Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1274

Bad News for Hell's Population Planning Ministry of Truth

A reader writes:

Good news! The HIV infection rate in Zimbabwe has decreased – plummeted, even!

And it's because of changing behaviour, not condom use! So, let's hear it from the world's media…

[crickets]

And, given that the population is well over 90% non-Catholic, the Scarlet Woman of Rome's refusal to allow condoms was never an issue in the first place.

The whole "Pope kills millions of AIDS victims" thing is just so brainless. So some guy in Timbuctu is just about to commit his thousandth act of fornication and suddenly pauses, thinking, "But the Pope said not to use a condom!" So in holy deference to Mother Church, he commits fornication, but without a condom. I think that's even dumber than "Married priests will cure homosexual assaults on children."

637 Followers!

Today, my suckups, toadies, and shuffling henchmen, I command you to listen to this little essay on Logic and Lawn Tennis by GKC



Having done that, I now command you to contemplate the teaching of the Church:

"1. Every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.

"2. A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects "the least of these" (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.

"3. Government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times."

Economics--like lawn tennis--was made for man, not man for economics. A world in which our Ruling Classes enjoy a 3669% rise in personal wealth and CEO's make hundreds of times more than their employees, get golden parachutes for driving their companies into the ground, and reduce human beings to "disposable workers" is a world headed in the wrong direction.

Latest proof of this: A duplicitous Caesar, after plunging us into a war that has killed perhaps 1,000,000 Iraqis as well as five other wars, and in the process killing, wounding, and maiming thousands of our own troops, rewards those troops by paying them crap wages (all while increasing our Ruling Class' net worth by 3669%.

Bottom line: when our troops were called on to make gigantic sacrifices for their country, they did. And they get paid crap wages for doing it.

When the rich (and this includes almost our entire ruling class both GOP and Democrat, including our God King, who sent them into harm's way) are asked to consider their obligation to the common good, they hole up in gated communities and move from place to place in limos with no contact with the bottom 99%. Their struggles over the budget are a game played out in a tiny bubble inside the beltway in which everybody on both sides of the aisle is willing to play chicken for political advantage with no regard for what the consequences will be for the hoi polloi.

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England,
They have no graves as yet. - G.K. Chesterton

That is all.

The only serious challenge to the duopoly

is articulated here.

All time Greatest Dawn Eden Headline is Evergreen

"Hurt in the line of doody"

A reader writes...

Here is a poorly formed thought:

We are a religion demanding that the now-pregnant mother of three others must be willing to risk her life during her pregnancy, or to carry to term the product of a rape.

But the 8 digit earning executive gets a pass in his responsibility to continue to create jobs because his taxes are nudged up a wee bit since that's the way the market works. This wealthy man could not possibly be expected to do such oddly heroic things as hire workers when his jets are getting extra taxes. His enormous excess personal wealth must remain intact and this is held as morally acceptable and in some quarters morally commendable.

If a minor increase in taxes plagues those with excess luxury so much that they do not do what is right and just with their means, they are not living Christian lives.

Benedict's most recent encyclical, Love in Truth demands something extra from these giants of wealth. As a consequence, this encyclical joins God is Love as one of the least quoted encyclicals in blogdom.

Warren Buffet gets it. Grover Norquist, not so much. Caritas in Veritate is to Grover Norquist what Humanae Vitae is to Margaret Sanger.

He's got a point. We do hear an awful lot about gigantic demands for heroic self-sacrifice for poor unwed mothers, but not very much about demand for heroic self-sacrifice for people living in extreme luxury. And such demands are, in fact, close to the heart of the Tradition (as the Rich Young Man will tell you). Here, for instance, is Benedict saying things that would get him labeled a "Marxist" or a "socialist" by people who get all their Catholic teaching from Talk Radio:

The dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner[83], and that we continue to prioritize the goal of access to steady employment for everyone. All things considered, this is also required by "economic logic". Through the systemic increase of social inequality, both within a single country and between the populations of different countries (i.e. the massive increase in relative poverty), not only does social cohesion suffer, thereby placing democracy at risk, but so too does the economy, through the progressive erosion of "social capital": the network of relationships of trust, dependability, and respect for rules, all of which are indispensable for any form of civil coexistence.

