Reasoning Repaired

Sisyphus in My Mirror

2009-10-07T02:00:00.002+03:00

     This on again / off again experimental blog-wannabe will close permanently. Although I’ve been thinking about closing it for awhile, four recent things I’ve read (or recalled) precipitated this final decision by bringing into focus some terribly important considerations. The four are provided below.

* * * * *
Tragedy of Sisyphus (adapted from Wikipedia)
     In Greek mythology, Sisyphus (Σίσυφος) was a king punished in Tartarus by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
     The word Sisyphean means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “endless and unavailing, as labor or a task.”
     Sisyphus was son of the king Aeolus of Thessaly and Enarete, and the founder and first king Ephyra (Corinth). He was the father of Glaucus by the nymph Merope, and the grandfather of Bellerophon.
     Sisyphus promoted navigation and commerce, but was avaricious and deceitful, violating the laws of hospitality by killing travelers and guests. He took pleasure in these killings because they allowed him to maintain his dominant position. From Homer onwards, Sisyphus was famed as the craftiest of men. He seduced his niece, took his brother’s throne and betrayed Zeus’ secrets. Zeus then ordered Thanatos (Death personified) to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus. Sisyphus slyly asked Thanatos to try the chains to show how they worked. When Thanatos did so, Sisyphus secured them and threatened him. This caused an uproar, and no human could die until Ares (who was annoyed that his battles had lost their fun because his opponents would not die) intervened, freeing Death and sending Sisyphus to Tartarus.
     However, before Sisyphus died, he had told his wife to throw his naked body into the middle of the public square in attempt to test his wife’s love for him. Annoyed by the obedience and loveless decision by his wife, Sisyphus persuaded Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, to allow him to go back to the upper world and scold his wife for not burying his body as a loving wife would. When Sisyphus returned to Corinth, he refused to retreat back to the underworld and was forcibly dragged back to the underworld by Hermes. In another version of the myth, Persephone was directly persuaded that he had been conducted to Tartarus by mistake and ordered him to be freed.
     As a punishment from the gods for his trickery, Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he could reach the top of the hill, the rock would always roll back down again, forcing him to begin again. The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus. Sisyphus took the bold step of reporting one of Zeus’ sexual conquests, telling the river god Asopus of the whereabouts of his daughter Aegina. Zeus had taken her away, but regardless of the impropriety of Zeus’ frequent conquests, Sisyphus overstepped his bounds by considering himself a peer of the gods who could rightfully report their indiscretions. As a result, Zeus displayed his own cleverness by binding Sisyphus to an eternity of frustration. Accordingly, pointless or interminable activities are often described as Sisyphean.

from C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce
     “I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road… Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it.”
     It is possible for a soul to choose to remain in heaven despite having been in the grey town; for such souls, their time in hell has been a period of testing, and the goodness of heaven will work backwards into their lives, turning even their worst sorrows into joy, and changing their experience on earth to an extension of heaven. Conversely, the evil of hell works backwards also, so that if a soul remains in, or returns to, the grey town, even its happiness on earth will lose its meaning, and its experience on earth would have been hell. None of the ghosts realize that the grey town is, in fact, hell. Indeed it is not that much different from the life they led on earth: joyless, friendless, and uncomfortable. (The works of Aristotle appear to be alluded to negatively in the first chapter as being the sort of books sold in the bookstores of the grey town.) It just goes on forever, and gets worse and worse, with some characters whispering their fear of the “night” that is eventually to come.

from Francis de Sales’ Finding God’s Will for You (from Jennifer Fulwiler with hat-tip to the Thinking Christian):

God’s servants who have had the highest and most exalted inspirations have been the gentlest and most peaceable men in all the world. Such were Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Moses is called “a man exceedingly meek above all men.” David is praised for his mildness.
On the contrary, the evil spirit is turbulent, bitter, and restless. Those who follow his hellish suggestions in the belief that they are heavenly inspirations can usually be recognized because they are unsettled, headstrong, haughty, and ready to undertake or meddle in affairs. Under the pretext of zeal, they subvert everything, criticize everyone, rebuke everyone, and find fault with everything. They are men without self-control and without consideration, who put up with nothing. In the name of zeal for God’s honor, they indulge in the passions of self-love.

The Internet gives us unprecedented opportunities to express our opinions in a relatively consequence-free environment—and, unlike face-to-face communication, it’s surprisingly easy to fall into self-indulgent, careless speech when the only repercussions you’ll face are words on a screen. In our age of 24/7 communication it’s especially important to remember: just because we’re defending God, doesn’t mean we’re reflecting God.

from St. John Chrysostom’s Homily on St. John’s Gospel, XLVIII.3:
Anger is no different than madness—it is a temporary demon; or rather it is worse than having a demon; for one who has a demon may be excused, but the angry man deserves ten thousand punishments, voluntarily casting himself into the pit of destruction, and before the hell which is to come suffering punishment from this already, by bringing a certain restless turmoil and never silent storm of fury, through all the night and through all the day, upon the reasonings of his soul.

Infant Cannibalism

2009-10-01T03:03:00.000+03:00

The Pope and Nancy Pelosi

2009-09-29T12:00:00.000+03:00

     The Pope and Nancy Pelosi are on the same stage in front of a huge crowd.
     The Holy Father leans towards Mrs. Pelosi and says, “Do you know that with one little wave of my hand I can make every person in this crowd go wild with joy? This joy will not be a momentary display, like that of your followers, but go deep into their hearts and they’ll forever speak of this day and rejoice!”
     Pelosi replied, “I seriously doubt that. With one little wave of your hand? Show me.”
     So the Pope slapped her…

Atheism

2009-09-26T15:00:00.001+03:00

Veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et labia mea detestabuntur impium. (My mouth will meditate on truth, and my lips will detest the impious man.) Proverbs 8:7

What Liberal Democrats Are About: Socialism & Government Takeovers

2009-09-09T20:30:00.001+03:00

Recently in the News

2009-08-31T09:00:00.000+03:00

A staunch pro-abortionist and homosexuality supporter passes...

A racist is confirmed...

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK): … But do you have an opinion, or can you give me your opinion, of whether or not in this country I personally, as an individual citizen, have a right to self-defense?
Sotomayor: I — as I said, I don’t know.

Global warming mythologists continue polluting...

Facism is on the rise...

Health care is improving, they claim...

Atheism: Death of the Mind

2009-07-23T13:00:00.001+03:00

     Atheism is a grave sin against the First Commandment. As is the case with all sin, it quite literally degrades our human nature–in this case, severely clouding the ability of the mind to reason correctly. Since the human intellect presents to the human will what it deems true (hence providing the will an object upon which to act), a disordered intellect (i.e., one not ordered to the true, the good, the beautiful) provides the will a disordered vision of reality… and hence a disordered object is chosen.
     Digression: One is not made free simply on the basis of absolutely unrestricted choices but on the basis of being able to understand and choose that which is good, true, and beautiful. (Analogy: a river is not more “free” if it is not constrained by its banks, for a river without banks to direct it to its telos and hence keep it from stagnating is nothing more than a swamp–the epitome of death and decay. Humans are not more “free” if the rules of the road are disobeyed: the result is not freedom but death.) Choices are secondary to the attainment of human excellence: freedom must be ordered to the good of the person, opening possibilities for the perfection of the individual and society. The highest ideal is not to have the option to choose, but the option for an excellent choice. This is why freedom is valuable… and a very delicate thing. “Choice” raised to the status of a cult becomes what all things risk becoming if so elevated: an idol. End digression.
     The intentionality of not wanting to understand arguments (which presupposes a free will, doesn’t it?)—say, Aquinas’ Five Ways—is thus just one of many, many soul-debilitating problems atheism imposes upon its adherents. Richard Dawkins, in this respect, is a poster-child example of intentional, emotional, unthinking, and narrow-minded reactions to faith.

Underrated Concupiscence Echoes Clinton: A Lecherous Gleam in His Eye

2009-07-22T20:00:00.001+03:00

Ukraine women are “most beautiful women in the world,” says Vice President Joe Biden
By Veronika Belenkaya and Dave Goldiner
Daily News – Wednesday 22 July 2009
     Vice President Biden says the women in the Ukraine are definitely babe-ushkas.
     After a two-day diplomatic visit to the former Soviet state, the too-talkative veep told President Viktor Yushchenko he was blown away by the gorgeous women.
     “[They’re] the most beautiful women in the world. That’s my observation,” Biden said.
The famously loose-lipped veep was overheard making the comment to his host during an unscheduled visit to an Irish-themed pub in the capital of Kiev.
     “It’s certain you have so many beautiful women,” the teetotaling Biden added as he sipped a Coke.
     Ukrainian women haven’t gotten that kind of shoutout since The Beatles praised them as knockouts in “Back in the U.S.S.R.”
The kudos came as no surprise to anyone in Brighton Beach, where Ukrainian women say they are known for their style and poise.
     “He came, he saw and he told the truth,” said Vlada Khmarska, 20, who lives in Odessa, Ukraine, and is visiting the U.S. for the summer. “Everyone who visits Ukraine says so—Ukrainian girls are beautiful.”
     “I think he nailed it,” added Sasha Sobolyewa, 18, a Midwood High School senior. “The women there are beautiful—tall and lean.”
     Biden later met with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the willowy blond with Princess Leia-style braids who wowed world leaders when she burst onto the scene in 2001.
     Ukrainian women are often stereotyped as statuesque blonds like Tymoshenko, but Oksana Romanova said their beauty is more than just physical.
     They are also known for their warm hospitality, she said.
     “It’s the smile, it’s charisma,” said Romanova, 20, also visiting for the summer.
     College student Marina Kovtunenko, 18, came to Brooklyn from Odessa with her parents as a baby.
     Guys are constantly bombarding her with compliments about her Ukrainian heritage.
     “I don’t know if it’s just a pickup line, but I hear it all the time,” she said. “I think it’s true.”
     Sobolyewa, who looked classy in high heels as she picked up a coffee in Brighton Beach, said it’s second nature for Ukrainian women to look their best.
     “It runs through your veins—you have to look good,” she said. “They send out the message they know they look good.”

