Thomas Aquinas's Proof of God

By Robert Barron
http://www.realclearreligion.org/
October 8, 2014

One of the unintended but happy consequences of the emergence of the new atheism is a renewed interest in the classical arguments for God's existence. Eager to defend the faith that is so vigorously attacked today, Catholic apologists and evangelists have been recovering these rational demonstrations of the truth of God; and the atheists, just as eager to defend their position, have entered into the fray. In the process, these ancient arguments, long thought by many to be obsolete, have found a new relevance and have been brought to greater clarity through the give and take of both critics and advocates.

Thomas Aquinas famously laid out five arguments for the existence of God, but he characterized one of them as "the first and more manifest way." This is the proof from motion, which can be presented simply and schematically as follows. Things move. Since nothing moves itself, everything that is moved must be moved by another. If that which causes the motion is itself being moved, then it must be moved by another. This process cannot go on to infinity. Therefore, there must exist a first unmoved mover, which all people call God.

In order to avoid misunderstanding (and it's fair to say that this argument has been misunderstood for centuries), several observations are in order. When Aquinas speaks of motion, he means change of any kind, not simply change of location. Growth in wisdom, fluctuation in temperature, birth, death, etc. are all examples of motion, or in his more technical language, the transition from potency to actuality. Once we grasp what Aquinas means by motion, it is relatively easy to understand why he insists that nothing can move or change itself. Whatever is in motion must be in potency, while that which causes change must be in actuality, just as the one learning French doesn't yet possess the language and the one teaching it does. Now since the same thing cannot be potential and actual at the same time in the same respect, nothing can be, simultaneously, both mover and moved. No one, strictly speaking, teaches himself French.

But let us suppose that the cause which is putting something in motion is itself being put in motion; then by the same principle, its change must be prompted by another. But this chain of moved movers cannot be indefinite, since the suppression of a first element would imply the suppression of every subsequent mover and hence, finally, of the motion that is evident to our senses. In regard to the negation of this sort of infinite causal series, the 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell had a particularly unhelpful observation. Russell opined that Thomas Aquinas couldn't imagine such a series, because medievals hadn't yet come to terms with the idea of infinite sets. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Aquinas had absolutely no problem imagining infinite series, since he speculated about them all the time. What he is denying is the possibility of an infinite causal series in which each element in the chain is here and now dependent upon the influence of a higher cause. Think of a pen which is here and now being moved by a hand, which is here and now being moved by muscles, which are here and now being moved by nerves, which are here and now being stimulated by the brain, which is here and now being sustained by blood and oxygen, etc. If we suppress the first element in this sort of chain, the entire causal nexus would collapse and the motion under immediate consideration would not be adequately explained. Therefore it follows that a prime mover exists, which is to say, an unactualized source of actualization, an unenergized energizer, an ultimate source of all of the change in the cosmos. 

Now there are many atheists and agnostics who acknowledge that this demonstration is logically airtight but who quarrel with the association that Aquinas makes, almost casually, at the very end: "and this all people call God." There might indeed, they say, be a prime mover or uncaused principle but this first element in the causal chain might be matter or energy or some such physical element. Many point to the famous law of the conservation of energy and conclude that the fundamental stuff of the universe just undergoes continual change of form throughout time.

In order to answer this objection, we have to examine the nature of the unmoved mover a bit more carefully. That which is truly the uncaused or unmoved source of energy must be fully actualized (actus purus in Aquinas's pithy Latin), which means that it is not capable of further realization. But energy or matter is that which is capable of undergoing practically infinite change. Energy or matter is endlessly malleable and hence about as far from actus purus as can be imagined. A rather simple thought experiment shows that such primal physical elements cannot be the unmoved mover. Neither matter nor energy exists as such but always in a particular form or configuration. In regard to either, one could always ask, what color is it, at what velocity does it move, under what conditions does it exist? A given piece of matter is one color, but it could be any other color; energy is at one quantum level, but it could be at any other.

Therefore, we are compelled to inquire about the cause that made it to exist this way rather than that. We can appeal, of course, to some other material cause, but then we are compelled to ask the same question about that cause, and having recourse indefinitely to similarly material movers won't get us anywhere closer to an ultimate explanation. The philosophical dictum that sums up this state of affairs is "act precedes potency." The first cause of change cannot be itself subject to change.

The unmoved mover is that which exists in a state of pure realization, that which cannot be improved in its being, that which simply is, that which is utterly in act. Do you see now why Thomas Aquinas equated it with God?

Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary.

FOUR WAYS G. K. CHESTERTON ENGAGED HIS CULTURE AND WHY HE STILL MATTERS TODAY

By Trevor Wax

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/

October 6, 2014

If you’ve read C. S. Lewis, you’ve read G. K. Chesterton, indirectly at least. Lewis listed Chesterton among his influences, and those who are familiar with both apologists can hear the echoes of Chesterton in the work of Lewis.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a poet, a journalist, an essayist, a literary critic, a novelist, and apologist. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, he was the first writer to refer to “Western” culture and civilization.

