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Daniel Imperato For President 2024
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The post Died Suddenly: Military Cadets, Mandated to be Fully COVID-19 Vaccinated, Are Dying Suddenly Recently appeared first on Global Research.
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On April 19, 2021, tragedy struck when a much-loved Uber Eats driver, Randall Cooke, 59, was brutally murdered and dismembered by Oscar Solis of the MS-13 gang in Pasco County, Florida. Randall was making his last delivery near his home in Holiday, a suburb of Tampa when he sent his wife a text. After his family reported him missing, Uber Eats provided authorities with his last known location on Moog Road. On April 21, Solis’ roommate told the police what had happened, providing details on the crime and the victim’s movements.
The security cameras revealed that Cooke had arrived at the house at 6:55 p.m. on April 19. The next day, Solis was witnessed carrying trash bags from his home, prompting investigators to search through the contents. To their horror, they discovered human remains. Solis had just moved to Florida from California in January and taken over his dad’s bedroom in the house of his fatal encounter with Cooke. The victim was likely lured inside under false pretenses and was then killed and assaulted in a fit of rage. Solis is also thought to have attempted to rob Randall of his valuables before murdering him.
Investigators searching the house uncovered evidence of the brutal crime in the form of blood, Cooke’s wedding band, and his car keys. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco described the incident as “demonic” and said there was no good reason for the attack. Nocco further commented on the criminal’s past, noting his rap sheet, which consists of nearly twenty violent crimes, including battery, burglary, assault, and possession of stolen auto parts.
Nocco asked for the public’s assistance in identifying a woman and man who had recently left the house at which Cooke had arrived, asking anyone with information to come forward. The death of Cooke, a dynamic and much-loved husband, has shaken the people of his community. The violent crime of Oscar Solis has highlighted the pressing significance of controlling the release of violent criminals more effectively.
The ongoing ‘Christian nationalism’ debates among the American talking class may be hyper-Twitterized and therefore increasingly wearisome, but one persistent critique of the idea deserves note: Many opponents of Christian nationalism allege that it is a form of idolatry, and as such, threatens not only the mission and health of the state, but also the Church. This charge is profoundly revealing, for it gestures, knowingly or not, to a foundational question in Christian political theology: What does it mean for the Church to fulfill Jesus’ description of it in John 17, and be in the world but not of it? We can find insight on this question in a surprising place: 17th-century debates about monarchy.
To be grossly reductionist, the history of Christian political thought contains a dialectic between two impulses: one toward transformationist pursuit of earthly justice, the other toward otherworldly pietism. The first of these views sees in Scripture a mandate to impose heavenly justice on earth. The disposition here is to take the words in the Lord’s Prayer “on earth as it is in heaven,” very seriously. The second regards human political projects with pessimism, looking only to the realization of the Heavenly Kingdom; it is ever wary of “immanentizing the eschaton.” The watchword for this group is “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36)
As it happens, the debates between absolute monarchists and republicans in the 17th-century Anglophone world get to the heart of this complicated dialectic by presenting us with two opposing stances. This debate shows that the defining tension in Christian political theology revolves around the legitimacy of human authority.
In the first camp are the divine-right absolutists, represented by such figures as Robert Filmer and King James I and VI of England and Scotland. For these men, a king’s rule over the body politic exactly mirrors God’s rule over the cosmos: Both are absolute, unaccountable, rightful, and benevolent. King James connects his monarchy to God’s in a work called The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: “Kings are called Gods by the prophetical King David, because they sit upon [God’s] Throne in the earth, and have the [account] of their administration to give unto him.” This rule is paternalistic, for the good of those below. In fact, it is literally paternalistic, for the benevolent and absolute rule of kings over their realms, like God’s rule over the cosmos, is extended into every sphere, bringing discretely ordered authority to every relationship, including the familial. As Filmer writes, “If we compare the natural duties of a Father with those of a King, we find them to be all one….” Justice lies in an integrated, harmonious order knit together by relations of hierarchy between God and man, king and subject, husband and wife, priest and layman, parent and child.
