Month: January 2015
“Je Suis Charlie” French for “I Am Charlie” + John Kerry
You Make Your Spouse Your “Soul Mate” ~ Marriage Health
I LOVED this article, “My Marriage Wasn’t Meant to Be” ~ via Matt Walsh:
…We think that our task is to find this preordained partner and marry them because, after all, they’re “The One.” They were designed for us, for us and only us. It’s written in the stars, prescribed in the cosmos, commanded by God or Mother Earth. There are six or seven billion people in the world, but only one of them is the right one, we think, and we’ll stay single until we happen to stumble into them one day.
And when that day happens, when The One — our soul mate, our match, our spirit-twin — comes barreling into our lives to whisk us off our feet and take us on canoe rides and deliver impassioned romantic monologues on a beach in the rain or in a bus station or whatever, then we’ll finally be happy. Happy until the end of time. We can get married and have a perfect union; a Facebook Photo Marriage, where every day is like an Instragam of you and your spouse wearing comfortable socks and sitting next to the fireplace drinking Starbucks lattes.
Yeah. About that. It’s bull crap, sorry. Not just silly, frivolous bull crap, but bull crap that will destroy you and eat your marriage alive from the inside. It’s a lie. A vicious, cynical lie that leads only to disappointment and confusion. The Marriage of Destiny is a facade, but the good news is that Real Marriage is something so much more loving, joyful, and true.
We’ve got it all backwards, you see. I didn’t marry my wife because she’s The One, she’s The One because I married her. Until we were married, she was one, I was one, and we were both one of many. I didn’t marry The One, I married this one, and the two of us became one. I didn’t marry her because I was “meant to be with her,” I married her because that was my choice, and it was her choice, and the Sacrament of marriage is that choice. I married her because I love her — I chose to love her — and I chose to live the rest of my life in service to her. We were not following a script, we chose to write our own, and it’s a story that contains more love and happiness than any romantic fable ever conjured up by Hollywood.
Indeed, marriage is a decision, not the inevitable result of unseen forces outside of our control. When we got married, the pastor asked us if we had “come here freely.” If I had said, “well, not really, you see destiny drew us together,” that would have brought the evening to an abrupt and unpleasant end. Marriage has to be a free choice or it is not a marriage. That’s a beautiful thing, really.
God gave us Free Will. It is His greatest gift to us because without it, nothing is possible. Love is not possible without Will. If we cannot choose to love, then we cannot love. God did not program us like robots to be compatible with only one other machine. He created us as individuals, endowed with the incredible, unprecedented power to choose. And with that choice, we are to go out and find a partner, and make that partner our soul mate.
That’s what we do. We make our spouses into our soul mates by marrying them. We don’t simply recognize that they are soul mates and then just sort of symbolically consecrate that recognition through what would then be an effectively meaningless marriage sacrament. Instead, we find another unique, dynamic, wholly individualized human being, and we make the monumental, supernatural decision to bind ourselves to them…
It’s a bold and risky move, no matter how you look at it. It’s important to recognize this, not so that you can run away like a petrified little puppy and never tie the knot with anyone, but so that you can go into marriage knowing, at least to some extent, what you’re really doing. This person wasn’t made for you. It wasn’t “designed” to be. There will be some parts of your relationship that are incongruous and conflicting. It won’t all click together like a set of Legos, as you might expect if you think this coupling was fated in the stars.
It’s funny that people get divorced and often cite “irreconcilable differences.” Well what did they think was going to happen? Did they think every difference would be reconcilable? Did they think every bit of contention between them could be perfectly and permanently solved?
People go into marriage with the mentality of children, and I really think that pop culture has a lot to do with that. Marriage is a choice made against the odds. That’s what’s so exciting about it. Thankfully, I made this choice with my wife. She is now my soul mate, my other, my completion, but I could not say that about her until we said “I do” to each other.