Chesterton was a big man (in more ways than one) who made a big splash. How did he engage his culture and why does he still matter? I offer four reasons:

1. Chesterton saw the big picture and would not compartmentalize the world.

Chesterton was a thinker who believed the purpose of education was to make sense of the world and our role in it. Thinking and education are not ends in themselves; they are about “connecting things.” Because he believed everything connects, Chesterton could speak knowledgeably on so many different subjects. He believed that Christianity, if truly all-encompassing, must speak to everything.

• Economics: Chesterton promoted Distributism, an economic ideology rooted in Catholic social teaching.
• Art: Chesterton criticized modern art and literature for “scorning the audience.” His biography of Charles Dickens led to a widespread reassessment of Dickens’ legacy and reestablished him as one of the great authors in English literature.
• Family: Chesterton defended the family as a microcosm of the world (“the home is larger inside than out,” he wrote) that must withstand constant assaults from social engineers who believe the family unit is an obstacle to progress.
• Government: Chesterton doesn’t fit the “right” or “left” paradigm of contemporary American politics, but he believed Christianity should influence government by reinforcing its responsibilities and warning of its imperialistic and overreaching tendencies.

2. Chesterton unmasked false presuppositions as he promoted a Christian worldview.

Chesterton often turned things upside down so his readers could then see them right side up. He made a winsome case for Christianity by poking holes in the assumptions of his opponents. It’s not by force of will, but force of wit that he startles you and makes you think. A few examples:

• On human depravity: “The man who denies original sin believes in the Immaculate Conception of everybody.”
• On miracles, he turns the tables to show that it’s believers, not unbelievers who are always appealing to evidence (“This is why I believe this miracle took place”). Meanwhile, it’s unbelievers, not believers who are always appealing to dogma (“Miracles can’t happen”).
• On naturalism, he flips the common picture of Christians held captive by their ancient superstitions while the “freethinkers” challenge religious dogma. Instead, he demonstrates that Christians are free to believe in an ordered nature, while the materialist can’t admit the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle into his machine. The Christian is freer to think than the freethinker.

Chesterton loved to point out that arguments against Christianity are often contradictory. For example, Christians are accused of being too joyful in the face of evil and suffering; they are also accused of being dour prudes who want to squelch the joy of everyone else. How can both be true?

The takeaway from Chesterton’s apologetic strategy was not just his defense of the faith, but the manner in which he went about his task. He debated his ideological opponents as friends, not enemies. He intended to convert enemies, not crush them. ”The aim of argument is differing in order to agree,” he wrote. “The failure of argument is when you agree to differ.”

3. Chesterton was not swayed by arguments that appeal to progress.

C. S. Lewis coined the term “chronological snobbery,” a description of our temptation to look with disdain on previous eras as if they have little to nothing to offer our advanced society. You can trace the line from Lewis’ warning against chronological snobbery back to Chesterton’s consistent refutations of faddish ideas of “progress.”

Chesterton was always warning his readers about people who fancy themselves reformers who want to do away with social institutions without understanding their historical significance. A few quotes:

“While the truth… is outside time, the heresies are always tied up with the times.”

“The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

For Chesterton, Christianity must not be burdened by whatever is fashionable. It is an act of dignity to defy the fads of contemporary society. The dead fish floats downstream. It’s a sign of life to resist the flow of your culture and stand against the tide.

4. Chesterton exhibited a joyful exuberance at the wonder of existence.

Chesterton was never bored or boring. “There are no uninteresting things,” he wrote. “Only uninterested people.” The emotion that infuses all of Chesterton’s writing is gratitude – a sign of joy and life, a sense of wonder at even the most mundane gifts we take for granted. ”Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese,” he wrote, and then proceeded to rectify this egregious oversight.

According to Chesterton, one way we pay tribute to our Creator is by our endless fascination with His creation. Take, for example, the classic essay “What I Found in My Pocket,” which gives insight into the clever and creative ways Chesterton’s curiosity led him on fantastic journeys of thought.

John Piper once explained why Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is one of the few books he has read twice:

“I will keep coming back to anyone who helps me see and be astonished at what is in front of my face – anyone who can help heal me from the disease of ‘seeing they do not see.'”

I echo the sentiment. Chesterton still matters for the model of cultural engagement he provides: a comprehensive vision of Christianity that touches all of life, challenges our modern sensibilities, and leads us back to childlike wonder at the world God has made.

Roger Stone’s Book ‘Nixon’s Secrets’ A Shocking Read

By Patrick Howley

http://dailycaller.com/

September 26, 2014

Roger Stone’s new book Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth About The President, Watergate, and The Pardon is a Washington thriller that hinges on a shocking revelation: that the CIA once planned to assassinate President Richard Nixon.

