Progressive again

For sheer, unadulterated pap, you just can’t beat good, old-fashioned normally progressive lines.

Progressivism

They believed in that vague kind of middle-American progressivism that expressed itself in Scandinavian furniture, subscriptions to the New Yorker, and “educational playthings.”

Ancient sex

In antiquity, and throughout the heathen world, the gods indulged in sex. Not so the God of Israel.

Church & poverty

A report in Zenit shows what truly obsesses the Church: "Some 27% of health care centers that attend AIDS patients around the world are administered by the Church; 44% are run by governments, 18% by nongovernmental organizations, 11% by other religious institutions, and 8% by other groups."

M. L. King's loose women

In the early '60s, Robert Kennedy authorized Hoover to bug and tap Dr. Martin Luther King. When the FBI turned up film of King with loose women, LBJ's White House moved the photos to the Washington press.

Hypocrisy

There is a story floating around cyberspace about a church service that was allegedly interrupted by a squad of armed men dressed in black with black ski masks covering their faces. They burst into the full church and fired into the ceiling. The leader stepped forward and announced, "If you're not willing to take a bullet for God leave now." There was a stampede of parishioners for the exits. The minister was left standing at the pulpit with a mere dozen remaining in the congregation. The masked leader announced, "OK, preacher, we got rid of the hypocrites. You can continue with your service." The masked gunmen left.

Giving blood

"If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent." But then again we'd have to ask ourselves, do we want liberal blood coursing through the veins of otherwise innocent people?

Donating

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, 'Who Really Cares,' cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals. Other research has reached similar conclusions. The 'generosity index' from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

Maverick

The media’s definition of a “maverick” which is: “agreeing with the editorial positions of the New York Times.”

Mrs. Palin

Sarah Palin wins Human Events' prestigious "Conservative of the Year" Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people.

Atheist hymn

I googled "atheist music" and found listings of tunes like "My head hurts, my feet stink and I don't love Jesus".

Academics

Moral relativism – a philosophy so vacuous that only college professors deem it useful.

William L. Hanaway

When there is a conflict between ideology and free imagination, ideology generally wins the battle but always loses the war.

Athanasius

"when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those "sensible" synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen".

Cardinal Dulles

‘I do not particularly strive for originality,” Cardinal Dulles wrote looking back on his career. “Very few new ideas, I suspect, are true.

NCR answered

Submitted by Consistent Ethic (not verified) on Fri, 12/12/2008 - 14:44.
All living organisms die, including human beings. The fact of death does not justify murder. Attempting to justify the murder of newly conceived human beings because many of them die is as absurd as justifying the murder of any other human being because he or she will surely die at some time.

Similarly, accidents happen, and the rare fusion of twins is one. The fact that fusion happens would not justify a project by scientists to make it happen any more than the chance that I might be hit by a car and lose a leg this afternoon justifies purposely hitting me with your car or cutting off my leg. The fact that an accident might happen to me, as death surely will, does not void my personhood. The fact that the accident of twin fusion might happen to fraternal twin embryos does not either prove or disprove the personhood of these embryos or of any human embryo.

It is true that the Church does not presume to judge when ensoulment happens and believes that this will always be a question beyond the scope of our human ability to know. Because the embryo, if it does not die, meet with an accident, or be hindered by human intervention, will surely develop into a fetus, an infant, a child, an adult and an old person, there is a strong probability that it is a person. As long as we can't prove it isn't (and we never will be able to do that), we have absolutely no right to harm it in any way, much less kill it.

Aren't the above obvious? We need to ask what utilitarian motives, including the pursuit of profit, would cause anyone, Christian (as the author says he is) or not, to try to render them unclear?

Finally, scientists like the one who cloned the sheep Dolly are abandoning embryonic stem cell research because alternatives that do not kill embryos (such as induced pluripotent stem cells) are more promising for medical research and treatment, as well as ethically far less problematic. Furthermore, medical pathologies are being treated right now with adult stem cells. No treatments at all have resulted from embryonic stem cell research that is ongoing, not only with the restricted number of stem cell lines eligible for federal funding under Bush administration guidelines but without restriction in US private labs and labs funded by foreign governments. Development of treatments from embryonic stem cells will always be complicated by the tumor-forming properties of embryonic cells. Graft/host rejection issues would present a strong impetus to the immoral cloning of embryos to be destroyed for medical use; excess embryos from in-vitro fertilization (also immoral, if for no other reason than its creation and abandonment of such embryos)are usable only for research, not actual treatments. I can imagine no possible reason for a scientist (or the incoming Presidential administration) to defend embryonic stem cell research or support it with my tax dollars other than the huge financial stake some parts of the medical and scientific community hold in this immoral and unneeded research.

NCR, you can do better. The Vatican has.

Cardinal Dulles

Cardinal Dulles soundly rejected this falsehood:

“Many politicians, like much of the American public, seem to be unaware that abortion and euthanasia are serious violations of the inalienable right to life. These are not just 'Church' issues but are governed by the natural law of God, which is binding upon all human beings. The right to life is the most fundamental of all rights, since a person deprived of life has no other rights.”

R R Reno

The progressive ideal of liberated desire

Henry Morgenthau

"Well, years into the Great Depression, FDR's secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, declared (quoted here verbatim): 'We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!'

Golda Meir

"Don't be so humble," Golda Meir used to say, "you're not that great".

Billings birth control

"In Western countries, in fact, natural methods have continued to be considered not only completely ineffective, but also inconvenient and difficult to apply. And there is another characteristic, which is never mentioned, that has contributed to giving them a bad name: the fact that they are free. No pharmaceutical company had any interest in financing research on this form of birth control. Instead, it was to their advantage to heap ridicule on it and discredit it".

NEH

The National Endowment for the Inanities.

GKC on labor leaders

What is the matter with these highly honourable men is that they trust their education more than their experience... They prefer the long words that stand for theories to the short words that stand for things. [ILNA 2 Oct 1920]

Hot water

Chesterton wrote: “I believe in getting into hot water. It keeps you clean.”

Mein Kampus

Is Mein Kampus a more descriptive term for many colleges in America today?

Jules Renard

He’s a good shot. Here’s a bull’s eye—“Victor Hugo. His landslides of verse.” Here’s another terse literary judgment: “With men like Chateaubriand and Lamartine you travel in the air, but without direction.” Ouch.

Renard doesn’t only aim his arrows at others. He observes his own vanity as a writer. A reminder to himself—“You may write as few books as you like: People will persist in not knowing them all.” And he judges himself a slacker: “I live in laziness as in a prison.” It’s the curse of all writers: Somebody else is always publishing. But Renard can be droll about himself, as in this observation: “Laziness: the habit of resting before fatigue sets in.” And he can be clever, making a bargain with time, that cruel taskmaster: “The sun rises before I do, but I go to bed after it does: We are even.” He can even outwit himself: “It’s many a day since I’ve felt ashamed of my vanity, or even tried to correct it. Of all my faults, it is the one that amuses me the most.”

Ellis on war

“Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.”

Ellis on feminism

She was impatient with feminism, pointing out that any woman who could cook could also poison.

Alice Thomas Ellis on her dead son

"The Birds of the Air

All his beauty, wit and grace
Lie forever in one place.
He who sang and sprang and moved
Now, in death, is only loved".

