The Globalist Reach And Grasp

     I’m sure my Gentle Readers are already aware of British media regulators’ attempt to bend 4chan to their will, under the aegis of Britain’s Online Safety Act. I’m sure you’re also aware that 4chan has “given the Brits the finger.” It was delightful to see the 4chan response, defiant in the face of a threat from an essentially powerless foreign entity. Other American companies threatened by the European Union have bent the knee almost at once. You don’t have to be a fan of Internet porn to applaud 4chan’s boldness.

     While I hope 4chan’s reply will embolden other American companies threatened by foreign busybodies, my main interest here is in whether the episode will teach said busybodies the limits of their ability to assert power. The globalist agenda is to eliminate all such limits. But limits are inherent in all human undertakings, from the septuagenarian desperately straining to thread a needle to the superbillionaire aiming at establishing a human colony on Mars. They’re imposed by our finitude and the laws of Nature.

     Baldly speaking, some people have to be clouted across the chops before they realize that they’ve gone too far. This is demonstrably the case with globalists and political forces. Our reluctance to administer such an update is one of the reasons the national and world situations are as they are. Yet it appears that while they may be late in arriving, appropriate clouts are being delivered to persons who need them. A look at the explosion of patriotic displays among Britons in recent weeks provides powerful evidence. American enterprises that refuse to bow to pressures to “conform” to the “norms” proclaimed by the globalists provide additional support.

     It’s no accident that the “norms” proclaimed by the globalists are virtually identical to the demands of the American Left. The aims of the two are highly compatible, at least in the near term. Were they to succeed in achieving those aims, they might then slug it out for supremacy, but for the moment they’re “fellow travelers.”

     But there’s a larger point to be made in this connection: The “norms” purveyed by those groups require the surrender of individual and national sovereignty. The individual must forfeit his independent power of judgment and decision. The nation must forfeit its jurisdiction – remember the etymology of that word – to supranational bodies unconcerned with national traditions, cultures, and preferences. In that context, the drives for a universal “right” to abortion and the elimination of national borders become comprehensible.

     The Westphalian nation-state was supposed to put an end to such nonsense. Clearly, there’s still some work to be done.

If You Yearn To Understand RussiaGate

     Sundance at The Last Refuge has produced a penetrating capsule analysis of the maneuverings and machinations that constitute the “prequel” to that extraordinary episode. It’s worth reading slowly and digesting in its entirety.

     To many American patriots, still reluctant to believe that even a Democrat would have stooped that low, the RussiaGate scandal can seem incomprehensible. To put it as briefly as possible, they don’t want to believe that a sitting president and a former First Lady could have been that vile. Yet the behavior of other Democrats has made it plain that there is no lower bound to their perfidy. For them, power is everything. Therefore, no tactic is too scrofulous to be considered.

     Mind you, many Republicans are no better. It’s in the nature of a political system that the worst, in Friedrich Hayek’s phrase, will rise to the top. In the United States, a nation steeped in Christian ethics, that dynamic was curbed for many decades by the restraint imposed by conscience in both its forms: i.e., both the inner awareness of wrongness, and “the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.” (H. L. Mencken)

     Put not your trust in princes. (Psalms 146:3) The letter after a politician’s name should be taken only as a guide to the direction of his villainy. Don’t allow exceptions such as Donald Trump to blind you to the general rule.

Still Sick

     I’m still laboring with bronchitis, and unlikely to be eloquent today, so allow me a brief commentary and a day of rest.

     I’ve long admired Canadian “public intellectual” Jordan R. Peterson. He has a talent for expressing fundamental ideas in penetrating ways. Also, he doesn’t shy back from the distasteful conclusion, which is something I cannot say about most opinion leaders today. In the video below, he makes a basic point without flinching. It’s a point that must be hammered home, for today, owing to “progressive” historical forgetfulness, we face a resurgence of one of the most evil ideas that any people has ever adopted:

     In this connection, see also this baseline essay.

Perhaps The Right Way To Engage The Left...

     ...is not to engage at all.