Economic science tells us that structural insecurity generates anti-productive attitudes wasteful of human resources, inasmuch as workers tend to adapt passively to automatic mechanisms, rather than to release creativity. On this point too, there is a convergence between economic science and moral evaluation. Human costs always include economic costs, and economic dysfunctions always involve human costs.

It should be remembered that the reduction of cultures to the technological dimension, even if it favours short-term profits, in the long term impedes reciprocal enrichment and the dynamics of cooperation. It is important to distinguish between short- and long-term economic or sociological considerations. Lowering the level of protection accorded to the rights of workers, or abandoning mechanisms of wealth redistribution in order to increase the country's international competitiveness, hinder the achievement of lasting development. Moreover, the human consequences of current tendencies towards a short-term economy — sometimes very short-term — need to be carefully evaluated. This requires further and deeper reflection on the meaning of the economy and its goals[84], as well as a profound and far-sighted revision of the current model of development, so as to correct its dysfunctions and deviations. This is demanded, in any case, by the earth's state of ecological health; above all it is required by the cultural and moral crisis of man, the symptoms of which have been evident for some time all over the world.

Go and read the whole thing. The man even favorably quotes evil evil peace and justicey Populorum Progessio by evil evil Paul VI, author of the evil evil Novus Ordo. No wonder George Weigel flipped out and tried to perform surgery on Benedict's encyclical like a German scholar dividing the Old Testament into Yahwist, Elohist, Priestly and Deuteronomic sources. He urged us, in essence, to pay attention to the bits he liked and to dismiss the bits he didn't. It was a staggeringly unconvincing performance.

But what Weigel could not pull off with bogus exegesis, we ourselves pull off by simply clinging to the inertia of received opinion from our Tribe of Conservatives. Things that don't fit our worldview tend to be things that just quietly vanish from our minds. We can't yell "socialist!" when Benedict talks about the rights of workers and gross economic disparities and accumulation of excessive wealth with no regard for the common good cuz he's, you know, the Pope. But we can and do just quietly ignore him and never mention or think about what he says while screaming these catch phrases at anybody who echoes him.

And so we arrive at a "conservative" subculture in the American Church where, as one Vox Nova reader put it:

We have here a curious melding of American protestant distrust of ecclesial structures (the USCCB is the bete noir) combined with an oddly deferential regard for the Pope, a generally right-liberal "Americanist" outlook on economics and social problems, all put in the service of what claims to be "orthodox" catechesis. It is really a strange bird, one that could only fly in America.

What cracks me up is that this subculture's Protestant-flavored and libertarian disregard for the Magisterium and the bishops partly appeals to this Vox Nova reader, for reasons that would horrify self-proclaimed "Faithful Conservative Catholics" who don't want guys like him standing so close to them. After all, the fact is the same people who howl with fury over phrases like "Spirit of Vatican" and who adore vigilante Catholics like Michael Voris as he presents the parts of the gospel that appeal to Talk Radio listeners are also likely to yell "socialism" or "closet Obama supporter!" every time anybody who is not Benedict says something like "It is important to distinguish between short- and long-term economic or sociological considerations. Lowering the level of protection accorded to the rights of workers, or abandoning mechanisms of wealth redistribution in order to increase the country's international competitiveness, hinder the achievement of lasting development".

So it has to be discomfiting when guys like the Vox Nova comboxer say:

This is an interesting dust-up. I have mixed views about Voris. On the one hand, he (and RealCatholicTV) are right to insist that the Church is more and deeper than the hierarchical offices. I have had enough experience with clericalism and diocesan administrative bureaucratese to make me appreciate any successful effort on the part of the laity to act for the Church without going through the burdensome process of working with diocesan staffs and (often) incompetent bishops. This all seems very "Spirit of Vatican II" to me, and I think it's good and necessary.