Lukewarm in our loyalties

Let us be lukewarm in our loyalties so that we will be soft in our hatreds. If nothing is worth fighting for, then nobody will fight. R.R.Reno

Souter on abortion

David Souter’s sorry argument that it would be wrong to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision because so many people had planned their lives and careers around it, by which he meant that abortion facilitates a lifestyle.
This is scant progress from Calhoun’s argument in favor of slavery on essentially the same grounds.

Jesuits

Asked about the feeling many have that the Jesuits “look down upon other orders,” Father Nicolas said, “This is a weakness we have and it is quite common".

Harvard

Civic illiteracy in the United States crosses all educational lines, including the vaunted Harvard where, according to the ISI survey, seniors scored 69.56 on the test, or a D-plus. And they were the best.

Cardinal Stafford

"[Obama's] rhetoric is post-modernist, and marks an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic".

Insufficient funds

Dear Sirs,

In view of what seems to be happening internationally with banks at
the moment, I was wondering if you could advise me about the
following:
If one of my checks is returned marked "insufficient funds," how do
I know whether that refers to me or to you?

Confused Citizen

Santayana

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana

Vice President

characterized by Benjamin Franklin as ‘Your Superfluous Excellency’.

Fr. Reese

“Why am I not surprised?" joked one bishop about Reese’s comments, speaking on a condition of anonymity to CNA.

"Fr. Reese is a mainstream media darling, but the truth is that he has very little knowledge of what goes on (in the episcopate) and far less influence,” he added.

Newspapers

'If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do
read the newspaper you are misinformed.'
Mark Twain

Sexual crimes

Fr. John Coughlin’s excellent review (“Scandal and Canon Law,” June/July 2008) of Nicholas Cafardi’s equally excellent book Before Dallas: The U.S. Bishops’ Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse of Children is marred by approval of setting aside “prescription,” the statute of limitations for the prosecution of a delict in canon law. Coughlin asserted that prescription rendered canon law ineffective for the prosecution of accused clerics because “victims of child abuse sometimes do not bring accusations to the attention of church authorities until many decades after the abuse has occurred.” This is a mantra chanted often in the media by self-serving contingency lawyers and victim groups, but the claim lacks both context and proof.

The prison where I have lived for the last fourteen years houses some 2,500 prisoners, 40 percent of whom are convicted of sexual crimes—most against children. That translates into a population of some one thousand sexual offenders in this single prison, with another six thousand in the state’s parole system. Two of these are Catholic priests, one accused three months after a series of claimed assaults and the other accused of an assault from twenty-seven years ago.

The other 6,998 are accused parents, grandparents, step-parents, uncles, teachers, ministers, scout leaders, and so on, and for them the typical time lapse between alleged abuse and a victim coming forward to report it was measured in weeks or months, or years—certainly not decades. There is simply no evidence to support Coughlin’s contention that sexual-abuse victims typically require decades to come forward.

So what sets the accusers of priests apart from other victims? The John Jay Report revealed that a full 70 percent of the claimants against Catholic priests came forward not in the 1960s to 1980s, when the abuse was claimed to have occurred, but in 2002, when Church institutions were forced into “blanket settlements.”

Before the Church abandons the rule of law in favor of the cascade of media bias, much more study of the relation between settlements and claims is needed. Financial settlement appears to be the sole common denominator that sets claims against priests apart from most other claims. As Archbishop Charles Chaput has asserted elsewhere in the pages of First Things, “statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it.”

Rev. Gordon MacRae
Hampton, New Hampshir

Homosexuality

It is frequently observed that male homosexuals in particular tend to be predatory; since they cannot procreate, they must recruit.

Jewish telegram

Our friend Midge Decter once described the typical Jewish telegram: “Start worrying. Letter to follow.”

Fashion

fleeing from the grave embarrassment of being fashionable.

John Adams

*On July 3, 1776, John Adams said:
*
"It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities still
more wasting and distresses yet more dreadful. If this is to be the
case, it will have this good effect, at least: it will inspire us with
many virtues, which we have not, and correct many errors, follies, and
vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonor, and destroy us. The furnace
of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals.
And the new governments we are assuming, in every part, will require a
purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues or there
will be no blessings....But I must submit all my hopes and fears to an
overruling Providence; in which, unfashionable as faith may be, I firmly
believe."

Family

It is necessary to go back to seeing the family as the sanctuary of life. [John Paul II]

Mencken

Never forget the words of H.L. Mencken, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it".

Mr. Biden

Moreover, this is a long-standing pattern with Biden. When he was running
for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination back in 1987, someone in
the audience asked him what law school he attended and how well he did.

Flashing his special phony smile, Biden said, "I think I have a much higher
IQ than you do." He added, "I went to law school on a full academic
scholarship" and "ended up in the top half" of the class.

But Biden did not have a full academic scholarship. Newsweek reported: "He
went on a half scholarship based on need. He didn't finish in the 'top half'
of his class. He was 76th out of 85."

Mr. Obama by Thomas Sowell

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark
is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and
articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world.

Democracy

Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.

~Benjamin Lichtenberg

Wisdom of Solomon

A worried woman went to her gynecologist and said:

'Doctor, I have a serious problem and desperately need your help! My baby is not even 1 yr. old and I'm pregnant again. I don't want kids so close together.' So the doctor said: 'Ok, and what do you want me to do?' She said: 'I want you to end my pregnancy, and I'm counting on your help with this.' The doctor thought for a little, and after some silence he said to the lady: 'I think I have a better solution for your problem. It's less dangerous for you too.' She smiled, thinking that the doctor was going to accept her request.

Then he continued: 'You see, in order for you not to have to take care of 2 babies at the same time, let's kill the one in your arms. This way, you could rest some before the other one is born. If we're going to kill one of them, it doesn't matter which one it is. There would be no risk for your body if you chose the one in your arms.

The lady was horrified and said: 'No doctor! How terrible! It's a crime to kill a child!

'I agree', the doctor replied. 'But you seemed to be ok with it, so I thought maybe that was the best solution.' He smiled, realizing that he had made his point.

Keys to the city

"Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks."

Eleazar

Eleazar, though ninety years of age, bravely preferred to die a most glorious death than to purchase a hateful life by violating the law which forbade to the Israelite the use of swine's flesh. His friends, "moved with wicked pity", were willing to substitute lawful flesh, that Eleazar, feigning to have eaten the forbidden meat, might be delivered from death. But, considering "the dignity of his age … and the inbred honour of his grey head", Eleazar spurned this well-meant proposal, which if accepted, though securing his deliverance from punishment, might scandalize many young persons, and could not deliver from the hand of the Almighty. Having thus changed into rage the rejected sympathy of his friends, the holy man bravely endured his cruel torture, probably at Antioch, during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. (2 Maccabees 6:18-31; 1 Maccabees 1:57-63)

Congress

"We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex--but Congress can."
~Cullen Hightower

Elections

Anybody qualified to run for office is smart enough not to.

John Opitz on life

Let me again try to begin by defining life and I think there exists a reasonable consensus amongst biologists on this definition, namely that life consists of all of the self-contained units of nature considered primarily of organic matter, autonomously and I stress the autonomously capable of undergoing development, reproduction and evolution. Note that this definition excludes the viruses because they're not autonomously capable of undergoing development and reproduction.