     Note the switcheroo exercised in this piece:

     Meher Ahmad: I'm Meher Ahmad, an editor in the New York Times Opinion section. There's been a resurgence in explicit "be thin" messaging and culture. With the Ozempic boom, we see the body-shaming of actresses like Sydney Sweeney and red carpets that were already filled with thin actresses becoming even thinner.
     On the right, there's been a focus on body size that's been bundled up not just with health and wellness but with religion, morals and politics. And so when everything is political and we're more divided than ever, should the size and shape of our bodies be any different? I'm here today with the Opinion writer Jessica Grose to understand why the right is obsessed with thinness and why that message is winning over women.
     Jess, I want to start first by asking you what the messaging on diet and thinness coming from the Christian influencer spaces is -- what do you see there?
     Jessica Grose: So it's really encapsulated by some things that the wellness influencer Alex Clark said at the Young Women's Leadership Summit.

     Audio clip of Alex Clark: Look around this room, let's just be honest. It's never been hotter to be a conservative. You are in this room and you are witnessing a cultural revolution. We've got the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together. Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity.
     Grose: And by contrast, liberals are TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light. So it's really defining what is "normal" as a very narrow ideal of womanhood. It's all tied up with not just body size, but also behavior.

     Ahmad: Even in that clip, Alex Clark is sort of describing a foil to what she describes as a liberal body type. How much of this is a reaction to a left version of a body type, and what even is that?
     Grose: So I think it's a reaction to the body positivity movement, which I would say peaked about 10 years ago. It was the idea that weight is not tied directly to health and that you can be healthy and not rail-thin.

     Grose is conflating health with thinness. She attempts to reframe the “body positivity” movement as a reaction to that, when in truth it was an attempt to defend obesity as perfectly consistent with health.

     Outrageous. And of course, since the Times is a left-wing organ, Grose also strives to politicize the pro-health, pro-femininity movement in progress, such that left-leaning readers will be inclined to shy away from it without further consideration. She might as well have shouted “Don’t strive to be healthy and attractive! It will make you a bad person!”

     The Left’s whole appeal to its members is its assertion of moral and intellectual superiority. It’s the most blatant of circular propositions: “If you’re smart and moral, be one of us! Then you can tell others, ‘I’m smarter and more moral than you, because I’m a leftist and you’re not.’”

     Of course, all this is “previous work.” Thomas Sowell has covered it extensively. Nevertheless, these points must be made repeatedly for a simple reason: The Left is relentless. It never ceases to campaign. It’s especially effective upon the young and as-yet-unformed, to whom the Siren song of superiority is singularly seductive. Its subtext is “Politics uber Alles,” a barb on the hook that seeks to exclude any alternative approach to living and relating to others ab initio.

     Something for my Gentle Readers to reflect on when they’re more awake.

Warning!

     Daniel Greenfield deposeth and saith:

     The Online Safety Act was sold to the British public as a way to protect children from adult content, but fighting porn proved to be a trojan horse over fighting what the regime cared about.
     Any Britons trying to read the Act probably never made it to Chapter 7 at which point the wooden horse legislation listed a ‘Committee on Disinformation and Misinformation’ and began handing out matching orders on how internet services are supposed to deal with the bogeys of unfettered speech. What does disinformation have to do with keeping kids from accessing porn?
     Recent court hearings revealed that officials had stated that the real purpose was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”. There’s only one kind of censorship the British government is really into.
     Rather than blocking pornography, the Online Safety Act was used to block videos of parliamentary debates about the Muslim sex grooming gang crisis in the UK. Not only wasn’t the Online Safety Act protecting children from being exposed to sexual content, it was being used to censor revelations about the complicity of the authorities in the sexual abuse of children.

     Yes, that’s Across the Water in our “brother nation” the United Kingdom, but it has some prospects for being replicated here.

     The American left has the same goal as the British Left: unbounded and absolute power in perpetuity. They know, as do my Gentle Readers, that there are three absolute requirements for the maintenance of freedom:

• Education,
• Communications,
• Weaponry.

