The new evangelization needs to take on the sexual revolution if it has any hope of making an impact anywhere in the Western world. I believe everything that the Catholic Church teaches in her Catechism.
Ludwig von Mises once said, "Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law." My entire series, "Supply, Demand, and Price" is a catalog of sad examples of our rulers creating failures and tragedies by ignoring the laws of economics.
Unfortunately, these days our rulers are no longer content with pretending that only the laws of economics are subject to their control and revision. They are trying to make the laws of biology subject to their will, as well. And, like ignoring laws of physics and economics, this leads to tragedy and disaster.
Copybooks were the manuals used to teach children writing. Back when Kipling wrote the poem referenced in my title, the exercises were basic moral doctrines.
I've been mulling over the apparent shortcomings of our federal government, and a couple possible constitutional amendments have come to mind.
One of the issues is that of gerrymandering. The re-election rate for incumbent members of Congress is over 90%. State legislatures draw districts in very partisan ways. I recall a Reader's Digest article on gerrymandering that described a district that stretched in six long narrow psuedopods across half the state, and another that was two residential districts connected by several miles of interstate highway. Somebody tried to get a district that was actually two areas completely separated from each other, but courts shot that down.
My proposed correction: "1. Congressional districts shall be drawn so that each can be enclosed within a rectangle with an area no more than 120% of the area of the district. 2. If the geography and population distribution of a state make doing so impossible, then congressional districts of that state shall be drawn to minimize the total area of rectangles enclosing all congressional districts. 3. States with only one district shall be exempt. 4. A rectangle shall be a geometric figure with four sides and four equal vertices."
A second issue is that the states have been rendered subservient to the federal government, which was never the intention of the Founders who wrote the Constitution. That was the original function of the Senate, to give the States a voice in the legislative process. A third is that getting rid of bad laws is far more difficult than it ought to be. As James Madison warned us, ""It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be to-morrow." To correct these, I propose the following amendment:
"1. The House of Relief is hereby established. 2. Members of the House of Relief shall be called Relievers. 3. The legislatures of each State shall appoint three Relievers, who shall serve at the pleasure of their respective state legislatures, which may recall or replace them at any time, and for any reason, or for no reason at all. 4. The House of Relief shall only have the power to pass bills that repeal federal laws and regulations of the United States, and to terminate federal departments and offices not established by the Constitution of the United States. 5. Any such bill which receives votes of one-third of Relievers currently in office shall be passed to the President of the United States without review by the other houses of Congress, and will become law upon his signature, or fail if the President should veto the bill. 6. Any bill which receives votes of one-half of all Relievers currently in office shall become law immediately, overriding any Presidential veto, without review by any other branch of government."
While I think these are more-or-less good ideas, I'm sure they could use some polish. Any ideas anyone may have for their refinement would be most welcome.
One of the most infamous events in the rise of fascism in the previous century was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. A bunch of German brownshirts went around in a planned riot, smashing the windows of their target minority group. No doubt they said it was a righteous protest.
When somebody tells you "I am totally anti-fascist," while acting just like a fascist (for example, smashing windows and setting fires in an oppressed minority neighborhood), they are not just telling you a breathtaking, bald-faced insolent lie. They are gaslighting you. They are trying to make you lose hold of reality. When they do this, you ought to ignore everything they say, and concentrate solely on what they do. By their fruits you will know them.
When people start smashing windows and setting fires, you do not have a peaceful or even non-violent protest. You have a riot. When the window-smashing and fire-setting starts, it is time for all people of good will, who care at all about the community they are in, to leave and go home. Leave the murderous, thuggish criminals out in the open, with no crowds to hide in, like a cockroach on a plate. Let the cops round them up. If they are smashing windows and setting fires, that proves that they hate you and everyone in your community. They are your enemies. Give them no aid and no comfort. Let the cops have them. Better yet, help the cops get them.
If President Trump is our first Jim Crow president, as Rebecca Hamilton says, he is doing a really bad job at it. After all, the point of Jim Crow is to keep Blacks poor, disenfranchised, separated, and downtrodden.
When an administration provides historically black universities and colleges with record funding (and at record durations), and oversees the lowest unemployment rates for blacks in decades, and sees blacks open 400% more small businesses in its first year than they had owned in the year prior, none of that helps keep blacks poor, ignorant, separated, disenfranchised, and downtrodden. If that's a try at Jim Crow, it's a yuuuuuge fail.
