Wheat & Weeds

Does Welfare Cause Terrorism?

2013-05-25T07:49:00.001-05:00

relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe.

Yes. Plus,as Geert Wilders points out in his book, adherents of radical Islarm are explicitly taught that Western welfare programs are a form of jiziya they are owed. What would be surprising would be an Islamist based in the West and not on the dole.

Oh, Bravo

2013-05-24T15:37:00.002-05:00

Conservatives, Condoms & Compassion RTWT, but here's the money quote:

while one can perhaps imagine a government that would help “average” people to realize their transcendent hopes and aspirations, our actual government is designed to wring any meaning out of life.

Instacurtsy

Bishop Jeffords-Schori: Demonic Posession Is A Spiritual Gift

2013-05-22T17:19:00.001-05:00

In case you missed it, the woman America's Episcopalians elected their primate went down to Venezuela and preached an interesting sermon -- one in which she rebukes St. Paul for his masculine presumption in stealing a possessed girl's "spiritual awareness" from her.

Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!

Just to be clear, the passage from Acts 16 describes Paul casting a demon out of a slave girl whose masters are using her possession to make moolah. The possessed girl is holier than St. Paul, according to the chief bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

I wonder if she is also holier than Jesus, who was known to cast out a few demons himself? Is he too guilty of not being able to recognize "beauty" which is "different"?

As Simcha Fisher says, please, Episcopalians,

get out now. Your church is bonkers.
I'm not even kidding. If you read your bishop's sermon and a cold horror came creeping over your mind, please remember: the Catholic Church is here. We will always be here. We will always be waiting. We have a couple of insane bishops, too, but they hardly ever get interviewed by the New York Times, and many of them are actually decent scholars, and faithful and courageous guys.

Indeed. This is what Benedict XVI made the Anglican Ordinariate for.

Calling Him Out

2013-05-22T14:43:00.000-05:00

Not sure Richard Dawkins actually merits the attention, but John Zmirak smites him nonetheless, pointing out the great "scientist" uses nothing like the scientific method to back up his theories -- such as that raising kids in religion is a form of abuse. The conclusion:

Dawkins reads an anecdote in a letter from a stranger, and from that incident alone concocts a universal theory, and proposes a social policy that would violate the rights of billions of parents across the globe, exactly as the racist scientists of Germany and America used their head calipers and biased IQ tests to justify strapping down helpless patients and mutilating them, for the greater good. So now you know: Richard Dawkins practices Nazi science without the accent.

Nothing Can Be Done

2013-05-11T20:02:00.001-05:00

By Ramirez, shamelessly pinched from here.

The country appears to be imploding.

The IRS has had to apologize for targeting Conservative groups for auditing (though it's not being forthcoming about how high-level the policy was).
David Stockman predicts doom and while many of his specific policy recommendations are somewhat rubbish, there's this:

These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
....
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.

That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

Even Harry Reid has figured out that Obamacare is "a train wreck." Meanwhile, the HHS Secretary who brought us Obamacare's death panels doesn't understand how they work . Update: Sen. Baucus retiring because of Obamacare.
Kermit Gosnell, a particularly gruesome abortionist, is on trial for murdering babies born alive and criminal neglect of a woman that led to her death. In testimony that is too gruesome to read, his staffers have testified that he or they "snipped" (meaning, killed with scissors after they were born alive) hundreds of babies over the years. He also didn't sterilize instruments and thus spread STDs to patients, refused anesthesia to minority clients, and forced women with second thoughts into abortions. ABC's Terry Moran called him (in a tweet) the "most successful mass murderer in American history," but the press can't be bothered to tell the story. Well....now they are, a little, after pro-lifers campaigned relentlessly. But the story is yucky, and everyone knows the reason the press doesn't cover it is because it's a little too much like every other abortion clinic. As Senator Boxer recently admitted, scoring against her own goal.
Pro-immigration Republicans are joining in the Left's crucifixion of an honest researcher.
And the press has finally discovered Benghazi (when you lose ABC.....) -- a shameful episode in which through utter incompetence the State Dept. allowed a fine public servant and his security team to die needlessly and then callously lied about it and tried to discredit the chief whistle blower. Even the Washington Post now outright says the White House explanation is a lie. In a free and functioning America, that would be impeachment bait, but no one is going to impeach the first black president, especially not when he has "President Joe Biden" as an ace in the hole.