Lebensunwertes Leben

2009-07-20T04:00:00.000+03:00

Killing Those Deemed Unworthy of Life
Eugenic Mentality Shows Little Signs of Dying Out
by Father John Flynn, LC
Zenit.org – 19 July 2009 (ZE09071901)
     The idea that some people are genetically inferior, and need to be eliminated or prevented from reproducing, is a mentality that still persists, despite the battering it took after the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.
     In a revealing interview published July 12 in the New York Times Magazine Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States was asked about abortion, among other topics.
     Referring to the Supreme Court decision that opened the doors to abortion, Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions about abortion funding, Ginsburg commented: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
     This amazing statement was not elaborated on, and there was no explanation of which groups might fall into the sectors “we don’t want to have too many of.”
     In an opinion article published July 14 by the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg admitted that the text could be interpreted as a mere description of the mentality behind the decisions, and so we are not certain if Ginsburg endorses this approach.
     Nevertheless, he continued, it certainly is true that the push for abortion owed a lot to a desire to eliminate those seen as unfit. It’s well known, he said, that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, “was a racist eugenicist of the first order.”

Forced Sterilization
     Just last month the sad history of forced sterilizations was commemorated in North Carolina.
     An aluminum sign was unveiled in Raleigh as a memorial to the thousands of people who were sterilized from 1933 to 1973 because they were considered mentally disabled or genetically inferior, reported the Associated Press, June 22.
     According to the article, North Carolina’s program targeted the poor and people living in prisons and state institutions, among others. Some were simply victims of rape. The state Eugenics Commission still continued until 1977, after which the mentally ill were placed under the court system.
     Sterilization programs are not only a matter of historical interest. On June 22, the Guardian newspaper reported that women in Africa with HIV are being coerced into being sterilized.
     Apparently, they are told that the procedure is a routine treatment for AIDS. The International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS is preparing a court case against the Namibian government on behalf of a group HIV-positive women in Namibia who were sterilized against their will.
     The Guardian also reported that campaigners say there is coerced sterilization in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and South Africa.
     The eugenics mentality is very widespread, albeit in a subtler form, when it comes to those who are handicapped or suffer from genetic defects. Often these people are simply eliminated before they have a chance to be born.
     Scientific developments promise to intensify the threat to these handicapped. On July 1, the London-based Times newspaper reported that researchers are developing a universal genetic test for embryos that will be able to screen for almost any inherited disease.
     Trials will begin shortly and Professor Alan Handyside, of the Bridge Clinic in London, explained to the Times that the test will be capable of identifying any of the 15,000 known genetic disorders. Currently only 2% of genetic defects can be picked up by embryo screening.

Designer Babies
     The article commented that this technique, known as karyomapping, will deepen the controversy over “designer babies.” It appears that the test could also be used to select an embryo with a particular eye color, or with genes that affect height.
     Nevertheless, checking for the many genes that control the diverse facets of development would be difficult to carry out in practice as hundreds of embryos would be needed to guarantee the desired profile.
     It’s already common practice to eliminate embryos or fetuses that suffer from Down Syndrome. Dominic Lawson criticized this tendency in an opinion article published by the British newspaper, the Independent, last Nov. 25.
     Lawson, who has a child of his own with Down Syndrome, noted, however, some signs of change. He quoted Carol Boys, the chief executive of the Down Syndrome Association, who said that about 40% of mothers who test positive for Down Syndrome are not refusing to terminate the pregnancy.
     In part, Boys explained, this is linked to the fact that women are tending to have children later in life. This means they are more conscious that they may not be able to have any other children. As well, these women have an established career of their own, that gives them more confidence in standing up to the pressures from doctors to have an abortion.
     According to Lawson, doctors in general have “a visceral bias in favor of eugenic termination.”
     “This is not based on a realistic and up-to-date assessment of the possibilities open to those with Down Syndrome, still less of the happiness which such people can and do bring to families, and even communities as a whole,” Lawson added.
     The cause of such an attitude is based on the fact that people with Down Syndrome are going to be more costly for the health system, he accused.
     New genetic tests are looming for Down Syndrome too, an article in the online section of the American Spectator announced on June 8. Sequenom, a company that makes genetic analysis products, has developed a new genetic test for Down syndrome.
     The test, called SEQureDX, is supposed to be safer and more accurate than any previous prenatal genetic test.

Unsafe
     “Though the new tests are safer for both mother and child, they will create a profoundly unsafe environment for babies who test positive for genetic abnormalities,” the article stated.
     At least three other companies are developing similar genetic tests and hope to have them on the market by the end of the year, the article noted.
     The promise of more accurate tests points to a fact not often given prominence, namely that sometimes perfectly healthy babies are aborted due to errors in genetic testing. According to a May 16 article from the Guardian newspaper, Dr. Anne Mackie, the head of screening programs for the U.K.’s National Health Service, estimated 146 healthy babies a year in England who do not have any abnormality are lost as a result of inaccurate test results.
     According to Mackie, 70% of hospitals in England still use tests that are more likely to give a “false positive,” that is, assessing women wrongly as at high risk.
     On Feb. 21, Benedict XVI spoke to participants in a conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life on the theme “New Frontiers of Genetics and the Danger of Eugenics.”
     Every human being, the Pontiff affirmed, “is far more than a unique combination of genetic information that is transmitted by his or her parents.”
     “We must beware of the risks involved in eugenics,” the Holy Father warned. He observed that today there are “disturbing manifestations of this odious practice” that are appearing.
     There is, he explained, “a tendency to give priority to functional ability, efficiency, perfection, and physical beauty, to the detriment of life’s other dimensions which are deemed unworthy.”
     “The respect that is due to every human being, even bearing a developmental defect or a genetic disease that might manifest itself during life, is thus weakened while children whose life is considered not worth living are penalized from the moment of conception,” the Pope commented.
     Benedict XVI urged that any form of discrimination be rejected as an attack on the whole of humanity. A call to action that should awaken consciences around the world.

One Bad Apple...

2009-07-17T23:50:00.000+03:00

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” (G.K. Chesterton)

Flailing Atheism

2009-06-23T05:22:00.000+03:00

“It amazes me to find an intelligent person who fights against something which he does not at all believe exists.” (Mohandas Gandhi)
“Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.” (C. S. Lewis)
“Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics. This is why, when pressed, the atheist will often attempt to hide his lack of conviction in his own beliefs behind some poorly formulated utilitarianism, or argue that he acts out of altruistic self-interest. But this is only post-facto rationalization, not reason or rational behavior.” (Vox Day)
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” (Martin Luther King)

Reagan Was A Real Man of Hope and Change

2009-06-18T00:00:00.001+03:00

Change Is Possible for Gays

2009-06-16T06:00:00.000+03:00

Change Is Possible for Gays, Says Psychologist
APA Admits Homosexuality Also Due to Environmental Factors
By Genevieve Pollock
Zenit.org – 15 June 2009 (ZE090615)
     A Catholic psychologist who specializes in reparative therapy with homosexuals says it’s possible for those with same-sex attractions to change, despite agenda-driven ideologies that state the opposite.
     Joseph Nicolosi, founder and director of the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Encino, spoke with ZENIT about his experience as a clinical psychologist and the former president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).
     NARTH, a “scientific, non-religious and non-political” organization, recently put out an article about the little known revision of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) statement on homosexuality, which was highlighted last month in a WorldNetDaily article titled “Gay Gene Claim Suddenly Vanishes.”
     Nicolosi explained that NARTH has been actively working on a research project compiling scientific data to dispute the APA’s claim on homosexuality, targeting three unscientific assumptions that form the basis of their policy.
     He stated that these erroneous assumptions are: “Psychotherapy does not change homosexuality, trying to change the homosexual person will harm him, and there is no greater pathology in homosexual persons than in heterosexual persons.”
     The psychologist asserted that the “APA is not governed by scientists, but by political interests.”
     “There has been no new data to justify their policies,” he added, “but they tend to give in to social and political pressure,” and thus “NARTH has been putting pressure on them to scientifically back up their stance on the biological nature of homosexuality.”
     Now, Nicolosi reported, the APA has “diminished its position saying homosexuality is biologically determined.” They have dropped the specific reference to a hypothetical “gay gene,” he affirmed.
     In other words, he said, they are beginning to recognize that homosexuality is also due to environmental factors, not just biological elements.
     “In fact,” he stated, “I and many of my colleagues at NARTH believe it is more environmental than biological.”
     Nicolosi noted that “the most important scientific information” gives “much more evidence for environmental causes of homosexuality than for biological.”