This view, sharpest in the 16th and 17th centuries, met with a radical new challenge from a few republican theorists. Its most famous champion, rather than a king, was the great poet John Milton. In both his political writings and epic poetry like Paradise Lost,a bold thesis emerges: Kingship is idolatry.
As Eric Nelson documents in The Hebrew Republic, Milton and republican thinkers such as Algernon Sidney and James Harrington used the Bible (especially 1 Samuel 8, in which the Israelites are indicted for requesting a king) to argue that to enthrone a human as monarch is to dethrone God. Milton writes that “it is not fit for a man, but for God only to exercise Dominion over men.” A republic, such theorists contended, is the only legitimate regime because it acknowledges God’s kingship; it is the truest form of theocracy. The Puritan evangelist John Eliot, in a tract called “The Christian Commonwealth,” expressed his desire to “set the Crown of England upon the head of Christ.”
In sum, the first view, the divine-right stance, emphasizes man’s role as imitator, or image-bearer, of God; the second, republican view emphasizes that man is not God, and is fallen. The first recalls nature as created, aiming at an ideal; at its best it is aspirational. The second dwells on nature as fallen; at its best it is realist.
Now, of course, the English republicans were theocratic conservatives by the standards of today, and it isn’t accurate to say that their worldview comprehensively opposed that of the divine-right theorists. C.S. Lewis argued that Milton essentially shared the old vision of organic, harmonious hierarchy notwithstanding his political republicanism. But ensuing political thinking winnowed out the hierarchical aspects of their vision, and elevated the concern about human authority: that contra the absolutists, fallen people cannot be trusted with god-like authority. A human king does not symbolically testify to God’s rule, but usurps his sovereignty. This notion has been distilled into a still broader principle: To erect earthly hierarchies with sinful men at their head is to invert, not mirror, the cosmic order.
It’s easy for us moderns to see how a greater suspicion toward given nature brought a desperately needed correction to a complacent absolutism. Humans cannot be confidently trusted with unilateral, unconstrained authority; rulers, clergy, husbands, and parents are all eminently capable of horrific abuse. There emerged in the modern era a recognition that, by aiming at a ‘natural ideal,’ humans will inevitably fall short because they are fallen. As people realized the need for this correction, the Miltonic skepticism of human rule as idolatrous won a near-total victory. Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government in response to Filmer’s Patriarcha, sweeping him away.
Today, within American Christianity, this hierarchy-critical view is dominant on both left and right. Liberals may soften their skepticism of human power when it comes to big government, and some conservatives certainly do the same when it comes to male headship of households. But both regard the exercise of authority with suspicion, even hostility. Brad Littlejohn has explained how this bipartisan rejection of authority unfolded in 2020.
Although a certain realistic skepticism of authority and hierarchy is certainly healthy, perhaps the pendulum has now swung too far. It requires no endorsement of ‘post-liberal’ ideas to suggest that the recent growth of anti-proceduralist, state-friendly ideas on the religious right and a greater desire for racial justice on the Christian left represent a reaction against the Miltonic ideal. Many Christians on both sides seem to feel that their churches have grown too otherworldly and their governments too reticent to engage in the muscular pursuit of God’s justice ‘on earth.’ That some proposed corrections—Christian nationalism or CRT, depending on your partisan alignment—are injudicious or extreme is not an excuse to dismiss this broader concern.
David Eisenberg follows many scholars in describing the modern political project, including the American experiment, as founded on a realism that gives up on perfecting man. But traditionalists and progressives alike are now voicing a rejoinder that must be answered: If you give up on pursuing an ideal, don’t be surprised when you stray ever further from it. The challenge that confronts Christian political theology today is how to guard against the abusive tendencies of fallen human authority figures while not destroying authority itself; how to acknowledge that nature is fallen, while remembering that nature was created good.
The post On Earth as it is in Heaven? appeared first on Providence.
An emergency landing was made during a flight traveling from Queensland, Australia, to the Northern Territory after two midair brawls occurred.
According to Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Northern Territory Police, belongings were thrown, a bottle was raised, and a window was smashed due to the unruly behavior of some of the passengers. As a result, four of the passengers were arrested and charged.
The brawls began when a group of passengers were standing in the aisle, and one of them waved a bottle over their head.