Nothing can be done. Which leads me to The Official Cartoonist's latest, w/ apologies to Lew, Stept & Tobias. Here's a taste, and then click over to sing the whole thing to yourself.

Come Solyndra, I can guarantee a loan
Comes the Beltway, I can criticize the tone
Come Benghazi? Nothing could be done.
Come vacation, Michelle. can take a separate plane
Come Joe Biden, I can leave him on the train
Come Benghazi, Nothing could be done.

Stand down Brother.
What difference does it make?
I’ll blame u-tube
While I campaign at your wake.

Brian Terry? There’s privilege to invoke
Eat a canine? I can always make a joke.
Come Benghazi? Nothing could be done.

Heroes & Traitors

2013-05-04T17:12:00.003-05:00

Steve Pickering as Wallenstein, Shakespeare Theater, Scott Suchman photo

While they're still playing, just wanted to put in a quick plug for Wallenstein & Coriolanus, in rotating rep at the Shakespeare Theater through the end of the month. The theater thinks the two plays are related because each features a great military hero who, betrayed by his country, then turns on it. They're calling it the traitor-hero series. Who's a hero: you be the judge?

They're just well done. Wallenstein is a Schiller play I knew nothing about prior to seeing this production, and I gather it's been rather loosely translated, though very skillfully: the language is elegant and sharp. Directed by Michael Kahn (whom I always maintain is the nation's best director for the stage -- he really knows how to bring the best out of actors), this a solid piece of work all around, very fresh.

Patrick Page as Coriolanus, Scott Suchman Photo

I'm not quite as sold on the partner production, Coriolanus, mostly because the actor who plays Coriolanus' foil, Aufidius, is somewhat weak and that mars things. But Patrick Page is a fabulous Coriolanus -- this is the same fellow who maybe ten years ago now portrayed a Iago so subtly menacing he made the audience hiss: just a tremendous actor.

He has the guts to play Coriolanus as something of an SOB, which I think is called for in the text. The last couple of productions of the play I've seen, Coriolanus seemed entirely noble and his refusal to show his wounds in public humble, such that the people seemed genuinely to have wronged him and he was almost a martyr. This production doesn't make that mistake --there's a far more interesting question posed about what Coriolanus deserves.

There are also some humorous moments deftly handled here. Diane D'Aquila makes a magnificent Volumnia, and she's wonderful in a scene where she pretends to let her grandson vanquish her as an enemy. And the people are shown to be what we might now call "low information voters" as a little relief from the tension of the main action. Quite well done.

Just Arrived

2013-05-03T19:40:00.001-05:00

Yay! And Mr. W. is generously (he might say, wisely) allowing me to read it first. Trying to read it through and resist the urge to turn right to the chapters on politics.

Tempting Child Protective Services

2013-05-01T20:00:00.001-05:00

When my kids were littler and I was a more paranoid mom, I saw this feature which showed that little children have no clear idea what a "stranger" is, with the result that one minute after moms instructed their offspring not to talk to strangers, the kids would do pretty much anything a stranger said. This was caught on camera -- to a little kid, a "stranger" looks scary like a monster or the bogeyman, so if the person looked nice, he was by definition not a stranger.

This terrified me, so I made a point not only of clarifying that a stranger might look nice, but also of testing the kids by driving by as they walked somewhere and role-playing their resisting my efforts to give them candy or have them help me find my missing puppy or whatever.

In retrospect this was a bit over the top on my part, especially for our neighborhood, but cut me some slack. They were my first kids. Now I'm a slacker mom who wouldn't even notice if the younger ones went missing.*

This has evolved into a running gag where if I happen to come home from work or from errands and see my kids coming home from school or the park, I slow down, roll down the window and offer them a lift home in my creepiest Creeper voice, "Hey, Little Boy, you want to get in my car? I'll give you some caaaandy."

