The Metaphysics of Caitlyn and Planned Parenthood

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I had a very of-the-moment experience the other night at bedtime in my hotel room. After reading about the unmitigated horror of Planned Parenthood’s customized cannibalizing of fetal body parts, I toggled over to the ESPN site to watch the propaganda video the network made to set up its awarding Caitlyn Jenner its Arthur Ashe Courage Prize.

I encourage you to watch the clip, which is about 13 minutes long. It is a remarkable piece of work, and profoundly indicative of the deepest metaphysical assumptions of Western culture today. Jenner’s heroism, according to the film, consists in his dramatic refusal of Nature — of imposing his own will and desires on nature so profoundly that he repudiates his own nature as a male. Jenner retains his male genitalia, and, of course, maleness in his genes. In other words, everything about Jenner’s material existence (that is, his existence in his body) is male. But Jenner thinks of himself as female, and presents himself publicly as a female. He believes that what he wishes to believe about himself is who he really is, in terms of his gender. And our culture has decided that someone who wishes to assert that he or she is actually of the opposite gender than his or her body, that not only is that person conforming to the Truth — courageously, against the opposition of tradition, religion, society, and so forth — but that courage in part consists of that very willingness to impose one’s will on Nature, to make it serve our desires.

If you watch the Jenner video, he/she keeps saying things like, “This is who I am” and “I had to be who I really am.” I’m not making fun of this; clearly Jenner believes this quite deeply. The images in the video in which s/he is presented as a lone conquering hero are crushingly sad; Jenner comes across as a defaced person lost in the desert, someone who thinks s/he is free, but who doesn’t seem free at all. The culture now seems to have accepted as self-evidently true that one’s gender is whatever one wants it to be. To assert this implies a metaphysical view that is radically at odds with classical (including Christian) metaphysics, which holds that nature is not mere stuff that we can fashion as we like, and impose our own meaning onto it, but rather that nature in some mysterious way reflects things as they actually are.

In the new edition of the (unfailingly excellent) Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers interviews philosopher Roger Scruton, who talks about the implicit atheism of contemporary culture, and how we are “defacing” Nature by denying — whether we realize it or not — that there is intrinsic, metaphysical meaning in matter. Driving home from the airport last night, listening to the Journal, a line from Scruton jumped out at me:

“As soon as we begin to understand how the human person, as it were, defines himself apart from the natural order, till we do that, we won’t begin to see exactly where the limits of scientific investigation lie.”

(Read more from “The Metaphysics of Caitlyn and Planned Parenthood” HERE)

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Nuclear Arms Race Begins: We Must Have a Military Nuclear Program Within a Decade

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Following the July 14, 2015 announcement in Vienna of the Iran-P5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Saudi press featured numerous articles openly calling for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to use the coming decade – the time frame of the JCPOA – to develop their own military nuclear program, against the nuclear threat that they say Iran will constitute after the agreement expires.

There have already been calls for a clandestine Saudi nuclear program to parallel Iran’s, which were backed up by official Saudi sources.

For example, the month before the announcement of the JCPOA, Saudi Ambassador to the U.K. Emir Muhammad bin Nawwaf bin ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz Al-Saud told the Daily Telegraph that if the upcoming nuclear agreement with Iran did not include a serious Iranian commitment to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, then as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned, “all options are on the table.” He emphasized that over the years, his country had opposed the development of nuclear weapons, but that Iran’s policy on the issue “has changed the whole outlook in the region.”

Emir Turki Al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief and Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., made similar statements, on a number of occasions. In April 2014, at a security conference in Bahrain, Al-Faisal called on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to acquire nuclear knowledge to deal with the Iranian danger. The previous year, at the 2013 Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference, he threatened that if Iran developed nuclear weapons, the GCC would consider acquiring its own “nuclear deterrent.”