Alarmed by the disturbance, the flight made a U-turn back to Queensland, where a woman was charged with disorderly behavior of an aircraft, common assault, and failing to obey the safety instructions of the flight crew.
The flight attempted to take off once more, and yet again, the same group of passengers started a dispute on board. This quickly escalated into a full fight leading to the interior window of the aircraft being smashed.
When the flight eventually arrived at Alyangula on Groote Eylandt, off the east coast of the Northern Territory, three passengers were arrested by NT Police and charged with various offenses.
A male adult of 23 was charged with intentionally endangering others, aggravated assault, damage to property, disorderly behavior in a public place, and infringement of a domestic violence order.
A female adult, 23, was charged with property damage, intentionally endangering the safety of others, and disorderly conduct in a public place.
At the same time, a 22-year-old man was also charged with commercial drug supply, drug possession, disorderly behavior, and possessing liquor in a restricted area.
All of the arrested passengers are to appear in the Darwin Local Court on Monday, and this incident has left the public outraged. People wonder how a situation like this could have unfolded on a commercial flight, reminding everyone of the importance of following safety instructions and maintaining appropriate behavior onboard.
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Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives. But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise.
The post The Real Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan. It Was Not To End the War Or Save Lives. appeared first on Global Research.
President Joe Biden addresses the North America’s Building Trades Unions legislative conference at the Washington Hilton on April 25, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
“This is the United States of America. There’s nothing, simply nothing, we cannot do if we do it together.”
It’s a line you’ve heard countless times if you’ve followed Joe Biden’s most recent presidential efforts starting in 2019, and it pops up once more in the commercial Biden’s camp released today for his official reelection launch. “Let’s finish the job!” the ad implores. What job? You’d be hard-pressed to find out by watching the ad.
Sure, there’s talk of “MAGA extremists” trying to cut Social Security, attacking reproductive rights, banning books, discriminating against LGBTQ people, and undermining voting rights. The country is still in the middle of a “battle for the soul of America,” we’re told.
Unfortunately, Biden and the Democrats haven’t made a whole lot of progress on these issues. Biden rejected his own party’s push to eliminate the debt ceiling last year, which would have neutralized the current hostage scenario that has given Republicans the leverage to try and slash Social Security. Other than use it as get-out-the-vote fodder, Democrats have done little on the federal level to protect reproductive rights, while Biden reportedly won’t take on the Supreme Court that’s driving this assault because he’s worried about hurting its public standing. The Democratic voting-rights bill went nowhere — the president quickly moved on after the party refused to eliminate the filibuster, and following mounting frustration from voting rights activists who found a White House distinctly uninterested in the issue. It’s hard to know how to take a measure of the country’s “soul,” but the fact that 71 percent of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction surely isn’t a sign of good health.
More importantly, there’s no indication of what Biden and his party plan to do about any of this. Outlining an ambitious, inspiring vision of his presidency if reelected, and giving some sense of his legislative priorities in term two — reviving the very popular Build Back Better bill that died two years ago and formed the backbone of his presidential agenda, for instance, or vowing to expand Social Security benefits — might give despondent, checked-out Americans some reason or even, dare I say it, enthusiasm to come out to vote for Biden and his party next year, to give them the congressional seats they need to finally get this program over the line. But there’s no such call to action. Vote for Biden because, somehow, he’ll finish the job, whatever it is.
Biden’s reelection pitch is, in short, a retread of his September speech about the threat to democracy from “MAGA Republicans,” which itself was a retread of the stale, uninspiring Democratic campaign approach of the past decades: don’t promise to do anything positive for people, just point to how scary the other guys are.
There’s little point these days in making electoral predictions, if there ever was. Our political era is virtually defined by its unpredictability. And the midterm results showed that a strategy of pure fearmongering about the horribleness of the opposition still has some juice in the tank.
But it’s also important to recognize, for the Biden campaign if no one else, that the president will be running in a vastly different environment from 2020, one that make his reelection — even against today’s Republican Party — far from assured.