Newman on the papacy

Then, since Newman's chief aim was to portray the measure of loyalty to the one in that Chair, he had to list his prerogatives: "He can judge, and he can acquit; he can pardon, and he can condemn; he can command, and he can permit; he can forbid, and he can punish. He has supreme jurisdiction over the people of God. He can stop the ordinary course of sacramental mercies; he can excommunicate from the ordinary grace of redemption; and he can remove again the ban which he has inflicted. It is the rule of Christ's providence, that what His Vicar does in severity or in mercy upon earth, He Himself confirms in heaven." Newman then could raise the question: "What need I say more to measure our own duty to it and to him who sits in it, than to say that, in his administration of Christ's kingdom, in his religious acts, we must never oppose his will, or dispute his word, or criticize his policy, or shrink from his side?"

God

If there is a God He should speak to man clearly and in three ways: through the evidence of nature (Newman means the cosmological argument), through the voice of conscience, and through revelation.

Moses on dissent

The phrase is from Exodus (23:2) where Moses warns: "Neither shall you allege the example of the many as an excuse for doing wrong."

Rock journalism

Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read...Frank Zappa

Change

In addition to abortion, there are more issues we should consider before we elect a liberal president:

George Bush has been in office for 7 1/2 years. The first six the economy was fine.


A little over one year ago :


1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high;
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon;
3) the unemployment rate was 4.5%.
4) the DOW JONES hit a record high--14,000 +
5) American's were buying new cars, taking cruises, vacations overseas, living large!...

But American's wanted 'CHANGE'! So, in 2006 they voted in a Democratic Congress and yes--we got 'CHANGE' all right. In the PAST YEAR:


1) Consumer confidence has plummeted ;
2) Gasoline is now over $4 a gallon & climbing!;
3) Unemployment is up to 5.5% (a 10% increase);
4) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $12 TRILLION DOLLARS and prices still dropping;
5) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.
6) THE DOW is probing another low~~ $2.5 TRILLION DOLLARS HAS EVAPORATED FROM THEIR STOCKS, BONDS & MUTUAL FUNDS INVESTMENT PORTFOLIOS!


YES, IN 2006 AMERICA VOTED FOR CHANGE...AND WE SURE GOT IT! ...
REMEMBER THE PRESIDENT HAS NO CONTROL OVER ANY OF THESE ISSUES, ONLY CONGRESS.
AND WHAT HAS CONGRESS DONE IN THE LAST TWO YEARS, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
NOW THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT CLAIMS HE IS GOING TO REALLY GIVE US CHANGE ALONG WITH A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS!!!!


JUST HOW MUCH MORE 'CHANGE' DO YOU THINK YOU CAN STAND?

GKC property and wives

According to Chesterton: “It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.”

GKC's economic history

“The truth . . . might be stated in many ways; perhaps the shortest statement of it is in the fable of the man who sold razors, and afterwards explained to an indignant customer, with simple dignity, that he had never said the razors would shave. When asked if razors were not made to shave, he replied that they were made to sell. That is A Short History of Trade and Industry During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.”

GKC on mediaevalism

“I never said I was a medievalist; and I have only the vaguest idea of what it would mean. But I have a very vivid and definite idea of what I mean. . . . The simple truth, which some people seem to find it difficult to understand or to believe, is that what a reasonable man believes in is not this or that period, with all its ideas, good or bad, but in certain ideas that may happen to have been present in one period and relatively absent from another period.”

GKC on birth control

"The whole business of Birth Control is quite literally a proposal to [throw] out the baby with the bath. The whole structural system of the suburban civilization is based on the case for having bathrooms and the case against having babies".

GKC on newspapers

The editors of the big papers “never forget their one great duty to the public; to prevent anything of any importance becoming public at all".

GKC and Orwell

Perhaps the most interesting fact is that Chesterton published [in GK's Weekly] the first essay by a writer named E. A. Blair, who would become better known as George Orwell.

Belloc on Islam

"Even the most cretinous must by now perceive that modern war may be the destruction of all our world. In terror at that prospect men seek remedies for the chaos or defences against it. The most absurd of such experiments was, I suppose, the so-called "League of Nations" which left Islam out of account and yet gave sovereign authority to Abyssinia. It was founded on a silly falsehood and was unworthy of the mighty fruit it has produced---which is no less than the mortal peril wherein we now stand". [ON GKC]

Nationalisation by GKC

"Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to ‘nationalise’ the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to nationalise the government, or even to nationalise the nation.” G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, pp. 5-6.

Bumpers

Bumper sticker of the year:
'If you can read this, thank a teacher -and, since it's in English, thank a soldier'

Bush on abortion

Signing the Partial Birth Abortion ban, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence act, reinstating the Mexico City policy, banning the military from performing abortions, banning taxpayer funding of abortions, and appointing two justices who are likely to vote to overturn Roe if given the opportunity, all against vehement Democratic opposition, is just “talking a good game and doing nothing”?

Abortions number

Using AGI [Guttmacher] figures through 2003, estimating 1,287,000 abortions for 2004-06, and factoring in the possible 3% undercount AGI estimates for its own figures, the total number of abortions performed in the U.S. since 1973 equals 48,589,993.

S.B.Anthony on abortionGuilty? Yes, no matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfu

Guilty? Yes, no matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh! thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.

Wealth redistribution

Here is a creative approach to redistribution of wealth as offered in
a local newspaper...

Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that
read 'Vote Obama, I need the money.' I laughed.

Once in the restaurant my server had on a 'Obama 08' tie, again I
laughed as he had given away his political preference--just imagine
the coincidence.

When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to
him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept.
He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to
redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need--the
homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the
server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The
homeless guy was grateful.

At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I
realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn,
but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did
earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more.

I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in
concept than in practical application.

Edward Kennedy

I’ve always considered Ted Kennedy to be the poster boy for this lie - claiming equality for women from his political pulpit while using them like toilet paper in real life.

One man, one vote

At the time when Herod murdered John the Baptist because of his promise, Rome practiced the principle "one man, one vote." Whoever the emperor in Rome placed in authority over a subject people, ruled.

Poverty

The society and economy of war, during which everything is subordinated to the urgent, immediate needs of the State, was taken as a blueprint for post-war society and economy. In order to justify this, new enemies like poverty and unemployment had to be found, so that the State could wage war on them by supervising, on behalf of society, the whole of society.

Posner

Carey invalidated a New York law reserving the right to sell contraceptives to licensed pharmacists. However, laws forbidding opticians to replace eyeglass frames without a prescription from an optometrist or ophthalmologist and other similar regulations were upheld by the Court. “Why it should be thought a worse offense against constitutional principle for a state to raise the price of condoms than to raise the price of eyeglasses remains the abiding mystery of the Court’s brush with sexual libertarianism,” says Posner. “The answer the Court would have given if asked – that sexual and reproductive freedom is a ‘fundamental’ right and economic liberty is not – just relabels the question. One might have thought libertarianism indivisible.”

Abortion and the Soviets

The late Soviet Union was the first nation since pagan times to legalise abortion. The date was November 20, 1920, shortly after the consolidation of the Communist Revolution.