Written by Nixon operative, post-White House Nixon friend, and Daily Caller men’s fashion editor Roger Stone and his co-writer Mike Colapietro (authors of “The Man Who Killed Kennedy,” a New York Times bestseller fingering LBJ as the culprit), this latest 700-page tome is a thoroughly readable tour of the dark places of Cold War American politics.

Stone, a Nixon admirer but not a hagiographer, told me that it’s a “story of resilience.” The last example of resilience, in Nixon’s case, was his post-resignation comeback as an author and sometime Bill Clinton foreign policy adviser.

Stone revealed to me that Hillary Clinton, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, tried to prevent retired Nixon from meeting her husband, then-President Clinton, in the early days of the Clinton administration.

“Every time we sent an emissary (Dole, Strauss) to Clinton to facilitate a meeting with Richard Nixon, Clinton would react favorably and then … Nothing,” Stone said. “Dick Morris learned Hillary killed each proposed meeting.”

Roger Stone has been a welcome though somewhat haunting presence in my life, characterized by his habit of sending me tabloid newspaper clippings in manila envelopes with the return address partially blacked out. It always adds a dose of intrigue to days marked by government oversight hearings.

Since the famous Matt Labash profile of Stone in The Weekly Standard — a literary achievement I dare not try to emulate — Stone has been a familiar brand, name-checked in the Kevin Spacey flick “Recount,” featured in Alex Gibney’s brilliant documentary “Client 9: The Rise And Fall of Eliot Spitzer” and acclaimed for his Richard Nixon back tattoo. Fame, a poison in the world of political operatives, has allowed him to find his second true calling: as a writer who can say anything he wants about what he’s experienced.

It is hard to overstate how much I enjoyed reading Roger’s new book. This second offering from the dapper one is the story he was meant to tell. Though Nixon is ostensibly the main character, the book takes flight in its details — its anecdotes on Nixon’s inner circle, both during and after his presidential years, on Kennedy, on Goldwater, on Spiro Agnew, on Watergate squealer and detested Stone nemesis John Dean (whom Stone is determined to beat in book sales, even without the Bob Woodward review in the Washington Post that Dean’s book got).

In reading the passage on Agnew I came to appreciate that this book in its head-spinning velocity and detailed animation of double-dealing and backroom deals might actually be one of the most sober examinations of Washington political culture ever put to print.

Stone captures the Catch-22 former Vice President Agnew faced immediately prior to his 1973 resignation: facing Nixon’s political wrath and, at least in his own mind, the threat of CIA assassination, Agnew went back and forth with Nixon administration officials about what kind of corruption he would plead guilty to and resign over. It’s a quintessentially Washington tableau: a powerful man, suddenly a liability, negotiating the fictional terms of his own disgrace and paying fines on back taxes he never owed.

Why was Agnew given the boot? As Stone explained to me, Nixon needed a sure bet for a pardon from his vice president, he had House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (a former Warren Commission member) in his pocket, and he also figured “Gerry is so dumb” that Congress would never impeach him and make Ford president.

This is, compared to what the schoolchildren learn, alternative history. It’s all the better for it. This insider account should be required reading for anyone who wants the truth, in magnificent detail, about the Nixon White House and post-presidency, and for anyone who wants to learn the appropriate tone to strike in writing about Washington, D.C. (Young political reporters take note).

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Tags: Hillary Clinton, Richard Nixon, Roger Stone

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Ben Affleck’s Islam Problem

Bill Maher and Sam Harris are the exception to liberal relativism. 

By Rich Lowry

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 7, 2014

Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, and Sam Harris

The latest episode of Bill Maher’s HBO show Real Time performed what was, in effect, an in-studio social experiment.

It sought to establish, in a controlled setting, the answer to this pressing question: How long could Maher and atheist author Sam Harris talk frankly about the illiberalism of much of the Muslim world before actor and director Ben Affleck, also a guest on the show, accused them of racism?

The result is in: not very.

In fact, almost as soon as Maher and Harris began to discuss how liberals are betraying their own convictions if they don’t stand up against social backwardness in the Muslim world, Affleck grew visibly agitated. He could barely contain himself when Harris opined, “We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people.”

That’s when Affleck interrupted, and soon enough, he was calling Maher and Harris out for their grossness, ugliness, and, yes, racism. How does it feel, guys?

You might be wondering, “Why should I care what the new Batman thinks?” The heated exchange was so notable because all three are men of the Left in good standing. As a walking embodiment of liberal piety, Affleck is emblematic of the movement’s see-no-evil discomfort with frank truths about the Muslim world.