(Hahahaha. I also wolf-whistle and cat-call Mr. W and he pretends to blush.)

Today I did this to Youngest Weed and a friend. His friend didn't get the joke and was somewhat put out that I didn't follow through with the candy.

And the Lord only knows what he told his parents.

*Attn CPS: that was a joke.

How I'm Observing Earth Day

2013-04-22T15:03:00.003-05:00

...by mocking it.

First there is this headline I've been seeing all day, wrongly assuming it was from the Onion: Earth Day leader killed, composted girlfriend.

I was going to remark at least he was consistent and composted, but when I finally clicked through, I found to my horror:

Inside the closet, police found Maddux's beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.

Styrofoam and air fresheners? Those take much longer to biodegrade than the poor girlfriend.

And treat yourself to 13 Worst Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970, including these gems:

"It is already too late to avoid mass starvation" --Denis Hayes, Earth day organizer

The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." — Kenneth Watt

Good Shepherd Sunday

2013-04-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

Shanghai artist Yu Jiade, The Good Shepherd,

Shamelessly pinched from here.

Curtsy: Fr. Dennis Brown's facebook page.

Not To Diminish The First Responders, But....

2013-04-20T06:58:00.000-05:00

Isn't the REAL hero of Boston a smoker? Scroll WAY the heck down in this quite good account of the manhunt in Watertown and you find this:

A resident in his 60s, believed to be called David Hanneberry, reportedly went outside to smoke and saw the tarpaulin cover of his boat was disturbed off the top.

One lone smoker out-performed all those surveillance cameras and cops! Curtsy to my Spy in New York.

Fred Phelps Is A Democrat

2013-04-18T08:30:00.000-05:00

The money quote in this story about one of the Westboro Baptist girls leaving the cult and becoming a gay rights activist is this:

In the old days, Gramps was a Democrat and a civil rights lawyer. He ran for governor in the ’80s. I remember driving around in his red truck in parades, throwing candy and stuff. We would have these big barbecues in the backyard. Al Gore came to my house for a fund-raiser once.

Naturally. You've gotta be Progressive to hate like that.

Through, The Roofers

2013-04-17T15:06:00.005-05:00

The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers & Allied Workers officially calls for repeal of Obamacare. Whoa, Nellie!

One of the concerns for the union is the cap on “lifetime medical bill payouts.” Currently, the roofers’ plan guarantees that active members won’t pay more than $2 million over the course of their lives for medical bills (it’s $50,000 for retired members). The ACA mandates that plans remove these caps. It also requires that all plans offer minimum benefits, and the union’s coverage would have to become more expensive to fulfill that requirement. Pile on a new fee charged to every enrollee and an excise tax that will hit some plans in 2018, and you have a union running for the hills as fast as it can.

Now that they're finding out what's in it....

Eggcellent

2013-04-17T08:19:00.004-05:00

Picasso & Dali Painting the Same Egg

Shamelessly pinched from this random spot on the 'net.

Awwwww

2013-04-16T14:54:00.000-05:00

Margaret Laura "Mila" Hager w/ her grandparents.

Shamelessly pinched from here.

The New Boston Massacre

2013-04-16T14:44:00.002-05:00

Via National Catholic Register.

The New Pheidippides*

by Edward Mulholland

Martin Richard bleeds like Boston

Blood red socks strewn on the ground

Massacred like Crispus Attucks

Hardly time to hear the sound

Bombs, ball-bearings, flying razors

Slashed the crowd on Boylston Street

Police, officials, random strangers

Drank death’s whiskey served up neat

Missing teeth at First Communion

Martin’s smile on my TV

Tears from neighbors missing Martin

Wordless, senseless tragedy

Too young to have seen the Towers

Crumble that September blue

Not too young to take, a victim,

Shrapnel meant for me and you

Now a family’s torn asunder

Flags half staff, as Ashmont weeps,

Face the Pesky Pole at Fenway,

Silently while Martin sleeps.

Pheidippides gasped out his message

“We have won a victory”

Fell to earth. His death for many

Seeming contradictory.

May Martin’s death inspire many

Fighting terror to fight on

So that freedom reign forever

Faneuil Hall to Marathon!