I have little use for the spirit of Vatican II myself, preferring the teaching of Vatican II. But I do agree that there is a curious spiritual affinity between those who ignore Humanae Vitae out of commitment to a particular sexual ideology and those who ignore the Church's teaching on economics and the common good out of a commitment to their particular economic ideology. And, on the whole, I think that yes, of those to whom much is given, much will be required. So if a poor women is expected to lay down her life for her child, I think a rich man is at least required to lay down his cigar and Lamborghini for the poor.

Meanwhile...

...as the duopoly fleeces you, the pagan predators in the corporate world figure out ways to reduce you to what used to be serfdom but is now called "the disposable worker":

Wary Companies Rely on Temps, Part-Timers, Hire Overseas

Over the past 10 years:

• The U.S. economy's output of goods and services has expanded 19%.

• Nonfinancial corporate profits have risen 85%.

• The labor force has grown by 10.1 million.

• But the number of private-sector jobs has fallen by nearly two million.

• And the percentage of American adults at work has dropped to 58.2%, a low not seen since 1983.

What's wrong with the American job engine? As United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX - News) Chief Financial Officer Greg Hayes put it recently: "Sales have come back, but people have not.''

That's largely because the economy is growing much too slowly to absorb the available work force, and industries that usually hire early in a recovery—construction and small businesses—were crippled by the credit bust.

[More from WSJ.com: CEOs Say Don't Expect Much Hiring]

Then there's the confidence factor. If employers were sure they could sell more, they would hire more. If they were less uncertain about everything from the durability of the recovery to the details of regulation, they would be more inclined to step up their hiring.

Something else is going on, too, a phenomenon that predates the recession and has persisted through it: Changes in the way the job market works and how employers view labor.

Executives call it "structural cost reduction" or "flexibility." Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon calls it the rise of "the disposable worker," shorthand for a push by businesses to cut labor costs wherever they can, to an almost unprecedented degree.

Capitalism, like democracy, only works in a Christian society, because Christianity puts pressure on capitalists and reminds them that there are higher matters than the bottom line, such as the human dignity of the worker. Get rid of a Christian culture and you get a system of predator/prey relationships, like the one re-emerging now as pagan values of mere power take over. The notion "all men are created equal" is a piece of pure mystical dogma handed down from the Christian tradition. Reject that tradition, and there is not a reason in the world for a wealthy and powerful person to think that disposable serfs possess any dignity that should impose on his bottom line.

So, as I was saying yesterday

After a century or so of interruption from a civilization that was still Christian, our rapidly paganizing culture is taking the brakes off the rich and powerful feeling any sense of obligation to the common good. The weak are prey and the powerful are predator:



That's a 3669% increase for our humble public servants and it's both Republican and Democrats, including our Hope and Change God King. Caesar, Mammon, and their court prophets in the media are busily ironing out their differences so that the plutocrats and the duopoly can fleece you blind.

Behold! The 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest Winner!

Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories. - Sue Fondrie

For them that don't know, the B-LBWC (named for the novelist who actually began a novel "It was a dark and stormy night.") is held every year and the challenge is to write the worst opening sentence to a novel. Here's the winner of the Adventure category:

"From the limbs of ancient live oaks moccasins hung like fat black sausages -- which are sometimes called boudin noir, black pudding or blood pudding, though why anyone would refer to a sausage as pudding is hard to understand and it is even more difficult to divine why a person would knowingly eat something made from dried blood in the first place -- but be that as it may, our tale is of voodoo and foul murder, not disgusting food." - Jack Barry

There's more where that came from. Lot's more.

On Parades

In which we ponder the thoroughly Chestertonian and Christian thing that is an ordinary hometown parade.

634 Followers!

Today, my minions, I'm happy to announce a new addition to your diet of thin gruel:



That is all!