A Republic If You Can Keep It

MUCH AS I RESPECT the post-presidency of Jimmy Carter and even his sand-bagged presidency, in retrospect, I don't think any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson's attempt to outdo FDR in creating equal justice (whose greatness was overshadowed by Vietnam) has been as satisfactory to me as Joe Biden has.

If Joe Biden had a real Democratic majority in the Senate for the past year and a half he would have taken up the ball that has been lying motionless on the court since Johnson left office and played it.   I think the attempt of the DC-NYC-cabloid servants of billionaire fascism to sink him over the hard, fraught and entirely correct decision to fulfill the commitment MADE UNDER TRUMP!  to end American fighting in Afghanistan can stand in as an example of what Lyndon Johnson knew he would face if he ended American involvement in Vietnam, the real reason that he got caught up in the Harvard boy's war that he inherited.  

If Biden gets a real Democratic Senate this fall and retains a Democratic House, I think he may prove to be a great president against all expectations and against all the lies and discrediting of the media and the pundit class.  See post below about as it concerns "wisdom." 

I think that the greatest part of Lyndon Johnson's program of equal justice was in terms of an attempt at economic justice, his Great Society programs, in that I think that his fellow non-Ivy product, Joe Biden, understands things a lot better than the Ivy Leaguers, Clinton and Obama.   In the whining about the great student-debt relief a lot of the idiots online and on the media don't seem to understand that a lot of "plumbers" either had or have student loan debt themselves or they have kids do and that THEY ARE ON THE LINE WHEN THE KID'S CAN'T KEEP UP WITH THEIR DEBTS.   If Democrats want to win they will directly appeal to parents and young people who have student debt because there are a hell of a lot more of them than there are pundits and seven figure cabloid talking heads.

But, of course, when rights are situated amid might and wealth something happens to rights

"facets of having one's way in the world"

IN THINKING ABOUT THE PERVERSION of the idea of rights divorced from moral responsibility which I have been writing about I remembered a sentence in the following passage from Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version Of Reality, the sentence I altered for the title.  Before you read the passage, consider what happens if you replace the word "wisdom" with the word "rights" and the situation of "rights" within the same triad with might and wealth when you really think about it in terms of what happens to the habitually considered virtue of the words in that context.  The implications of virtue in our habitual way of thinking about wisdom in that triad is a lot like the ill considered reality of rights divorced from any moral responsibility and that restraint on their perversion into something far removed from good.  Especially consider the role that the "free press" and their legal representatives have played in that perversion of the concept of equally endowed rights to the place where "rights" granted to artificial entities and the creation of money as the equal of speech was the Supreme Court rigging the biggest "rights" lottery for wealth and so might, the rich and so powerful.  And even more so the entertainment that is what most poeple spend most of their time consuming so it is what really bends and distorts the thinking of far more people, far more so than the "news".  

The poet focuses upon the great triad of control and pride, the three facets of having one's way in the world, might, wisdom and wealth.

Might here means military force, the capacity to control markets and natural resources.  Wealth means the capacity to manage capital and impose requirements and restraints and leverage on all of the others so that the whole of the global economy is ordered to flow toward us.

But, then, wisdom.  We had not expected wisdom to come along with might and wealth. Especially because our theme is wisdom and the work of the university is wisdom. Who can speak negatively of wisdom when we remember our great intellectual inheritance from the Greeks?  But, of course, when wisdom is situated amid might and wealth something happens to wisdom. And, of course, that is what has happened among us. We have understood with Bacon that knowledge is power and we have transposed wisdom into knowledge that could control, that strange interplay between wisdom and knowledge has brought us the gift of the great scientific revolution in Bacon's time.  And in its wake the great technological advances that have moved toward control that is never disinterested. And before we knew it Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas have entitled a book "The Wise Men," a study of six of the titanic figures who have managed U. S. foreign policy with Niebuhrian realism and have produced the abiding superpower, ample wisdom, ample might ample wealth in order to be the chosen race in the modern world.

Perhaps inevitably the great universities have signed on with that wisdom, have entered into compacts of wisdom that has bought the universities the wealth of research grants and the power of connectedness. And now we are sobered as we are in this consultation, needing to take a deep breath concerning the way of wisdom-enlightenment-knowledge to which we have been pledged. That wisdom has led us to immense power and wealth.

