Free Republic

He was a lousy president—but I always thought he was a nice man.

Maybe not the brightest bulb in the box—but compared to what we have now, I’d take Carter back any day—LOL! Maybe even Richard Nixon-——

The problem is that in our Care Bear society, we are conditioned to belive that "being nice" is a virtue. It is not. A Christian knows (or ought to know) that kindness is a Fruit of the Spirit, not nicety. And upon reflection it is very possible to be nice to the point of being unkind.

A mother who does not sternly rebuke her two-year-old son when he runs into the street is "being nice," because her tender heart cannot bear the thought of spanking him. But she is also being selfish and unkind, for if the child does not learn that running into the street hurts - in a way that can cause no real corporeal damage - what happens when later he runs thoughtlessly into the street... and a car is there, but Mother isn't?

Jimmy Carter's façade of nicety and Christianity have been shown to be hollow through his public professions. Disliking the Southern Baptist Convention's stalwart defense of what we have always called Christian morality, he left along with Bill Clinton and Al Gore - two other non-clerics - to found a "Baptist" "church" in accord with their own tastes and prejudices, which curiously seem to align quite well with those of American teenagers... and Barak Obama.

Soon a moment will come when Carter can no longer do harm to American culture and civilization. Let us hope and pray that that moment will come sooner in the form of repentance - a public repentance would also reassure the rest of us as well as repairing for the grave scandals he has caused through his championing of immorality and falsehood as morality and truth - rather than later and only upon his death.

When he signed the law last year, Obama issued a signing statement contending that the notification requirement was an unconstitutional infringement on his powers as commander in chief and that he therefore could override it.

The president gave his signature to a law that he knew to be unconstitutional? That's a dereliction of duty. If it's true Obama should be censured.

And if it turns out that Bergdahl IS a deserter, and that Obama knew of this when his fellow soldiers were sent to die to find him and/or when he traded five terrorists for the man, then Obama should be censured, impeached, deposed and stripped of both his passport and his right to Secret Service.

For life.

“But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.”
~Our Lord according to St. Matthew, chapter 18 verse 6

Actually, I am amazed at the most popular comments in the New York Time, where they actually condemn the author’s lack of awareness of the threat from Islam and Muzzie immigrants.

I know; I was shocked! But you know, though, these days everyone except Hollywood bimbos (male and female) and academic coneheads (who unfortunately have disproportionate influence in the press) is anti-immigration. It's a VERY popular position in America AND in Europe.

The implication here is that this is false, just a racist rant.

But is it TRUE? The author is profoundly uninterested.

There are lots of nasty things circulating around here these days.

If you come to Paris, your best bet is to stick to the Left Bank west of rue Monge and avoid the 13th district. Do not cross into the suburbs unless you are going to Yvelines, and even there, avoid Trappes and do not leave your sheep out at night (my friend's cousins are agriculteurs and do not keep sheep anymore because they kept disappearing every year around Ramadan).

France's "responsibility as a colonial power" arose after centuries of Arab pirates raiding its coasts and kidnapping its women for the slave trade. It was a retaliatory act against a historical predator. But let not historical facts get in the way of The New York Times' globalist variant on "manifest destiny."

Christianne Taubira, the Minister of "Justice" for the current Socialist government and traitor to France erstwhile separatist for her native Guyanne from France, before writing the bill that ultimately made sodomy a legitimate act of consommation of "marriage" in this country, drafted a law "recognizing France's culpability in the Negro slave trade." When asked why she did not bother to mention the North Africans' role in enslaving blacks AND whites, she said that she didn't want "young Arabs in France to have that on their backs."

How come only white countries need to be diverse?

I have asked this question numerous times. I have not gotten a response beyond sputtering and screaming (and getting tossed out of an idiot hipster bar).

The truth of income inequality is that it changes not by making the rich poorer, but by increasing the wealth of those who create wealth.

Precisely.

And this is why, in the great realignment, there will be many vulgar plutocrats whose fortunes disappear. Because, seriously, what have Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet done to improve anyone's standard of living?

Much of the "wealth" the Left wants to tax at the "top" today is fake. It is widely acknowledged among economists that sequestering of the excess liquidity is one of the major reasons why Bernankeism has not yet resulted in spiraling inflation. So the obvious problem is that if we force such largess into the pockets of people who are likely to spend it, releasing it into the real economy, its worthlessness will become immediately apparent.

Amazing: an essay on immigration into France that does not even discuss Islam or Muslims. How fascinatingly vapid.

I have lived in Paris since 2008, and this author's shallow pen and even shallower brain are all you need to witness to understand why I do not, EVER, frequent the "expat" crowd in this city. This is the archetypical idiot American liberal fetishizing a hypothetical non-existant Marxist European wünderland.

If you really want to get fired up, read some of the contents implying the French people (most of whose families have never lived outside of France) deserve this for their colonial past.

What rubbish.

Leaders and politicians have to talk to the foes, it is their job.

The Holy See is a sovereign state, but the Pope is not just the head of state of the Vatican City; he is also the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and these two roles are separate and distinct. If tomorrow the Italian government decided to seize the Vatican this would not make a difference with regards to the Pope's status within the Church.

Moreover, the Catholic Church (of which I am a member( regards itself as divinely sanctioned and exclusively so among religious congregations; accordingly, she considers herself the only legitimate religious force in the world.