Hidden partisanship

Submitted by Doug Pruner (not verified) on Fri, 10/17/2008 - 06:38.
I wonder how many here are aware of an addition to Dr. Cahill's CV, easily found on the web.
To professor of theology at Boston College and a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America can be added an advisor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
That removes at least some of her freeness of speech in complaining about alleged pro-Republican Catholicism. Jesus himself counseled his followers to be "no part of the world", which should include partisan politics. (John 17)

Positive & negative morals

Submitted by CT (not verified) on Fri, 10/17/2008 - 03:13.
Professor Cahill's reflections miss an essential dimension of Catholic moral analysis, namely, the difference between negative moral norms and positive ones. Negative norms, so-named because of what is "not" to be done, bind on consciences semper et ad semper, that is, at all times and in every instance. Positive norms, by contrast, bind at all times but not in every instance. It is never morally permissible to kill an innocent, but the conditions of what constitutes a just wage, or fair housing, or support for the unwed requires the exercise of prudential reasoning and thus admits a variety of responses.

To suggest that the negative prohibition against the killing of the innocent is to be considered as equally compelling as the positive obligation to provide a liveable wage is to grotesquely confuse the matter. They are not equally binding on consciences in any case and thus not in matters concerning the coming election. Good people can differ on how to meet our positive obligations to meet the needs of the poor. There can be no difference among good people when considering the murder of the innocent, because such people, by willing even indirectly what is objectively grave evil, exclude themselves from the category of the good.

Any political party which deliberately facilitates the killing of innocent life on a routine basis thereby excludes itself from the realm of viable political options concerning the positive obligation to promote the common good.

AIDS in Uganda

"We understand that casual sex is dear to you," said Sam L. Ruteikara, the co-chair of Uganda's National AIDS-Prevention Committee, "but staying alive is dear to us."

"Listen to African wisdom, and we will show you how to prevent AIDS."

Ruteikara wrote that efforts to maintain the world's most successful AIDS prevention program were being "sabotaged" by Western "experts" who insist that only condoms will work.

Cloning

Amid all this, are you still trying to achieve your first dream, harvesting embryonic stem cells from human clones?
We’re continuing this work, but with less urgency since the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells—adult cells that have been reprogrammed back to an embryonic state. We’re working on new ways to reprogram skin cells that would allow us to safely create a bank of stem cell lines that would closely match the population as a whole. It turns out that only 100 cell lines could give you a complete haplotype, or immune, match for 50 percent of the U.S. population. These reprogrammed cells are not as controversial since you don’t use cloning or embryos.

Independent minds

Harold Rosenberg intended with his phrase “the herd of independent minds”

Plato

Plato’s lesson: Revolutions arise not from the dissatisfaction of the ruled, but from the self-serving, self-destructive rationalizations of their rulers.

Augustine

- "scenes which give us fresh joy as we share others' joy in them" [Instr.17]
- "the sun is always shining on the round earth" [First Meaning of Genesis 1.21]
- "rape does not destroy chastity if the soul withholds consent" [Civ.Dei 1.16-18]
- "what is a political system without justice but organized crime" [Civ.Dei 4.4]
- "society is an agreement on the things one loves" [Civ. Dei 19.24]

Beauty and truth

Pulchrum et verum sunt idem subiecto, sola ratione differunt. Thomas Aquinas

Liberal education

"What am I going to do with my Degree in Philosophy? Open a shop and sell concepts?".

Italian Politics

Of Italy, Ratzinger comments with that same seriousness: "political systems collapse, and then nothing really changes".

Huxley on atheism

"Atheism is, logically speaking, as absurd as polytheism": Thomas Huxley

Liberals

Definition of a liberal as "someone unable to take his own side in a fight".

Change

I must admit that I was certain we were on the right track of legitimate reform until the late summer of 1968, when a returning student asked me altogether too eagerly, 'Father, what are we going to change this year?"

The new liturgy

Someone once commented that it was a terrible thing to contemplate how few liturgists have been hanged.

Newspapers

Grade level: Biden, 7.8; Palin, 9.5 (Newspapers are typically written to a sixth-grade reading level.)

Alice T. Ellis

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.

C of E

the C of What's Left of E

Brougham

Lord Brougham said something very wise. 'Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave'."

Ireland

Oscar Wilde described English rule in Ireland as 'stupidity aggravated by good intentions.'

Msgr. Gilbey

Monsignor Gilbey is cited as saying, "We are not led to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of the Christian is not to leave the world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man."

Imperium

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(Hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

Pay heed, Roman, to ruling the nations under your sway. This shall be your special skill, to impose the way of peace, to spare the humbled and to crush the proud.

Virgil, Aeneid

Scudery, Mme. de

Madeleine de Scudéry: Love is a flighty creature which desires everything and can be contented with almost nothing.

Democratic party

Stricherz highlighted the importance of bringing the common people back to power. "I think the average folks are more commonsensical and less inclined to corruption than the elites." "I would take the first hundred people from the phone book in Boston rather than the first 100 academics from Harvard to run the country."

Darwin still missing links

I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the case for or against Darwinism. But let me quote one comment by the late Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History. He had already written an introductory text called Evolution. After it came out, a curious reader asked why he had not included in the book any "direct illustrations of evolutionary transitions." Patterson replied: "You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line -- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test."

At about that time, Patterson gave a talk to curators at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the course of his talk he said that there was "not one thing" that he knew about evolution although he had been studying it for twenty years. He challenged colleagues to tell him "any one thing that you think is true," but was answered with silence. That was in 1981.

Jews in Calcutta

The Jewish community built at least five synagogues and two schools. Today, there are 700 students at the Elias Meyer Free School and Talmud Torah. Not one is Jewish, and nothing particularly Jewish is taught there.

Woman

From A Discourse of the Married and Single Life: Wherein by Discovering the Misery of One, is Plainly Declared the Felicity of the Other by Ionas Man (1621):

Let a man also consider the qualities, wherewith women are indued, which for the most part are opposite to those of men: as, her wantonnesse, to his sobriety; her forwardnesse, to his meekness; her stubornesse, to his patience; her pride, to his humilitie; her lightnesse, to his gravitie; her disliking, to that which he approveth; her covering of which he denieth: wherein they justly resemble the shadow of mans body, which if a man persue, it will runne from him; if he goe away, it will follow him: this is all the comfort that man in his choice can have, that perhaps it may be his fortune, inter malos, non habere pessima: amongst many that are evill, not to light of that which is worst of all.”

Notre Dame Univ

Longtime Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh used to describe Notre Dame as the place where the Church does its thinking. To outsiders that has always seemed a sign of Notre Dame’s inordinate sense of self-importance.

Camille Paglia

“That in the year 2001 the group chanting of crude four-letter words for female genitalia is viewed as some sort of radical liberation implies that the real issue in The Vagina Monologues isn’t male oppression but bourgeois oppression—the malady of the dainty, decorous professional class.”

Kierkegaard

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
S�ren Kierkegaard

B Boxer on pregnancy

At one point during the meeting, Boxer said, in reference to pregnant women, "You can talk about it any way you want, but she's carrying a child." A second time she said, "I would just like to state the obvious. When a woman is pregnant, and I was, you're carrying a child and if you protect the pregnant woman, you're protecting that whole entire pregnancy."