Possible
     The most essential point however, the psychologist affirmed, “is that change is possible, that men and women can come out of homosexuality.”
     “This idea of ‘once gay, always gay’ is a political position, not a scientific position,” he added.
     The therapist affirmed that he has seen this in his own private practice, and that it is also substantiated in a body of scientific research.
     Nicolosi, also the author of “Healing Homosexuality: Case Stories of Reparative Therapy” and “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality,” asserted that many people have already adopted the erroneous assumptions put forth by the APA.
     There is a need to assist and minister to men and women “who are looking for help to come out of homosexuality,” he said, “because so many times they are just told ‘Well, you’re born this way,’ pointing to the APA and saying ‘because they said it.’”
     He expressed the hope that as the APA recognizes the efficacy of therapy with homosexual persons, more psychologists will be encouraged to be involved in this type of treatment.
     “Within our profession,” the psychologist explained, “we trump politics with science.” In other words, if we challenge the APA with scientific data, it “has to override any political or special interest forces.”
     The therapist emphasized the need for all people to share this message with homosexual persons that “you don’t have to be gay.”

Encouragement
     If you know a homosexual person, he said, “encourage that person, educate him, give that person information, take the opportunity to let him know that choice is possible.”
     “They need to believe it,” he added.
     Nicolosi explained: “It is a very hard therapy. First of all, it is hard in itself because you have to dig deep into emotional issues. Homosexuality is not about sexual issues, but emotional. There are the emotional underpinnings that have to be addressed.
     “Then not only are you having to deal with those emotional underpinnings that are challenging on an individual level, but you have the other battle of a culture that is saying to you, ‘You’re homophobic; you’re naïve; you’re not facing reality; you’re just a guilt-ridden Christian, get with it.
     “You’re fighting a culture that is not supporting you, plus you have your own individual battle. So it’s a two-front war.”
     “With the AIDS epidemic, this could be about life and death here,” he asserted. “We’re not talking about something insignificant.”
     The psychologist underlined the need to “inform and educate young people.”
     He explained: “So when a 15-year-old boy goes to a priest and says, ‘Father I have these feelings, I have these temptations,’ that priest should say, ‘you have a choice; if you don’t want to be gay there are things that you can do.’”
     “The boy should not to be told, ‘God made you this way,’” Nicolosi said.

Scientific data
     He continued: “This is not about going after an oppressed minority. It’s not about pointing out pathology for the sake of pointing out pathology.
     “This is telling young people, look, if you go down this road, you are likely to have a higher level of depression, anxiety, failed relationships, sexual promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse than people who live their lives heterosexually. You will get involved in more, to be polite, esoteric exotic sexual practices. It goes on and on and on.
     “And that’s just science, simply a comparison of two groups.”
     The therapist added, “This notion that you are going to fall in love with a man and live happily ever after is Hollywood. The reality is that it’s a hard lifestyle.”
     Nicolosi, also a national speaker on the topic, urged the development of more Catholic programs, noting that other faiths have already been putting forth a “vital ministry helping people coming out of homosexuality.”
     “Our doctrine is clear,” he said, “and even if we have a weaker ministry, our doctrine on homosexuality is more brilliant than anything the Protestant denominations can come up with.”
     The psychologist specifically referenced a 1986 document signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope, addressed to the Catholic bishops “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.”
     In the letter, the cardinal, at that time prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, outlined the moral underpinnings and practical considerations of the pastoral care of “those whose suffering can only be intensified by error and lightened by truth.”
     In this light, Nicolosi underlined the importance of helping homosexual persons who want to change, because “if you are Christian, you have to believe that you are intended for the opposite sex” and that “sexual complementarity is part of the natural law.”
     This is something that “should be evident to everyone,” as “our Christian anthropology,” he stated, and yet “it is amazing” how many people are confused about this.
     “They actually believe, or want to believe, either for personal reasons or political reasons, that God created two kinds of people: homosexuals and heterosexuals,” Nicolosi noted.
     “It is seeping into the consciousness without critical evaluation,” he cautioned, the resignation that “God just made them that way.”

Courage
     The psychologist appealed to priests to not be intimidated to teach about homosexuality from the pulpit, noting that he has met many Catholics who are “discouraged that there is no resource for them.”
     “We have Courage as the only orthodox Catholic ministry, and it’s underfunded, underrepresented and essentially pushed to the side,” he stated.
     He reported that “Courage is only represented in 10% of the parishes in this country” and thus many “men and women who want to come out of homosexuality” are left without resources on a local level, making it “very tough for them.”
     Nicolosi suggested that if a priest is working with a homosexual person and is uncertain about how to help, to refer him to a reparative therapist, “who really knows about this particular kind of treatment.”
     “Not to just any generic psychotherapist,” he added, “but to a therapist who has training in sexual re-orientation change.”
     Referencing Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter, he warned against a “studied ambiguity” in the face of the real need homosexual persons have for outreach from the Church.

Obama's Planned Economy

2009-06-15T12:00:00.000+03:00

From the 1934 Chicago Tribune:

Celebrating and Rewarding Deviancy

2009-06-09T14:00:00.001+03:00

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release June 1, 2009

LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER PRIDE MONTH, 2009

By The President of the United States Of America
A PROCLAMATION

     Forty years ago, patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resisted police harassment that had become all too common for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Out of this resistance, the LGBT rights movement in America was born. During LGBT Pride Month, we commemorate the events of June 1969 and commit to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans.
     LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. [?!?!?!] There are many well-respected LGBT leaders in all professional fields, including the arts and business communities. LGBT Americans also mobilized the Nation to respond to the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic and have played a vital role in broadening this country’s response to the HIV pandemic.
     Due in no small part to the determination and dedication of the LGBT rights movement, more LGBT Americans are living their lives openly today than ever before. I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions in the first 100 days of an Administration. These individuals embody the best qualities we seek in public servants, and across my Administration—in both the White House and the Federal agencies—openly LGBT employees are doing their jobs with distinction and professionalism.
     The LGBT rights movement has achieved great progress, but there is more work to be done. LGBT youth should feel safe to learn without the fear of harassment, and LGBT families and seniors should be allowed to live their lives with dignity and respect.
     My Administration has partnered with the LGBT community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Here at home, I continue to support measures to bring the full spectrum of equal rights to LGBT Americans. These measures include enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions and Federal rights for LGBT couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security. We must also commit ourselves to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic by both reducing the number of HIV infections and providing care and support services to people living with HIV/AIDS across the United States.
     These issues affect not only the LGBT community, but also our entire Nation. As long as the promise of equality for all remains unfulfilled, all Americans are affected. If we can work together to advance the principles upon which our Nation was founded, every American will benefit. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
     NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride [?!?!?!] Month. I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.
     IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of June, in the year of our Lord [?!?!?!] two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-third.
     BARACK OBAMA

Pro-Homosexual Researchers Conceal Findings:
Children Raised by Openly Homosexual Parents More Likely to Engage in Homosexuality
By Trayce Hansen, Ph.D.
http://www.drtraycehansen.com/Pages/writings_prohomo.html
     Research by social scientists, although not definitive, suggests that children reared by openly homosexual parents are far more likely to engage in homosexual behavior than children raised by others. Studies thus far find between 8% and 21% of homosexually parented children ultimately identify as non-heterosexual. For comparison purposes, approximately 2% of the general population are non-heterosexual. Therefore, if these percentages continue to hold true, children of homosexuals have a 4 to 10 times greater likelihood of developing a non-heterosexual preference than other children.
     Some researchers who uncovered sexual preference differences between homosexually and heterosexually parented children, nonetheless declared in their research summaries that no differences were found. Many believe they concealed their findings so as not to harm their own pro-homosexual, sociopolitical agendas.
     All social scientists who conduct research in this emotionally-charged area have personal biases. That’s a given. But if the authors of these studies want to be regarded as scientists, and not activists, they must set aside their biases and straightforwardly present their findings.
     Regardless, no one should be surprised that homosexual parents are more likely to raise homosexual children. As one of the few forthright pro-homosexual advocates proclaimed, “Of course our children are going to be different.”
     In fact, many believe the percentages of non-heterosexual children in these studies would be even greater if more of the children had been raised from birth by openly homosexual parents. But most weren’t. A majority of these children actually were born into and raised by mother-father couples before one of their parents “came-out” and the parents divorced.
     Findings from the best and most recent twin studies have found that homosexuality, unlike eye color, is not genetically-caused. But there are a number of non-genetic mechanisms through which homosexuality could be transmitted from one generation to the next. Those mechanisms include role-modeling, social learning and differential reinforcement, as well as outright encouragement of non-heterosexuality by parents or others.
     No one knows for sure by what complex mechanisms homosexual parents disproportionately rear homosexual children. But regardless of how, it appears they do. The public needs to be made aware of the findings of these studies so that when courts adjudicate and citizens vote on issues related to homosexuality, they’re fully informed as to the possible consequences of those decisions on children.
     *****************************
     For a review of the research studies alluded to above, as well as additional analysis and references, see article entitled, “A Review and Analysis of Studies Which Assessed Sexual Preference of Children Raised by Homosexuals.”

