You see so many seemingly intelligent, normal people who suddenly become semi-psychotic when Trump is even mentioned. I think it must be an acquired wiring problem.

The other trigger figure was Cardinal Pell.

That adds another layer or two to the phenomenon.

Mark Dice:

Hulk Hogan Unleashed for Trump! – Brings Down the House at RNC, Trump Returns with Historic Speech!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCSrenpnJvo

Biden reportedly digging his heels in.

Prominent Democrats concerned that “He can’t win.”

Yet aggregating pollster FiveThirtyEight had Biden with a narrow pathway to victory last week.

Shouldn’t the concern rather be “He can’t govern”?

Evidently they don’t care so much about governing but about the spoils attached thereto.

The apparent insane hatred some good people display for various figures is so widespread that it has to be rooted in some important mechanism of human nature.

We have an innate sense of justice because we’re made in the image of God, who detests evil and punishes it.

The problem with us is that due to the noetic effects of original sin that sense of justice has gone awry. We’ve become self-centered little gods.

As a result, everybody wants justice… but for the other fellow, not themselves!

And our standards of justice are also distorted, even inverted in some cases, so that we regard good things as bad and vice versa.

I’d suggest the animus against Cardinal Pell had its origin in his refusal to go along with calling homosexuality good. It challenged many people’s inverted morality.

Well, Chris Ulhmann is the right arsehole isn’t he?
I once thought he had some redeeming qualities but, no.
What an emotional pile of completely slanted garbage.

Lincoln would be horrified that his memorial is called a temple.

I think most people miss the point about the National Mall & indeed, the symbolic sculptures and architecture of Washington. The USA is a Republic and many aspects were modelled on & reminiscent of the Roman Republic. This is very reminiscent in the Capitol. The first time I went to Washington you couldnt wipe the smile off my face. “My God”, I said to my husband,”Its Rome!”

God bless America; Aftermath of an attempted assassination

Qanta Ahmed, The Spectator Australia 19 July 2024

Seated on the South Lawn of the White House on 15 September 2020, we couldn’t help but stand as President Trump arrived on the Balcony, leading the three Middle East leaders into the afternoon sun. We were about to witness the signing of the Abraham Accords bringing Israel into peace with Bahrain and UAE that day, and soon after, Morocco and Sudan. I was seated towards the edge of the 600-strong crowd, surrounded by donors sporting Presidential Seal cufflinks, tribute to their deep pockets and deeper still networks.

Next to me Batsheva, doting aunt of a Jared Kushner senior White House staffer, began reciting a soft prayer. Hearing the Hebrew, I enquired about the prayer. She was incanting the Jewish Bracha (blessing) uttered when one sees a king. I wanted to join in. Following her lead phonetically, we prayed together, one an American Jewish woman, one an American Muslim woman, both understanding our President to be our leader.

In the years since that moment of hope and light, President Trump has faced first ridicule, then derision, then dehumanisation and censure; silenced on mainstream and social media, bound in a litany of legal cases, convicted in my city of New York and finally today, targeted for assassination.

As an American and a Muslim, I pray for the full recovery of our former and likely future President and his family. I pray for my nation, the United States, a generous home to me for over 30 years. And as a Muslim I am bound to follow the example of our Prophet as we are reminded in the Islamic Hadith (Sahih Muslim 1828) to pray to our Maker for whomever is given charge of our nation beseeching of our Creator, ‘Whoever is given charge over my nation and he is gentle with them, be gentle with him.’ In other words one prays that the Almighty ‘might treat the ruler as he reigns’. (I remembered this prayer when King Charles III was crowned and wrote about that in this column).

Tonight, I remember the other part of this prayer.

‘Oh Allah, whoever is given charge over my nation and he is harsh with them, be harsh with him.’

There has been harshness within our nation. There has been harshness directed at our great nation’s former president.

We are collectively responsible as a nation for this appalling moment, led astray by a recklessly vitriolic far-left which has co-opted the remnants of the Democratic party. Today, the generous and hopeful America I first moved to in 1992 is unrecognisable.

Consumed by narcissism, extreme left woke neo-orthodoxy and an obscene marriage (maybe not only of convenience but also perhaps of infatuation) with virulent Islamism, the Democratic party that President Bill Clinton once led has been largely devoured.

In the void remaining, President Trump and his supporters have relentlessly been ridiculed, ostracised, dehumanised and demonised. This Frankenstein left calls Trump Hitler even as they celebrate, sanction and refuse to condemn breathtakingly virulent dehumanisation of America’s Jews since 7 October unleashing an astonishing licence for public hate speech, hate crimes and acts of hate towards America’s Jews. All of this has contributed to these highly combustible moments we must now face as virulent antiSemitism flows in our colleges, schools and campuses in the guise of anti-Zionism while espousing blatant allegiance with US designated Foreign Domestic Terrorist Organisations including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Today’s events were not possible without extreme speech.

Extreme rhetoric in our nation has led to this moment. Islamist jihadist ideology I have examined for decades reveals the power of extreme speech and how it dehumanises, how it diminishes integrative complexity, how it devolves into us versus them, good versus evil, and binary constructs until – having successfully laid the groundwork in the previous absolute dehumanisation of ‘the other’ – there remains only the elimination of the other.

Who knew? While I was busy studying radicalisation in the foothills of the Hindu Kush in North-West Pakistan, or in the lands of Yazidism and the valleys of the Zagros in Iraqi Kurdistan, big-budget radicalisation was unfurling right under my nose here in America’s most moneyed zip codes.