Democracy

"... they take alarm at the voice of the majority.
"In that voice it is the people that they hear; it is the people that
they fear; it is democracy that they fear. Is that putting the matter
too strongly? Numerous books and articles in recent years have raised
alarums about an impending "theocracy." It would seem that their
authors are, in fact, alarmed by a democratic discourse in which all
arguments are in play in the deliberation of how we ought to order our
life together". [RJ Neuhaus FIRST THINGS OCT 2008]

Samuelson

Nobel Prize winner Paul A. Samuelson informed readers of his widely used textbook, 'The Soviet economy is proof that ... a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,'"

Mexico

“Mexico is a rich country, with poor people.”

Titus Oates

Titus Oates as a “Catholic conspirator,” but Oates was an Anglican curate, an active homosexual, and a man already convicted of perjury in his native town. He himself later said he only pretended to convert to Catholicism to get a list of Catholic names so as to accuse this persecuted minority in the absurd popish plot (1678–1681)

Clinton

As one of Clinton’s speechwriters recalls, “There is no one who is more easily articulate in my memory, and I can’t remember a thing he said.”

Frances Fitzgerald

For people such as Fitzgerald, politics is “the real world.”

Blind watchman

"My watchmen are blind, all of them unaware; They are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; ...these are the shepherds which know no discretion; Each of them goes his own way, every one of them to his own gain..." Isaiah 56: 9-11

Sudan

Post-colonial governments, which in the early years had the blessing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, took vast tracts of land in the name of agricultural development, turning farmers who worked their own land into wage laborers for the state and its allies.

Some Sudanese have even been pushed off their land entirely. In the early 1990s the Nuba people were forced into “peace villages,” where they provided a steady supply of cheap, captive labor to mechanized farms. In other areas, including parts of Darfur, intensive mechanized farming by the government and investors who were heedless to the need to protect the fertility of the land left large tracts barren.

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Semi-Catholic JFK

John F. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to enunciate the idea that Catholicism might somehow be detrimental toward being a good American. In seeking to distance himself from the dark powers of Rome, he promised that he would always act "in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise."

Liberals

There is a good reason, though, that liberals are liberals. By and large, they are people who never fully mature and who go through life, like sullen teenagers, resenting figures of authority -- be they police officers, members of the military, teachers who believe in discipline and academic standards in the classroom – people, in short, who have rules and values. These folks started out by resenting their parents, assuming their parents were responsible adults and not aging hippies, the sort of parents who set curfews and expected good grades, parents who objected to their offspring boozing, shacking up and using drugs.

Children

"Psalms 127:3 Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit
of the womb is his reward".

Halifax

“If I had to choose between an immoral celibate clergy and a moral married clergy, I would choose the former.” The Lady was scandalized, but the future Lord Halifax remained firm: “Oh yes, I would” (Lockhart, vol. 1, p. 255).

Malines by Fr. Jaki

This corresponded to the principle quod ab omnibus semper et ubique, given by Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, a principle as unworkable then as now.

College

As Thomas Sowell has said, most higher education is just expensive insulation from reality.

Eisenhower

Also in Eisenhower's farewell speech
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite".

Calvin

the pulpit had abolished the altar;

Yes

they are the sort who can't take 'yes' for an answer.

NATO

NATO, said Lord Ismay, speaking of Europe in 1949, was created to "keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out."

Oil profits

Exxon Mobil does make $1,400 a second in profits -- hear the sharp intakes of breath from liberals with pursed lips -- but pays $4,000 a second in taxes and $15,000 a second in operating costs.

Economics

"Normal people solve crosswords; economists write papers (of which 80 percent are never read)."

Gin & tonic

The bar’s only other patron looked at Mr. Drew and remarked, “I thought you were off the drink.”

“I am,” Mr. Drew replied, “but I have a gin and tonic every now and again. I find it helps me to mind my own business. Would you like one?”

Liberals

Liberals always were the snobs of US politics.

Bonhoeffer on abortion

“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of
the right to live which God has bestowed on this nascent life. To
raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a
human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact
is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this
nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And
that is nothing but murder.”/

/–Dietrich Bonhoeffer/

GKC The decent inn of death

My friends we will not go again nor ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death.

FLYING INN The Rolling English Road

Adult Desire

The Culture of Adult Desire.

Sperm donation

Rabinowitz' fellow Rabbi Yaakov Ariel blamed sperm donation for encouraging women to marry too late. He also condemned its disruption of the traditional family structure: "There is no such thing as a single-parent family, just like there is no square that is a circle. A family consists of a father, mother, and children."

Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 proclamation that "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today".

Government

There's no problem, it seems, that a government can't "fix" by making it worse.

Tale of a tub

"Swift was always partial to his strikingly original The Tale of a Tub (1704). On reading the work again in later years, he exclaimed 'Good God! What a genius I had when I wrote that book!'"

Swift & Sam J

Samuel Johnson claimed that A Tale of a Tub was a work of true genius (in contrast to Gulliver's Travels where once one imagines "big people and little people" the rest is easy) and too good to be Jonathan Swift's.

Stupidity

Nathan Glazer remarked on this failure of Higher Education to correct stupidity. It just gives stupidity more words in which to be stupid.

Dorothy Day

"Raw materials went into the factory and came out ennobled and man went in and came out degraded" was a saying of Pope Pius XI.

Feminism

Yet that is exactly what has happened since 1968. From Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer on up through Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf, feminist literature has been a remarkably consistent and uninterrupted cacophony of grievance, recrimination, and sexual discontent. In that forty-year record, we find, as nowhere else, personal testimony of what the sexual revolution has done to womankind.

Normal

Left-handed people aren’t the norm, but they’re normal.

Services rendered

Suppose we're tracking the unusual career of a hooker who, after a busy decade spent in an upscale brothel in Washington, enters politics herself and runs for a Congressional seat as a Democrat. Both as a candidate and as a congresswoman, however, she gleefully supports hard-line Republican positions on the controversial issues. When outraged liberals ask ranking Democrats why she is permitted to sabotage party policy, the Senators stand mute and red before the cameras, fingering their collars while their wives stare stonily at the ceiling tiles at the far end of the auditorium.

How would we account for the embarrassed silence with which this ex-hooker was allowed to defy the party line and torpedo its endeavors? The most plausible explanation is that the maverick congresswoman must have video of "professional courtesies" extended to key Democratic power brokers in the course of her previous career, and that the power brokers themselves, preferring to cover these episodes with a decorous silence, permit her some ideological deviation in exchange for her discretion. The second most likely explanation -- a distant second -- is that the same key Democrats who have the clout to terminate or advance her career secretly applaud her right wing stances, that inside those union-made undershirts beats the heart of a Goldwater.

OK, I concede. It's a very distant second.

O'Connell

Daniel O'Connell would say he examined his conscience whenever he received a favourable mention in the London Times.

Storm Troopers Live

At the NY Academy of Science, there was a debate about human cloning and the benefits to be derived therefrom. James Kelly. paraplegic, was there to debate the medical worth of human cloning. When I attempted to speak to Christopher Reeves, the moderator, pro-cloning researcher J. Craig Ventner, pinned my arms to my side and clamped his hand over my mouth.

Feymann

As the great physicist Dr Richard Feynman said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts."

Conferences

I told him a story I heard from a German professor, about a scholar who wrote scathing reviews of his colleagues’ work, then started going to conferences and met the people he was reviewing and discovered he really liked them—so he stopped going to conferences.