Take Up Your Cross

2009-05-11T22:00:00.003+03:00

New Life in Christ: What it Looks Like, What it Demands
By Charles J. Chaput
First Things – On the Square
Monday 11 May 2009
     The Catholic faith is not simply a collection of doctrines and ideas, or a body of knowledge, or even a system of beliefs, although all those things are important. At its root, Christianity is an experience: a life-changing, personal experience of the risen Jesus Christ. Everything else in the writings of St. Paul, and everything else in our life as Catholics, flows from that personal encounter with Jesus Christ. If we truly seek him, then we will always find him. But when we find him, we need to be ready for the consequences, because nothing about our lives can be the same.
     Let me share a story with you to explain what I mean. It’s about a young man named Franz who lived about sixty years ago in a small village in Austria. Franz was the illegitimate son of a farmer who later died in World War I. He was a wild teenager. Local people recall that he was the first one in his village to drive a motorcycle. And it’s not because he drove safely or kept to the posted speed limits.
     Franz was the leader of a gang that used to fight rival gangs in neighboring towns with knives and chains. He was something of a cad, too, and a womanizer. He got a girl pregnant and was forced to leave town. People said he went to work for awhile in an iron mine.
     For reasons nobody knows, Franz came back a changed man. He had always gone to church, even during his wildest days. But when he returned, he was a serious Catholic, not just a Sunday Catholic. He started making payments to support the child he had fathered out of wedlock. He married a good Catholic woman and settled down to become a good farmer, husband and father, raising three children and serving as a lay leader in his local parish.
     I want to quote something Franz wrote in a letter to his godson. He wrote: “I can say from my own experience how painful life often is when one lives as a halfway Christian. It is more like vegetating than living.” Believers today are relentlessly tempted to accept a halfway Christianity, to lead a “double life”—to be one person when we’re in church or at prayer and somebody different when we’re with our friends or family, or at work, or when we talk about politics.
     Part of this temptation comes from normal social pressure. We don’t want to stand out. We don’t want to seem different, so we keep our religious beliefs to ourselves. It’s as if we’ve internalized the old adage: “Never talk about religion or politics in polite company.” I’ve never accepted that kind of thinking, myself. Religion, politics, social justice—these are precisely the things we should be talking about. Nothing else really matters. Few things could be more important than religious faith, which deals with the ultimate meaning of life, and politics, which deals with how we should organize our lives together for justice and the common good.
     These are the things we need to talk about if we really want a new life, a whole and undivided life, in Jesus Christ. I think it’s important, though, that we start with a kind of “diagnosis” of the culture we’re living in, and the challenges it forces us to face. The reason is simple. We’re living in the first age in human history where entire societies are organized around this principle of “a double life.”
     The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls our period the “secular age.” How we got to this moment is far too big a subject for this article. The point is that in just a few centuries we’ve gone from living in a world where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to living in a world where belief in God doesn’t seem to be necessary or to make any difference.
     Most men and women today can live their whole lives as if God didn’t exist. Of course in all the developed, Western-style democracies, we’re allowed to believe in God, and even to pray and worship together. But we’re constantly lectured by the mass media to never impose our religious viewpoints on our neighbors. This curious idea is always framed as a reasonable and enlightened way to live. You’re free to believe what you want to believe, I’m free to believe what I want to believe, and the government agrees not to tell either of us what to believe or not to believe.
     But things really aren’t as reasonable and enlightened as they seem. Here’s a recent example: Pope Benedict visited Africa in March. On the plane a reporter asked him about the AIDS epidemic and the Church’s disapproval of condom uses. Now, there aren’t many nations or organizations in the world today that have poured as much money and human effort into the fight against AIDS in Africa as the Catholic Church. That’s just a statistical fact. So when the Pope answers a question like this he’s speaking, not just from theological opinion, but with real knowledge about conditions on the ground.
     And Benedict said that promoting condom use doesn’t help. In fact it does just the opposite. Nobody listened to his answer beyond that point. It was all over the media for the next several days how this conservative pope was sacrificing millions of Africans with AIDS on the altar of the Church’s rigid moral dogma. By one count, more than 4,000 articles were filed on the subject. And what’s astounding is the uniformity of the criticism—that the Pope and the Church are backward and medieval, and that Catholic beliefs are a threat to the public health.
     What happened? The pope challenged one of the cultish little orthodoxies of our time, the cult of the condom, and the underlying ideology that sexual intercourse is a fundamental human “need” that can never be questioned—not even in situations where pursuing that need could cost you your life.
     So public discussion gets shut down. Nobody stops to consider that what the Pope said wasn’t just sectarian religious belief, but that it actually makes good practical sense. Giving people condoms offers them a false sense of security and encourages the very behaviors that lead to the transmission of AIDS. What’s even more frustrating is to know that leading AIDS-prevention research scientists in Africa actually agree with the Pope.
     We’re taught to think that we live in an open society that respects freedom of religion and the free exchange of different ideas. But we don’t.
     And we shouldn’t kid ourselves. We may not be too far from the day when it will be legally discouraged to hold certain moral views and illegal to refuse to do certain things we find to be evil. The question then becomes: How are we going to live in this new world? How can we lead a “new life in Christ” in an unbelieving age?
     We can’t really answer that question until we get some things straight about what it means to be a Christian. And that means first getting some things straight about Jesus Christ. This is another one of the by-products of our secular times: We don’t really quite know what to think about Jesus anymore. Why?
     Because our culture has given Jesus a make-over. We’ve remade him in the image and likeness of generic compassion. Today he’s not the Lord, the Son of God, but more like an enlightened humanist nice guy.
     The problem is this: If Jesus isn’t Lord, if he isn’t the Son of God, then he can’t do anything for us. Then the Gospel is just one more or less interesting philosophy of life. And that’s my first point about how we need to live in a secular age: We need to trust the gospels, and we need to trust the Church that gives us the gospels. We need to truly believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the son of Mary; true God and true man; the One who holds the words of eternal life. If we aren’t committed to that truth, then nothing else I say in this article can make any sense.

     Here’s a second point: Jesus didn’t come down from heaven to tell us to go to church on Sunday. He didn’t die on the cross and rise from the dead so that we’d pray more at home and be a little kinder to our next-door neighbors. The one thing even non-believers can see is that the Gospels aren’t compromise documents. Jesus wants all of us. And not just on Sundays. He wants us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, and all our mind. He wants us to love our neighbor as ourselves. In other words, with a love that’s total.
     We need to take Christ at his word. We need to love him like our lives depend on it. Right now. And without excuses. Remember the man in Scripture who told Jesus: I’m ready to be your disciple, but first I need to plan my father’s funeral? The way Jesus responds is very blunt and rather disturbing: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. Follow me and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Of course, he’s not commanding us to show disrespect for our parents. What Jesus is saying is that there can be no more urgent priority in our lives than following him and proclaiming his kingdom.

     My third point flows from the first two: Being a follower of Jesus Christ is not just one among many different aspects of your daily life. Being a Christian is who you are. Period. And being a Christian means your life has a mission. It means striving every day to be a better follower, to become more like Jesus in your thoughts and actions.
     Blessed Charles de Foucauld once said that, “God calls all the souls he has created to love him with their whole being. . . . But he does not ask all souls to show their love by the same works, to climb to heaven by the same ladder, to achieve goodness in the same way. What sort of work, then must I do? Which is my road to heaven?”
     God expects big things from each of us. That’s why he made us. To love him and to serve one another, and to play our personal part in bringing about the kingdom of love. So you have to ask yourselves the same questions that Blessed Charles asked himself. What does God want you to be doing? How does he want you to follow Christ?
     Now, how do you go about finding the answers to these questions? By talking to God, humbly and honestly, in prayer. By getting to know Christ better through daily reading and praying over the gospels. By opening yourself up to the graces he gives us in the sacraments. “Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you.” It’s not about you choosing what you want to do with your life. It’s about discovering how God wants to use your life to spread the good news of his love and his kingdom.
     Blessed Charles, by the way, is one of the great stories of the twentieth century. He was a Frenchman who lived most of his life like the prodigal son, squandering his inheritance on alcohol, women, and dead-end pleasures. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, his life changed forever. He felt called to follow Christ literally, setting off on foot to Nazareth to devote himself to a humble life of manual labor, prayer, and charity. Some years later, his imitation of Christ led him to the Sahara Desert, where he lived as a hermit and eventually died a martyr’s death.
     Most of you will find your own road to heaven starting a little closer to home. That’s appropriate. In fact, it’s exactly what God intends. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus meets and reveals himself to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They’re not heading for Jerusalem or Moscow or Ottawa or Beijing or Washington, D.C. They’re on their way home. Likewise in the Gospel of Mark, the angel tells the women at the empty tomb that Jesus “is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him as he told you.” Galilee was an obscure and unimportant place. But it was the apostles’ home.
     In other words, Christ reveals himself to his followers in their ordinary lives. Jesus meets us on the way of life, and we find him again and again in the “breaking of the bread,” and as we pray over the Law of Moses, the prophets, the psalms, and all of Scripture. Our encounter with him in our personal circumstances opens our minds to the meaning of all these things. Jesus wants us to grow where we’re planted. Your task is to preach the gospel with your lives no matter where you are or whatever you find yourself doing—going to school, working, raising children, making a home.