We could have not said it, you know. She could have met someone else. I could have fled into the hills to be a celibate hermit for the rest of my life. She could have moved to the city and married some rich lawyer or banker. She could have never called me back after our first date. We could have dated for years until eventually the relationship flickered out, as they almost always do. She could have gone to California to become an actress. I could have moved to Denmark and shacked up with a Scandinavian crossing guard named Helga. There were literally millions of things that either of us could have done. An innumerable multitude of possible outcomes, but this was our outcome because we chose it. Not because we were destined or predetermined, not because it was “meant to happen,” but because we chose it. That, to me, is much more romantic than getting pulled along by fate until the two of us inevitably collide and all that was written in our horoscopes passively comes to unavoidable fruition.
We are the protagonists of our love story, not the spectators.
There’s no doubt that certain personality types might gel better with you; you might have a few specific traits and characteristics you’re looking for in a mate. It’s good to have standards, obviously. I’m not saying that you should just throw yourself into the mosh pit and say, “hey, I have no soul mate so I’ll just marry anyone! Who’s game?”
But I am saying that, if you’re single, there are probably hundreds of options out there. None of them soul mates, but all of them possibly potential soul mates. You don’t have to sift around for that one custom made, personalized grain of sand in the desert. You’ll be alone forever if you do that, and you don’t have to be alone forever….
WTF! Are These People Nuts? State Dept. Spokesperson
Gateway Pundit: We Are at War With People Who Want to Kill People in the Name of a Variety of Causes
“The Good Wife’ Had More Obama Officials Than Paris Rally” ~ Jake Tapper
Via Lonely Conservative:
Former White House spokesman Jay Carney appeared on CNN to defend the Obama administration’s decision not to send any high ranking officials to the march against terrorism in France over the weekend. It came out today that neither President Obama nor Vice President Biden had much going on, so the administration is using the excuse that security would have been a nightmare. That didn’t fly with CNN’s Jake Tapper, who pointed out that the show “The Good Wife” has more representation from the Obama administration than the Paris march had.
“There may not be any question about the resolve of the United States and the alliance, and as has been pointed out by President Obama, among others, France is the United States of America’s oldest ally,” Tapper said. “But you know who was the first world leader to visit the United States after 9/11? Jacques Chirac went to Washington D.C. and New York City. There is something special about this relationship. Two independent countries, two independent nations born around the same time, with in the same decade. Certainly you’ll grant the point that there’s something wrong when this season’s ‘The Good Wife’ had higher Obama representation, with a cameo from Valerie Jarrett, than this very important rally, perhaps the most important rally in Europe in a generation. And it’s described here as the biggest rally in French history.” (Read More)
Mohammad Killed Those That Satirized Him ~ Bill Warner
Via Creeping Sharia:
“No-Go” Zones in America? Robert Spencer on Fox & Friends
No “Real” U.S. Representative Was At Rally In France (#EmptyChair)
Even Jake Tapper says he is “ashamed by U.S. leaders’ absence in Paris“
…But I find it hard to believe that collectively President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Attorney General Eric Holder — who was actually in France that day for a conference on counterterrorism — just had no time in their schedules on Sunday. Holder had time to do the Sunday shows via satellite but not to show the world that he stood with the people of France?
There was higher-level Obama administration representation on this season’s episodes of “The Good Wife” on CBS.
I get that the President visited the French Embassy in Washington and that Secretary of State John Kerry spoke in French, and I certainly understand that the American commitment to security in Europe rivals no other. But with all due respect, those are politicians spending money that they didn’t earn and sending troops whom they don’t know…
[….]
After September 11, the first world leader to visit the United States was France’s Jacques Chirac, though the most forceful conversation about France in Congress that I can recall came a few years later during debate over whether to invade Iraq and revolved around renaming pommes frites in the U.S. House cafeteria.
And I’m frankly floored that not one of the people who is contemplating running for president in 2016 has yet to even tweet on the subject of the momentous demonstration in Paris, much less attend France’s biggest rally in the history of the republic.
I imagine that Hillary Clinton and her husband are kicking themselves for not hopping on a corporate jet to get here. Can you picture Hillary and Bill walking in the front row, arm-in-arm with Netanyahu and Hollande?
Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Paul Ryan attended the Green Bay-Dallas football game Sunday and at least one of them sent his potential rivals mischievous tweets as if they were contemplating running for president of Beta Theta Pi.
And Jeb? Mitt? Crickets….