Turkey

The patriarch’s alma mater, the Halki Seminary, has been closed by Turkey’s Constitutional Court since 1971.

Lusseyran. Jacques

The luminous autobiography of Jacques Lus­seyran, a teenage leader in the French Resistance. In 1941, Lusseyran recruited dozens, and eventually hundreds, to the Resistance. His group provided false papers, helped repatriate downed British airmen, and published and distributed the underground newsletter Défense de la France. In 1943, Lusseyran was caught and sent to Buchenwald. There he led a different sort of resistance movement—one against despair. Attending carefully to the official German newscasts, he listened between the lines to deduce the Allies’ progress and then walked from block to block in the concentration camp, delivering his version of the news. “It was not facts, names, or figures that all these men wanted. It was certainties, the kind of realities that went straight to the heart. Only a man standing before them could give them that. They needed his calm and his voice, and it was I who had become the voice.” What is most astonishing about his story is that, since the age of seven, Lusseyran had been completely blind.

Lacan

A philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one [Lacan]

Heraclitus

Doctors cut, burn, and torture the sick, and then demand of them an undeserved fee for such services.

Planck

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.

Max Planck (1858-1947), Scientific Autobiography

Abortion

Flavius Josephus, a well-known Jewish historian who described the destruction of Jerusalem, wrote: "The law, moreover enjoins us to bring up all our offspring, and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing humankind."

Basil discards this distinction that has been supported by some church fathers as "subtle". The foetus is regarded as "a child that should have been born".

Gore Vidal

The New York Times, which refused to review his next five novels. He retains a special contempt for the paper, "which never found a well it could not poison".

Obama

Senator Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" and Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?" [Thomas Sowell]

Noel Coward

What Noel Coward once called Nescafe Society.

Alan Dershowitz

When even Harvard law professor and one-time member of O.J. Simpson’s so-called dream team Alan Dershowitz claims that over 90% of all criminal defendants are guilty.

GKC

The deadly serious whimsy of G.K. Chesterton: [Stanford Encyc Philos]

"Holy Writ by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery". Gregory Moralia xx.1

In vain may heroes fight and patriots rave
If secret gold creeps on from knave to knave [Pope]

220: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts"
241: I do not understand what is meant by the burden of responsibility. By the burden of decision, yes. Whether to put on a coat, or write a dispatch upon which war or peace may depend. Its degree depends on the materials which are available and not the least on the magnitude of results which may follow. With the results, I have nothing to do.
‑‑‑: "Good is sometimes done" said one of his children. "Yes, but never by you. Never allow yourself to believe that ... One should always try to do right, but cannot count on doing good" (Lord Salisbury). Cecil, David The Cecils of Hatfield House

350: In 1775, the British Colonial Secretary on slavery: "We cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage in any degree a traffic which is so beneficial to the nation". [Lewis, Walker Without Fear or Favor: a Biography ... Roger Brooke Taney ]

"The world today produces more food per inhabitant than ever before. Enough is available to provide 4.3 pounds to every person every day". (Peter Rosset in the NYTimes, 1 Sept. 1999, A23]

"The most generous people in the world are the very poor, who assume each other's burdens in the crises which come so often to the hard pressed. The mother in the tenement falls ill and the neighbor in the next room assumes her burdens. The father loses his work, and neighbors supply food to his children from their own scanty store. How often one hears of cases where the orphans are taken over and brought up by the poor friend whose benefaction means great additional hardship! This sort of genuine service makes the most princely gift from superabundance look insignificant indeed ... The very poor give without any self-consciousness". p. 94 of Random Reminiscences of Men & Events (Sleepy Hollow Press 1984) by John D. Rockefeller. Yes, the original one, who made all their money.
JD also goes on to say: "I have been surprised to learn how far a given sum of money has gone in the hands of priests and nuns and how really effective is their use of it". [109]. He attributes this to "Organization".

A fine paragraph from Columban Mission (Sept./Oct. 1998 on Taiwan): "Most Taiwanese are bilingual, using both the Taiwanese and the Beijing or Mandarin dialects. On the surface, the Beijing dialect is almost always understood. If the object is to make yourself understood, then Mandarin is fine; but not if the object is to understand the people".

W.J. Bryan: "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate: the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak". (Cited in NYRB 19 Nov 98, p.62)

"Realism is possible, materialism is not". Einstein on physics to Roy Wood Seltara, 15 Feb. 1942.

"Whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance" [Thomas Aquinas. S.Th. 2.ii.Q.66.art.7]

In defending Freetradism (NYTimes, 4/17/99), Alan Greenspan did not mince words as he intoned: "It would be a great tragedy to stop the wheels of progress because of an incapacity to aid the victims of progress".

73: Bedier citing Didron: "Il faut conserver le plus possible, reparer le moins possible, ne restaurer a aucun prix. Ce qu'il disait des vielles pierres, il faut l'entendre de nos vieux beaux textes"

"Anger is a useless emotion in war". [D.L. Sayers]

331: Has Life a Meaning? When we reject belief in a god, we must give up the idea that life on this planet has some pre-ordained meaning. Life as a whole has no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, in a chance combination of molecules ... All this just happened” [Peter Singer]

Μεγα bιbλov, μεγα κακov

41: [Baring in C]: "What can it matter what church one goes to? if one thinks it necessary to go to church?". "Catholics think it does matter" said Beatrice.
"Yes, but Protestants don't" said C. "That's the beauty of being a Protestant".
"Yes, but although they don't mind anything else, they do mind Catholics" said Beatrice.

More

"The landlords of the provinces undermined the agricultural and economic basis of the Empire by expanding their landed estates at the expense of the free peasant farmers". (David Nicol. The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261-1453 (Cambridge UP, 1993. p.3).

"The horse and carriage did not evolve into automoblies, nor did railroads evolve into airplanes". David McCourt (NYTimes 27 Aug. 1998).

Dave Barry: "Xerox reported an $8 trillion profit, all in 50s".

"When Queen Mary restored the old faith in 1553, the sodomy law, along with all the rest of Henry's laws on treason and sedition, was repealed: "The love and favor of the subject towards their sovereigne rules & governor", says the preamble to 1 Mary, chapter 1 better assure the ruler's state than do "the dread and feare of lawes made with rigorous pains and extreeme punishment". The Whole Volume of Statues At Large, 2:199. [Cited in Bruce R. Smith Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England. 1994]

"In prose, the basic element of the structure is the sentence; in verse, the sentence makes its peace with the line, or the whole thing collapses". (A. MacLeish. introd. to Ogden Nash Selected Poetry. NY 1995)

. The Israeli abortion rate is estimated to be five to ten times higher in Israel than in Denmark, the USA, the United Kingdom, and Canada: “In Israel, abortion is not a controversial issue.”
Law: unlike the German legal system, the Israel legal system has declared some forms of life to be “wrongful,” and Israel appears to be the only country to permit “wrongful life” law suits. The Israeli legal system does not generally protect fetuses.
Genetic counseling: as opposed to many German counselors, “most” Israeli counselors believe the good society implies a “healthy” population. Far more Israeli than German counselors believe some forms of life to be “unworthy of living.” “Not only the state, but even more the medical establishment in Israel is pushing toward a wide use of screening tests, in contrast to the German medical establishment, which is responsible for not introducing such tests to the general public.” Unlike Germany, “cost-benefit analysis related to genetic abnormalities is not rejected in Israel.” “At the prenatal stage, non-tolerance towards the genetically deviant is the norm among Israeli counselors.”
The following list of Jewish characterizations of Jewish reproductive practices illustrates the historical inaccuracy of claims made by modern opponents of eugenics, who present eugenics exclusively as a racist and anti-Jewish mentality:

1884 The American Hebrew: “The law of fittest surviving, aided by the breeding of hereditary qualities in a pure race, has given the Jews a physiological and mental superiority which can be perpetuated only by the perpetuation of the race purity.”