Alongside these statements by Saudi officials, there have been various reports in media worldwide on Saudi intentions to establish a military nuclear program, or to acquire nuclear weapons from a third party, meaning Pakistan. (Read more from “Nuclear Arms Race Begins: We Must Have a Military Nuclear Program Within a Decade” HERE)

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Baltimore Mayor Pushed for Publicly Funded Hotel That Has Been Hemorrhaging Money

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In 2008, construction was completed on the 757-room Baltimore Hilton, a $305 million publicly-funded hotel spearheaded by Baltimore’s mayor at the time, Martin O’Malley. The hotel, in seven years of operation, has never turned a profit. The best year of operation saw a $2.9 million loss.

“It’s the biggest boondoggle ever. It’s hemorrhaging money every year and has less-than-stellar performance,” Democratic Maryland state Sen. James Brochin told The Daily Caller.

Originally intended to draw revenue from a supposed untapped convention market in Baltimore, the Hilton Hotel project slowly began losing money when conventions passed on Baltimore for other locations such as Austin, Texas and nearby Washington, D.C.

In July 2005, more than three years after the plan was finalized, it was still facing opposition in the city council. Of the 15 council members, only three said they believed the hotel would actually help the city . . .

After O’Malley pushed the hotel vote to pass with the council, The Sun reported that this, the “costliest public project in Baltimore history” may see the fate of other cities’ failed publicly funded hotel ventures, such as St. Louis, Omaha, and Overland Park, Kan., “all cities that used public money to build hotels. Failing hotels.” (Read more from “O’Malley Pushed for Publicly Funded Hotel That Has Been Hemorrhaging Money” HERE)

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From Sea to Shining Sea: Here Are Examples of Voter Fraud Across America

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It is a stark reality that exists nationwide, from the rural counties of Georgia to the urban centers of New York.

The Heritage Foundation has documented nearly 250 cases where nefarious citizens, officials, candidates and campaign operatives conspired to commit vote fraud, compromising the integrity of our elections to achieve their ideological goals.

That list is just a tiny sampling of voter fraud, and it keeps growing. In May, the Heritage Foundation highlighted several recent cases.

Here are some of the egregious new additions to the voter fraud database: . . .

In eastern Kentucky, Ross Harris and Loren Glenn Turner funneled $41,000 to the 2002 county judgeship campaign of Doug Hays for what the defendants claimed was a lawful operation to pay more than 1,200 people $50 each to drive voters to the polls. (Read more from “From Sea to Shining Sea: Here Are Examples of Voter Fraud Across America” HERE)

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Obama’s Attack on the Suburbs Is an Attack on the American Dream

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The hypocrisy of government “planners” is astounding. Government planners are experts at planning destruction, distancing themselves from the results, and then recommending additional planning to fix what they have destroyed. They have been rearranging society according to their social engineering agenda, redistributive economic theories, cynical “division politics” strategies, and racial quotas for decades and the more planning they do, the more chaos we get.

I have been closely following the Obama Administration’s recently announced plan to racially diversify upper middle income neighborhoods through their recent HUD directive titled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” for some time now, and continue to wonder when the media and curious Americans are going to start asking the hard questions about this incessant drive to socially engineer our lives, and the devastating outcomes they have produced.

Sadly, I doubt the media will delve into the complicated but overwhelmingly negative externalities generated by years of adherence to the liberal social planners’ agenda, and their societal reorganization goals. So it’s our turn to bypass them and ask the hard questions ourselves.

Here’s the critical question for the government planners: Who is in charge of the neighborhoods and cities with significant minority populations, and why are many of these areas struggling?

Of course, the answers are extremely inconvenient for the liberal social planners among us because the correlation between liberal governance and their symbiotic “planning” agenda in inner cities, and economic hardship for its citizens, is high. If the government planners who engineered the negative economic outcomes, housing outcomes, and education outcomes in the inner cities they dominate failed to generate even average outcomes for their citizens, then why would middle-class America be remotely open to the idea of these destructive planners engineering outcomes in their neighborhoods?