* I needed reminding.

Kim Jong Un Inspires Poetry

2013-04-14T16:22:00.001-05:00

I know NorKo's threats are no laughing matter, and that it's closer than we once thought to being able to hurt us, but I can't help it; every time a Kim rattles his saber it calls to mind a bit of doggerel composed by the late Dean Walter, an associate pastor at the little church I was raised in.

He shot a rocket in the air,
It fell to earth in Delaware.
Which isn't bad (but just between us?
He thought he had it aimed at Venus).

Make Them Cover The Gosnell Story

2013-04-12T14:06:00.001-05:00

The media are curiously uninterested in the trial of Kermit Gosnell. To his credit, Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic is an exception. Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Trial Should Be A Front Page Story.

As he reports:

The grand jury report in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I've read. "This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy - and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors," it states. "The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels - and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths."

Dr. Gosnell is now on trial for 7 counts of murder, but his actual body count is in the hundreds. For years, in filthy conditions, he outright killed live babies -- and when he couldn't, he paid non-medical staff to do so in his stead.

From the Grand Jury report:

When you perform late-term "abortions" by inducing labor, you get babies. Live, breathing, squirming babies. By 24 weeks, most babies born prematurely will survive if they receive appropriate medical care. But that was not what the Women's Medical Society was about. Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered: he killed them. He didn't call it that. He called it "ensuring fetal demise." The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that "snipping."

Over the years, there were hundreds of "snippings." Sometimes, if Gosnell was unavailable, the "snipping" was done by one of his fake doctors, or even by one of the administrative staff.

But all the employees of the Women's Medical Society knew. Everyone there acted as if it wasn't murder at all. Most of these acts cannot be prosecuted, because Gosnell destroyed the files. Among the relatively few cases that could be specifically documented, one was Baby Boy A. His 17-year-old mother was almost 30 weeks pregnant - seven and a half months - when labor was induced. An employee estimated his birth weight as approaching six pounds. He was breathing and moving when Dr. Gosnell severed his spine and put the body in a plastic shoebox for disposal. The doctor joked that this baby was so big he could "walk me to the bus stop." Another, Baby Boy B, whose body was found at the clinic frozen in a one-gallon spring-water bottle, was at least 28 weeks of gestational age when he was killed. Baby C was moving and breathing for 20 minutes before an assistant came in and cut the spinal cord, just the way she had seen Gosnell do it so many times. And these were not even the worst cases.

As Friedersdorf notes in his subtitle, there are SO many angles to this story about a filthy unregulated abortion clinic in the inner city of Philadelphia:

Dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failings. It just is insanely newsworthy.

And yet here is a picture of the space reserved for media at the trial.

Shamelessly pinched from here

I pinched the picture from a go-get-'em post at Get Religion at which blogger Mollie asked some reporters why they aren't covering the story the same way they would any OTHER story featuring a mass murderer preying on minority women and children.

Particularly excellent is the Washington Post's reporter's claim that she's a policy person and doesn't cover local crime. Riggghht. Like the Post hasn't covered local shootings in Aurora and Newtown. Or OJ Simpson's local stabbing of his wife.

Rightly does Mark Steyn refer to the conditions at this clinic as the Government's Back Alley -- because everyone knows that Dr. Gosnell's clinic is not a one-off, but will force us to take a hard look at what "safe" means in the expression that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare."

For that matter, what does "choice" mean when no one wants to shine a light on this aspect of Gosnell's behavior:

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Robyn Reid didn't want an abortion. But when her grandmother forcibly took her to an abortion clinic one wintry day in 1998, Reid figured she'd just tell the doctor her wishes and then sneak away.
Instead, Kermit Gosnell barked: "I don't have time for this!" He then ripped off her clothes, spanked her, wrestled her onto a dirty surgical stretcher, tied her flailing arms and legs down and pumped sedatives into her until she quit screaming and lost consciousness, she told the Daily News yesterday.
Nicole Gaither got an abortion from Gosnell in 2001. After four days, she said, the pain was so bad she could barely walk. She returned to the clinic, where, she said Gosnell blithely told her he'd left fetal remains in her.