     No free society can withstand the loss of any of those three,

     The Left has made deep inroads into education in the U.S. I’m sure I need not present the Bill of Particulars all over again. Weaponry is a battlefield: Washington and the state governments have done their damnedest to limit a right guaranteed in the Constitution, and though we of the “gun culture” have had some recent successes in rolling back those incursions, there’s still a long way to go. Communications, thanks to the Internet, was a bright spot for freedom lovers... but the UK’s Left is showing our domestic vermin the path to follow on that front: “safety,” especially for “the children.”

     If there’s anything we ought to have learned beyond all possibility of refutation, it’s that when a Leftist starts talking about “the children,” he’s reaching for power. “The children” is now a shibboleth, a bludgeon-phrase intended to foreclose argument on the current subject, whatever that may be. The Left has no interest in children’s well-being. How on Earth would any concern for children be consistent with “gender fluidity” ideology and “drag queen story hour?” Or allowing Muslims into the United States, come to think of it?

     But as Greenfield notes, the UK’s power-lusters have dropped the mask. Don’t allow our domestic variety to pretend to be different.

Good Advice Dept.

     I just saw this on X:

     I wanted to applaud. The cult of celebrity has done great harm to these United States. It’s time for it to end. Perhaps a mass exodus of “celebrities” to countries they prefer – North Korea, perhaps? – would start the trend.

     Few remember how it started. Television was the enabling medium. Instead of having to “go to a show,” you could have entertainers of all sorts in your living room. Athletes – really, just another species of entertainer – soon followed, as local television stations started to broadcast the games of local teams. The media collaborated in foisting these intrusions upon us, perhaps in the hope of boosting their own “celebrity” status.

     Quite recently, a friend spent $7,000 – that’s seven thousand US dollars — to take her granddaughter to a Taylor Swift concert. (Please don’t ask for the details; I’m already on the edge of nausea.) If that isn’t a symptom of a severe illness, I can’t think of a better one. It’s an illness that must be headed off while the target population – young Americans – is most susceptible. Once it takes hold, the disease usually proves incurable. The afflicted stumble through life worshipping singers, actors, power hitters and quarterbacks. Sometimes they take their values and political positions from those... persons. Take note, parents.

Mantras For 2025

     I’ve been repeating two lines a lot lately:

• Islam is toxic to human life.
• You can’t take the savagery out of the savage.

     I get some agreement, and some pushback. Yet the evidence continues to accumulate:

     Stories similar to those two are multiplying. The innate toxicity and savagery of certain creeds and peoples is becoming ever more apparent. The media can no longer sweep all of it under the carpet.

     I could go on a long tirade about this, but I’ve already done so many times:

• Islam
• Race

     So I’ll simply refer you to those occasions.

     To those who’ve wondered: Yes, I intend that the better pieces from Liberty’s Torch V2.0 will be brought here. It will be a slow process, and just now I have a bad case of bronchitis. Please be patient.

Versailles 2025 Part 2

     If the following is accurate:

     ...perhaps Zelenskiy has been denying “the will of the people” this whole time.

     Popular self-determination was a theme of some importance in 1919 at Versailles. Lloyd George and Clemenceau showed it little respect. They sewed nations together according to their preferences, no matter what the affected peoples would have preferred. But the ultimate determinant of what governments can get away with is what people will “suffer, while evils are sufferable:”

     Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. – Frederick Douglass

     None of the nations patched together at Versailles has survived into the 21st Century. All have fissioned or otherwise mutated. There’s been a lot of violence in the process.

     Volodymyr Zelenskiy is a dictator. All dictators cling to power, for a reason as old as The State itself:

     Living in the public eye had always entailed increased risk. Historically, whenever some troublemaker had roused the rabble to a greater pitch than the Establishment of that time and place could tolerate, it had disposed of him with no compunction and extreme prejudice. There were parts of the world where that was still the inevitable price of rising to power—places where a dismissal from high office was always administered with high-velocity lead. Power seekers in such lands arrived in their palaces with their death warrants already signed and sealed; they merely awaited delivery. [Shadow of a Sword]

     That’s the fate awaiting Zelenskiy, should his grip on Ukraine slacken and fail.