The planners, in conjunction with the liberal political and activist class, will, of course, blame the inevitable backlash against this attempt to place government sponsored housing in upper middle income neighborhoods on racism, but Americans are tiring of this old trick. Americans of all races, creeds, and countries of origin want to live in neighborhoods of their own choice and choose these neighborhoods for a variety of reasons. Some choose the convenience of city-living because they dislike long commutes. Others choose the suburbs because they want a yard for their children to play in. And some choose the country because they like the relaxing symphony of the Lord’s sounds of nature at night. Pretending these decisions are the twisted result of a devoutly racist country is an insult to every American who bought their home because it was their piece of the American Dream, not a bullet point in a government master-planning document.

The rank hypocrisy here, which escapes the media spin doctors who are avoiding this story because of its potentially explosive impact on electoral politics, is that it’s the planner’s adherence to the tax-and-spend ideology and zoning regulations which are primary drivers of generational poverty in the very areas many struggling Americans are looking to escape from, and the low income housing crisis in America, respectively. Restrictive zoning and “rent control” policies have long been pointed to as drivers of housing shortages and any Econ 101 student understands that when you restrict the supply of any good or service, the price will rise.

Magnifying the problem is that restrictive zoning requirements add layers of fixed costs to housing construction projects which make the business of building homes profitable and sustainable only if you build high income housing to defray the fixed costs. The Left employs this same hat trick often; first they create a problem, and then they propose more of the poison as an antidote. They created the low income housing crisis through their adherence to heavy zoning, planning, and housing regulation, then they ruined the many inner cities, where they govern unchallenged, forcing people out of those cities to the suburbs, and now they chase those same people to the suburbs following them with legislative and regulatory threats to impose their big government agenda on them, regardless of how far away they move or how desperate they are to escape their grasp.

I know many of you are overwhelmed right now with the avalanche of bad news emanating from the Obama Administration on both the foreign policy and domestic fronts. It’s a challenge to keep up with it all. But, the Obama Administration’s war on the suburbs is an attack on that portion of the unique American Dream which every American cherishes, a small piece of land which we can look at and call “home.”

Conservatives should fight this HUD rule and defund this attack on their constituents’ front door. (Posted with permission of the author, “Obama’s Attack on the Suburbs Is an Attack on the American Dream”, originally appeared HERE)

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Thousands Rally in Times Square to Protest Iran Deal

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Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Times Square Wednesday evening in protest over the recent landmark nuclear deal with Iran.

As CBS2’s Jessica Schneider reported, some ten thousand are rallying in solidarity with signs and voices raised against the nuclear deal.

Protest organizers proclaim: “Washington is prepared to give Iran virtually all that it needs to get to the bomb. To release $150 billion to Iran will result in the expansion of worldwide terror” . . .

In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry led back-to-back, closed-door briefings, trying to sway lawmakers to approve the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

“We are convinced that the agreement that we have arrived at with world powers is an agreement that will prevent Iran from the potential of securing a nuclear weapon. It will make the region, our friends and allies safer, it will make the world safer,” Kerry said. “And we are convinced that the absence of any viable alternative absolutely underscores that fact.” (Read more from “Thousands Rally in Times Square to Protest Iran Deal” HERE)

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Pope Francis to Be Tried by Sanhedrin

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A re-established and self declared Israeli Sanhedrin, the religious High Court composed of 71 sages, has declared that it is putting Pope Francis on trial unless he retracts his statement that the Jews have no right to the land of Israel or to Jerusalem.

In February 2013, the Vatican officially recognized the “State of Palestine” but more significantly, the Vatican signed a treaty in June with “Palestine” in which the Holy See switched its diplomatic relations from the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the “State of Palestine”. This treaty is the first legal document negotiated between the Holy See and the Palestinian state and as such, constitutes an official recognition.

The trial and judgment will be on September 20th, 2015. If Pope Francis chooses to ignore the summons, he will be judged in absentia.

The Sanhedrin sent a letter to Pope Francis in reaction to the Vatican’s recent support of the Palestinian Authority’s unilateral moves to declare themselves a nation, reported the Hebrew magazine Matzav Haruach on June 24.