"Stand up! It don't hurt that bad!" he yelled at her, she said, before suctioning - without any medication - her insides.
In 2001, Davida Johnson changed her mind about aborting her 6-month fetus after seeing Gosnell's dazed, bloodied patients in his recovery room, she said. But in the treatment room, Gosnell's staffers ignored her protests, smacked her, tied her arms down and sedated her into unconsciousness, she said. She awoke no longer pregnant.
Weeks later, she said, she was diagnosed with a venereal disease that she believes she contracted from unsterilized equipment Gosnell used. Now, she can't carry a baby to term and said she has miscarried four times since her abortion.

Dr. Gosnell, with his sadism and penchant for keeping the feet of the babies he killed in jars. is a particularly disgusting abortionist, but his is by no means the only unregulated, unclean clinic running a cash/volume business while preying on blacks and latinos in the inner city. And most women who go in for abortions report being pressured into it by boyfriends or parents.

Planned Parenthood clinics won't report sex trafficking, they'll help pimps exploit young girls brought here from other countries. Here's undercover video to prove it.
Dr. Leo Carhart killed a woman in his Montgomery County, MD clinic last February.
Delaware abortion clinic botches 5 abortions in as many weeks. A former employee testifies:
Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich, former employee said, "It was just unsafe. I couldn't tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was." Werbrich alleges conditions inside the facility were unsanitary. "He didn't wear gloves," said Werbrich.

In New Jersey in February, a botched abortion that nearly killed a girl led a trail to an abortion clinic where health officials reported these conditions:

the botched abortion caused so many medical complications that Newark Beth Israel Medical Center filed a complaint with state officials. The Department of Health and Senior Services investigated the abortion facility and found dirty forceps, rusty crochet hooks used to remove IUDs, and a quarter-inch of dirt and debris under an examining table.

Why is this so hard? Why do we hear no "choice" advocates condemning Gosnell and distancing themselves from him?

There is no "choice," there is no "safe," at 1.5 million per year and a multi-million dollar industry, there is no "rare."

There is "legal," though. Shouldn't we ask ourselves why? (Hint: forget about honest disagreement over when a human life deserves legal protections. Follow the money.)

But who the hell cares? It's only women.

**********
Update: Today was a "tweetfest" in which participants were to use the hashtag #Gosnell to shame the media into covering the story. And, lo, slowly, it is working -- tho' so far only among journalists we already knew were rational.

Terry Moran of ABC News tweeted earlier today that "Kermit Gosnell is probably the most successful serial killer in the history of the world."

Jake Tapper covered the story on his show at 4:00 pm.

Megan McCardle: Why I didn't write about Gosnell's Trial -- and why I should have:

I knew about the Gosnell case, and I wish I had followed it more closely, even though I'd rather not. In fact, those of us who are pro-choice should be especially interested. The whole point of legal abortion is to prevent what happened in Philadelphia: to make it safer and more humane. Somehow that ideal went terribly, horribly awry. We should demand to know why.

What happened in Philadelphia should never happen again, and all of us--not just the Philadelphia police--should be asking how we make sure it doesn't. I don't know the answer to that yet, because I still don't understand what happened in Pennsylvania. But I'll be working to figure it out.

But WaPo still can't be bothered to mention it -- except offhandedly in paragraph 20 of a story about a clinic regulation bill in VA.

Dispatch from Oz

2013-04-11T10:24:00.004-05:00

About a month ago intrepid correspondent Brett McS, reporting then- live from my Emergency Back-up Country (which is looking better and better BTW), sent me this interesting election result from Western Australia, which he describes as sort of Oz's Texas: three times the size of the Lone Star state, dynamic, growing economy, with a bit of a "wild West" flavor. I think he wanted to cheer me up with a bit of optimistic news.

He notes:

I like the direction of the Green vote.

Yes, that is interesting. I asked him what accounts for that and here's his speculation. Essentially the Labor party has drifted Leftward -- too Leftward as it turns out, leaving an opening for conservative politicians.