Versailles 2025

     No doubt Liberty's Torch’s Gentle Readers are aware of the enormous gaggle of “leaders” gaggled in Washington on Sunday to “help” with the Russia-Ukraine “peace talks.” No doubt you’re also aware that this is being treated as something that “should” happen. And finally, you’re aware that a lot of the contention is over which parts of its former self Ukraine must concede to Russia as the purchase price of peace.

     All I can think of the whole dreary matter is “It's 1919 in Versailles all over again.”

     You know your history, don’t you? The famous Pan-European Peace Conference of 1919, that was supposed to draw a line under the recently concluded unpleasantness? The one that redrew nearly every national border in Europe, according to the preferences of British prime minister Lloyd George and French potentate Georges Clemenceau? The one where Woodrow Wilson harped endlessly on his “Fourteen Points,” prompting Clemenceau to remark “The Lord God had only ten!”

     Well, they missed the centennial, but I suppose this is as close as they could come.

     The Russia-Ukraine War, which seems to have begun with an act of aggression by Russia, need not have involved any other nation. Yet it did. From nearly its inception it involved the United States, because the Grey Council that really exercised the powers of the presidency under Puppet-in-Chief Joe Biden saw opportunities for power and profit. It was a large part of the reason Donald Trump regained the presidency. No one wanted to imagine Biden negotiating with Vladimir Putin, much less confront the reality.

     Putin’s vision of a reborn Russian Empire could not tolerate the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. Regardless of the demographic realities of the Donbas and Crimea, he would have attacked that reason alone. Even so, it was never a conflict that needed American involvement... any more than was World War I.

     Woodrow Wilson so greatly desired to involve the United States in the Great War that he seized on the slenderest possible pretext – the soi-disant “Zimmerman telegram” – to do so. Perhaps he would have done so anyway, after the Lusitania affair. I have little doubt that he saw himself as a world-historical figure, destined by God to bring American standards of justice to the Old World. He saw himself as divinely destined to become the President of the United States:

     After the election he told William F. McCombs, chairman of the Democratic National Committee: "Before we proceed I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing." Surprised, McCombs reminded him of his services during the campaign, but Wilson exclaimed: "God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal could have prevented that!"
     Wilson never doubted that he was a foreordained agent, "guided by an intelligent power outside himself," with important work to do in the world. For him the League of Nations, his most famous enterprise, was not simply a human contrivance for ordering international relations; it represented God's will and, in rejecting it, the United States was trying futilely to resist its Providential destiny. As Wilson told some friends toward the end of his life: "I have seen fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their destruction.... That we shall prevail is as sure as God reigns." To Raymond Fosdick, a former League official, he exclaimed, with tears in his eyes, a few weeks before his death in 1924: "You can't fight God!"

     [Paul F. Boller, Presidential Anecdotes]

     There’s a lot of danger in thinking yourself a divine agent. But there can be a great deal of power (for some) and profit (for some) in warfare. Lloyd George and Clemenceau wanted their slices. They thought they’d got them... for a while.

     I hope President Trump doesn’t involve the United States any further in this. We don’t need another “security guarantee” that would imperil – possibly spill – the blood of our best yet profit us nothing.

     Let’s conclude with a little music:

I'm here sitting in the wreck of Europe
With a map of Europe
Spread out in a hall of Versailles
And every single nationality and principality
have come for a piece of the pie
I'm sitting in the wreck of Europe
With a map of Europe
And the lines and the borders are gone
We've got to do this jigsaw puzzle
It's an awful muddle
But somehow we've got to go on

Lawrence of Arabia is waiting in the wings
He's got some Arab sheikhs and kings
And we're in debt to them somehow
Lawrence of Arabia has got this perfect vision
Gonna sell him down the river
There's no time for him now

I think I'm gonna take a piece of Russia
And a piece of Germany
And give them to Poland again
I'll put together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
And hope that is how they'll remain
Then I'll take a bit of Turkey
Then a lot of Turkey
This is all quite a heady affair
There's Persia and Iraq to pick up
And there's Churchill's hiccup
And we can't leave it up in the air