The prelude to the intra-liberal fight was the prior week’s show, when Maher pointed out the absurdity of liberals’ getting exercised over, say, actor Jonah Hill’s using an anti-gay vulgarism, but ignoring that gays can be stoned in Muslim countries. “To count yourself as a liberal,” Maher declared, “you have to stand up for liberal principles” — meaning across the board.

Maher had zeroed in on one of the more perverse aspects of contemporary politics, which is that self-consciously tolerant liberals often look the other way when confronted with the intolerance of the Muslim world.

For them, saying discouraging things about Islam feels too judgmental. It requires insisting on the superiority of certain Western standards. It means jettisoning the comforting fictions of multiculturalism. It entails resisting the reflex to consider any criticism of the Third World as presumptive racism.

As militant atheists, Maher and Harris feel free of these constraints; criticizing religion is part of what they do for a living. As a garden-variety liberal, Affleck is subject to all of them and reacted as if two Klansmen had wandered onto the set with him.

When Maher and Harris pointed out how widespread retrograde attitudes are in the Muslim world, Affleck said they were “stereotyping.” But the data doesn’t stereotype. Especially in less-developed countries, it is appalling.

The percentage of Muslims in Middle Eastern and South Asian countries who say that honor killings are never justified is shockingly low (31 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Pakistan). Support for the stoning of adulterers is more than 40 percent in Bangladesh and 80 percent in Afghanistan. The death penalty for leaving Islam is almost, although not quite, as popular as stoning.

Affleck simply couldn’t handle the truth. He kept on insisting it is just a few bad apples who think this way. At one point, he tried to wave Maher and Harris off with a condemnation of the Iraq War, positing an implicit moral equivalence between an overly idealistic war of liberation and the stoning of apostates.

Affleck obviously isn’t a public official or a public intellectual. But he represents a dominant tendency within liberalism. Imagine a State Department staffed by less-glamorous Ben Afflecks. Imagine a president of the United States who shares his instincts. This is the Obama administration. It’s why, in part, it has always been so reluctant to speak of Islamic terrorism and extremism. It’s why the president says the Islamic State is not Islamic.

The nation is truly in peril if Bill Maher, of all people, is more clear-eyed than those running our government.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2014 King Features Syndicate

Today's Tune: The War on Drugs - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Today's Tune: The War on Drugs - Red Eyes (Live)

Music Review: The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream

By Ryan Burleson

http://www.pastemagazine.com/

March 18, 2014

I wasn’t sure I needed an album like Lost in the Dream until I heard it. Even then, it took a few listens before I could articulate why it scans the way it does: Wistful but not resigned, invigorated but not wide-awake. As its title suggests, Lost in the Dream often trades in gaseous, impressionistic hues, and a cavalry of affected guitar, synth, lap steel, sax, harmonica and piano tracks gel into luminescent aural sunsets at several points throughout the album. These ambient drifts bookend Adam Granduciel’s tender songs, the lyrics of which also tend to reveal themselves in refracted ways. Indeed, it can be difficult to discern more than a handful of lines in succession—Granduciel’s feathery, mostly reserved delivery sees to this, as well as the tonnage of reverb baked into the mix—but listeners can’t miss the sense of melancholy and anxiety woven into nearly every second of Lost’s hour-plus run-time. “Am I alone here, living in darkness?” he asks on “Eyes to the Wind,” his questioning telling all in a handful of words.

This sense of need derives from a predicament in which I find myself in 2014, when it’s easier to discover, say, an adventurous R&B artist than a new band of trad-rockers with anything interesting to say, musically or otherwise. Rock isn’t dead, of course. But, at least as far as “indie” is concerned, the landscape has shifted so far in the last two decades that it almost seems like an act of rebellion to hit the stage with only two six-strings, a bass and a drum kit. I suspect that’s due as much to technological innovation as to the discomforting fact that rockers may be running out of ways to be interesting, which might partly explain why indie bands in particular seem so infatuated with the past at this juncture. But The War on Drugs give me hope that the genre isn’t completely picked over, that perhaps the answer doesn’t so much lie in re-treading the past as it does in looking outside rock music entirely for inspiration.

Don’t get me wrong: Only a creature from another planet would miss the iconic rock/pop touchstones which inform much of Lost in the Dream. Nods to heartland troubadours Neil Young, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen abound, as do faithful takes on Britpop and Americana. But it’s to Granduciel’s credit that the touchstones are minor points in a much vaster narrative that also seems to include left-field inspirations like drone music. (Whether this was intentional or not is beside the point.) And there’s no mistaking that the 34-year-old’s own hard-won vision carries more weight in his work than any aging rocker or laptop wiz-kid’s influence could ever hope to. Lost in the Dream pushes rock music forward—it isn’t the mirror of supposed better times that lesser bands make because they can’t or don’t want to locate their own voice.