(See more at HotAir) Why, though, was the administration not there? I wondered aloud on this, then I saw this:
Even though Holder was steps away from the rally, he didn’t participate. After seeing the above it brought back memories of this
It is like living in another world from leftist Democrats. They live in an Alice In Wonderland existence.
There was a VERY low level person in the crowd however:
Barack Obama sent a top campaign bundler instead. US Ambassador to France Jane Hartley was sent to the rally. Hartley is a top campaign bundler and former Carter administration official. She raised at least $500,000 for Obama’s re-election.
Don’t know who Ambassador Hartley is? Let Jon Stewart fill you in. Gay Patriot astutely notes:
If I may be a bit incendiary, it’s really not difficult to figure out why The Emperor choose to spend Sunday afternoon watching football instead of standing in solidarity with the rest of the world against Terroristic Islam. There was no political advantage to going to Paris, of course. Also, the Emperor has what Hillary Clinton would call “empathy” for the terrorists, as they represent, in his view, the oppressed victims of Euro-Colonialism. One can look, as a matter of contrast, to the regime’s dispatch of three high-ranking representatives to the funeral of a thug in Missouri; which was both politically advantageous (whipping up the black vote before mid-term elections) and in synch with the Emperor’s sympathies.
Take note as well that Gateway Pundit documented many Muslim students didn’t participate in the moment of silence for the attacks. BUT, we can ALL take solace in knowing that when a thug tries to kill a cop (but is instead killed), Obama will send three representatives to [Michael Brown’s] funeral.
While 50 MAJOR world leaders were in France to support the French people… this was Obama’s schedule:
“Intolerance” [Thought Police] is Synonymous with Higher Education
Video Description:
Dennis Prager interviews a tenured Professor John McAdams from Marquette University… a Jesuit [Catholic] University. He recounts a student being told — essentially — that any in-class discussion of same-sex marriage is akin to bigotry and intolerance.
The Professor has a blog entitled “MARQUETTE WARRIOR” where he recounts this issue. Of course it was picked up by other sites as well, for instance, Breitart, as well as on national radio (listen herein).
The irony is that this is suppose to be a religious institution and a place for higher learning. In all the philosophy classes I have been in I have never had the right NOT to be offended when talk of my Christian faith comes into class discussion. Nor would I want or force people to accept the claims of my faith “in situ.”
Challenge and freedom of thought IS a corner stone of any healthy society. We see what barbaric societies do to try and intolerantly make another civilized society tolerant (speaking here of Charlie Hebdo).
If, in a philosophy or ethics class, or a political science class subjects are untouchable… is this not an intolerant form of governance on the university level? Where thinking outside of boxes or freedom of expression and thought are suppose to be paramount? It turns out the university is the most “unfree” place in America — the opposite of its goal I think:
▼ What Are the Least Free Places in America? Universities (PragerU)
This is a sad-sad story.
For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/
Robert Spencer On Sharia No-Go Zones In France (Hannity)
Via Jihad Watch
See: No-Go Zones
Washington Post Surprised Gun Control Didn’t Work as Advertised
Editors note: below is a GRAPHIC video of a police officer being executed — filmed from a building. I can’t help to think that if this was in Texas someone from that same vantage point would have a clear shot to dissuade such an execution, and, maybe kill a bad guy (if the person was a good shot with a pistol).
- “Three policemen had arrived on bikes but had to leave because the men were armed, obviously… Then the attackers took off in a car.” (HotAir)
Gay Patriot notes the Washington Posts amazement that gun control doesn’t work:
Since 1939, France has had the kind of “Common Sense Gun Control Laws” that groups financed by Mike Bloomberg claim to favor (although the laws don’t go far enough, in their view, because they still permit a small number of private citizens to own firearms.) The editorialists at the Washington Post are baffled why France’s strict gun laws failed to prevent the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
A genuinely troubling question: Why didn’t France’s gun laws save the Charlie Hebdo victims?
[….]
There is no right to bear arms for the French, and to own a gun, you need a hunting or sporting license which needs to be repeatedly renewed and requires a psychological evaluation.