If you went through the exercise of considering "rights" in the same place in that triad with might and wealth you would, I think, find that in a very simliar way as "wisdom" you will find that the habitually considered virtue of "rights" becomes very problematic when you consider the actual inequality of the distribution of those due to the manipulation of those with wealth and, so, power and their servants in the judiciary, legislative bodies and in the executive branch.  

Consider what happens to this later passage from his lecture when you replace "rights" for "wisdom" and what really happens when you replace equality with inequality, whether you lie about that on the basis of "merit" or some other excuse.  When, like wisdom can, "rights" are turned from a necessary restraint of moral responsibility into a mere tool of having your way.   As any assertion of rights is inevitably tied in with or, rather, mistaken with MERELY "having your way in the world," they are probably even more problematic than "wisdom" when located within that triad of control.

Second.  The triad of fidelity focuses on the neighborhood as the triad of control is drawn to the club. The club is a staging ground for exclusion so that one need deal only with one of those one chooses who are most like us. It is a mark of privilege that brings with it the sense of knowing best and being right. It proceeds by excluding the other, variously Women or Blacks or Jews or the Poor.  And, of course, the best universities have been no more hospitable than the clubs with their exclusionary quotas.

But the neighborhood takes in all of us who move up and down the street. There is an egalitarian assumption about the legitimatcy of all its members and the sharing of resources to which all are entitled.  Historically, without romanticizing a rural community before social stratification and division of labor and the development of surplus wealth - with the exception of the doctor - was more or less an egalitarian community.

But the urban reality of social stratification, division of labor and surplus wealth has largely destroyed that sense of neighborly egalitarianism. And, of course, the university is deeply enmeshed with that crisis. For admission is a ticket to entitlement.

We can no longer have affirmative action the urban elite court has ruled, so that the privileged who come from better schools are better prepared for applications and, so, on the basis of socially constructed merit can occupy the space and the fellowships.

We produce a class of managers of social symbols - of which I am a member - marked out at best by only a vague memory of having done real work. The process of privilege and entitlement evokes a stream of influence that culminates in might and wealth and a certain kind of wisdom.  And, of course, such a trajectory of control will hide behind a hundred defenses of pedigree and certification and gated communities and tenure and all the rest.

See how that passage works when you replace notions of "rights" for notions of "wisdom."

I think the motives of how the idea of wisdom or the idea of rights are perverted through the accumulation of petty privileges in even the only slightly more favored population who want to get a first foothold in the climb to the top (as if any but a handful of them will get anywhere near that) and the ease with which their consciences can be numbed from what it gets them in regard to that inequality turning the amoral wisdom or denatured right into a virtue is worth thinking about.   

The idea of so-called merit, especially when you attribute that to an allegedly natural inequality in intelligence or  biological "fitness,"  is a very seductive temptation among the college credentialed who most certainly believe themselves and, so, their children will be so favorably endowed.  Story telling, especially the debased form of that in novels and movies and stage plays often interchange all of those singifiers of "virtue" in ways that pervert all of our thinking.   When you add the refusal to distinguish between rights as an equal endowment by God to God's creatures, which People are, to a mimicry of having the power to declare such endowments by jumped-up, often basely motivated or merely deluded judges, justices, legislatures, heads of state, etc. you get something very similar to the official designation of wise ones through academic credentialing and media publicity.  But if I go on in that line I'll get into the designated "public intellectuals" and that would turn into a rant.  


P. S. from the next day.  I decided to give you a small sample of how that would go.

The extent to which equality and democracy and any organized or group attempt to make life decent for all is dependent on the moral restraints of malignantly claimed and used freedoms or "rights," an attempt which is absolutely dependent on and even defined by an intention to follow moral precepts of the kind that will do that is as at odds with the conceptions of modern, materialist, secularism as it was the feudal notions of divine rights of kings.  

Kings, princes, legal frameworks of hereditary family dominance (such as the "democracy" of classical Athens was set up to benefit) were notorious for exempting themselves from the same kinds of moral restraints I'm talking about which were more often, haphazardly, demanded of those lower down in those systems.  As has been pointed out here, many times, the results of that were what God told the prophet Samuel to warn the Children of Israel would be the results if they turned to a king, he would rob them and oppress them and steal their livelihoods and even children and they would be their slaves.  Not unlike what the American financial and legal system is doing to what used to be the middle class. If republican government, even one allegedly a democracy, replaces our modern billionaire oligarchs for royals, nobles and other gangsters, it's not much of a deal for the rest of us.  