The first song most of us heard from Lost was “Red Eyes,” a galloping, wide-eyed romper that somehow manages to float even as it surges forward. This is a tactic Granduciel uses often and effectively, letting the drums and acoustic guitars provide a consistent spine so that he can push and pull the watery, tremolo’d leads, sax, synth and other ambient flourishes with a nuanced grace. It’s all very beautiful, enamoring stuff until the songwriter dispenses with the niceties and throttles everything in the mix to near-peaking levels, as he does toward the end of both “Red Eyes” and its companion “Burning,” which Granduciel himself recently (and rightfully) compared to Rod Stewart’s 1981 hit “Young Turks.” “An Ocean in Between the Waves” is Lost’s other stampede, building incessantly for seven minutes to an abrupt and powerful stop.

The rest of Lost proceeds at a slower clip, oscillating between a sort of drip-drip tenderness (“Suffering”), comforting alt-country (“Eyes to the Wind” and “Lost in the Dream”), and, in a singular turn for the album, a kind of vibe-y, delay-heavy hypnosis (“Disappearing”). (There’s also the meditative instrumental “The Haunting Idle,” which seemed unnecessary until I realized how perfectly it sets up the explosion of “Burning.”) Of these modes, I’m most seduced by the mid-section of “Suffering,” which is one of the most romantic pieces of rock music I’ve heard in years. Granduciel and band drift gently between C and F chords before ambling down to A, a reminder of how one subtle, elegant shift is worth a thousand superfluous runs. He asks, “Will you be here, suffering?” less as a passive-aggressive barb than a tired plea for empathy, the music suggesting neither anger nor supplication. Many times Granduciel is more spirited on Lost, but the M.O. of “Suffering” seems, to me at least, to speak volumes about the powerful undercurrent running throughout the collection. He’s known pain in his time, but losing hope doesn’t appear to be an option. He’s “just a burning man, tryin’ to keep the ship from turning over, again.”

Review: 'Lost in the Dream' by The War on Drugs

The War On Drugs Photo by Dusdin Condren

By Eric Goldberg

http://www.popmatters.com/

March 10, 2014

Adam Granduciel, the man behind the War on Drugs, has been recording trance-inducing Americana since 2005, and along with his long-time friend and former bandmate Kurt Vile, created a whole new style of folk-based rock reverie doused in an ocean of synthesizers. Lost in the Dream is the band’s third full-length and continues to develop the Tom Petty-meets-Sonic Youth sound they pioneered. On all of the band’s previous releases, Granduciel would build the core of the songs himself, playing most of the instruments and endlessly tinkering with the mixes until they’d reached an adequate level of perfection. He’s had various musicians play on previous albums but with Lost in the Dream Granduciel decided to change things up. He recorded the core of these songs with two collaborators, longtime bass player Dave Hartley and pianist Robbie Bennett.

The inclusion of Hartley and Bennett is immediately evident. While Granduciel has always used piano in his songs to some extant, his use was relegated to a few chords that accentuated the songs. Many of the songs here feature Robbie Bennett’s piano work prominently and these arrangements are much more involved than on previous the War on Drugs incarnations. The foregrounded piano on “Under the Pressure”, “Red Eyes”, and “Eyes to the Wind” proves a perfect compliment to the lyrical and vocal maturity on display here. Although it remains effects laden, Granduciel’s voice is more expressive than ever as well. That passion burns bright through the driving “Red Eyes” as well as the gentle “Suffering”. Whereas, Granduciel is no stranger to ballads, “Suffering” is perhaps his most affecting song to date. In the past, Granduciel’s lyrics were often metaphor-laden (“Arms Like Boulders” and “Needle in Your Eye #16”), but the lyrics on Lost in the Dream continue to relate on a more personal level, much in the same way Slave Ambient‘s “Brothers” did. When he sings, “Will you be here suffering?” you can feel it in the pit of your stomach. It aches with sadness and the humanity displayed works to the album’s advantage. Often the most personal feelings are also the most universal.

Lost in the Dream is the next logical evolutionary step in the War on Drugs’ sound, taking classic rock and recreating it in Granduciel’s image. The album continues his love affair with synthesizers, but also sees him expanding his sonic palette. “Under the Pressure” and “Red Eyes” approach ‘80s new wave in keyboard sounds, while “Burning” uses Born in the USA-style synthesizers to dreamier effect. Granduciel had flirted with some of these sounds on 2011’s Slave Ambient, but their prominence on Lost in the Dream defines the record’s sound. Granduciel’s songwriting has always been pretty straightforward in a classic rock sense, but his arrangements have always been complex and here they continue to grow in size and scope. Guitar sounds and hazy murmurs float in and out of focus over a glowing atmosphere of synthesizers, approximating the actual sound of dreams as much as a band like My Bloody Valentine. What’s amazing about Granduciel’s songwriting is that even as he approaches and crosses the ethereal plane, his songs can still be anthems in the same way Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan songs can be anthems.