     One final point: Love the Church; love her as your mother and teacher. Help to build her up, to purify her life and work. We all get angry when we see human weakness and sin in the Church. But we need to remember always that the Church is much, much more than the sum of her human parts.
     The Church is the Bride of Christ. The Spirit that worked in Jesus Christ and in his apostles is still at work in the Church. Jesus promised his apostles that when they teach, it will be he who is teaching. That when they forgive sins, it will be he who forgives. That when they say his words, “This is my body,” the bread and wine will become his body and blood. Jesus doesn’t forget his promises. Where the Church is, Jesus Christ is—until the end of the age. And we always want to be where Christ is, because there is no way home to God except through him.
     So love the Church. And this is crucial: Know and revere what the Church teaches. What the Church teaches is what Christ wants you and everyone else to know—for our own good and for our salvation. Know what the Church teaches so you can live those teachings and share those teachings with others.
     The leaders of today’s secularized societies like to fancy themselves as true humanists and humanitarians. But these same societies justify killing millions of babies in the womb and dismembering embryos in the laboratory. We dispatch the handicapped and the elderly and call it “death with dignity.” Our very language has become subverted. The family is no longer the covenant communion of a man and woman that leads to new life and hence the future of society. In fact, there are so few babies being born now in developed, Western-style countries that we have to wonder whether our civilization has lost its will to survive.
     Only the Church stands up against these inhuman trends in our societies. It’s your mission, as lay men and lay women, to ensure that Christ’s teaching is preached and explained and defended at every level of our society—in politics, in the workplace, in the culture. This takes real courage. There are all sorts of pressures, subtle and not so subtle, to sell out Jesus. To water down or diminish his gospel. To pick and choose among his teachings. But we can’t do that. Make a promise to Jesus Christ never to contradict the Church’s teachings by your words or actions.
     Only the truth can set people free. That truth is Jesus Christ. So if we truly love our neighbors we will want them to know the truth. The whole truth. Not just the parts of it that make them feel good and don’t challenge them to change.
     It’s not possible for real Christians to lead a double life; our whole way of thinking and acting needs to be transformed by our faith, or we make ourselves into hypocrites. Like our friend Franz once said, being a halfway Christian is like being a vegetable. It’s not really a life. It’s barely an existence. And that reminds me that it’s time for me to tell you the rest of the story about Franz.
     Germany invaded Austria in 1938. Unlike most of his neighbors, Franz refused to cooperate in any way with the new National Socialist regime because he considered Hitler to be an enemy of Christ and the Church. For five years he waged a personal campaign of moral resistance. But finally, he was arrested for refusing an order to enlist in the German army.
     While awaiting his sentence, many people, including his family and his local priest, urged him to pay lip-service to the regime and thereby spare his life. Franz wouldn’t do it.
     So sixty-six summers ago, on August 9, 1943, Franz died on a Nazi guillotine. Today we remember him as Blessed Franz Jägerstätter—a martyr for the truth that a Catholic can never lead a double life; that there can be no such thing as a halfway Christian.
     Blessed Franz wrote beautiful letters to his wife from prison. In one of them he talked about the great martyrs of the Church. He wrote: “If we hope to reach our goal some day, then we, too, must become heroes of the faith. For as long as we fear men more than God, we will never make the grade.” Another time he wrote: “The important thing is that we do not let a single day go by in vain without putting it to good use for eternity.”
     That’s the heart of the matter for anyone who wants to be a real Christian. That’s the path to a new life in Christ: Put every day to good use for eternity. And the time to begin that is now.

     Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is archbishop of Denver and author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. This article is based on a speech given in Edmonton, Alberta on 30 April 2009.

Penguin Wisdom

2009-05-10T18:40:00.004+03:00

Penguins are pro-life and pro-family...

... which means they are more intelligent than the anti-family, pro-abortion, and pro-homosexual forces.

Happy Mother's Day!

Chances That An Atheist Will Believe in God As A Function Of...

2009-05-07T11:50:00.001+03:00

Permitting the Slaying of the Most Innocent of Innocents

2009-05-04T16:10:00.001+03:00

[Mr.] Obama, in his press conference last week, cut through the noise to the essence of the issue. Torture, he said, “corrodes the character of a country”… (The New Yorker)

… Yeah, right. This from the man who does everything possible to support, protect and encourage legislation that permits the killing of the most defenseless—the most innocent of innocents: the unborn. Through his support of the dehumanization and killing of the unborn, Obama is doing more to corrode the character of the nation and to reduce politics to a crude power game of the strong over the weak than pro-abortionists ever thought possible.

Prayer’s Goal: Holiness in Doing God’s Will… Not in Understanding God

2009-04-30T18:00:00.002+03:00

Ask yourself “Have I prayed well today?”
Do not try to find out how deep your emotions were,
or how much deeper you understand things Divine.
Ask yourself “Am I doing God’s will better than before?”
If you are: prayer has brought its fruits.
If you are not: it has not,
     no matter the amount of understanding
     or feeling you may have derived from
     the time spent in the presence of God.

Theophane the Recluse

Orwell’s Eastasia Death Worship Incarnate

2009-04-29T13:30:00.002+03:00

100 Days of Death
Jill Stanek
World Net Daily – Wednesday 29 April 2009
On Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Obama began his death march as the most anti-life president in U.S. history. Today marks Obama’s 100th day in office. This list substantiates Obama’s personnel and policies to that end. He actually started way before Day 1:

Day 1: At 12:01 p.m. EST, the White House website is instantly and completely transformed from pro-life to pro-abortion. Scrubbed is President Bush’s Sanctity of Human Life proclamation issued the week before in commemoration of Jan. 22, the anniversary Roe v. Wade, and all else heralding preborn life. In its place: “President Obama … has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority in his administration. … He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.”
Day 1: Obama signals his intention to fund human embryo experimentation by stating in his inaugural address, “We will restore science to its rightful place.”
Day 4: Reverses Mexico City Policy, releasing taxpayer money to international organizations that promote or commit abortions (for which Obama received 35 percent approval in a Gallup Poll, making this his least popular decision to date).
Day 4: Releases statement expressing desire for Congress to restore funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which has previously been found to aid in China’s coercive abortion and sterilization program.
Day 16: Chooses pro-abortion Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine as Democratic Party chairman.
Day 16: Nominates pro-abortion, pro-porn David Ogden as deputy attorney general.
Day 16: Nominates “pregnancy is slavery” and former ACLU and NARAL counsel Dawn Johnsen as assistant attorney general.
Day 16: Nominates Thomas Perrelli, former pro-euthanasia attorney for Terri Shindler Schiavo’s husband Michael, to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice.
Day 16: Nominates pro-abortion former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan as solicitor general, with the buzz she is on short list as next Supreme Court nominee; she supports taxpayer funding of abortion.
Day 17: After attending National Day of Prayer breakfast, signs executive order redirecting the Office of Faith Based Initiatives to include a “focus on family planning,” according to NPR.
Day 24: Nominates former House co-sponsor of the Freedom of Choice Act, Leon Panetta, as CIA director.
Day 38: Signals commitment to comprehensive sex ed by including it in his 2010 budget.
Day 39: Announces plan to repeal Bush regulations enforcing protection of health care entities and workers not to participate in morally abhorrent practices.
Day 40: After Daschle withdraws as HHS secretary nominee, chooses radically pro-abortion Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who has financial ties to late-term abortionist George Tiller.
Day 41: Nominates pro-abortion and pro-universal health (abortion) care Sen. Tom Daschle as secretary of health and human services.
Day 41: Appoints pro-abortion Jeanne Lambrew as deputy director of newly created Office of Health Care Reform under Daschle, which Planned Parenthood heralded as “exciting” in a statement.
Day 41: White House transition team publishes 55-page list of demands from pro-abortion groups.
Day 45: Holds “health care summit” at White House, inviting only pro-abortion groups.
Day 46: Creates new post of ambassador for global women’s issues and appoints Melanne Verveer, abortion activist and former chief of staff to first lady Hillary Clinton; according to the Associated Press, she “pledged … ‘deep commitment’ … [to] slowing the world’s population explosion and empowering women … through … the right to choose if and when to become pregnant.”
Day 49: Signs executive order providing taxpayer funding of human embryo experimentation and overturns Bush executive order funding alternative morally acceptable adult stem cell research.
Day 50: Announces 30-day review period with intent to overturn HHS regulations enforcing conscience protections of health care entities and workers.
Day 51: Signs bill into law restoring UNFPA’s funding – to a record $50 million.
Day 51: Signs bill into law (which he sponsored as senator) restoring cut rate wholesale birth control pill prices to Planned Parenthood.
Day 51: Signs bill into law increasing “family planning” funding by $7 million and cutting abstinence funding by $14 million.
Day 51: Signs bill into law increasing international “family planning” funding by $30 million.
Day 51: Announces establishment of the White House Council on Women and Girls, which the National Organization for Women “cheers” in a statement.
Day 51: Obama administration promotes unlimited right to abortion at U.N. Commission on the Status of Women meeting and denies negative effects of abortion.
Day 51: Nominates pro-abortion Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
Day 56: Names Melody Barnes, who previously served on the boards of EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, as his director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Day 57: Makes first pro-abortion judicial pick in former ACLU board member David Hamilton as U.S. circuit judge, who previously blocked implementation of an informed consent law before abortion.
Day 59: Appoints executive director of EMILY’s List, Ellen Moran, as White House communications director.
Day 75: Names pro-abortion Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff, who earned a 100 percent approval rating from NARAL while congressman.
Day 78: Nominates pro-abortion Yale Law School dean Harold Hongju Koh as the State Department’s legal adviser, who believes in the international right to abortion and was former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who authored the Roe v Wade decision.
Day 85: Department of Homeland Security releases document calling pro-life activists potential domestic terrorist threats.
Day 94: FDA refuses to appeal court ruling ordering over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill to 17-year-old girls and boys.