The letter stated:

“Because the Vatican recognized the organization known as the Palestinian Authority as a nation, and has begun to refer to it as a nation in its documents. His honor has named the head of said authority as an ‘Angel of Peace’, as was explained by a spokesman for the Vatican, that his intention was to encourage Abu Mazen to advance towards peace. These actions, to our great dismay, are consistent with a long series of actions and stances that are as in the days of the Roman Catholic Religion, that swore to persecute Israel because we refused to accept their Messiah as the Messiah of Israel, and to renounce our faith. The recent announcements and actions of the Vatican are a rebuke to the Jewish Nation and to the Bible, which you use to interpret the prophecies, as if God has abandoned his original Nation of Israel. Reality has proven the opposite to be true.”

“We require from you an apology for your recognizing as a nation those who stole the land, those who are known as the Palestinian Authority, and we are informing the Vatican that the sole God given right to the land of Israel is to the Nation of Israel. If His Honor the Pope, and the Vatican, do not apologize within two weeks of receiving this letter, and if he does not change his ways, we shall judge these actions in the Court of Mount Zion, in a court of 71 Jewish elders of Zion, and enact the prophecy of ‘The liberators will rise up upon Mount Zion, to judge the Mountain of Esau and the kingdom shall be God’s’ (Obadiah 1:21). The court shall judge the Vatican in its presence or in absentia, and it is possible that the Vatican will be found guilty of anti-Semitism, as has been known to be done several times throughout history, and to place responsibility upon the Vatican for all of the outcomes of its actions.”

(Read more from “Pope Francis to Be Tried by Sanhedrin” HERE)

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Illegal Alien Victim’s Mother: ‘We Are at War Right in This Country’

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Choking back tears, parents whose children were slain by illegal immigrants said Tuesday the federal government and so-called sanctuary cities both share blame for their children’s deaths, and pleaded with Congress for an all-out effort to secure the border and deport those who already snuck in.

“I don’t want your sympathy, I want you to do something,” demanded Laura Wilkerson, whose 18-year-old son was strangled, had his throat smashed and his body lit on fire by an illegal immigrant trained in mixed martial arts. “Quit sitting silent because it’s going to help you get a vote.”

The lawmakers, who said they were moved by the testimony of Ms. Wilkerson and a handful of others who recounted their relatives’ murders, vowed to take action and trained much of their criticism on San Francisco, whose sanctuary policy protected an illegal immigrant whom police have accused of killing 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle earlier this month as she walked on Pier 14 with her father . . .

The hearing highlighted a shift in the immigration debate. Over the last few years, immigrant rights advocates have essentially won the public debate, focusing on sympathetic illegal immigrants, and so-called Dreamers in particular, who have made good on their chances of a better life in the U.S. . . .

“I want you to be angry that America’s borders are wide open. America does not know who is in this country. It is time to put Americans first,” Ms. Wilkerson said. “Close the borders, figure out who is really here. Keep statistics. Realize that we are at war right here in this country.” (Read more from “Illegal Alien Victim’s Mother: ‘We Are at War Right in This Country'” HERE)

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2nd Smoking Gun Video: Planned Parenthood Abortionist Haggles Over Payments For “Intact Fetal Specimens” [+video]

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Yesterday a new video was released showing Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Medical Directors’ Council President, Dr. Mary Gatter, negotiating the price points for intact fetal specimens and offering to use a “less crunchy technique” to get more intact body parts.

Last week’s video showing Planned Parenthood Senior Director of Medical Services Deborah Nucatola blithely discussing dismembering children in the womb and harvesting their organs for sale launched a movement to investigate and possibly defund America’s largest abortion provider.

Planned Parenthood has responded by trying to discredit the undercover investigators, led by the Center for Medical Progress’s David Daleiden. They claim that heavy editing misleads viewers, and that the prices Nucatola mentions only cover incidental costs relating to the transport and preservation of the tiny baby body parts.

Those claims fall apart when you watch this second video. As the press release below the video explains:

Gatter is a senior official within Planned Parenthood and is President of the Medical Directors’ Council, the central committee of all Planned Parenthood affiliate medical directors.