So I'm watching this speech by Donald Trump. John C. Wright has been going on about how the media is carefully and deliberately trying to hide anything about Trump that might appeal to voters, and only present those things which they will find frightening or repugnant. I figured it behooved me to let the man speak for himself.
He opens with some solid statements that men like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have been making for years, to wit, that crime hurts Black communities most, and that riotous protests especially are hardest on the people who are already hurting most. He points out that the results of Democrat party fiscal and domestic policy has been the opposite of progress. All well and good, but it's been ridiculously difficult to convince the victims that they are in fact in an abusive relationship with the Democrat Party.
He also wants to reverse NAFTA and some other free trade agreements because one result has been that production of easy to manufacture goods (eg, textiles), has gone overseas, and the Americans who used to do those jobs no longer have them.
If you only look at the jobs and production that has gone to foreign countries, it's easy to suppose that free trade is a bad thing. What gets ignored is how free trade helps us be richer by lowering the prices we pay for easy-to-make goods, and makes those desperately poor people who have started making those goods richer, by becoming more productive. The upshot/counter argument is that ending free trade is our way of saying that poor people in Third World nations don't deserve to have an industrial revolution, or wealth.
And then he makes the second half about how the election is his Personal Struggle against corruption, and attacks on his opposition (for results and policy, as well as for their personal characters). Admittedly, our system of campaign and election laws is designed (or, as he says, rigged) to make sure that only the Demicans and Republicrats can win elections.
He calls for an end to the crony capitalism which has made him rich.
Uh huh.
He says he's going to protect every American job. For each job protected, we've found that eight others wither before they can be created. He's going to cut taxes for all workers and small businesses. Good for him. He says he'll make it very expensive for a company to pull up stakes and go elsewhere. Bad populism, there. He plans to reform the regulatory regime to make it more business friendly. I hope so, but good luck with that. He continues to take a hard line on immigration. The idea that we should have immigrants who want to be Americans, who hold American values of justice, hard work, self-reliance, and tolerance dear, appeals to me. The idea that we ought to tighten immigration otherwise doesn't. It is absurdly difficult to become an American citizen. Unless you're already a millionaire, you'd be lucky to make it in even a decade.
He wants educational reform -- school choice, charter schools, merit pay, tenure reform. Jeb Bush did do some of that at one point in FL. Perhaps he can be Mr. Trump's Secretary of Education. He wants more police, more enforcement, and better judges and prosecutors. He's out to take down cartels and gangs like was attempted with the Mafia in a previous generation. But at what price for the innocent? Will he bear in mind Blackstone's Formulation that it is better for many guilty to go free than that one innocent be punished?
In healthcare, he's out to repeal the PPACA, better known as Obamacare. While not every clause of that law is bad, it's not worth it to try to save what was beneficial. He intends to improve consumers' ability to choose the healthcare they want. Well and good.
He says he'll restore honor and reduce corruption. That requires giving more teeth to the federal government's equivalent to internal affairs. Didn't Mr. Obama also promise us the most transparent administration ever? A particular policy, though: no speaking fees paid to spouses of high-powered administration officials and bureaucrats.
He finishes with more populism, promising to fight for average American people. There's a fair bunch of conservative virtue-signaling in his speech. I find myself agreeing more and more that conservatism is just the liberalism of the previous two generations.
So far, I'd say the media probably aren't trying to be fair to him. There are a few more recent speeches posted by the same Youtube account I can watch to see. And I probably ought to revisit Mr. Trump's campaign site to see what his particular policy recommendations are.
As Moxie Marlinspike points out, the idea that only people who have something to hide have anything to fear from our surveillance state is a load of crap. As he points out, there are far too many laws for any of us to know what they are and not break them.
The common law dictum that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" can only rationally apply to common law. It is impossible to be knowledgeable about all the new federal statute, regulatory, and case law of the last year alone!
There is greater risk: California's state legislature has previously done away with the statute of limitations, and is planning to do so again. There is a WSJ article entitled "Sacramento's Nonprofit Shakedown," but I don't have access to it behind the paywall.
We are not trying to walk through a minefield of legal problems. No, we are law enforcement's targets in a shooting gallery, and either blasted or spared based upon their whims, prejudices, and moods. We live under appointed despots.
Mozilla has launched an anti-PRISM campaign at StopWatching.Us. I signed their open letter with my real name. And I know that by admitting that, I'm giving the government a double-check means of determining my real identity. But I've always assumed that anything I say here can be traced back to me, given sufficiemt resources.
Claire Wolfe said at the close of the last century that it was too late to reform the US government, but too early to start shooting the bastards. I wonder if she's changed her mind about that latter part, yet.
