Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1228
October 12, 2011
Yup.
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Also, there's this problem facing the protestors:
It's true. Mindless anti-corporate blah blah which imagines a utopia without our highly interconnected global technology is the fantasy of high school sophomores who have read too much Thoreau.
And yet, despite all that, we recognize that there is nonetheless something obscene going on when GE generated $10.3 billion in pre-tax income but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion. We know there is something wrong when Exxon Mobil, reported in 2009 a record $45.2 billion profit, but paid none of it to the IRS. We know there is something wrong when our Ruling Class increase their personal wealth by 3669% during the biggest economic downturn since the Depression while a million of the vets they sent off to fight their War for Empire are out of work.
As long as those facts continue to exacerbate, the attempts by Limbaugh and other apologists for the status quo will continue to ring more and more hollow. Particularly, as more and more of the middle class stop being the people who used to laugh along with Limbaugh and start becoming the people Limbaugh laughs at: namely, the poor. Yes, the OWS people are typically young people who don't have a clue what they want. But they do have a clue that something is very, very wrong. And they are not wrong about that. And if the only answer they receive is mockery while that evil goes unaddressed, it is the mockers who will have to answer for that, not the young people who responded to the increasingly loud cry of conscience.
Personally, I still like my idea: Strip every member of Congress of all income in excess of the average income in their district and put that money into a fund for disabled veterans. It will have the immediate benefit of causing the scum to flee Congress once it is no longer able to benefit them personally, it will cause only people who want to actually serve their country to run, and it will help take care of the people who have sacrificed for, rather than exploited, their country. Everybody (but congressional scum) wins!
Our God King Probes the Possibility of Mandating Women Priests
The Justice Department holds that the Lutherans cannot fire Perich for complaining to the government even if church teaching forbids it.
And it was this question – when might the government's interest in preventing discrimination trump a religious group's principles? – that prompted the justices to ask the attorney for the government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during Oct. 5 oral arguments why female priests could not be mandated by the government on similar grounds.
"The belief of the Catholic Church that priests should be male only – you do defer to that, even if the Lutherans say, look, our dispute resolution belief is just as important to a Lutheran as the all-male clergy is to a Catholic?" asked Chief Justice John Roberts, questioning Leodra Kruger, the U.S. solicitor general's assistant who represented the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
"Yes," Kruger responded. "But that's because the balance of relative public and private interests is different in each case."
"Do you believe, Miss Kruger, that a church has a right that's grounded in the Free Exercise Clause and/or the Establishment Clause to institutional autonomy with respect to its employees?" asked Justice Elena Kagan.
"We don't see that line of church autonomy principles in the religion clause jurisprudence as such," the federal government's attorney replied.
Kruger also said the ministerial exception to discrimination laws was not simply a part of the First Amendment's guarantee of the "free exercise of religion."
Justice Scalia then pressed Kruger on the difference between ordinary "associations" – subject to a range of anti-discrimination laws – and religious ones.
"There is nothing in the Constitution that explicitly prohibits the government from mucking around in a labor organization," said Justice Scalia, "but there, black on white in the text of the Constitution are special protections for religion. And you say that makes no difference?"
Kruger's response included her explanation of what the government considers "the core of the ministerial exception as it was originally conceived … which is that there are certain relationships within a religious community that are so fundamental, so private and ecclesiastical in nature, that it will take an extraordinarily compelling governmental interest to (allow) just interference."
But Justice Breyer pushed the federal government's attorney to say how far she believed the protection extended.
"Suppose you have a religion and the central tenet is: 'You have a problem with what we do, go to the synod; don't go to court,'" he asked. "So would that not be protected by the First Amendment?"
"It's not protected," Kruger responded.
The government attorney went on to attack Hosanna-Tabor's use of the ministerial exception, which she said would mean " that the hiring and firing decisions with respect to parochial school teachers and with respect to priests is categorically off limits" to federal regulators.
"We think that that is a rule that is insufficiently attentive to the relative public and private interests at stake," she said, citing "interests that this Court has repeatedly recognized are important in determining freedom of association claims."
It was then that Breyer sprung the question of whether a woman might sue over her exclusion from the Catholic priesthood, on the same basis that Perich was suing over a religiously-grounded termination.
Kruger said the two situations were different – not categorically, but rather because "the private and public interests are very different in the two scenarios."
"The government's general interest in eradicating discrimination in the workplace is simply not sufficient to justify changing the way that the Catholic Church chooses its priests, based on gender roles that are rooted in religious doctrine," she said.
But, she said, the government does have a "compelling and indeed overriding interest in ensuring that individuals are not prevented from coming to the government with information about illegal conduct," even if the church in question would prohibit its members from doing so on religious grounds.
Justice Samuel Alito pointed out that this distinction between the Lutherans' lawsuit prohibition on the one hand, and the Catholic Church's male priesthood on the other, seemed arbitrary.
Kruger's clearest articulation of the Obama administration's position on religious freedom came in response to Justice Kagan's question as to whether she was "willing to accept the ministerial exception for substantive discrimination claims, just not for retaliation claims."
The government's lawyer responded that "substantive discrimination" claims, such as those alleging sex discrimination, could also be legitimate grounds for a lawsuit against some religious institutions.