     While President Obama appears addicted to campaign mode audience adulation and maintains an extremely heavy travel schedule, he has left his day-to-day operations, policy decisions, and speechwriting in the hands of serious abortion industry and activist players. Furthermore, by personnel and policy announcements to date, the Obama administration has signaled its intention to push his abortion agenda on the world.
     This is only the start.
     Jill Stanek fought to stop “live-birth abortion” after witnessing one as a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. In 2002, President Bush asked Jill to attend his signing of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. In January 2003, World Magazine named Jill one of the 30 most prominent pro-life leaders of the past 30 years. To learn more, visit Jill’s blog, Pro-Life Pulse.

Notre Dame's Fr. Jenkins: The Grand Manipulator

2009-04-28T08:30:00.002+03:00

With Apologies to Dostoevsky…

Declining Notre Dame: A Letter from Mary Ann Glendon
By Mary Ann Glendon
First Things Blog – 27 April 2009

The Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.
President
University of Notre Dame

Dear Father Jenkins,
     When you informed me in December 2008 that I had been selected to receive Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, I was profoundly moved. I treasure the memory of receiving an honorary degree from Notre Dame in 1996, and I have always felt honored that the commencement speech I gave that year was included in the anthology of Notre Dame’s most memorable commencement speeches. So I immediately began working on an acceptance speech that I hoped would be worthy of the occasion, of the honor of the medal, and of your students and faculty.
     Last month, when you called to tell me that the commencement speech was to be given by President Obama, I mentioned to you that I would have to rewrite my speech. Over the ensuing weeks, the task that once seemed so delightful has been complicated by a number of factors.
     First, as a longtime consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, I could not help but be dismayed by the news that Notre Dame also planned to award the president an honorary degree. This, as you must know, was in disregard of the U.S. bishops’ express request of 2004 that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” and that such persons “should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” That request, which in no way seeks to control or interfere with an institution’s freedom to invite and engage in serious debate with whomever it wishes, seems to me so reasonable that I am at a loss to understand why a Catholic university should disrespect it.
     Then I learned that “talking points” issued by Notre Dame in response to widespread criticism of its decision included two statements implying that my acceptance speech would somehow balance the event:

“President Obama won’t be doing all the talking. Mary Ann Glendon, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, will be speaking as the recipient of the Laetare Medal.”
“We think having the president come to Notre Dame, see our graduates, meet our leaders, and hear a talk from Mary Ann Glendon is a good thing for the president and for the causes we care about.”

     A commencement, however, is supposed to be a joyous day for the graduates and their families. It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre Dame’s decision—in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops—to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.
     Finally, with recent news reports that other Catholic schools are similarly choosing to disregard the bishops’ guidelines, I am concerned that Notre Dame’s example could have an unfortunate ripple effect.
     It is with great sadness, therefore, that I have concluded that I cannot accept the Laetare Medal or participate in the May 17 graduation ceremony.
     In order to avoid the inevitable speculation about the reasons for my decision, I will release this letter to the press, but I do not plan to make any further comment on the matter at this time.

Yours Very Truly,
Mary Ann Glendon

     Mary Ann Glendon is Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. A member of the editorial and advisory board of FIRST THINGS , she served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican from 2007 to 2009.

Moloch's Minion?

2009-04-20T21:00:00.002+03:00

Change: Ordered or Disordered?

2009-04-09T21:08:00.005+03:00

     The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical appeal: “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.” [Contra Mark 8:36] It is a simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy use: “Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.” Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world. Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and to act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also a unfailing power to move men. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die—to bear witness—for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.
          Whittaker Chambers, Witness, “Letter to My Children”

     “… But whatever his strengths, there’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope and change. Of course, that can change. Some things really do change when a person reaches the White House. Power ennobles some men. It diminishes others. Bad policy ideas can be improved. Good policy ideas can find a way to flourish. But as Catholics, we at least need to be honest with ourselves and each other about the political facts we start with…
     … In fact, we have the duty to change bad laws and resist grave evil in our public life, both by our words and our non-violent actions. The truest respect we can show to civil authority is the witness of our Catholic faith and our moral convictions, without excuses or apologies…
     … Americans, including many Catholics, elected a gifted man to fix an economic crisis. That’s the mandate. They gave nobody a mandate to retool American culture on the issues of marriage and the family, sexuality, bioethics, religion in public life and abortion. That retooling could easily happen, and it clearly will happen — but only if Catholics and other religious believers allow it…
     … We can’t talk piously about programs to reduce the abortion body count without also working vigorously to change the laws that make the killing possible. If we’re Catholic, then we believe in the sanctity of developing human life. And if we don’t really believe in the humanity of the unborn child from the moment life begins, then we should stop lying to ourselves and others, and even to God, by claiming we’re something we’re not.”
          Archbishop of Denver Charles Chaput, 23 February 2009

As A Political State—Good Riddance; As A Nation—I Weep Bitterly For Her

2009-04-08T14:30:00.003+03:00

Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb
Nicholas Eberstadt
World Affairs – Spring 2009
     A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing.
     Since 1992, Russia’s human numbers have been progressively dwindling. This slow motion process now taking place in the country carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications that threaten to recast the contours of life and society in Russia, to diminish the prospects for Russian economic development, and to affect Russia’s potential influence on the world stage in the years ahead.
     Russia has faced this problem at other times during the last century. The first bout of depopulation lasted from 1917 to 1923, and was caused by the upheavals that transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. The next drop took place between 1933 and 1934, when the country’s population fell by nearly 2 million—or almost 2 percent—as a result of Stalin’s war against the “kulaks” in his forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. And then, between 1941 and 1946, Russia’s population plummeted by more than 13 million through the cataclysms and catastrophes of World War II.
     The current Russian depopulation—which began in 1992 and shows no signs of abating—was, like the previous episodes, also precipitated by events of momentous political significance: the final dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of Communist Party rule. But it differs in three important respects. First, it is by far the longest period of population decline in modern Russian history, having persisted for over twice as long as the decline that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, and well over three times as long as the terrifying depopulation Russia experienced during and immediately after World War II.
     Second, unlike all the previous depopulations in Russia, this one has been taking place under what are, within the Russian context, basically orderly social and political circumstances. Terror and war are not the engines for the depopulation Russia is experiencing today, as they have been in the past.
     And finally, whereas Russia’s previous depopulations resulted from wild and terrible social paroxysms, they were also clearly temporary in nature. The current crisis, on the other hand, is proceeding gradually and routinely, and thus it is impossible to predict when, or whether, it will finally come to an end. [This article continues—follow the link below.]
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     A comparison dramatizes what is happening in Russia. Between 1976 and 1991, the last sixteen years of Soviet power, the country recorded 36 million births. In the sixteen post-Communist years of 1992–2007, there were just 22.3 million, a drop in childbearing of nearly 40 percent from one era to the next. On the other side of the life cycle, a total of 24.6 million deaths were recorded between 1976 and 1991, while in the first sixteen years of the post-Communist period the Russian Federation tallied 34.7 million deaths, a rise of just over 40 percent. The symmetry is striking: in the last sixteen years of the Communist era, births exceeded deaths in Russia by 11.4 million; in the first sixteen years of the post-Soviet era, deaths exceeded births by 12.4 million.
     The Russian Federation is by no means the only country to have registered population decline during the past two decades. In fact, 11 of the 19 countries making up Western Europe reported some annual population declines during the Cold War era. On the whole, however, these population dips tended to be brief and slight in magnitude. (Italy’s “depopulation,” for example, was limited to just one year—1986—and entailed a decline of fewer than 4,000 persons.) Moreover, the population declines in these cases were primarily a consequence of migration trends: either emigration abroad in search of opportunity (Ireland, Portugal), or release of foreign “guest workers” during recessions or cyclical downturns in the domestic economy (most of the rest). Only in a few Western European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom) did negative natural increase ever feature as a contributing factor in a year-on-year population decline. In all but Germany, such bouts of negative natural increase proved to be temporary and relatively muffled.
     So where, given these daunting facts, is the Russian Federation headed demographically in the years and decades ahead? Two of the world’s leading demographic institutions—the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) and the U.S. Bureau of the Census—have tried to answer this question by a series of projections based upon what their analysts believe to be plausible assumptions about Russia’s future fertility, mortality, and migration patterns.
     Both organizations’ projections trace a continuing downward course for the Russian Federation’s population over the generation ahead. As of mid-year 2005, Russia’s estimated population was around 143 million. UNPD projections for the year 2025 range from a high of about 136 million to a low of about 121 million; for the year 2030, they range from 133 million to 115 million. The Census Bureau’s projections for the Russian Federation’s population in 2025 and 2030 are 128 million and 124 million, respectively.
     If these projections turn out to be relatively accurate—admittedly, a big “if” for any long-range demographic projection—the Russian Federation will have experienced over thirty years of continuous demographic decline by 2025, and the better part of four decades of depopulation by 2030. Russia’s population would then have dropped by about 20 million between 1990 and 2025, and Russia would have fallen from the world’s sixth to the twelfth most populous country. In relative terms, that would amount to almost as dramatic a demographic drop as the one Russia suffered during World War II. In absolute terms, it would actually be somewhat greater in magnitude.
     Strikingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Moscow’s leadership is advancing into this uncertain terrain not only with insouciance but with highly ambitious goals. In late 2007, for example, the Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials, GDP will quadruple in the next two decades, and the Russian Federation will emerge as the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020.
     But history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline. It seems highly unlikely that such an ambitious agenda can be achieved in the face of Russia’s current demographic crisis. Sooner or later, Russian leadership will have to acknowledge that these daunting long-term developments are shrinking their country’s social and political potential.

