the ruler and the second subject, on the other hand, would be accidental/coincidental -- to discover/understand some fact of the moral expectations and obligations obtaining between the ruler and the first subject would tell you nothing about the moral expectations and obligations obtaining between the ruler and the second subject.

THUS, morality is, and must be, grounded in the relationship(s) obtaining between non-contingent persons.

----------------
And, by the way, I have just demonstrated that God is a plurality of persons -- while this is not a demonstration that God is precisely Three Persons, it *is* a demonstration that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not in conflict with what "unaided reason" can tell us about the nature of God ... or of ourselves.

At the same time (without getting into it here), reason also tells us that there is One God.

So, there is One God ... who is a plurality of Persons.