Unfortunately, when American and other modern "democracies" or just republics were being invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the role of prophet was given over to things like science which, by common agreement, excluded moral consideration because its laws were not laws for governing the lives of people but describing the movements of planets and bodies in motion, things which could be shown, on average, to mindlessly and predictably follow such laws.  The material success of that limited effort blinded the elites of the time to that exclusion of sucn an essential moral framework and intention necessary for the creation of laws to produce a decent life among we people who are reduced to the same category of atoms and molecules by the most extreme extensions of that materialist superstition in things such as the terminally decadent notion of eliminative materialism by a similarly deluded misidentification of the methodology of science with the ideological insistence that those are an all-encompassing, all seeing, all knowing seer when they so obviously cannot function as that.  The idolatry of science, in some, especially, academic contexts and certainly in a judicial one is matched or replaced with the idolatry of legalism, in the United States Constitutionalism, in a similar pseudo-historical ideological process. Many lies must be told in the process.  Some of them bald-faced lies.

Also See what I said the other day about the perversion of the framing of the U.S. Constitution by the slave power and the financiers who certainly never intended to establish equality for People of Color, Women, etc. and how we still live with the consequences in the very institutions created by the slave-holders and financiers to prevent equality and, so, any democracy that in a modern context deserves to be called that. Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, etc. are just the vulgar white trashy elite wanting to return to a time when People of Color are excluded, once again.  The entire focus of Republican-fascist politics since the election of Bill Clinton has been increasingly obvious as a force to reestablish that, the original scheme of the financiers to harness the fascists has resulted in the white supremacist fascist strain gaining dominance as it could have been predicted they would.  It costs nothing to be a racist, you've got to have money to be a rich oligarchic fascist.  And racists tend to be rather stupid, blaming those less powerful than themselves, or more cowardly because they are afraid to face who really robs, cheats and enslaves them.  The extent to which monarchies depended on the cowardice as much as the ignorance of the majority of "their subjects" could probably not be over-estimated.  Happens in "republics" too.

Get Liz Cheney On Record As Opposing the Unitary Executive Theory Before Beatifying Her

ONE OF THE THINGS that Liz Cheney must be grilled on before her media canonization as a presidential candidate - who will result in splitting the opposition to Trumpist Republican-fascism and, like all third party candidates who have any impact at all, put the worst candidate with any chance in the presidency - is her relationship to the elite-fascist theory of the unitary executive that her father and his ward, George W. Bush elevated during his regime.*  NO ONE WHO SUPPORTS THE U.E. THEORY HAS ANY BUSINESS BEING CONSIDERED AS PRESIDENTIAL IN A DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC.   If you want a reminder of that and the role that Dick Cheney played in elevating the powers that Trump repeatedly asserted during a less flashy but no less ruthless era of Republican power, you should read this paper by Mark J. Rozelle and Mitchel A. Sollenberger, The Unitary Executive Theory And The Bush Legacy.  That should be rightly considered to include both W and his dad, the earlier infamous pardoner of his criminal associates in the waning days of his presidency, another tie in with Trump's practice of the ill considered presidential power which the framers of the Constitution clearly didn't think through to account for a George H W Bush or a Donald J. Trump.  

The absurd faith, absurd in the face of the most conclusive of contradicting fact evidence and the extreme dangers of it, that the American system of government set up in the Constitution is a work of perfection that should never be changed, is just that, absurd.  That the language of the Constitution could be used by sleazy, American-fascist, corporate lawyers and poly-sci guys to create the blueprint for the president to wield powers more in line with an overt dictator than with the express concepts of modest and limited powers the majority of the framers and the ones that most Americans have assumed were there, proves beyond any doubt that we really are in desperate need of a Constitution that kills those fascist dreams in the bud explicitly and disallows the "freedoms" that have gotten us where we are now.  Like that "right" to lie which I've been pointing out so often.