America the Beautiful is approaching almost a decade of intense domestic political tribalism, poisonous identity politics and, thanks to Covid, a deeply frayed social fabric. Indeed, such a fraying of the social fabric characterises the aftermath of all pandemics, as the brilliant counterterrorism intellectual Brian Michael Jenkins clearly delineates in his work Plagues and Their Aftermath: How Societies Recover from Pandemics. This frayed fabric tends to persist – spoiler alert – not for decades but centuries in the wake of global plagues.

Extreme speech with its binary simplicity feeds a ravenous news cycle straining to capture an ever-diminishing attention span targeted by massive bot-farms financed by national and international malignant actors. The result: fraught with tension, suspicion, alienation and frightening hate, Americans are separated gaping chasm by gaping chasm.

As the prayer in the Hadith reminds us, our leaders at this moment will indeed be judged harshly by our Maker for our leaders have treated all of us harshly. They have manipulated us with extreme speech, silenced debate, and censured the target of their hatred, President Trump, who has been throughout captive like a moth to a flame in an incandescent crucible of their animus.

This harshness is exemplified by a government which shows compassion only to a rarefied elite, yet denies it to the everyman upon whom it only rains scorn; a compassion cultivating the rabid anti-Semite at the expense of the disempowered American Jewish citizen. When we cannot protect the most vulnerable minorities in our nation – the Jewish people – it must be said – we may not be able to protect our most empowered citizens, our former and future president.

Language, Foucault has argued, furnishes the building blocks of a particular reality. Language is the battlefield across which power struggles are waged. And it is to language we must now turn.

America’s origins were inscribed in some of the finest language to define a democracy. We must now turn to our founding documents and tenets: one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Melania Trump in her letter after the assassination attempt wrote that our ‘gentle nation is frayed’. Be gentle with my nation. God Bless America. God have mercy on us all.

Defence Department compensation plan for Afghan killingsRhiannon Down
12 hours ago

28 comments
Entire villages in Afghanistan could benefit from a scheme to compensate victims of unlawful killings and abuse by Australian special forces while on deployment, with the Chief of Defence granted decision-making power.
The day before they came into effect on Friday, Defence Minister Richard Marles quietly released the regulations, which provide a pathway for families of the 39 Afghans killed by Australian Defence Force personnel and other victims who suffered “unlawful assault or property damage” to receive financial payouts and other forms of compensation.
Documents outlining the long-anticipated response to the inquiry into Australian Defence Force war crimes in Afghanistan, released almost four years ago, say individuals who are “reasonably likely” to be the relatives of wrongfully killed Afghans and other victims would be eligible for a payout, but did not specify a dollar figure. Those seeking compensation would also have to be “reasonably likely” not to be a member of a terrorist organisation or subject to sanctions.
In documents outlining the functioning of the scheme, the Albanese government acknowledged the precarious security situation in Afghanistan, complexities arising from the “broad” definition of family, and risk that victims receiving financial compensation could become “targets for criminal organisations or the Taliban”. Security experts and the Greens have raised conflict-of-interest concerns about placing the nation’s highest-ranking military figure in a decision-making position on compensation claims for misconduct committed by his own personnel, rather than an independent arbitrator.
Under the regulations, Chief of Defence Force Admiral David Johnston would refer individuals to a newly created Afghanistan Inquiry Compensation Advocate, who would then make their recommendation on the outcome to the top-ranked military official.
Documents explaining the functions of the scheme said that the CDF, who would also be responsible for deciding if he will accept the advice concerning the claim or reject it, would be “best placed to source and verify information”.
The scheme brings the government closer to responding to the 15 recommendations set out in former judge Paul Brereton’s November 2020 report into ADF war crimes committed after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, with a spokeswoman for Mr Marles saying the government was committed to implementing the Defence-designed compensation scheme.
“The Deputy Prime Minister has been clear about the Albanese government’s commitment to implement the recommendations of the Brereton Report to the fullest possible extent, including establishing a pathway for compensation,” she said.
“The Deputy Prime Minister, in his capacity as Minister for Defence, directed Defence to design a scheme in consultation with relevant agencies. The establishment of the Afghanistan inquiry compensation scheme represents a significant step forward in closing out these recommendations.”
In circumstances where entire communities have been impacted by the death of a person they relied on, the regulations said “in kind” compensation could be provided for an entire village, such as through the “building of infrastructure”.
The scheme, which can provide compensation without establishing criminal liability for killings, also noted sums of money may not provide compensation in the “same way” infrastructure or other supplies would.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the Coalition had sought a briefing from the government on the scheme and “will consider it carefully in the national interest”.
Greens Defence spokesman David Shoebridge said Labor had designed a “bizarre system” to assess compensation claims, arguing the CDF had full-time duties to attend to and adding “hundreds of extremely complex applications” to his workload seemed “unworkable”.

And juxtaposed to the Mall, just across the river, is Arlington. 

Which was once the estate of General Robert E. Lee.

Which reminds me of General George McLellan’s views on Washington, as expressed in a letter to his wife written in early summer 1862 as he was about to embark on the ill-fated march up the Virginia peninsular to take Richmond and end the war, “I feel very glad to be away from that sink of iniquity.”

The commander of the Confederate forces, Joseph E. Johnston, had a bad habit, going back to the Mexican War, of getting seriously wounded in battle, as he did again at the Battle of Seven Pines.

Confederate President Jeff Davis replaced Johnston with Robert E. Lee.