     Marxist theory famously envisioned the “withering away” of the state upon the full attainment of Communism. That utopia never arrived in the USSR (or anywhere else for that matter). But with the collapse of Soviet rule, Russia has seen a pervasive and profound change in childbearing patterns and living arrangements—what might be described as a “withering away” of the family itself.
     In the postwar Soviet era, Russia’s so-called “total fertility rate” (TFR), which calculates the number of births a typical woman would be expected to have during childbearing years, exceeded 2.0—and in the early years of the Gorbachev era, Russia’s total fertility rate temporarily exceeded 2.2. After 1989, though, it fell far below 2.0 with no signs as yet of any recovery. Russia’s post-Communist TFR hit its low—perhaps we should say its low to date—in 1999, when it was 1.17. By 2005, the total fertility rate in the Russian Federation was up to about 1.3—but this still represented a collapse of about two-fifths from the peak level in the Gorbachev years.
     In the late 1980s, near the end of the Communist era, there were just a handful of European countries (most of them under Communist rule) with higher fertility rates than Russia’s. By 2005, the last year for which authoritative data is available, there were only a few European societies (perhaps ironically, most of them ex-Communist) with lower rates.
     What accounts for the Russian Federation’s low levels of fertility? Some observers point to poor health conditions. And indeed, as we will see, Russia’s overall health situation today is truly woeful. This is especially true of its reproductive health.
     A consortium headed by the World Health Organization estimated that for 2005 a woman’s risk of death in childbirth in Russia was over six times higher than in Germany or Switzerland. Moreover, mortality levels for women in their twenties (the decade in which childbearing is concentrated in contemporary Russia) have been rising, not falling, in recent decades.
     But Russia’s low fertility patterns are not due to any extraordinary inability of Russian women to conceive, but rather to the strong and growing tendency among childbearing women to have no more than two children—and perhaps increasingly not more than one. The new evident limits on family size in Russia, in turn, suggest a sea change in the country’s norms concerning family formation.
     In 1980, fewer than one Russian newborn in nine was reportedly born out of wedlock. By 2005, the country’s illegitimacy ratio was approaching 30 percent—almost a tripling in just twenty years. Marriage is not only less common in Russia today than in the recent past; it is also markedly less stable. In 2005, the total number of marriages celebrated in Russia was down by nearly one-fourth from 1980 (a fairly typical Brezhnev-period year for marriages). On the other hand, the total number of divorces recognized in Russia has been on an erratic rise over the past generation, from under 400 divorces per 1,000 marriages in 1980 to a peak of over 800 in 2002.
     In 1990, the end of the Gorbachev era, marriage was still the norm, and while divorce was very common, a distinct majority of Russian Federation women (60 percent) could expect to have entered into a first marriage and still remain in that marriage by age 50. A few years later, in 1996, the picture was already radically different: barely a third of Russia’s women (34 percent) were getting married and staying in that same marriage until age 50.
     Since the end of the Soviet era, young women in Russia are opting for cohabitation before and, to a striking extent, instead of marriage. In the early 1980s, about 15 percent of women had been in consensual unions by age 25; twenty years later, the proportion was 45 percent. Many fewer of those once-cohabiting young women, moreover, seem to be moving into marital unions nowadays. Whereas roughly a generation earlier, fully half of cohabiters were married within a year, today less than a third are.
     Is Russia’s post-Communist plunge in births the consequence of a “demographic shock,” or the result of what some Russian experts call a “quiet revolution” in patterns of family formation? At the moment, it is possible to see elements of both in the Russian Federation’s unfolding fertility trends. Demographic shocks tend by nature to be transient; demographic transitions or “revolutions,” considerably less so. But this much is clear: to date, no European society that has embarked upon the same demographic transition as Russia’s—declining marriage rates with rising divorce; the spread of cohabitation as alternative to marriage; delayed age at marriage and sub-replacement fertility regimens—has reverted to more “traditional” family patterns and higher levels of completed family size. There is no reason to think that in Russia it will be any different.
     There are many ramifications of the dramatic decline in population in Russia, but three in particular bear heavily on the country’s prospective development and national security.
     First, when Western European nations reached the level of 30 percent illegitimate births that Russia has now attained, their levels of per capita output were all dramatically higher—three times higher in France, Austria, and Britain, and higher than that in countries such as Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
     This means that Russia’s mothers and their children will be afforded far fewer of the social protections that their counterparts could count on in Western Europe’s more generous welfare states.
     A second and related point pertains to “investment” in children. According to prevailing tenets of Western economic thought, a decline in fertility—to the extent that it occurs under conditions of orderly progress, and as a consequence of parental volition—should mean a better material environment for newborns and children because a shift to smaller desired family size, all else being equal, signifies an increase in parents’ expected commitments to each child’s education, nutrition, health care, and the like.
     Yet in post-Communist Russia, there are unambiguous indications of a worsening of social well-being for a significant proportion of the country’s children—in effect, a disinvestment in children in the face of a pronounced downward shift in national fertility patterns.
     School enrollment is sharply lower for primary-school-age children—99 percent in 1991 versus 91 percent in 2004. And the number of abandoned children is sharply higher. According to official statistics, as of 2004 over 400,000 Russian children below 18 years of age were in “residential care.” This means that roughly 1 child in 70 was in a children’s home, orphanage, or state boarding school. Russia is also home to a large and possibly growing contingent of street children whose numbers could well exceed those under institutional care. According to Human Rights Watch, over 100,000 children in Russia have been abandoned by their parents each year since 1996. If accurate, this number, compared to the annual tally of births for the Russian Federation, which averaged about 1.4 million a year for the 1996–2007 period, would suggest that in excess of 7 percent of Russia’s children are being discarded by their parents in this new era of steep sub-replacement fertility.
     A third implication of the past decade and a half of sharply lower birth levels in Russia will be a drop-off in the country’s working-age population, and an acceleration of the tempo of population aging in the period immediately ahead. Barring only a steady and massive in-migration, Russia’s potential labor pool will shrink markedly over the coming decade and a half and continue to diminish thereafter.