1894 Cesare Lombroso: “The constant centuries-old persecutions functioned, as one would say following Darwin, as a selecting factor for the race as well as the individual.”

1895 Alfred Nossig: “biological superiority of contemporary Jews.”

1901 Maurice Fishberg: “the modern Jew is, physically and mentally, a product of natural selection, of a process of survival of the fittest which has been going on for two thousand years.”

1905 Max Levy: “the relation of the Jew to his surroundings and environment will follow the laws… clearly set forth by Spencer, Huxley, Darwin and other exponents of the theory of evolution.”

1910 The Jewish Chronicle: “Moses, the Lawgiver, was the first and greatest of all eugenists.”

1911 Arthur Ruppin: persecutions acted as a “selection process,” leaving only the smartest.

1916 Rabbi Max Reichler: “Neglect to hand on undimmed the priceless germinal qualities which such families possess, can be regarded only as betrayal of a sacred trust.”

1917 Yitzak-Issac (?) Ratner: “He [Abraham] was literally compelled by eugenics.” (date of publication may have been as early as 1910.)

1930 Hans Goslar: [Jewish] “eugenic efficacy.”

1939 William Feldman: “judicious selective mating…. Race hygiene was almost a fetish among them [the Jews].”

1940 Hyman Morrison: “only the sturdiest of the group survived.” Hart comments: “Published in 1940, Morrison’s polemic would seem to suggest that little reconsideration of Jewish history in the light of the laws of natural selection had occurred.”

1949 Isidore Simon: Jewish sacred writings demonstrate an intense interest in matters “that we today would call eugenics and heredity.”

McQueen allows Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Canada's most notorious abortionist and campaigner, his usual retort that the only children aborted were destined to become criminals anyway and that society is better off without them. "Basically my thesis is that abortion has eliminated many of the ills that befell society, because children are unwanted," he told McQueen. "Very often they've been mishandled to the point where they became antisocial, and accumulated so much hostility and hate in themselves, that eventually they take it out on other people, so they will become criminals." (http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Features/2007/12/17/4728323-sun.html)

Demand For Same-Sex Marriage Was Based on a Lie By Gwen Landolt
December 17, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Same-sex marriage was undemocratically passed into law in Canada in June 2005. The then Liberal government, aided by the secular media, argued that same-sex marriage was necessary on the basis of "equality" for homosexuals who were supposedly experiencing painful discrimination because they could not enter into legal recognized marriages with their same-sex partners. This, it turns out, was a lie.
Certainly many homosexuals themselves made clear at that time that same-sex marriage was not a concern in their community. For example, Gareth Kirkby, then managing editor of the homosexual newspaper, Xtra West, stated back on September 6, 2001, that:
"…In our culture, we haven't created the same hierarchy as has heterosexual culture. We know that love has many faces, and names, ages, places… We know that a 30-year relationship is not better, no better, than a nine-week, or nine-minute, fling - it's different, but not better. Both have value. We know that the instant intimacy involved in that perfect 20-minute [sic]…in Stanley Park can be a profoundly beautiful thing. We know a two-year relationship where people live apart is as beautiful, absolutely as beautiful, as a 30-year relationship where people live together. We know that the people involved in an open relationship can love each other as deeply as the people in a closed relationship…"
Mitchel Raphael, Editor-in-Chief of the Toronto-based homosexual magazine, "Fab" stated in an editorial in the May 5, 2005 issue:
"The gay marriage movement in Canada has been spearheaded by a handful of lawyers and a few homo activists who most queers couldn't name if their lives depended on it. …. For a multiplicity of reasons - queer apathy, for one - there has been no mass gay movement supporting same-sex marriage here in Canada."
Yet, Liberals working in close collaboration with the homosexual lobby group, EGALE, assisted by a compliant media, pushed through the same sex marriage bill despite the views of the public as well as of the homosexual community itself.
Those who opposed same-sex marriage for very valid reasons could not get a word in the media or in Parliament where very little dissent was permitted. Those who objected to same sex marriage were curtly dismissed as bigoted reactionaries willfully discriminating against deserving and decent same-sex couples who only wanted to publicly pledge and commit their love.
It turns out, however, according to recently released statistics, that pledging their love by legal marriage is not high on the agenda for homosexuals. Recently released federal figures from Statistics Canada indicate that less then 5% of homosexual Canadians have bothered to marry since same-sex marriage was legalized in 2005.
What is more, the lies and distortions by the media, and former Liberal government on this issue are still continuing. This was disclosed from a surprising source - namely the Ottawa Hill Times in its September 24, 2007 issue in an article written by its regular columnist, Tom Korski. The Hill Times, by the way, is a prominent newspaper distributed to all the politicians and bureaucrats on Parliament Hill on a weekly basis. In short, it's read by everyone who counts on Parliament Hill.
The article points out that the Canadian media is still covering up for homosexuals on the same-sex marriage issue by its failure to report the small number of homosexuals who have actually married in Canada and further that the media still takes its propaganda direct from the homosexual lobbyists EGALE. This only proves what we already know - the secular media is nothing more than a propaganda machine for the politically correct.
As usual, the ever prescient Gareth Kirkby of Capital Xtra makes clear how the work for same-sex marriage was a total waste of time and money. In an editorial in the October 18, 2007 issue of the newspaper he sums up the same-sex marriage issue as follows:
"Remember the headlines as media picked up on the propaganda of pro-marriage forces, like EGALE and Canadians for Equal Marriage? The headlines that claimed we were flocking to city hall and churches to get the deed done as courts legalized same-sex marriage province after province. And again, similar headlines as the lobbyists claimed we were rushing to say our vows out of fear that Stephen Harper would reverse federal legislation allowing marriages nationwide. EGALE claimed last October that 10,000 couples had married. It was a lie. Very few among us are eager to embrace marriage rights…"
"Didn't we just spend a decade and by some estimates $2 million to wage this fight? Didn't we just put all our other major issues virtually on ice because some couples, a few lawyers and a couple of out-of-touch lobby groups decided that same-sex marriage was the only thing that really mattered…"
"Marriage is a heterosexual institution designed by the church, endorsed by the state, with the intention of controlling the sexuality of women and by extension, their husbands. [Sic]…"
"I don't expect the wedding rate will pick up. We have something better in our relationships, something that allows for a variety of friendships, f… buddies, lovers, sisters and exes. We don't put all the pressures on one person …"
"We don't need the limitations of marriage. So we're taking a pass. But what a waste of time and money, and a tragic diversion of focus, in that decade-long fight. Let's move on to more important work."
Republished from the Nov/Dec 2007 edition of Reality magazine of REAL Women of Canada

“If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country,” H.L. Mencken complained of Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign, “he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayers’ expense.”

