RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/joe-bidens-gender-obsession-william-kilpatrick/

“Women can’t reach ‘full God-given potential’ without abortion, Joe Biden claims.”

So reads a headline in a LifeSite News piece reporting on a statement issued by President Biden on International Women’s Day.

Biden didn’t put it quite so bluntly.  The part of the statement in question reads, “Every person deserves the chance to live up to their full God-given potential without regard for gender or other factors.”  But it’s obvious from the rest of the statement that pregnancy is one of those “other factors” that might get in the way of reaching one’s full potential.

It’s an odd way of thinking.  Biden almost seems to be saying that God endorses abortion if giving birth might interfere with the development of other potentials.

Our “full God-given potential”?  Never mind the “God-given” part, “full potential” is in itself a very slippery concept. It’s a term that owes more to human potential psychology than to Christian theology. We all have many potentials as human beings. But does God want us to fulfill all of them?  How about our potential to become a drug addict, a career criminal, a rapist, or a hit-man?

Biden’s statement ends with a plea to work for “limitless possibilities for all.”  But no person ever has or ever will have “limitless possibilities.”  It’s a well-known fact of life that fulfilling one potential cancels out the possibility (or desirability) of fulfilling certain other potentials.  A person who fulfills his ambition of becoming a world-champion sumo wrestler will in all likelihood have to forgo his hopes of becoming an Olympic figure skater.

Biden’s statement unintentionally acknowledges that life puts limits on our potentials when he says:

Yet too often, in too many places, women and girls face obstacles that limit their possibilities and undermine their participation in economic, political, and social life.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/nationalism-good-and-bad-bruce-thornton/

The last two weeks we have been inspired by the brave resistance of Ukraine’s people to the brutal violence of the Russian invaders. Outmanned and outgunned, the Ukrainians have continued to fight against overwhelming odds, even as the invaders answer their resistance with atrocities like the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol.

The paradox is that both sides in this war are in part motivated by nationalist loyalties that the transnational “new world order” has proclaimed are quaint superstitions and folkways at best, and intolerant promulgators of xenophobia and violent aggression at worst. What the Russo-Ukrainian war shows is that patriotic nationalism, like pretty much everything we humans do, can be good or bad, depending on the intentions and purposes it serves.

The weakening of nationalism reflects the globalist ideology that slowly developed over the last two centuries. It reflects two developments that define modernity: secularism and the world-shrinking technologies that expanded global trade. For most of humanity, faith has been one of the foundations of national identity like language, history, culture, customs, and mores. But especially in the West, faith has been reduced to a private preference banished from the public square, rather than being part of the collective expression of national identity. It’s no coincidence that over time the decline of patriotism has paralleled the decline of faith.

The other development was new 19th-century technologies like the railroad, telegraph, and steamship, which created a global economy. International commerce brought the world’s peoples closer together and bound them by trade, creating a global economy which brought disparate national cultures together. The gradual growth of greater global trade and its managerial elite suggested that international cooperation and similar interests were more efficient and beneficial than the zero-sum national difference that frequently, like religion, fomented violent conflict. Similarly, transnational organizations, covenants, and treaties would turn force into a costlier and less effective means of adjudicating conflicting national interests than international diplomacy.

Especially after the rise of fascism and Nazism in the 20th century––which were blamed on nationalist loyalties rather than on the malignant novel ideologies that exploited them––nationalism fell out of favor, particularly to the global elites and supranational institutions of the “rules-based international order.” Nationalism became a malignant ghost from the past that the enlightened global elites scorned.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/16/fed-had-one-job-to-do-it-failed/

Along with President Joe Biden and Congress, the Federal Reserve has a responsibility to manage inflation, a job it was established to do. And just like Biden and Congress, the Fed has failed at its job.

At the Fed’s own website, it states clearly what its primary job is, by law: “Conducting the nation’s monetary policy by influencing money and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of full employment and stable prices.”

Well, today, we have neither “full employment” nor “stable prices.” On Tuesday, the government reported that wholesale prices, that is prices just a step before retail, surged 10% in February.

As bad as that number was, it didn’t include the huge jump in energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Consumer prices rose “only” 7.9% in February. So expect them to go even higher next month.

This inflation came thanks mostly to absurd policies – paying people to stay home while spending trillions of dollars of “stimulus” on federal programs not related to COVID – pursued by the Democrats who control both Congress and the White House.

Even some Biden political supporters say it’s the Democrats’ fault, not “Putin’s price hikes” or “COVID,” or “corporate greed.”

Indeed, former Obama administration economists Larry Summers and Steven Ratner have both said that, contrary to all the finger-pointing, Biden and Congress are to blame for the current inflation.