Woodrow Wilson waves his fourteen points around
And says "The time to act is now
Won't get this opportunity again"
Woodrow Wilson has his fourteen points
But Clemenceau turns to Lloyd George
And says "You know that God himself had only ten"

Today I'm carried by a league of notions
(It's a league of notions)
By a league of notions
I don't think I quite understand
(I don't think I understand)
I only know from this commotion
(From this commotion)
There's a chance that we could turn
The world in the palm of our hands
(We can turn the world in the palm of our hands)

Voices in the corridors of power
Candles burning hour by hour
Still you know that to the victors go the spoils
Such a great responsibility to make it fair
And there must be some reparations now
And don't forget the oil

Today I'm carried by a league of notions
(It's a league of notions)
By a league of notions
I don't think I quite understand
(I don't think I understand)
I only know from this commotion
(From this commotion)
There's a chance that we could turn
The world in the palm of our hands
(We can turn the world in the palm of our hands)

Pax vobiscum
Wo-Oh, Pax vobiscum

[Al Stewart]

Is This Correct?

     Gentle Readers whose memories are long enough will remember the hurricane of questions that erupted over the use of a large SWAT team to effect a late-night arrest of Trump advisor Roger Stone. You’ll also remember that before that SWAT team arrived on-site, a full CNN camera crew was in place around Stone’s home, ready to film the action from start to finish – which it did. It was so clear that CNN had been tipped off about the raid to come that the network didn’t bother trying to deny it.

     That was scandal-of-the-week, for a time. But the foofaurauw over it didn’t last very long. It was already generally agreed that American law enforcement had been politicized, especially at the federal level. Americans took a “What can you expect?” attitude toward it. Of course, such a “What can you expect?” attitude segues naturally into “What can you do?”

     But there’s a new contestant on the scandal runway:

     Is this true? Can anyone verify or falsify it?

     If it’s true, it would be the scandal of the century. It would suggest that CNN had advance notice that there would be an assassination attempt on then-candidate Donald Trump. Where would such notice have originated? Does it lend any credence to the assertion, mostly made in fringe circles, that the Secret Service wanted Trump to be assassinated?

     No one has ever provided a credible answer to the penetrating question why Trump’s Secret Service detail was so low-quality and its performance so lax. It appears that with Trump’s return to the White House, such matters have been shrugged aside. I doubt the family of murdered Corey Comperatore is over the agony.

     CNN’s editorial policy is left-of-center. The network has shown Trump no love. But to have prior notice of an assassination attempt, and to condone and cover it as if it were just another news item, would be beyond forgiving.

     If the above claim can be verified or falsified, it’s vital that it be done. But who has unquestionable access to the raw facts of the matter?

A City In Insurrection

     I dislike being this exercised on a Sunday morning, but here it is:

New: illegal alien Tatiana Martinez is a TikTok influencer (tatianamartinez_02) with 30k followers was arrested today. This woman focused on alerting crazy protesters to disrupt, harass and disrespect ICE and law enforcement officers in California. She is also a nominee for… pic.twitter.com/PFJCvAkkt1

— hernando arce (@hernandoarce) August 16, 2025

     There you have it, Gentle Reader. The City of Los Angeles is towing the cars of ICE agents whenever they stop to make an arrest. That’s not accidental. That’s city policy. It puts Los Angeles, once a great city, into a state of insurrection against the federal government.

     So what now? Will this policy even draw a rebuke? Will the Department of Homeland Security send Mayor Karen Bass a strongly worded letter? And what about that blowhard in Sacramento? You know who I mean: the one who fancies himself a future president! What will he do to demonstrate compliance with federal law on immigration?

     There’s no chance of California “authorities” doing anything to comply with the law. California needs its illegals to retain all those juicy seats in Congress. Besides, they vote Democrat.

     Stay tuned.

A Deeper Look

     A mostly “outrage” article at American Greatness concludes with this offhand assertion:

     The global demonstrations against Israel, violence against Jews on U.S. campuses, and Israel’s diplomatic isolation are rooted in rampant antisemitism and Marxism.