The song lengths here stretch out further than on previous releases with only “The Haunting Idle” hovering around the three-minute mark. Despite these long lengths, the songs never meander or feel too long. Instead they glide forward triumphantly, lingering longer on moments of beauty rather than ending prematurely. The album’s centerpiece is the triumphant “Eyes to the Wind”, a song that lifts your spirits until they’re absolutely soaring. It’s an anthem that even beats out Wagonwheel Blues opener “Arms Like Boulders” for the best song Granduciel has ever written. The song reaches “Thunder Road”-esque grandeur and, if it doesn’t get your adrenaline pumping, then you better check your pulse and make sure you aren’t dead. The album tends to bask in its own magnificence and rightly so. Final track “In Reverse” takes its time getting started, having more than earned the right to do so.

Lost in the Dream is an elegant, triumphant album and perhaps the pinnacle of the ambient Americana sound Granduciel and Kurt Vile invented with Wagonwheel Blues and Vile’s Constant Hitmaker, respectively. It’s an alternate universe in which ‘80s Bruce Springsteen began using synthesizers to approximate dream states for anthems like “Born in the USA” and “Dancing in the Dark” instead of using them in service of pop melodies. Wagonwheel Blues took the indie world by storm with its re-appropriation of classic rock while the increased fidelity of Slave Ambient grew brighter and bigger on top of Wagonwheel‘s foundations. Those albums were great, but Lost in the Dream is not only a growth, but a perfection of that sound. With their third album, the War on Drugs continue to recreate classic rock in their own image and in doing so they created a classic album of their own.

Rating:

President Ebola

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 6, 2014 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 17 Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

U.S. President Barack Obama takes reporters' questions during a news conference at the conclusion of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in the Dean Acheson Auditorium at the State Department August 6, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama hosted the first-time, three-day summit to strengthen ties between the United States and African nations.

In 2009, Obama lifted the ban on AIDS cases entering the United States. Describing HIV as “a virus that has touched lives,” he announced that he was ending a ban based on “fear rather than fact.”

Obama didn’t specify what new facts about AIDS had been discovered that made it no longer infectious or a threat to public health. Instead he just had the CDC remove HIV from the list of “communicable diseases of public health significance.” Was HIV no longer of “public health significance”? The amount of money being lavished on it indicated otherwise. Was it then suddenly no longer communicable?

The CDC awkwardly tried to explain why syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases were still on the list, but HIV wasn’t. The answer could be summed as “because Obama said so.” The CDC did promise to “consider other diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases, for scientific review.” But most STDs don’t have their own billion-dollar lobby that can make or break politicians.

In a cage match between public health and politically correct cash, the winner was AIDS. And so the ban was lifted and immigrants no longer had to be tested for HIV.

But Obama was not a one-disease politician. He was also open to being touched by other viruses. The same year that his CDC decided that AIDS was no longer a communicable disease, Bush era quarantine regs were also scrapped.  The regs had been part of an Avian Flu response that Senator Obama had demanded when he was cynically maneuvering for political advantage. But that was then. This is now.

In a bid for amnesty, Obama opened the southern border and flooded America with dangerous diseases.

The commitment to open borders had clear viral consequences. Border agents have already come down with antibiotic resistant infections carried by illegal aliens and in some cases passed these diseases on to their children. Also along for the ride was Swine Flu, a potentially fatal and communicable disease.

Obama had declared Swine Flu a “national emergency” around the same time that he was putting out the welcome mat for AIDS. But in his push for amnesty, he also welcomed Swine Flu into the country.

And that was just the beginning.

An Enterovirus D68 outbreak, that has now claimed the life of an American child, followed. The death took place in New Jersey, which has one of the highest rates of unaccompanied alien minor placements and possibly the highest rate when accounting for territorial size. Some D68 cases appeared to be linked to a mysterious condition in Colorado causing paralysis and spinal cord abnormalities in children.

As horrifying as these public health crises caused by Obama’s open borders policy are, the real nightmare may still be coming.

Even though Ebola doesn’t have its own lobby yet, it’s getting the AIDS treatment. The White House has been firm about rejecting any Ebola travel ban. Instead arriving visitors from Ebolaland are getting flyers at airports telling them to report any symptoms to their doctor. The CDC is claiming that the source screenings, which can be fooled by an Ebola carrier taking Advil, are good enough.

And if not, well, the Democratic Party’s voters have to come from somewhere. Who cares if they happen to be vomiting up blood while they’re casting their vote?

If AIDS can magically stop being a “communicable disease of public health significance,” why not Ebola? Why not any and every epidemic that might potentially keep a future Democrat out of Chicago?

As with AIDS, Obama is taking the line that Ebola has to be stopped at its source in Africa and that keeping the infected out of America will somehow interfere with this mission. It’s the sort of reasoning that makes a lot of sense to someone who views borders and nations as outdated relics. It doesn’t, however, make much sense to most Americans who still think there is such a thing as the United States.