Actors posing as buyers ask Gatter, “What would you expect for intact tissue?”

“Well, why don’t you start by telling me what you’re used to paying,” Gatter replies.

Gatter continues: “You know, in negotiations whoever throws out the figure first is at a loss, right?” She explains, “I don’t want to lowball, because I’m used to low things,” before suggesting “$75 a specimen.”

While Gatter twice recites Planned Parenthood messaging on fetal tissue collection, that “We’re not in it for the money,” and “The money is not the important thing,” she immediately qualifies each statement with, respectively, “But what were you thinking of?” and “But it has to be big enough that it’s worthwhile for me.”

There’s a world of difference between “not for profit” and “worthwhile for me.” Particularly when you take this into consideration:

Let me just figure out what others are getting, and if this is in the ballpark, then it’s fine, if it’s still low, then we can bump it up. I want a Lamborghini.
The Lamborghini reference is a joke, of course, but the routine way in which Gatter negotiates is not. Federal law prohibits selling or purchasing human fetal tissue (also known as baby livers, lungs, etc.).

Another point that is clear from the video: this abortion doctor is clearly willing to change the abortion procedure based on the selling of human parts, saying that she would ask the surgeon to use an IPAS (a manual vacuum aspirator) to “increase the odds that he’s going to get an intact specimen.”

While the first video was disturbing for the cavalier way Dr. Nucatola discussed dismemberment over wine, the tone of this video is chillingly businesslike. It is clear from Dr. Gatter’s conversation that she knows how price setting for fetal parts works, and how to bargain with fetal parts buyers. She even mentions asking around at other affiliates in the area to see what prices they are getting, to make sure she gets the market rate for “specimens.”

This is damning. No wonder Planned Parenthood is refusing to provide Dr. Nucatola to brief the congressional committee investigating the case. With a video like this, however, the committee may have all that it needs. (Posted with permission of the author, “Planned Parenthood Abortionist Haggles Over Payments For “Intact Fetal Specimens” in New Video”, originally appeared HERE)

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Donald Trump Heaps Insults on RINO Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Other Foes [+video]

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By Michael Scherer. A triumphant and unrepentant Donald Trump launched a barrage of personal attacks and name-calling on his campaign rivals Tuesday, most notably calling South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham an “idiot” and handing out Graham’s cell phone number to the whole world.

He dismissed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as “weak on immigration,” and mocked Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s glasses and Hillary Clinton’s hand wave.

“What a stiff, what a stiff, Lindsey Graham. By the way he has registered zero in the polls,” Trump said, at an appearance in Bluffton, S.C. “A total lightweight. In the private sector, he couldn’t get a job.”

Earlier in the day, Graham called Trump a “jackass.” In response, Trump called Graham an “idiot” and held up a card that included Graham’s personal phone number, then asked his supporters to call Graham. “I don’t know, give it a shot,” he said.

Graham’s campaign manager, Christian Ferry, said in a statement that Trump “continues to show hourly that he is ill-prepared to be commander-in-chief.” (Read more from “Donald Trump Heaps Insults on Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Other Foes” HERE)


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Donald Trump Releases Phone Number of U.S. Senator

By Lauren O’Neil. Today in Donald Trump news, the 2016 presidential candidate has released a rival’s personal cellphone number to everyone with an internet connection.

Trump was speaking at a televised campaign event in South Carolina on Tuesday when he turned his attention to the state’s senior senator (and fellow Republican presidential hopeful) Lindsey Graham.

“I got called a jackass by this guy,” Trump said, referring to a comment Graham made to CNN earlier in the day in response to Trump’s assertion that Senator John McCain is “not a war hero.”

“Then I said to myself, ‘Hey, didn’t this guy call me like, four years ago?’ Yes,” Trump continued. “Lindsey Graham, I didn’t even know who he was.”

The businessman and host of the reality TV show Celebrity Apprentice explained that Graham had called him looking for a “good reference” on the Fox News program Fox & Friends, on which Trump is a regular guest, and also to solicit campaign donations. (Read more from this story HERE)

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