     While anti-Semitism is a significant component of the worldwide agitation against Israel, it’s far from the whole story. That story begins after World War I, when Europe’s nations mortgaged their economies by becoming dependent on Middle Eastern oil. It remains a key driver of hostility toward world Jewry even today.

     Today, there’s an additional element in the anti-Israel stew: the massive influx of Muslim migrants to Europe. All over the Old World, there are now significant populations of Muslims within the nations of what was once called Christendom. The Islamic demographic is the most restive and violent portion of the populations of those nations that have let them in.

     As has been stated many times, including by me, Muslims do not immigrate to Christian countries to assimilate; they come to conquer. Islamic doctrine both forbids assimilation and commands conquest. Even a single-digit percentage of Muslims in an otherwise peaceful country can credibly – albeit sotto voce – present that country’s political elite with a threat of unacceptable violence and public disorder. Note that when the percentage of Muslims in a nation reaches double digits, the political class finds itself forced to spend a large fraction of its time and resources on placating them.

     This completes the explanation for worldwide indifference to the plight of Israel and its people. It’s an important step, for bigotry of any sort is personal; we can hope, at least, that the bigots will wear out, age out, or disappear. Indeed, bigotry is the preferred explanation for Western hostility to Israel. It’s the easiest influence to combat.

     But oil supplies and the threat of Islamic riots are a much graver matter.

You Get A Certain Feeling

     We know the wire services are as politicized as the media that consume their offerings. Still, now and then one must wonder whether they care whether anyone is paying attention:

     “People over-assign [climate-change] impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviors much more carbon intensive, like flying or eating meat,” said Madalina Vlasceanu, report co-author and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University.
     The top three individual actions that help the climate, including avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog and using renewable electricity, were also the three that participants underestimated the most. Meanwhile, the lowest-impact actions were changing to more efficient appliances and swapping out light bulbs, recycling, and using less energy on washing clothes. Those were three of the top four overestimated actions in the report.

     Now, being a former scientist and a rational man, I’m on the “denier” side of the “global warming” / “climate change” “debate,” so none of that would have been on my agenda under any circumstances. But here’s a supposed “professor of environmental social sciences” hectoring the warmista faithful that You’re doing the wrong things!

     You get a certain feeling about these people and the ones who hearken to them. You can sense that it troubles them that those who believe their bilge aren’t sufficiently devout. Why, look at them! They’re happy! How can they allow themselves that luxury when the Cause isn’t yet triumphant?

     A priest I knew, back in my fond and foolish youth, called this “calling for the hairshirts.” And indeed, if the bull goose loonies at the pinnacle of the “global warming” / “climate change” lunacy could have their way, we’d all be wearing hairshirts 24/7 and sleeping on beds of barbed wire. They aren’t nearly as concerned about the supposed plight of the planet as they are about extinguishing the very last embers of human happiness and flourishing.

     I’ve said it before (and I type that phrase so much lately I should have a macro for it):

They hate you.

     Do not take advice, much less commands, from people who hate you.

     BY THE WAY: If you aren’t yet aware of it, Mike Hendrix has granted me contributor’s privileges at Cold Fury, so if you want more Fran – there’s no accounting for tastes, but some do, you know – you can find more there.

Enemy Of The State

     The years have made one fact utterly clear: The State hates Christianity – especially the Catholic variety – above all other things. Christianity is the State’s foremost opponent.

     I needn’t recount the reasons for my Gentle Readers. Any system of belief that holds that there is a higher authority than the political would draw the State’s enmity. Christianity doubles down by putting that Authority beyond the State’s reach. And to celebrate human freedom as well! The nerve!

     So wherever you find the State, you will find it scheming to do damage to Christianity. The Soviets tried their damnedest to eliminate it completely. I’m sure you know how the Red Chinese treat Christians. And let’s not discuss the North Koreans; it’s too nice a day.

     But what of our free and “tolerant” Republic?