You mean the Mohammedan terrorists refused to apply for gun permits or sit for psychological valuations, but decided to get guns anyway? Jamais dans la vie!…
Keep in mind that police officer that was executed was unarmed as well as the three police officers that responded on bicycle to the Charlie Hebdo attack that turned tail and ran the other way. BECAUSE they were UNARMED!
- CBS News relayed reports from Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that the first two officers to arrive “were apparently unarmed” and “fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher.”
- The UK’s Independent reported that “three policemen arrived on bikes but had to leave because [the attackers] were armed.” A policeman who had been assigned the position of bodyguard to Charlie Hebdo editor, Stephane Charbonnier, was killed, and one policeman on a mountain bike was killed, as well.
Sick!
The President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Calls for Islamic Reformation!
The President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, made a surprise visit St. Mark’ Cathedral on the Nativity Feast. WOW.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi visited the main Coptic Christian cathedral Tuesday during its Christmas Eve mass (Coptic Christians celebrated Christmas yesterday), “the first such visit by an Egyptian president in history” according to First Things writer Mark Movsesian. “It’s important for the world to see this scene, which reflects true Egyptian unity, and to confirm that we’re all Egyptians, first and foremost. We truly love each other without discrimination, because this is the Egyptian truth,” Sisi told service attenders.
Coptic Pop al-Tawadri thanked Sisi for his visit, calling it “a pleasant surprise and a humanitarian gesture.”
It isn’t the first such gesture that Sisi has made—in a speech celebrating the birth of Mohammed on New Year’s Day, he called on Muslim religious leaders to help fight against extremism: ”I say and repeat, again, that we are in need of a religious revolution,” he said, according to CNN. ”You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting on you. … We need a revolution of the self, a revolution of consciousness and ethics to rebuild the Egyptian person—a person that our country will need in the near future.”…
Huge news via Breitbart! On the one hand you have people on Bill O’Reilly defending the Muslim Brotherhood, but the inserted leader of Egypt may be the beginning of what we should hear from leaders in Islamic countries. Again, this is the first leader of an Islamic country who has said publicly that Islam needs to reforms:
One of the most controversial, and yet indisputable, observations that can be made about the current state of global affairs is that Islam has problems with violence and aggression. (That’s not redundant – cultural and political aggression without physical violence are possible, and troublesome.)
This observation does not imply that all Muslims are universally violent or aggressive – that’s the straw-man argument apologists for Islam and critics of the West would rather deal with. But there are aspects of Islamic practice that make it useful to those who would pursue the path of violent domination. It doesn’t take much effort to find passages in the Koran that can serve as signposts along that path.
Contrary to the endless harangues of their domestic critics, people in the West are not comfortable with the notion of a “bad religion.” Religious tolerance is an important value across the European diaspora, and it was written into the ideological DNA of the United States. Granted, this ideal of tolerance has not always been observed with the greatest fidelity, but everyone gets the general idea that their neighbors should be respectfully allowed to pursue whatever religious faith they choose. Criticism of any faith from the outside is uncomfortable.
But here we are, looking back over quite a bit of Islamic violence around the world, unable to find parallel behavior in any other contemporary religious practice. (It’s telling that the nearly universal responses to a discussion of Islamic violence are What about the Crusades? or What about the Inquisition? Whatever else one can say about those chapters of history, they indisputably took place a long time ago.) Something is different with Islam, and not in a good way. It’s so obvious, and yet so politically incorrect to point it out, that it has reached elephant-in-the-room status.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is willing to talk about the elephant in the room, and he didn’t mince words when he spoke on the topic of Islamic violence in Cairo on New Year’s Day:
It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
That thinking – I am not saying “religion” but “thinking” – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!
Is it possible that 1.6 billion people should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible!
This is all the more remarkable because al-Sisi was addressing a gathering of Islamic scholars and clerics. He went on to tell them a “religious revolution” was needed, and “the entire world” was waiting for it…
[….]
It is nevertheless remarkable to hear a leader of al-Sisi’s prominence and devout religious background to call for a worldwide Islamic reformation. Note that he’s not using the “hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists” dodge, or saying that violent jihadists are aberrations bound to wither away on the “wrong side of history.” He’s calling for revolutionary action across the Muslim world, and calling out fundamentalists who believe Islamic law and tradition were chiseled in stone centuries ago…