I could have included "political science" in that list of pseudo-sciences that I called for demoting the other day because it is on the same level of stupid as economics or psychology.  One of the most obvious things about the United States, one of the most dangerous facts about the United States is that we have had a flourishing and indigenous fascist ideology which precedes the framing of the Constitution and which, through corruption and blackmail, was embedded directly into the Constitution in ways that were merely partially and, to an extent superficially overturned by the Civil War and in structures and language so basic to the form of government that it sets up that it is not only still there but it runs things.  

White supremacy, the slave-power which merely transformed into the American apartheid of Jim Crow, which the Roberts Court is reviving right now, is only one of two strains of indigenous fascism which not only is influential, it has ruled large parts of the country with the merest of intervals of something more democratic during the Reconstruction period and in the period after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts came into effect, only to be destroyed by John Roberts and his concurring associate "justices".  It embedded the extremely dangerous anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, giving it confirming powers over the federal judiciary and a veto over the more democratically constituted House.  It embedded the extremely dangerous Electoral College which has insured some of the actual losers of presidential elections were put into office, never once with good effect - Rutherford Hayes and George W. Bush were both products of that and pretty terrible presidents - and providing billionaire fascists and foreign despot-billionaires a rich opportunity for ratfucking our elections.  

The competing fascist force among the financiers, originally associated with the Northern colonies and early states but which, despite that lore and encouraged regional bigotry, is ubiquitous in every state and region, originally embodied in the proto-fascist Hamilton and the likes of John Jay, had, at times, been less extreme in their operations and more genteel in their claims.  Until Trump disgusted them with his uncoothness and his too open willingness to overtly claim the kinds of powers with full vulgarity, they were all in when it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who were doing the same and earlier when it was the Bush v. Gore five in the Supreme Court working in concert with Jeb Bush to put his brother and Cheney in power.  While I am sure there are some "never-Trumpers" who are sincerely reformed into supporting democracy, you will forgive me if I am skeptical as to their ultimate position once he is gone.  I would bet you anything that if it were a more acceptable white-supremacist, unitary executive fascist, they would be all-in with them against even a moderate Democrat who had an intention of steering the country to the democracy which has been thwarted from the start.

The use of the mythology of the United States, a mythology primarily created by white talkers and scribblers and media figures, academics, etc. has never faced the fact that from the start white racism and oligarchic financiers were an active and influential fascist strain in American society, politics and life.  White People except in so far as they could be held in debt-slavery or wage-slavery were not the primary focus of the indigenous American fascists, that would be the Native Americans who they killed and robbed of their land and the Africans who they enslaved and their African-American offspring who also provided a rich opportunity in setting poor-whites against them so as to avoid the more numerous and voting rich-withes a target when they opted to kick down instead of up.  The Constitution provided the property-owning poorer whites with anything from a chance to actually be represented in government to, at best, an illusion that that was what was going on, state constitutions did the same though, in some cases, they actually did provide more of the democracy that the federal Constitution was sold as providing.  In the well over two centuries after the thing was set up, few if any scholars of the country and the Constitution and its laws has honestly called these things what they really have been and are becoming again under the Roberts Court, Republican-fascist-Trumpism and whatever the evidence to that effect.

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A Short Modern Political History Of The Post WWII America I've Lived My Life In

America in the post-WWII period made such a fetish of "liberty" and "freedom" that it gloried in the liberty to destroy freedoms for other people and the most obnoxious and irresponsible of freedoms and liberties exercised to the destruction of liberty and freedom for those with less power or more of a sense of moral responsibility.  The show-biz, Hollywood, block-buster "American Psycho" style of "art" as a flower of such liberty of such freedom should, by now, have led people to notice that there is something wrong, something very dangerous about it.  The asshole Supreme-Court enabled automatic-wielding mass murderers are a product of that libertarian psychosis.