The media, which can stir up a mass panic over a fly in a restaurant, is warning of “Ebola-phobia” and assuring the country that there’s no reason to fear an outbreak. Ebola isn’t really all that contagious, say all the same media outlets which have been claiming that AIDS and leprosy aren’t all that contagious. But then again no disease carried by Democratic Party voters can be considered truly contagious.

Except maybe leftism.

Now that we know that we don’t have to worry, it’s only a question of which outbreak we don’t have to worry about first.

Due to Obama’s policies, we have so many contagious and deadly diseases waiting in line to infect Americans that it’s not clear which outbreak we should be worrying about the least. Should we be getting unready for an Ebola outbreak, a Swine Flu outbreak or an Enterovirus B68 outbreak?

But that’s what happens when the border security of a nation vanishes into thin air.

ISIS fighters who returned to the United States were allowed in. Illegal aliens with every possible disease were allowed in. Any other course of action would be Islamophobia and Ebolaphobia.

ObamaCare has a menu of exotic disease outbreaks to cope with. Even as Ebola enriches our airports, Virginia has become “Ground Zero” for Chagas disease which kills 11,000 people a year, a mysterious paralyzing virus is spreading across Colorado and the border patrol even caught a case of leprosy.

Where does one go to find leprosy in the age of Obama? New York City. While the United States is overwhelmed with foreign leprosy cases, it is now possible to be born in New York City and live your entire life there and still come down with leprosy because it’s become an endemic disease. Leprosy cases really took off after Ted Kennedy’s Immigration and Nationality Act did to public health what he had done to Mary Jo Kopechne. The top source countries for the disease are Mexico, Vietnam and Cuba.

So much for socialized medicine.

Open borders means a constantly shifting menu of diseases and terrorist threats that never go away because the door is open. It’s as open to an Ebola patient as it is to an ISIS Jihadist. AIDS is as welcome as the next Anwar Al-Awlaki. They are all part of the great multicultural future of the Democratic Party in which Islamic terrorists and Third World diseases battle it out for the opportunity to destroy America.

If an Ebola outbreak does happen, this disastrous administration and its leader may go down in history as President Ebola. But even if it doesn’t, there’s always President Swine Flu or President B68.

And there are always the classics. Three years after Obama took down the HIV travel ban, foreign-born Latinos AIDS cases in New York had risen to 31%. There’s a lot of talk about the importance of spreading awareness of the disease, but we could start by spreading awareness of the fact that allowing people with infectious diseases into the United States has deadly consequences.

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“The Drop”: A masterful Brooklyn thriller — and James Gandolfini’s terrific final role

Gandolfini, Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace headline a fantastic cast in this twisty, riveting Dennis Lehane thriller

By ANDREW O'HEHIR

http://www.salon.com/

September 11, 2014

The stylized and claustrophobic crime thriller “The Drop,” which is full of twists and traps for both its characters and the audience, doesn’t so much take place in the real Brooklyn of 2014 as in a fictional Brooklyn of the mind wrought from the borough’s colorful history. I’m sure someone will write in to tell me that old-time nay-buh-hood tough guys like the ones played by Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini in this movie can still be found in corners of Bensonhurst or Sheepshead Bay or wherever, but that’s not really the point. This vision of Brooklyn is the creation of crime novelist Dennis Lehane (who adapted the screenplay for this film from his short story “Animal Rescue”), who has established himself, across “Gone Baby Gone” and “Mystic River” and numerous other movie-friendly books, as the poet laureate of the white Catholic urban Northeast even as it fades toward extinction.

There are many reasons to admire this tense and tightly constructed film, which marks the impressive English-language debut of Oscar-nominated Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam, but one of the best lies in the alternately vulnerable and terrifying performance by Gandolfini, in his final film role. He isn’t playing Tony Soprano here, but a corrupt small-time goon named Cousin Marv, a guy more like one of the low-level mobsters whom Tony terrorizes and dominates, and who yearns to find a way to fight back. Marv was once the owner of the divey neighborhood tavern, and his name is still above the door, but years ago he had to settle a mysterious debt by surrendering the bar to a glossy-haired Chechen mobster called Chovka (the terrific Michael Aronov). So Marv lumbers on through life, doing a younger man’s bidding, bossing around his bartender and cousin, Bob (played by Hardy), and living in one of those tiny, knickknack-encrusted, outer-borough bungalows with his sister Dottie (Ann Dowd).