It's like buying a sports car with an automatic transmission.
“Well, blind me with science!”.

bits & pieces

Buchanan, Patrick The Great Betrayal 1998

289: Free Trade is like watering the desert

Drane, Augusta Theodosia The Life of Saint Dominic [c189

"The silent eloquence of holy life has a larger apostolate than the gifts of tongue or of healing". Fine book. Mother Frances Raphael writes as a woman will, being more interested in the man than in his deeds.

Beckett's Godot: "Without God, a fashionable piece of existential despair" (Robert Lax)

Yet more

"Holy Writ by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery". Gregory Moralia xx.1

In vain may heroes fight and patriots rave
If secret gold creeps on from knave to knave [Pope]

220: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts"
241: I do not understand what is meant by the burden of responsibility. By the burden of decision, yes. Whether to put on a coat, or write a dispatch upon which war or peace may depend. Its degree depends on the materials which are available and not the least on the magnitude of results which may follow. With the results, I have nothing to do.
‑‑‑: "Good is sometimes done" said one of his children. "Yes, but never by you. Never allow yourself to believe that ... One should always try to do right, but cannot count on doing good" (Lord Salisbury). Cecil, David The Cecils of Hatfield House

350: In 1775, the British Colonial Secretary on slavery: "We cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage in any degree a traffic which is so beneficial to the nation". [Lewis, Walker Without Fear or Favor: a Biography ... Roger Brooke Taney ]

"The world today produces more food per inhabitant than ever before. Enough is available to provide 4.3 pounds to every person every day". (Peter Rosset in the NYTimes, 1 Sept. 1999, A23]

"The most generous people in the world are the very poor, who assume each other's burdens in the crises which come so often to the hard pressed. The mother in the tenement falls ill and the neighbor in the next room assumes her burdens. The father loses his work, and neighbors supply food to his children from their own scanty store. How often one hears of cases where the orphans are taken over and brought up by the poor friend whose benefaction means great additional hardship! This sort of genuine service makes the most princely gift from superabundance look insignificant indeed ... The very poor give without any self-consciousness". p. 94 of Random Reminiscences of Men & Events (Sleepy Hollow Press 1984) by John D. Rockefeller. Yes, the original one, who made all their money.
JD also goes on to say: "I have been surprised to learn how far a given sum of money has gone in the hands of priests and nuns and how really effective is their use of it". [109]. He attributes this to "Organization".

A fine paragraph from Columban Mission (Sept./Oct. 1998 on Taiwan): "Most Taiwanese are bilingual, using both the Taiwanese and the Beijing or Mandarin dialects. On the surface, the Beijing dialect is almost always understood. If the object is to make yourself understood, then Mandarin is fine; but not if the object is to understand the people".

W.J. Bryan: "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate: the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak". (Cited in NYRB 19 Nov 98, p.62)

"Realism is possible, materialism is not". Einstein on physics to Roy Wood Seltara, 15 Feb. 1942.

"Whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance" [Thomas Aquinas. S.Th. 2.ii.Q.66.art.7]

In defending Freetradism (NYTimes, 4/17/99), Alan Greenspan did not mince words as he intoned: "It would be a great tragedy to stop the wheels of progress because of an incapacity to aid the victims of progress".

73: Bedier citing Didron: "Il faut conserver le plus possible, reparer le moins possible, ne restaurer a aucun prix. Ce qu'il disait des vielles pierres, il faut l'entendre de nos vieux beaux textes"

"Anger is a useless emotion in war". [D.L. Sayers]

331: Has Life a Meaning? When we reject belief in a god, we must give up the idea that life on this planet has some pre-ordained meaning. Life as a whole has no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, in a chance combination of molecules ... All this just happened” [Peter Singer]

Μεγα bιλov, μεγα κακov

41: [Baring in C]: "What can it matter what church one goes to? if one thinks it necessary to go to church?". "Catholics think it does matter" said Beatrice.
"Yes, but Protestants don't" said C. "That's the beauty of being a Protestant".
"Yes, but although they don't mind anything else, they do mind Catholics" said Beatrice.

Odds & ends

The purpose of this blog is to provide "Pebbles for David's Slingshot", those odds bits of information which will help control the Goliaths of this world.

In today's NYObserver, there is a review by Daniel Mendelsohn of E.O. Wilson's latest contribution to the cacophony. He (rightly) dismisses Wilson as "a Mr. Magoo genially oblivious of everything he can't or won't see".

I use your position as an excellent example of the truism that a Liberal is but a Puritan without the secular power to enforce his opinion. Once the Liberal gets the power, the Puritan shows up immediately. The passion for order (power) trumps the sense of justice. And the fiddling with the facts begins. [To Fr. McBrien]

"I only had a roll in the sack; she got pregnant"

LONDON, May 7, 2008 - MPs of the Commons Home Select Committee were said to be shocked last week to learn that poor women and girls in the UK are being lured into the sex trade by job advertisements at job centres run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Denise Marshall, director of a government funded anti-trafficking organization, the Poppy Project, told the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that the government was acting as a "pimp" for the sex trade.
The jobs listed include stripper, webcam stripper, adult show hostess, lap dancing and work with an escort agency. Some vacancies listed the ability to "discuss sexual fantasies" as a useful skill. One ad, called "admin work" by the Jobcentre Plus website, said successful applicants would earn £10 an hour to "talk dirty" and perform sex acts live in front of a webcam.
The Department for Work and Pensions, however, said it is obliged to carry the ads because of a High Court decision in 2003. A spokesman for the department said, "Jobcentre Plus has a duty to advertise any legal job. Legal vacancies within the adult industry come within this." The spokesman said Jobcentres Plus was required to carry such ads after the High Court overturned their previous policy "which did not accept certain types of adverts connected with the sex and personal services industries".

Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking.

“There are philosophical or methodological objections to evolutionary theory. They have been very well voiced by Professor Karl Popper that the current neo-Darwinian Theory has the methodological defect of explaining too much. It is too difficult to imagine or envisage an evolutionary episode which could not be explained by the formulae of neo-Darwinism”. Sir Peter Medawar (p.xi)
“All I want to say is that most of this research dealt only with two factors, mutation and selection, in other words, the original Darwinian model. Popper is right; this model is so good that it can explain everything, as Popper has rightly complained.” Ernst Mayr (p.47)

Adult stem cells are programmed to make repairs, and so have resulted in numerous potential and real therapies. Embryonic stem cells are programmed to make babies, and have been impossible to control.

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."
"Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: "ye must have faith." It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with." [Max Planck]

In these three books, Wills simply did not know enough to do the job. [Luke T. Johnson on Gary Wills’ three Jesus books]

‘Like the university, which she still resembles in several ways, the Church must shut her mind firmly against the needs of society. This is not only her age-long duty, it is also her only chance of turning out in the end to have served the needs of society. If she is to survive, the one thing she must not do is move with the times. She must pursue or regain her role as a force for order and continuity, stay as she is or was until the times move back to her, still or once more preach, not indeed torments or sectarian hatred, but an all-powerful, all-loving God and his divine Son. Whether she likes it or not, she has her obligations to my sort of person as well as to her communicants.’ [Kingsley Amis]