     In addition to its daunting fertility decline, Russia’s public health losses today are of a scale akin to what might be expected from a devastating war. Since the end of the Communist era, in fact, “excess mortality” has cost Russia hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
     The 1960s and 1970s witnessed an increase in mortality rates for key elements of the Soviet population. But Russia’s health patterns did not correct course with the collapse of the USSR, as many experts assumed they would. In fact, in the first decade and a half of its post-Communist history the country’s health conditions actually became worse. Life expectancy in the Russian Federation is actually lower today than it was a half century ago in the late 1950s. In fact, the country has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life previously unknown in all of human history.
     Like the urbanized and literate societies in Western Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the overwhelming majority of deaths in Russia today accrue from chronic rather than infectious diseases: heart disease, cancers, strokes, and the like. But in the rest of the developed world, death rates from these chronic diseases are low, relatively stable, and declining regularly over time. In the Russian Federation, by contrast, overall mortality levels are high, manifestly unstable, and rising.
     The single clearest and most comprehensible summary measure of a population’s mortality prospects is its estimated expectation of life at birth. Russia’s trends in the late 1950s and early 1960s were rising briskly. In the five years between 1959 and 1964, for instance, life expectancy increased by more than two years. But then, inexplicably, overall health progress in Russia came to a sudden and spectacular halt. Over that 18-year period that roughly coincides with the Brezhnev era, Russia’s life expectancy not only stagnated, but actually fell by about a year and a half.
     These losses were recovered during the Gorbachev period, but even at its pinnacle in 1986 and 1987, overall life expectancy for Russia was only marginally higher than it had been in 1964, never actually managing to cross the symbolic 70-year threshold. With the end of Communism, moreover, life expectancy went into erratic decline, plummeting a frightful four years between 1992 and 1994, recovering somewhat through 1998, but then again spiraling downward. In 2006—the most recent year for which we have such data—overall Russian life expectancy at birth was over three years lower than it had been in 1964.
     The situation for Russian males has been particularly woeful. In the immediate postwar era, life expectancy for men was somewhat lower than in other developed countries—but this differential might partly be attributed to the special hardships of World War II and the evils of Stalinism. By the early 1960s, the male life expectancy gap between Russia and the more developed regions narrowed somewhat—but then life expectancy for Russian men entered into a prolonged and agonizing decline, while continued improvements characterized most of the rest of the world. By 2005, male life expectancy at birth was fully fifteen years lower in the Russian Federation than in Western Europe. It was also five years below the global average for male life expectancy, and three years below the average for the less developed regions (whose levels it had exceeded, in the early 1950s, by fully two decades). Put another way, male life expectancy in 2006 was about two and a half years lower under Putin than it had been in 1959, under Khrushchev.
     According to the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base for 2007, Russia ranked 164 out of 226 globally in overall life expectancy. Russia is below Bolivia, South America’s poorest (and least healthy) country and lower than Iraq and India, but somewhat higher than Pakistan. For females, the Russian Federation life expectancy will not be as high as in Nicaragua, Morocco, or Egypt. For males, it will be in the same league as that of Cambodia, Ghana, and Eritrea.
     In the face of today’s exceptionally elevated mortality levels for Russia’s young adults, it is no wonder that an unspecified proportion of the country’s would-be mothers and fathers respond by opting for fewer offspring than they would otherwise desire. To a degree not generally appreciated, Russia’s current fertility crisis is a consequence of its mortality crisis.
     How did Russia’s mortality level, which was nearly 38 percent higher than Western Europe’s in 1980, skyrocket to an astonishing 135 percent higher in 2006? What role did communicable and infectious disease play in this fateful health regression and mortality deterioration?
     By any reading, the situation in Russia today sounds awful. The Russian Federation is afflicted with a serious HIV/AIDS epidemic; according to UNAIDS, as of 2008 somewhere around 1 million Russians were living with the virus. (Russia’s HIV nexus appears to be closely associated with a burgeoning phenomenon of local drug use, with sex trafficking and other forms of prostitution or “commercial sex,” and with other practices and mores relating to extramarital sex.) Russia also faces a related and evidently growing burden of tuberculosis. As of 2008, according to World Health Organization estimates, Russia was experiencing about 150,000 new TB infections a year. To make matters worse, almost half of Russia’s treated tubercular cases over the past decade have been the variant known as extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB).
     Yet, dismaying as these statistics are, the picture looks even worse when we consider cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality trends.
     By the late 1960s, the epidemic upsurge of CVD mortality in Western industrial societies that immediately followed World War II had peaked. From the mid-1970s onward, age-standardized death rates from diseases of the circulatory system steadily declined in Western Europe. In Russia, by stark contrast, CVD mortality in 1980 was well over 50 percent higher than it had been in “old” EU states as of 1970, and the Russian population may well have been suffering the very highest incidence of mortality from diseases of the circulatory system that had ever been visited on a national population in the entire course of human history.
     Over the subsequent decades, unfortunately, the level of CVD mortality in the Russian Federation veered even further upward. By 2006, Russia’s CVD mortality rate, standardizing for population structure, was an almost unbelievable 3.8 times higher than the population-weighted level reported for Western Europe.
     Scarcely less alarming was Russia’s mortality rate from “external causes”—non-communicable deaths from injuries of various origins. The tale here is broadly similar to the story of CVD: impossibly high levels of death in a society that otherwise does not exhibit signs of backwardness.
     In Western Europe, age-standardized mortality from injury and poisoning, as tabulated by the World Health Organization, fell by almost half between 1970 and 2006. In Russia, on the other hand, deaths from injuries and poisoning, which had been 2.5 times higher than in Western Europe in 1980, were up to 5.3 times higher as of 2006.
     A broadly negative relationship was evident between mortality from injuries and per capita income. In other Western countries in 2002, an increase of 10 percent in per capita GDP was associated with a drop of about 2 points in injury deaths per 100,000 population. Yet Russia’s toll of deaths is nearly three times higher than would be predicted by its GDP. No literate and urban society in the modern world faces a risk of deaths from injuries comparable to the one that Russia experiences.
     Russia’s patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.
     Taken together, then, deaths from cardiovascular disease and from injuries and poisoning have evidently been the main drivers of modern Russia’s strange upsurge in premature mortality and its broad, prolonged retrogression in public health conditions. One final factor that is intimately associated with both of these causes of mortality is alcohol abuse.
     Unlike drinking patterns prevalent in, say, Mediterranean regions—where wine is regarded as an elixir for enhancing conversation over meals and other social gatherings, and where public drunkenness carries an embarrassing stigma—mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on. Further, extreme binge drinking (especially of hard spirits) is associated with stress on the cardiovascular system and heightened risk of CVD mortality.
     How many Russians are actually drinkers, and how heavily do they actually drink? Officially, Russia classifies some 7 million out of roughly 120 million persons over 15 years of age, or roughly 6 percent of its adult population, as heavy drinkers. But the numbers are surely higher than this. According to data compiled by the World Health Organization, as of 2003 Russia was Europe’s heaviest per capita spirits consumer; its reported hard liquor consumption was over four times as high as Portugal’s, three times that of Germany or Spain, and over two and a half times higher than that of France.
     Yet even these numbers may substantially understate hard spirit use in Russia, since the WHO figures follow only the retail sale of hard liquor. But samogon—home-brew, or “moonshine”—is, according to some Russian researchers, a huge component of the country’s overall intake. Professor Alexander Nemstov, perhaps Russia’s leading specialist in this area, argues that Russia’s adult population—women as well as men—puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week.
     From the epidemiological standpoint, local-level studies have offered fairly chilling proof that alcohol is a direct factor in premature mortality. One forensic investigation of blood alcohol content by a medical examiner’s office in a city in the Urals, for example, indicated that over 40 percent of the younger male decedents evaluated had probably been alcohol-impaired or severely intoxicated at the time of death—including one quarter of the deaths from heart disease and over half of those from accidents or injuries. But medical and epidemiological studies have also demonstrated that, in addition to its many deaths from consumption of ordinary alcohol, Russia also suffers a grisly toll from alcohol poisoning, as the country’s drinkers, in their desperate quest for intoxication, down not only sometimes severely impure samogon, but also perfumes, alcohol-based medicines, cleaning solutions, and other deadly liquids. Death rates from such alcohol poisoning appear to be at least one hundred times higher in Russia than the United States—this despite the fact that the retail price in Russia today is lower for a liter of vodka than a liter of milk.
     Josef Stalin is said to have coldly joked that one death was a tragedy, while one million deaths was just a statistic. This comment seems to apply to post-Communist Russia as well to Stalin’s own deranged regime. For the better part of a generation, Russia has suffered something akin to wartime population losses during year after year of peacetime political order. In the United Nations Development Program’s annually tabulated “Human Development Index,” which uses health as well as economic data to measure a country’s living standards as they affect quality of life, Russia was number 73 out of 179. A country of virtually universal literacy and quite respectable general educational attainment, with a scientific cadre that mastered nuclear fission over half a century ago and launches orbital spacecraft and interplanetary probes today, finds itself ranked on this metric between Mauritius and Ecuador.

     In the modern era, population decline itself need not be a cause for acute economic alarm. Italy, Germany, and Japan are among the societies where signs of incipient population decline are being registered nowadays: all of these are affluent countries, and all can anticipate continuing improvements in their respective levels of prosperity (albeit at a slower tempo than some might prefer). Depopulation with Russian characteristics—population decline powered by an explosive upsurge of illness and mortality—is altogether more forbidding in its economic implications, not only forcing down popular well-being today, but also placing unforgiving constraints on economic productivity and growth for tomorrow.
     As we have already seen, it is Russia’s death crisis that accounts for the entirety of the country’s population decline over the past decade and a half. The upsurge of illness and mortality, furthermore, has been disproportionately concentrated among men and women of working age—meaning that Russia’s labor force has been shrinking more rapidly than the population overall.
     Health is a critical and central element in the complex quantity that economists have termed “human capital.” In the contemporary international economy, one additional year of life expectancy at birth is associated with an increase in per capita output of about 8 percent. A decade of lost life expectancy improvement would correspond to the loss of a doubling of per capita income. By this standard, Russia’s economic as well as its demographic future is in jeopardy.
     It is not obvious that Russia will be able to recover rapidly from its health katastroika. There is an enormous amount of “negative health momentum” in the Russian situation today: with younger brothers facing worse survival prospects than older brothers, older brothers facing worse survival prospects than their fathers, and so on. Severely foreshortened adult life spans can shift the cost-benefit calculus for investments in training and higher education dramatically. On today’s mortality patterns, a Swiss man at 20 has about an 87 percent chance of making it to a notional retirement age of 65. His Russian counterpart at age 20 has less than even odds of reaching 65. Harsh excess mortality levels impose real and powerful disincentives for the mass acquisition of the technical skills that are a key to wealth generation in the modern world. Thus Russia’s health crisis may be even more generally subversive of human capital, and more powerfully corrosive of human resources, than might appear to be the case at first glance.
     Putin’s Kremlin made a fateful bet that natural resources—oil, gas, and other extractive saleable commodities—would be the springboard for the restoration of Moscow’s influence as a great power on the world stage. In this gamble, Russian authorities have mainly ignored the nation’s human resource crisis. During the boom years—Russia’s per capita income roughly doubled between 1998 and 2007—the country’s death rate barely budged. Very much worse may lie ahead. How Russia’s still-unfolding demographic disaster will affect the country’s domestic political situation—and its international security posture—are questions that remain to be answered.
     Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and is Senior Adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research.

See also: Julie DaVanzo, Gwen Farnsworth, “Russia’s Demographic ‘Crisis’,” Rand Corporation Conference Proceedings, 1996; Graeme Smith, “Russia shrinks: Russians are dying younger each year, having fewer children and resisting immigration. The result is a population freefall and a risk of economic ruin,” Toronto Globe and Mail, 21 April 2006; Murray Feshbach, “Dying Inside: Behind the Bluster, Russia Is Collapsing,” Washington Post, Sunday 05 October 2008, Page B03