Hopefully, the court will tell the Executive to go to hell. But you never know. This, and gay "marriage" will probably be the first ways in which the State will attempt to exert control over the internal affairs and sacramental life of the Church. I can imagine a day coming when the State will also attempt meddle in the Eucharist by imposing some dumb regulation about the dangers of wheat gluten. Or somebody will try to declare the anointing of the sick to be a violation of medical regulations. The State can be quite creative when it wants to crush the Church. For the Church will, on this point, tell the State to buzz off. We went through all this with the Investiture Controversy.
A reader puzzles…
Perhaps you have some biologists who can help me understand this question.
"If the driving force behind evolution is that beneficial characteristics that help a species survive and reproduce get passed on the the next generations, how does homosexuality fit into being a beneficial characteristics that will help the human population reproduce and survive?
I feel as if science is placed in a bind in that either homosexuality is a beneficial characteristic for the survival and reproduction of the human species and therefore the science behind evolution would have to be reworked, or homosexuality is not a beneficial characteristic for the survival and reproduction and should therefore not be encouraged by the medical community."
I've occasionally wondered how partisans of the Darwin Mythos (the theory that evolution is the All-Explaining Theory of Absolutely Everything) square the commitment to the Mythos and the (typically hand-in-hand) commitment to the notion that we must believe and profess that homosexuality is the source and summit of all that is noble, pure, good, and forward-thinking. Intrinsically fruitless sex does not immediately present itself as the fulfillment of the doctrine of survival of the fittest. I'm sure there's some clever attempt to sort out the contradiction somewhere in the writings of our Chattering Classes. But since I've never believed that the atheistic materialist dogmatic philosophy for which evolutionists so often fly cover is true, nor that homosex is good, I've never felt any need to reconcile the one with the other. I regard defenses of both as excuses for sin, and I've never been mystified that sinners who might otherwise be hostile to one another will temporarily drop their quarrel (as the Pharisees and Herodians, and Pilate and Herod Antipas dropped theirs) to make war on Jesus Christ. There is such a thing as satanic ecumenism.
October 11, 2011
Word 2007 question
Hey Geek Types!
So a few days ago I'm working on my computer and it freezes. I'm using Word 2007 at the time. i do a crash reboot and get the thing going again. However, when I open a document in Word, I notice that for some reason everywhere there is a field code it is not showing me normal highlighted text, but the whole field code. How do I make it go back to showing normal text?
Help me Obi-wan Kenobi! You're my only hope!
You Can Tell Catholics are Really Awful and Had it Coming
How? Because as everybody knows, Hindus are earth-affirming, peace-loving and in touch with the rhythms of Mother Gaia. So when they burn down a Catholic Church and raise a banner of triumph over the ashes, that can only be because Catholics are awful and had it coming. Remember, the creed of the postmodern West is "All religions are equally superior to the Catholic Faith."
"You will be hated by all for my name's sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved." – Mark 13:13
God bless the suffering Church.
Before the Pendulum Mindlessly Swings Back to the GOP
One thing people might consider doing is letting go of the Dem/GOP pendulum. Here, lest people forget, is what we got in the good old days:
In 2000, the United States ran a surplus. In 2009, it ran a deficit of $1.4 trillion—10 percent of the economy. The 2010 deficit was almost equal, and the 2011 deficit is projected even higher. The national debt is surging to 100 percent of GDP, portending an eventual run on the dollar, a default, or Weimar inflation. The greatest creditor nation in history is now the world's greatest debtor.
In the first decade of what was to be the Second American Century, a net of zero new jobs were created. Average households were earning less in real dollars at the end of the decade than at the beginning. The net worth of the American family, in stocks, bonds, savings, home values, receded 4 percent.
Fifty-thousand plants and factories shut down. As a source of jobs, manufacturing fell below healthcare and education in 2001, below retail sales in 2002, below local government in 2006, below leisure and hospitality, i.e., restaurants and bars, in 2008—all for the first time.
In April 2010, three of every four Americans, 74 percent, said the country is weaker than a decade ago, and 57 percent said life in America will be worse for the next generation than it is today.
Who did this to us? We did it to ourselves.
We abandoned economic nationalism for globalism. We cast aside fiscal prudence for partisan bidding for voting blocs. We ballooned our welfare state to rival the socialist states of Europe. And we launched a crusade for democracy that has us tied down in two decade-long south Asian wars.
The party that wrought all that has not changed a bit or learned a thing, which is why the bulk of their rhetoric is not about "blunders and sins we won't do again" but "Obama sucks!" (true enough, but not a remedy for our ills). Why keep voting for any of these clowns on either side of the aisle?
Everything is Just Fine
Ex-mortgage CEO sentenced to prison for $3B fraud
ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The CEO of what had been one of the nation's largest privately held mortgage lenders was sentenced Tuesday to more than three years in prison for his role in a $3 billion scheme that officials called one of the biggest corporate frauds in U.S. history.
The 40-month sentence for Paul R. Allen, 55, of Oakton, Va., is slightly less than the six-year term sought by federal prosecutors.
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Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100
A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
Paul is, of course, insane
The sensible course of action is for our Nobel Peace Prize Winning God King to be conducting military actions in 75 countries and maintaining a huge military presence in countries which are quite capable of defending themselves such as Japan, Germany and 120 other nations.
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