Biden’s not going to have a problem securing the Democratic nomination, chiefly because of the party’s characteristically antidemocratic behind-the-scenes maneuvering. They’ve moved the South Carolina primary to the very first election on the schedule — as great for Biden as it is terrible for the party — and have nixed any presidential debates, protecting the president from the handful of insurgents who have raised their hand to run against him, and forestalling any open discussion about the party’s priorities and future direction.
But the general election campaign is not the primary, and Biden won’t have the benefit of Democratic functionaries and various loyalists putting their thumbs on the scales to help him win. And he’ll need it. Doubts about Biden’s fitness, which is distinct from his age, are not unreasonable. As of January this year, Biden has spent all or part of 197 days of his presidency away from the White House in Delaware, at his home or his beach property, along with more than sixty days at Camp David. By October last year, when this number was smaller, it constituted more than a quarter of his entire presidency, and far outpaced Donald Trump, who had been frequently criticized by liberals for skipping out of the White House. It’s why party strategists have questioned if the president is up to the rigor of a presidential campaign.
Building on his 2020 strategy, Biden has spent the past three years steadfastly avoiding the press. Biden often skips the traditional practice of holding joint press conferences with world leaders, and has sat down for interviews only fifty-four times in his first two years — roughly a quarter of the amount Trump did, and about half of what even Ronald Reagan managed. He averages fewer news conferences per year than any president since Calvin Coolidge, apart from Reagan and Richard Nixon. He’s taken the unprecedented step of refusing to sit down for an on-the-record interview with the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. As the Times noted, he’s “taken steps to reduce opportunities for journalists to question him in forums where he can offer unscripted answers and they can follow up.”
This worked in 2020, when the pandemic gave the president a ready-made excuse to disappear for days and avoid public appearances. And while the demands of the presidency might offer another such reason, the wisdom of doing so is an open question, given the importance to a campaign of traveling the country and appearing in front of voters.
Nor will Biden have the unique historical conditions that his own advisers privately acknowledged were the only reason he won three years ago. COVID may have been “the best thing that ever happened to him,” as adviser Anita Dunn remarked at the time, but the president himself and much of the country now believe that “the pandemic is over.” Exit polls from 2020 showed Biden voters were driven in large part and even mostly by opposition to Trump, including because of his disastrous pandemic response, but the president no longer has an unpopular incumbent to run against — in fact, the unpopular incumbent is himself.
Biden’s approval ratings are desperately low right now, and fell still further — among GOP voters, no less — after he recently shifted to the right. Recent polling indicates 70 percent of Americans don’t want Biden to run again. (A majority also don’t want Trump to run again, but a smaller majority of 60 percent). On top of this, with his domestic agenda stalled, Biden has — partly thanks to historical accident, but also partly thanks to his own deliberate choices — presided over a dramatic shrinkage of the US welfare state, one that had largely been expanded, again largely as a result of historical accident, under his right-wing predecessor.
That shrinkage is all the worse for the fact that it’s come amid deteriorating economic conditions. Nearly a quarter of US adults are food insecure, roughly five points higher than the already-staggering rate recorded last year. More than a third say it’s been “somewhat” or “very” difficult to pay their bills, a jump of 25 percent from the year previous. The latest Census Bureau report puts nearly 38 million people, or 11.6 percent of the population, living in poverty as of January 2021, a number that’s almost certainly grown since various forms of pandemic aid that existed then have faded away. US life expectancy has dropped for the second year in a row. And a recession is being widely predicted in the next year, exactly the kind of pandemic-like shock that could derail a presidency.
Past presidents have pulled through in similarly tough spots. And Trump, who looks increasingly likely to be the GOP nominee, is a deeply polarizing, chaotic, and, for the Democratic base, energizing opponent, who could easily engineer another defeat for himself and his party — arguably the most likely to do so out of any of the other possible Republican choices, even.
But these are not conditions that anyone would want to be running in. And other than once more telling everyone how bad the alternative would be, there seems to be no impetus inside the gathering Biden campaign to so much as pretend, as they successfully did the first time, that they will fight for specific policies to improve people’s lives, like a public health-insurance option or a $15 minimum wage — possibly because they don’t want to be on the hook again for a bunch of promises they have no intention of carrying out.
One thing’s for sure: it’s going to be a bleak nineteen months.