Antisemitism on Main Media, France 24, from Egypt

 

On France24, an obvious hatred of Jewish people from a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood. Interesting video and watch to the end, please.  The commentator did a good job trying to flush out the prejudice, rather hatred, of the representative. Here is the link http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.ca/2012/06/nader-amram-muslim-brotherhood.html

for more comment. Many posts today.

The Sisters of Life and Cardinal Burke at the Same Conference in July

Seven post day and here is another one. I am plugging the Sisters of Life today. One of the marks of this congregation is that the entire ministry is one of supporting Life, as against abortion and contraception. If a young woman is considering a vocation which is timely and highly needed, here is an order to choose. The link to their beautiful website is here.

The sisters also have a retreat house, which may be seen at this link.

If you can send them a donation, do so. If you are considering a vocation to the religious life, consider them. Pray. We could use them in Europe.

The sisters support Courage, and here is a note on the upcoming special conference at which they shall take part.




National Courage Conference

July 19-22, 2012 l Emmitsburg, MD

Join our Sisters at the National Courage Conference this summer.

From the Courage website:
“Courage, an apostolate of the Catholic Church, ministers to persons with same-sex attraction and their loved ones. We have been endorsed by the Pontifical Council for the Family and our beloved John Paul II said of this ministry, ”COURAGE is doing the work of God!”  We also have an outreach called  EnCourage which ministers to relatives, spouses, and friends of persons with same-sex attraction.”

This year’s conference features many excellent speakers including:  Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Fr. Paul Check, Msgr. John Esseff, Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons, Andrew Gill, Th.Psy.D., Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR, Fr. Jeffrey Keefe, Timothy G. Lock, Ph.D., Bishop Thomas Olmsted, Fr. Paul Scalia & Sean Stevens, Ph.D. 

More information

Joseph Curl on yesterday's decision and Dr. Sanity's brilliant note

And, in the WT, another person, Joseph Curl, who has extensive experience in political watching seems positive as not only to the interpretation of tax, but that the decision helps, rather than hinders, the possibility of Romney winning the election. Note this statement from Joseph Curl:
Chief Justice Roberts has given Mitt Romney a key attack: The president is a tax-and-spend liberal bent on expanding government to unprecedented levels. And the presumed Republican nominee knows it: “If we want to get rid of Obamacare, we’re going to have to replace President Obama,” he said from a rooftop in Washington overlooking the Capitol. “What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president.”


So, for Campaign 2012, it’s game on. And for his part, Mr. Fleischer regained his pithy pundacity after digesting the high court’s ruling. “Mitt Romney will appeal this decision to the American people on November 6th. Oral arguments are already taking place.”

Dr. Sanity has surpassed herself in her comment on the SCOTUS decision. I highly recommend you read her blog on this, and here is a cartoon from her blog. She is one of my two favorite blogs and she is especially intelligent, as some of you know. She quotes Stephen Hicks with regard to this delusion of the Post-Modern, one of my themes, but here so excellently defined.

 Stephen Hicks wrote in Explaining Postmodernism[pages 175-177]:

To the modernist, the "mask" metaphor is a recognition of the fact that words are not always to be taken literally or as directly stating a fact--that people largely use language elliptically, metaphorically, or to state falsehoods, that language can be textured with layers of meaning, and that it can be used to cover hypocrisies or to rationalize. Accordingly, unmasking means interpreting or investigating to a literal meaning or fact of the matter. The process of unmasking is cognitive, guided by objective standards, with the purpose of coming to an awareness of reality.

For the postmodernist, by contrast, interpretation and investigation never terminate with reality. Language connects only with more language, never with a non-linguistic reality....

For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rehtoric. Rhetoric is persasion in the absence of cognition....And so given the conflict models of social relations that dominate postmodern discourse, it makes perfect sense that to most postmodernists language is primarily a weapon.

This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanley Fish, as noted in Chapter Four, calls all opponents of racial preferences bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan. Andrea Dworking calls all heterosexual males rapists and repeatedly labels "Amerika" a fascist state. With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language's effectiveness.

Language as a weapon, people, is used not only by Americans, but by Europeans as well, which is why we Catholics must not only put on the mind of Christ, but speak truthfully and clearly. 

George Will's interesting interpretation of yesterday's decision

An interesting take on the decision yesterday of SCOTUS may be found in WP by George Will. You may not agree with his proposal, but it is worth reading here.

A section reads:



If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power — the power to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior for whatever Congress deems a public benefit. Instead, the court rejected the Obama administration’s Commerce Clause doctrine. The court remains clearly committed to this previous holding: “Under our written Constitution . . . the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.”
The court held that the mandate is constitutional only because Congress could have identified its enforcement penalty as a tax. The court thereby guaranteed that the argument ignited by the mandate will continue as the principal fault line in our polity.
The mandate’s opponents favor a federal government as James Madison fashioned it, one limited by the constitutional enumeration of its powers. The mandate’s supporters favor government as Woodrow Wilson construed it, with limits as elastic as liberalism’s agenda, and powers acquiring derivative constitutionality by being necessary to, or efficient for, implementing government’s ambitions.
By persuading the court to reject a Commerce Clause rationale for a president’s signature act, the conservative legal insurgency against Obamacare has won a huge victory for the long haul. This victory will help revive a venerable tradition of America’s political culture, that of viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint, searching for congruence with the Constitution’s architecture of enumerated powers. By rejecting the Commerce Clause rationale, Thursday’s decision reaffirmed the Constitution’s foundational premise: Enumerated powers are necessarily limited because, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, “the enumeration presupposes something not enumerated.”

The Sacrament which is renewed daily...

A seminarian friend sent me this. My parents have been married for 64 and one-half years. To all good couples in good marriages, God bless you. I remember today Arlene and Wayne, Joe and Kay, Myrna and Fred, Charlene and John, Charles and Eileen, John and Marie, Slavko and Anna, David and Sharon, and, Heather and John.

Fre

SS. Peter and Paul

The Great Key to Truth and Love, and the Keys to the Kingdom-St. Peter's Rome is guarded by the statues of SS. Peter and Paul. The locals told me years ago that Paul's body language in the statue points to Peter and says, "Do whatever he tells you to do."

Happy Feast Day of SS. Peter and Paul.

Girls on the Circle Line

Yesterday on the tube, I overheard, as I was squashed up against the door, some smart young girls discussing the demise of the economic systems and security of Europe. One girl said she would ride her horse to work, without understanding that she may not have a job. The other girl was a bit more on top of the solutions. She said she had gathered together a list of people she knew with skills which would help a small group get by in economic crisis. What a good idea. Now, I could not tell by the way these two young women were dressed that they were Christians. However, if common talk on a tube revolves around crisis, more people than the Christians are thinking about this.

Catholics, wake up.

Even in Britain...