Labor has crept leftwards over the years under the influence of Chardonnay Socialists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chardonnay_socialist), only accelerated by the rise of the former (?) Marxist who is our current PM. (Sound familiar?) That accounts for Labor’s disastrous alliance with The Greens, which they are scrambling away from unconvincingly as we speak. The traditional Labor voters are working class people who have no time for enviro-weenies, so they have been left without a home. That’s where the Conservatives under John Howard, and now Tony Abbott, have stepped up to provide an option.

And the secret to Abbott's success? The common touch (among other things of course):

The Howards and Abbotts spend a lot of time on Talk Radio where they find out what are the concerns of typical Aussies – often presented quite bluntly, even to a serving Prime Minister. (Gillard’s recent attempt at Connecting With The People, on the other hand, was hilariously inept and great Tim Blair fodder. Shades of Obama there, I would think).

...Being interesting, humble, willing to listen, handling often hostile questions without being evasive or going into Lecture Mode or filibustering... I could imagine Scott Walker being successful (he strikes me as an American John Howard). Ted Cruz would be a ratings magnet. John McCain, not so much.

So, the Australian conservative’s recent success has been due to keeping in touch with the concerns of what would be, predominantly, the “white working class” demographic... in your country. As far as I can tell that demographic has been largely ignored by Wall Street Republicans (and tragi-comically so by David Cameron’s Tories in the UK).

This is the GOP's weakness -- not that its ideas are inherently bad, but it has no idea how to connect with workers -- the kind of person who doesn't think of himself as an entrepreneur.

Weary of Lectures

2013-04-10T18:12:00.000-05:00

Oh, dear me, Yes, Betty Duffy:

I have lost interest in reading or writing prescriptive articles on Christian living, as though I need only tweak this or that area of my life to be a spiritual success story.

What's especially difficult for me is being patient when the conversation turns to such things (or spiritual self-help books or how the raise the perfect holy saint child books) and not just being an old crank about it. There was a time when I was younger when that sort of article helped me and filled a need. But now it all seems semi-Pelagian and formulaic to me. I'd like to think I've grown more liberal in the best sense and more tolerant. But it's more likely I'm just bored and grumpy with a different set of people.

Happy Feast of the Annunciation (Transferred)

2013-04-08T21:29:00.001-05:00

Almost forgot I've been saving this for today!

The Annunciation, Mikhail Nesterov, 1901

Someone Should Have Said It Aloud 5 Times Fast First

2013-04-08T16:37:00.002-05:00

Really, McDonald's? (Though it sort of follows from this I suppose.)

The Lady Not For Turning

2013-04-08T10:14:00.002-05:00

I love Steve Hayward's tribute to Lady Thatcher at Powerline.

When Leo Strauss received the news that Winston Churchill had died in January 1965, he made the following spontaneous remarks in his classroom at the University of Chicago on the lessons of Churchill’s life—lessons that apply just as well to Margaret Thatcher. His conclusion:

The death of Churchill reminds us . . . of our duty. We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.

Update: Three items.

The Argentine pope pays tribute to Lady Thatcher:

"His Holiness Pope Francis was saddened to learn of the death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher," the papal message stated. "He recalls with appreciation the Christian values which underpinned her commitment to public service and to the promotion of freedom among the family of nations. Entrusting her soul to the mercy of God, and assuring her family and the British people of a remembrance in his prayers, the Holy Father invokes upon all whose lives she touched God’s abundant blessings."

Fun footage of Baronness Thatcher's last debate in Parliament below, but first an anecdote.

One of the chefs where I work (a great, robust, bass-voiced Turk) has lasting affection for Baroness Thatcher because he was on duty in the kitchen of some hotel in Colorado where she and Dennis were attending some conference or summit or some such thing. In the morning she came into the kitchen and the chef offered to make her breakfast, but she refused, saying she always made her husband's breakfast for him herself.

Now this. Wait til the end where she says she's enjoying herself.

Go, Bergoglio!

2013-04-07T07:46:00.000-05:00

Listening to or reading my co-religionists' inter-religious debates about everything from politics to the virtues of raw milk, I've become increasingly alarmed that most orthodox Catholics --at least in the English-speaking world-- are hamstrung by a kind of neo-Pelagianism that reduces every question to an argument from authority and the obligation to will the "right" solution to every problem.