I've long been critical of the US government, but I've never been seditious or proposed violence. Long before the government could cross any line past which I could have felt justified at opening fire on any of them, I became Catholic, and learned that martyrdom was the better response, both in its morality and in its effectiveness. If you shoot the bastards, they use that as an excuse for escalating their tyranny. If they martyr you, they cannot -- at least, not to themselves.
If you haven't heard about the PRISM scandal (where the feds copy and store everything going through numerous web services, including but not limited to google, facebook, yahoo!, and msn), you really have not been paying attention. Even if your stuff's encrypted now, the feds plan to keep it until they can crack it. But there's a bit of help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: http://prism-break.org/
Now, I'll be honest; I haven't investigated Rob Reid's information, but it seems largely reasonable. Anyone care to confirm his numbers, or supply better ones?
According to the USCCB, Rep. Diane Black (along with 50 cosponsors, has introduced legislation to require the HHS to respect the first amendment civil rights of believers. It's HR 940; you can search the Library of Congress for the bill; you can tell your representatives to cosponsor and support it (if they haven't already).
Well, it would appear that my government may well regard me as a terrorist. (Salute to the Pittsford Perennialist for the link.) I have strong political views, I dissent from the policies of the regime, and there are those who may find me intimidating. We've come a long way from the original usage of the word, which was the means the Revolutionary French government of the 18th century tried to intimidate its people into complete and utter submission.
In essence, the Obama administration's message to these Catholics, despite a cosmetic compromise, is akin to telling Austin's bohemians that they can dress like hipsters on the weekends so long as they behave like corporate shills Monday through Friday.
I think this is one of the best encapsulations of what's being done to us with the HHS Mandate. Only, we're not being asked to sell out our beliefs, man, but to betray our God and Creator.
Section 1. We the people who ordain and establish this Constitution intend the rights protected by this Constitution to be the rights of natural persons.
Section 2. People, person, or persons as used in this Constitution does not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected state and federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.
Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people's rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, and such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.
Did any of you notice what was missing from Section 3?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Source
Most forms of "peaceable assembly" are corporations. What this amendment allows the government to do is to presume that once you're standing with others in any sort of legally organized body or structure (other than government, itself), you do not have the rights of people. Here's the article.
I have just added to the "Other Links" section of the sidebar The Sunlight Foundation, which I found on Linux Today. They act to make government more transparent and accountable. Thus far I've only skimmed their site, but what I've seen I like. I recommend adding them to your bookmarks. I'd prefer to have a government I didn't have to fear, but since I don't, I'll take the tools I can get to make it a servant of the people, rather than our overlord.
One problem is that our justice system is misnamed. It is a criminal prosecution system. Its interest is not in justice and common law, but in statues, regulations, and procedural correctness. Prosecutors do their best to ensure that exculpatory evidence is never introduced, and work assiduously to avoid jury trials (to save time and money), and juries are never told to consider justice in convicting and giving sentencing recommendations. Is this a prudent way for a just society to order their priorities? Are time and money more important than justice?
A more just punishment would involve restitution, not incarceration. Stealing should involve not just paying back what you stole, but being forbidden the opportunities you used to steal. Embezzlers should not be allowed to go back into positions where they have authority over money.
Crime is prevented by simple things like reducing opportunities to commit them. Dr. Ruwart pointed out almost 20 years ago that if you reward police for reducing crime, instead of convicting criminals, they will act to do so -- and save us money in the process.
Another simple way to reduce crime is not punishing people for owning or using a little weed. (No, I don't use or approve of weed. I'd rather have a drink myself, even though I can readily recognize that ethanol causes a lot more adverse medical outcomes, that can easily be a lot more serious.) Relegalizing opioids and cocaine can come later.
are the acronyms for the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, bills currently being rushed through Congress as quickly as possible. As written, both will enable censorship of vast swaths of the Internet (like, any site that includes user-provided and/or generated content). Here's the rundown on why SOPA and PIPA are very bad ideas. That they are largely unconstitutional is a pretty good first reason.
Call and/or email your assorted congresscritters. Don't bother write at this point; envelopes are subjected to huge delays to protect Congressional staff personnel from biological and chemical weapons. I doubt even a postcard could get through in time. You can find your representative at House.gov and your senators at Senate.gov. A brief search and a couple of links will get you to a page with their office number (dial direct instead of trying to go through the switchboard) and email address.
It turns out OWS has a real list of real demands. Naturally, domestic press either hasn't a clue or refuses to cover it, but (according to Naomi Wolf in the Guardian whose article you should read) the top three demands are (I quote):
[G]et the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.
