What good is NATO if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy? Why are there only 5 out of 29 countries that have met their commitment? The U.S. is paying for Europe’s protection, then loses billions on Trade. Must pay 2% of GDP IMMEDIATELY, not by 2025.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2018
I grow more convinced by the day that The Donald is working for the other side.
So: Philipine dictator Rodrigo Duterte points out that the entire Original Sin schtick is painfully stupid, and the bishop down there responds by summoning Catholics to 3-days of fasting and prayer.
Archbishop Romulo Valles and the association of bishops that he heads called for a day of prayers on July 16 to invoke “God’s mercy and justice on those who have blasphemed God’s holy name, those who slander and bear false witness and those who commit murder or justify murder as a means for fighting criminality”. Starting on July 17, the bishops asked Filipino Catholics to join them in three more days of prayers with fasting and alms-giving without giving other details.
Now, I freely admit that I’m no expert on the mind of Our Invisible Friend, but this makes no sense to me. Surely Our Invisible Friend can decide what to do about Duterte all by Himself with being nagged by millions of hungry Catholics?
It’s summertime, and the living is easy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera … so, naturally, Florida Man is out raising hell.
Video shows Florida man, 72, trying to attack neighbor with tractor
Florida man didn’t drink while driving, only while stopped at traffic lights
I lived in Orlando for 8-years, and don’t miss Florida a bit.
In 1670, a Dutch philosopher named Baruch Spinoza published Tractatus Theologico Politicus, which advanced a then radical idea: Political and theological writings can be correctly interpreted only if their interpretation is located in an understanding of the time and place in which they were written. More prosaically, “love they neighbor” meant one thing in 1
In the next century, it was a French political philosopher named Montesquieu who picked-up the baton, writing a treatise known as The Spirit of the Laws and arguing that laws are enacted in particular places, at particular times, by particular people, in response to particular circumstances; they have an aim, and an animating spirit. The jurist, then, is to identify the principle that undergirds the particular and apply it to new circumstances. Nearly always, this is what is going on when you hear howls about judges “making law.”
Consider ‘privacy,’ for instance. The word never appears in America’s founding documents, but is everywhere implicit. When the courts defend your privacy they aren’t making new laws but respecting what is plainly there — even if the Founders didn’t know diddly about cell phones.
In complex cases, courts will research the legislative history of a bill in order to better understand the spirit that animated its passage.
Justice Antonin Scalia, lauded by the Right as ‘brilliant’ and so forth, famously refused to investigate the legislative history of the law, no matter how complex the case. He did not interpret the law, and in fact refused to interpret the law; what Scalia did is diagram sentences. That is not brilliance, but textual fundamentalism; it is the intellectual laziness of a man who wouldn’t do the hard work of discerning and understanding, and the intellectual cowardice of a man resolved to never be startled.
And insofar as Brett Kavanaugh is in that same anti-intellectual tradition, he is unfit for the court and should not be confirmed.
It is simply impossible, with Trump’s onslaught of indecency, to maintain pre-Trump standards.
Just so. And the indecencies are so relentless, so individually offensive and egregious, that it is difficult to even keep up — never mind influencing events toward a correction.