I've written about this a lot (chiefly here, I suppose) because it's my current and recurring bugaboo. Sometimes it comes up in a discussion of the virtue of prudence in political matters, and sometimes as a lament for the stupid arguments people make as they try to engage non-believers, and sometimes I see good and serious people torturing themselves with heavy burdens they think are essential to being good Catholics that are not essential in any way and that crush the joy out of life in Christ and make people frighteningly susceptible to being scandalized by their own and others' failings. "A saint sad is a sad saint" as St. Teresa used to say, and I see a lot of sad saints, because they are focused on not screwing up rather than on living life united to Jesus. It's heart-breaking because life could be so much more joyful and beautiful if people could only see it.

Naturally therefore I read this with interest and pleasure -- in an article about Pope Francis' forthcoming book co-written with a rabbi.

Bergoglio posits that this type of rigid religiosity “disguises itself with doctrines that pretend to give justifications, but really deprive people of freedom and will not allow them to grow.”

“Fundamentalism is not what God wants,” Bergoglio says.

He believes that as a result of this religiosity, people are not prepared to overcome the crises of life, the failings one has, the injustices one commits. “They do not have tools to recognize or understand the mercy of God,” he says.

I suppose both fearful Conservatives and self-justifying Liberals will misread him to mean doctrine doesn't matter. But given what he says in the same article about abortion and same-sex marriage, I'm confident he means no such thing, but rather that Christianity cannot be reduced to a set of rules and formulae we look up in a handbook and try never to violate -- as if Christian perfection were something we can simply will rather than an action of grace -- a relationship with Jesus who is alive, and a progressive growth into the freedom and joy of the sons of God.

And there was this in his chrism mass:

It is not in soul-searching or constant introspection that we encounter the Lord: self-help courses can be useful in life, but to live by going from one course to another, from one method to another, leads us to become pelagians and to minimize the power of grace, which comes alive and flourishes to the extent that we, in faith, go out and give ourselves and the Gospel to others, giving what little ointment we have to those who have nothing, nothing at all.

Again, given his repeated emphasis on Confession and the wiles of the devil in just the few short weeks of his papacy, I don't think the remark can be construed as a deprecation of traditional doctrines of sin and grace. He's telling us "Be ye perfect" is not a call to perfectionism, but an invitation to trust God and offer the gift of ourselves to others so that grace can work and love can grow.

Jeremy Irons Earns Two Minutes' Hate

2013-04-04T19:43:00.001-05:00

Jeremy Irons expressed doubts about gay marriage in a recent interview.

Poor thing. I'm sure the two minutes' internet hate has begun and he's probably already been bullied into an apology. Two things surprise me in this clip. 1) An actor thinking an issue through and expressing a little hesitation, however mildly (and ultimately incoherently). 2) That Jeremy Irons isn't gay.

Irons will certainly catch hell for comparing gay marriage to incest, but before anyone tells you that's crazy talk, I'll just point out a few items.

A Political Science Professor at Columbia is defending himself against incest charges not by innocence -- he admits a three year sexual relationship with his own daughter-- but on gay marriage grounds.

(Every time I think Columbia can't sink any lower I am wrong.)

Here are a few other links, posted without (much!) comment as simply signs of the times.

Remember a couple of decades ago when the APA said homosexuality wasn't a disorder? Many researchers taking a different view of pedophilia.Think that's an outlier? Pedophilia is a sexual orientation under CA bill.
Gay marriage activist: "The institution of marriage should not exist." Read why.

Gay Danish couples win right to marry in any Church in the country. Let's keep an eye on what happens to the 1/3 of priests & pastors who say they will under no circumstances perform such ceremonies.
In January a judge in New Jersey ruled it was unconstitutional for a Methodist church to refuse to perform same-sex weddings.
Gay students try to oust the Catholic Chaplain from GW University because he doesn't support homosexuality.

Legacy and Bergen say they are primarily upset about the counseling Shaffer offers. They say he urges students who have homosexual feelings to lead a life of celibacy.