BREAKING: In a nationwide ruling against a Trump Administration religious conscience rule, a federal district Court today ruled against the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Court sided with Pennsylvania and New Jersey in their years-long effort to force the Little Sisters of the…

— BECKET (@becketfund) August 13, 2025

     Please read the whole thread.

     The game here “should” be “obvious.” The absolute sanctity of human life, including that of the unborn child, is fundamental to Christian belief. The Catholic Church is the foremost defender of the right to life in the whole world. If the State can force the Church to yield on that point, it will have made a fatal breakthrough. Think about it: If one crucial tenet of the faith can be compromised for Church-State amity, why would the others be immune? Pretty soon, Church teaching would be hollowed out completely.

     The governments of the United States of America would have succeeded where the Communists and totalitarians failed. Quite a feather for the gradualists’ cap, eh?

     Of course the Little Sisters of the Poor will appeal. They might win at the Circuit Court level, but it’s even money that the case will go all the way to the top. It’s a case to be watched closely. Defenders of human life should take note – and provide what support they can.

     I wonder if the Institute for Justice could be persuaded to get involved?

Back To That, Eh?

     The Left, terrified that it’s losing its bastions in the executive branch of the federal government, has revived the “global warming / climate change” scam for one more run on the boards. In light of this, I would recommend that my Gentle Readers review three articles:

• The PDOOMA Series
• You’re Getting Colder!
• Breakthrough!

     The screaming may not have peaked yet. But one who is armed with data and logic will have an easier time coping with the screamers. Remember that a great part of their distress – all of it, in some cases – arises from their being out of power. To the Left, that’s like having their church closed, locked, and posted for demolition.

     No, don’t sympathize with them. Don’t try to comfort them. Remember what they think of you.

Dissent Requires Courage

     I have an admission to make, Gentle Reader: I'm not terribly courageous. There are times when I back away from saying plainly and explicitly what I think about a particular proposition. It's normally in those cases where I could expect a storm of denunciation from persons who agree with me on most other things: a consequence of the polarizing and hardening of opinion on innumerable subjects. So my "courage of convictions" is a good distance from perfect.

     But I'm nearing the end of my life. If I'm ever to correct that deficiency, it must be soon.

     Those readers who have respected my views on matters of faith and the spirit are the most likely to feel what follows as a "gut punch." If you proceed from here, don’t claim afterward that I didn’t warn you.

---

     I'm a Catholic. That doesn't mean I agree with the totality of Church teachings. The Church has been wrong on a number of occasions and subjects. I've been called a "cafeteria Catholic" for that. Whatever! I stand by my convictions.

     On a variety of subjects, clerical doctrinal overreach has been rampant. Church teaching has at times seemed designed to benefit the Church hierarchy and the clergy generally, rather than to explain and explore the will of God as it was elucidated to us by His Son. This was at its most dramatic in the years near to the end of the First Millennium, when clerics routinely exploited the millenarian fears of European Christians to enrich themselves.

     About thirty years ago, the Church added two remarkable "sins" to its catechism: income tax evasion, and "excessive" sexual pleasure even between husband and wife. Never mind that the income tax itself is a form of armed robbery, or that "excessive" is always a matter of opinion. Never mind that many a State is blatantly oppressive, even murderous, or that the marital bed is supposed to be a place of fulfillment and joy. The Church condemned these things; we're supposed to feel guilty about them and plead for absolution from them.

     To which I replied, "Where is your authority for these pronouncements?"

     (...crickets chirping...)

     For "baseline" thoughts on clerical overreach, see this essay.

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     It is unacceptable for a human institution to arrogate authority that belongs only to God. The moral-ethical rules are His rules. We cannot legitimately alter them, nor can we extend them into realms where they don't apply. Neither teleology nor "good intentions" can justify it. Yet the Church has done so repeatedly.