In the borderline-surrealist universe created by Roskam, cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis and their design team, Marv’s existence is like a living death, or a slow-motion version of hell: When Dottie dares to express the idea that they should cash in their house and their savings accounts and go travel, “go see things,” Marv answers without looking up from the sports page: “What things?” There are a couple of lines in “The Drop” that made the audience audibly gasp at the screening I attended, most notably the one when Marv tells one of his no-account acquaintances, “We’re all dead men walking. We just don’t know it yet.” We’re meant to see an immediate contrast between the battered and embittered Marv and Bob, the proverbial decent guy in an indecent situation. Bob narrates the beginning and end of the film, and he isn’t anywhere near as slow on the uptake as he first appears. But he has a position of Switzerland-like neutrality to uphold; he knows what goes on in the neighborhood but steers clear of the obvious bad guys, while trying to remain a mild nonentity in the eyes of the cops.

This is Lehane’s first produced screenplay (he has previously written episodes of “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Wire”), and you’re either going to respond to his hard-boiled, zinger-laden dialogue or you’re not. For my money this is a highly potent pairing of writer and director; Roskam pushes the suspense and paranoia to horror-movie levels as the mysterious events and aphoristic, misleading conversations of Lehane’s script begin to close around Marv and Bob like an invisible net. Cousin Marv’s Corner is one of a rotating network of bars used by Chovka’s crew as “drops,” where an entire evening’s illegal receipts for gambling and drugs and whatever else, from all over Brooklyn, will be gathered and collected. It isn’t a “drop night” when Marv’s gets stuck up by a couple of masked hoodlums, thankfully, but Chovka still isn’t delighted to have $5,000 of his money disappear into the night, and Bob and Marv need to do their utmost to get it back.

That mishap is not fatal, or at least not for the bar proprietors, but it attracts a lot of attention from undesirable quarters, including the seemingly friendly Detective Torres (John Ortiz), who attends 8 o’clock Mass with Bob every morning — at a soon-to-be-closed Catholic church, a nice Lehane-ian touch — and can’t help noticing that he never takes confession. Concerned that Bob and Marv are staging or planning a big inside job, Chovka insists that they handle the million-dollar drop for the biggest gambling day of the year: Super Bowl Sunday. (Snippets from the actual Denver-Seattle game earlier this year are overheard, a marketing and licensing triumph of sorts.) While they prepare for the big event, Marv and Bob need to wash off a bunch of blood-stained cash, get rid of a severed arm (with a stopped watch) and – oh yeah! – discuss Bob’s unexpected acquisition of a new girlfriend and a new puppy.

At first, the abused pit bull that Bob finds in a trash can outside the house of a waitress named Nadia (Noomi Rapace) seems entirely unrelated to the story about Bob and Marv and Chovka and the money, and the question of who is double-crossing whom and why. Except no, it actually doesn’t. Roskam understands the essential dream-logic at work in Lehane’s best stories, where nothing is ever coincidental. It’s obvious that Nadia has some relationship to the dog, either literal or metaphorical – the first thing Bob notices about her are the potato-peeler scars on her neck. And Nadia’s tentative romance with Bob, cemented by their mutual adoption of Rocco the (irresistible) puppy, lures in a notorious local character called Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts, the star of Roskam’s memorable first feature, “Bullhead,” as well as Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone”).

In case you’re keeping score, that makes an Englishman, a Swedish woman and a Belgian, playing the three legs of a potentially violent Noo Yawk triangle. That sounds like a disastrous multinational farrago, but honestly they’re all terrific and I never had a problem with it. If Hardy’s Brooklyn accent feels a little studied, he’s such a powerful physical actor that he commands the screen anyway. Rapace is playing a Russian immigrant, which is no problem, and she can do hunted, haunted and damaged like nobody’s business. Schoenaerts is so scary and so convincing as Eric that I didn’t realize he was a foreigner until I looked him up later. As I’ve said, the world of “The Drop” isn’t entirely naturalistic and isn’t meant to be. Even if you want to argue that these characters represent some plausible 21st-century urban reality, they’re also specters or projections or archetypes drawn from all the other crime stories we’ve read or seen.

If you know Lehane’s work, you don’t need me to tell you that none of these people, Bob and Nadia included, is entirely as they seem to be on the surface. I suppose we can except Chovka, who never pretends to be anything other than a slimy, murderous and manipulative Chechen crime lord. (Aronov deserves an Oscar for the way he milks an extended moment when Marv and Bob serve him a shot of small-batch Irish whiskey and stand around hoping he’ll like it.) Oh, and here’s a small but necessary spoiler: Rocco the dog has no dark secrets, and is just fine. Look, be warned: “The Drop” is a bloody and downbeat fable whose final twists are not going to send you out of the theater humming the “Ode to Joy” or anything. But I found this dark odyssey through an amoral dream Brooklyn curiously invigorating; it’s a masterful construction that held me rapt from first shot to last, that builds intense electrical energy and then releases it. While it’s heartbreaking to see the grace and grief and tragedy of Gandolfini’s final performance and realize that he’s gone, it’s one hell of a movie to go out with.