[R]eform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
[D]raft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
These are none of them entirely bad ideas. I can deal with some sort of blunting of the Citizens United ruling, even though I think the good guys won. It certainly allows the richest people or groups to give the greatest exposure to their message, but without it, many worthwhile messages were completely stifled. I would far rather we had real freedom to campaign on whatever message we wanted, as long as we were telling the truth, but for as long as honesty is entirely optional and slander and libel are completely acceptable in campaign speech, we have to have something.
Repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was a buyout of Republicans by Citigroup; John Dingell (D-MI) said that it would result in banks "too big to fail" that would have to be bailed out. But then the anti-redlining regulations were added, to help Clinton in his dream of subsidizing the housing of people who were unlikely to pay for their own homes with the Community Reinvesting Act, by transferring all the risk from the banks to the federal government. That has ALSO helped to set us on our current train-wreck financial crisis. I would like to see a return of at least the conflict-of-interest regulation that the Glass-Steagall Act act imposed.
That third item? It has my FULL SUPPORT. What they are talking about there is plain, simple, pure plunder by law, also known as corruption.
Ms. Wolf also makes a pretty good case that the crackdowns were coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security (which department is a reason to spit upon the memory of the 2d Bush presidency if ever there was one). And as she has said, it's no wonder these people are having the $#!t kicked out of them at the behest of the federal government.
It is becoming ever more clear that the only time our government cares at all about privacy is when it is ensuring you won't be prosecuted for sexual deviancy, contraception, or abortion. I recently read a description of the internet that certainly seems to apply: a borderless security and surveillance state.
So what has me going on now? I just ran across ZDNet's series on the ever-so-loathesome USA PATRIOT Act. The summary is here, and includes links to the entire four-part series. Another article there quotes Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) as saying "We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says," in an article titled "The 'REAL' Patriot Act is Classified." Here's ZDNet's source link. Apparently, the interpretation which the Department of Justice relies upon is classified, and cannot be debated openly in Congress without violating classification rules. And this thing has been passed more or less unchanged.
So who thinks the US government is nothing like a tyranny? Who thinks we are protected from it? Who thinks the Fourth Amendment is a dead letter?
I am taking down the blegroll entry for Free the Notre Dame 88, a defense fund for the 88 protesters arrested when President Obama delivered the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame . . . because all charges have been dropped!!
I'm not really very familiar with Fr. Corapi. I've seen the video of his conversion story/ testimonial regarding Reconciliation. (Search Fr. Corapi's conversion on YouTube; you'll find it.) But I am aware of a lot of people who dearly love his preaching.
Obviously, I'm writing about the accusations made against him. What do I (or anyone not involved in the case) actually know?
Nothing.
Is it possible he's guilty? Of course; consider the case of Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, another priest noted for holiness with a pretty broad following, who confessed to some wrongdoing.
Is it possible he's innocent? Absolutely. My inclination is to think that his innocence is more believable than his guilt. And unlike Fr. Euteneuer, he claims innocence.
By all means, the best advice is that Fr. Corapi gave in his adamant denial of guilt: pray for ALL of those involved.
Entirely a propos of this, Fr. Gordon MacRae has a post about this. Fr. MacRae knows full well what happens when you fight this sort of allegation. Also a propos is this 2003 article, by a man who ought to know more about what goes on in court when one of the clergy is accused. I urge you to go and read them both.
Comments are moderated. First, because this helps me find new ones. Second, because I've had comments that were nothing more than a means to link to a business site of which I do not approve (e.g., "Nice blog" or "Nice post" with the link in the commenter's name or the post itself). Third, because some comments are personal attacks. I don't tolerate that crap. In fact, it was an anonymous F-bomb directed at another commenter that motivated me to enable comment moderation.
Try to stay on topic, and try to avoid gross rudeness.
All of my good works are possible only through the grace of God. In other words, they are gifts given freely to me by Him. Thus, all attributions are to God. And since He has given all so freely to me, how can I then selfishly not share His gifts with others? Thus, I impose no license on any of this work, and declare it all to be in the public domain.
Those who derive from it are on their own, legally, morally, and spiritually, though I will pray for them all, and ask Our Lady of Perpetual Help to do the same.
Catholic libertarian. Where the two conflict, Catholic usually wins. I have a website and an old blog. While my intent is to focus on heroes and heroism, that will not prevent me from ranting about whatever thoughts are so recurring in my head as to be annoying.