     In recent years, fearing that its doctrinal overreach has endangered the allegiance of its flock, the Church has tried to "have it both ways:"

     Catholics believe that an individual's conscience is the ultimate determinant of what is wrong or right for that individual. Moreover, God will judge us according to the fidelity with which we have followed our conscience. Nevertheless, this conscience needs to be formed by objective standards of moral conduct. The Church provides us with just that -- moral norms based on Jesus's teachings, the inspired scriptures, centuries of tradition, and the laws of nature.
     These moral standards may seem at times to be inhibiting or restrictive. The fact is, that quite to the contrary, they release or liberate us. These norms both make us free, and lead us to the deep happiness that comes from following God's plan. Jesus underscored that point when he said: If you live according to my teachings, you are truly my disciples; then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

     [Father Joseph M. Champlin, What It Means To Be Catholic]

     The attempt to tread the narrow line between "Let your conscience be your guide" and "We know better than you do" could not be more obvious. Yet there is no avoiding the primacy of conscience. Conscience, once supplemented with reason, provides us the tool for knowing right from wrong, the "land of sin" from the "land of liberty."

     For what is the conscience? It's the "knowing with" that God provides to every human soul: the "knowing with" God, through the faculties He has awarded us. I had a character in a novel explain it better than I could:

     The word ‘conscience’ means ‘knowing with.’ But knowing with whom? As we can’t read one another’s consciences, or transmit into them, it can only be God. Conscience is the channel God uses to help us make our judgment calls—which does not mean that if you and I make a particular one differently, then one of us is ‘wrong.’ You can never know what another person’s conscience has told him...or whether he’s really paid attention to it as he should.”

     The hard-and-fast rules that must undergird the operations of conscience are set out by Christ Himself in Matthew Chapter 19:

     And behold one came and said to him: Good master, what good shall I do that I may have life everlasting?
     Who said to him: Why asketh thou me concerning good? One is good, God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
     He said to him: Which? And Jesus said: Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. [Matthew 19:16-19]

     Note that Christ's pronouncement comes close to the Noahide Commandments. These are the lightest requirements any faith has ever laid upon Mankind. As they were enunciated first by God the Father and then by His Son, we may trust the Authority behind them. Moreover, they are fully consistent with two even higher Commandments:

     But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together: And one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him: Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?
     Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
     On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. [Matthew 22:34-40]

     I hold that these rules and these alone are the original authority to which the Church must cleave. The Church's authority is derived from those rules. I've never met a challenge sufficient to make me doubt it.

     Much of my fiction has been aimed at elucidating the rules by which a Catholic – or any other person who wants to see himself as good – must live. Dissent if you please; I stand by what I've written, here and elsewhere. I'll do so when I face God at the Particular Judgment, without fear.

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     Why is this on my mind, you ask? Mainly for two reasons. First, in these later years of life I've become more judgmental of myself. I've always promoted clarity in thought and expression. To fall short of that standard lowers me in my own eyes. Second, because there are innumerable persons who lack a sense for the limits of their authority, and not all of them are in Holy Orders.

     I could go on, but I don't want to become tiresome. Let that stand for the moment. Love God with your whole heart, listen always to your conscience, and do have a nice day.

Quote Of The Day

     Julie Kelly, whose work appears at American Greatness and elsewhere, has become a personal favorite among journalist-commentators. Her writing is forceful, to the point. More, she has a talent for the “wait, what?” phrase that I can’t help but admire. Here’s an example from a recent article:

     Former government apparatchiks and their media fluffers, however, aren’t the only ones in panic mode.

     I went into a gale of laughter over “media fluffers.” The term fluffer has nothing to do with pillows; it’s a term from the pornography industry. If you don’t know what it means, look it up. In the context of the article, which covers the recent criminal referrals against various Obama / Biden associates and others connected to the Clintons, it is appropriate as well as hilarious.

     Applause for Julie Kelly!

It’s Alive… It’s Alive…

     Greetings, Gentle Readers! I’ve decided, after the decline and fall of Liberty’s Torch V2.0 — I assure you, you really don’t want to know the reasons – to return to this site, keep it alive, and post here from time to time. However, any new work I produce will appear first at Cold Fury, where Mike Hendrix has graciously granted me contributor’s privileges. (If you think he was being wise and generous, see your brain-care specialist at once!)

     This blogging schtick is a hard habit to break!