The consequences of this state of fact is thus: the Pope may engage the Holy See in diplomatic relations with a non-Catholic temporal state, but he has no authority whatsoever to engage the Church in diplomatic relations with what Catholicism affirms to be illegitimate religious forces. It would be analogous to the U.S. saying that it did not recognize the Republic of China (based in Taipei) as the legitimate government of China but setting up an embassy there anyway. This is the problem with attempting to engage in "dialogue with Islam."

Naturally, of course, an individual Catholic may engage in dialogue with an individual Muslim. But this is different from the CATHOLIC CHURCH engaging in dialogue with ISLAM. Doctrinally, the Catholic Church has absolutely nothing to learn from Islam and "Islam," defined as it is by rejection of certain fundamental Catholic teachings (notably the Incarnation) cannot benefit from Catholicism without destroying itself (affirming the truth of Catholicism would be tantamount to denying the validity of Islam).

Read and circulate as far and as wide as possible!

So, Joseph took Mary as his wife but they weren’t really “married” until after Jesus birth when he actually had sexual relations with her?

(Or, if you are Catholic, they were presumably NEVER married.)

As they say, good sir, it is the exception that proves the rule.

What St. Joseph had with the Virgin Mary has been fittingly termed a "Josephite Marriage," one in which there was no consummation but in which it was understood from the start that this would be the case. Yet it was still a union between one man and one woman, it involved the subordination of the female party to the male and it was centered around the rearing of a child.

It is true that non-consummation does not make a marriage void ab initio, but only if one party files suit to claim it. (Incest, on the other hand, makes a marriage null regardless of the will of either party.) Nevertheless, in civil law (and even in ecclesiastical law, though this latter also includes provisions specifically befitting a Christian home), *all* potential grounds for annulling a marriage have to do with the integrity of the family structure in terms of rearing and building patrimonial worth for the next generation, and of the good faith of both parties in building this up.

The availability of divorce and contraceptives has obscured the essential structure of marriage but not changed it per se. Equality of the spouses has been a more ominous change, since it is a step away from the melding of two persons into one household. "Gay marriage" will destroy the essence altogether: while adoption is hypothetically possible for gay couples, one cannot underestimate the symbolic reproductive importance of the male/female union and potential consummative act. Marriage will once and for all cease to be a high-level mating ritual and become at long last an arrangement for shacking up.

For now, I won't speak of the negative effects on man, masculinity and responsibility. I'll only say that if feminists think that situation is less degrading to a woman than subordination to a father or husband, I've got a bridge in London to sell them.

So, Joseph took Mary as his wife but they weren’t really “married” until after Jesus birth when he actually had sexual relations with her?

(Or, if you are Catholic, they were presumably NEVER married.)

As they say, good sir, it is the exception that proves the rule.

What St. Joseph had with the Virgin Mary has been fittingly termed a "Josephite Marriage," one in which there was no consummation but in which it was understood from the start that this would be the case. Yet it was still a union between one man and one woman, it involved the subordination of the female party to the male and it was centered around the rearing of a child.

It is true that non-consummation does not make a marriage void ab initio, but only if one party files suit to claim it. (Incest, on the other hand, makes a marriage null regardless of the will of either party.) Nevertheless, in civil law (and even in ecclesiastical law, though this latter also includes provisions specifically befitting a Christian home), *all* potential grounds for annulling a marriage have to do with the integrity of the family structure in terms of rearing and building patrimonial worth for the next generation, and of the good faith of both parties in building this up.

The availability of divorce and contraceptives has obscured the essential structure of marriage but not changed it per se. Equality of the spouses has been a more ominous change, since it is a step away from the melding of two persons into one household. "Gay marriage" will destroy the essence altogether: while adoption is hypothetically possible for gay couples, one cannot underestimate the symbolic reproductive importance of the male/female union and potential consummative act. Marriage will once and for all cease to be a high-level mating ritual and become at long last an arrangement for shacking up.

For now, I won't speak of the negative effects on man, masculinity and responsibility. I'll only say that if feminists think that situation is less degrading to a woman than subordination to a father or husband, I've got a bridge in London to sell them.

Disclaimer: The author's views reflecting an unfavorable comparison of Roman Catholic clergy to their Anglican counterparts do not reflect the poster's.

Frank and Gingrich are not exactly close friends. The former House Speaker had previously said Frank should be put behind bars for the role he played in the financial crisis in 2008.

I think at that point we'd have to jail probably 70 to 80 percent of the House.

HECK! I'm all for it!

In brief, Keynesian economics is about spending more money than you make. Eventually, there will be a day of reckoning.

Raise tax revenues? How about close the loopholes that let multi-millionaires like leftist WARREN BUFFET (who think Americans making $200K should foot the bill instead of themselves) hide their cash away? How about get rid of tax exemptions for charitable contributions that draw resources away from productivity?

So long as the idiots in Congress insist on playing the demagogic “class warfare” game against the upper middle class, the real rich parasites will never pay their dues—and the “humanitarian” NGOs will continue to siphon the economic lifeblood of the U.S.A.

What does this say about the climate models that incorporate ocean currents?

Well, in fairness, not everything is carried at the same speed... Also, the last time anything like this happened (Chernobyl), the debris was picked up by the wind over land, which is not quite the same as flowing through ocean currents. Climate models, on the other hand, are based on many observations over long periods of time. (Climate change models are something else. Europe is supposed to be cooling down but we've had a terrifically mild autumn here in Paris.)

But you are correct that scientists are not infallible. A few of them (i.e., Richard Dawkins) get hung up on the power of science. Most of them are more modest about their capacity to correctly interpret novel situations/findings/et c. before lots of corroborative data is available. Unfortunately, the journalists seem to take any leaning in one direction as a sign that "scientists believe X."