It is one of the worst of ironies that not a little of that corruption of the aspirations of freedom were due to the legitimate demand of People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, working People to have their rightful measure of the freedom that had been, from the beginnings hoarded by white men of property and wealth, those who Roger Taney said the Constitution was written on behalf of and who were the sole owners of any legal rights claimed under it.  Like all good things that come from the economic underclasses, once those have gained currency, those with wealth and property or merely a larger amount of that, will steal it and turn it to their own, exclusive advantage.  The advocacy of civil rights turned into the demands of white-guy and gal libertarian, racist-fascism.  The kind of freedom which is not in conflict with and quite salable by the real white power of wealth and commerce was never at any rick, especially the marketing of alcohol, other addictive and health damaging and resolve weakening substances, was a freedom which was never at risk.  Neither were those petty freedoms which the white underclass had never been denied, as long as they didn't endanger the maximum profitability of those with wealth.  Nor the exercise and encouragement of character defects, certainly not the expression of racist, sexist or other bigotry, nor the lies that enhanced the power and position of the rich.  In the meantime, any aspirations of responsible and so real and legitimate freedom, especially by the Black underclass, other People of Color, Women who were not wealthy, was unprofitable, an undermining of the utility of racism, sexism, etc. The extent to which the Voting Rights Act, especially, made things more democratic and, so, endangered the political power of the party of indigenous fascism and the wealthy, the Republicans, it had to go and the Roberts Court, building on the Rehnquist Court, did that and the Constitution cannot be held to have either been violated in the process.  That alone proves that the thing is now a menace for all of us except the fascists.   Fascists and Nazis always have complete freedom to do what they want under fascism and Nazism, as long as they act like fascists and Nazis.

* No presidency which is not a product of the majority of the vote in the election should be called an administration, it is a regime if not a junta.  I do think, given the role that the banana-republican moves of Jeb Bush in Florida, with the collusion of FOX with his cousin John Ellis and the corrupt Rehnquist Court played in putting him in the presidency that Bush II was properly thought of as a junta.  That such a thing could happen under our Constitution impeaches its legitimacy, though you'll never hear the media or polite society admit that.

The Goddamned Media Is Not The Friend Of Equality, Democracy Or Even The Survival Of The World

 

Night Thoughts And Hate Mail

INSOMNIA And NIGHT THOUGHTS CAN be an opportunity for serious thinking and last night it helped me do what I hadn't done while fully awake, put together the thoughts from two posts on the difference between owning our bodies and owning money and what Fr. Dan Donovan said about the ways in which great wealth impedes us fulfilling our moral obligations and, so, "makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility."  Not only that but Fr. Donovan said great wealth, "makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility."  Think about that the next time you think about what Peter Theil or Elon Musk is up to, or the recent tax-cheat 1.6 billion dollars that a billionaire gave to the legal-sleaze who ratfucked us into a Republican-fascist Supreme Court majority.   That our Constitutional system allows that level of financial corruption of our basic governmental institutions proves that it will either be changed to prevent that or American democracy is doomed.

We use words and ideas like owning something without ever really thinking about what that means and how much of it is actually based on nothing much but artificial and imaginary rules behind human practices.  The ownership of an investor in the gain they get from their speculations and manipulations is entirely artificial.  There is no law of nature, no law of God that gave any of the billionaires a "right" to claim ownership of the wealth generated by the workers who actually produced anything that was sold or to a cut of everything the artificial entities that are the companies and corporations workers produce wealth under "earns".  The entire structure of capitalist economics is an artificial structure to organize the generation of profits and to extract as much of that wealth for those who are said to "own" them through lending money under laws that will always tend towards the runiously usurious, something which there is quite an obvious ban on in Scripture.  Beware the virtues claimed by those who spend years mastering the mythology and lore of moneygrubbing that both economics and such a huge amount of the civil law is.  Even the nicest of them are apt to unnoticingly support the worst moral atrocities due to their mastery and what it gets them.  Be even more careful when it's the corporate media and those who would like to get well paid in it.  

The habits of thought we get into by never considering what owning something means and the imaginary structure that most ownership concists of while we use the word to mean very differnt things, a muddle that someone as sophisticated in thinking as Stanley Hauerwas got in with an inapt comparison of the entirely natural ownership of someone to their own body and the ownership of the artificial entity, money, which is a creation of generally artificial and generally very corrupt legal schemes, espcially in how those with more of it can con or weedle or force those with less of it to give it to them.  The extent to which that structure of imaginary legalism is always to be suspected of corruption reaches something like an ultimate degeneracy when it comes to the enslavement and wage-enslavement of other people compelled under legal penalties, punishments and, ALWAYS IN THE END, VIOLENCE, which underlies all of slavery and only to a lesser extent wage-slavery.  

Balzac famously said that there was always a great crime behind the possession of great wealth, something which would have been even more impressive if it were not an observation of the Scripture that had been the basis of most of the moral civilization that someone like Balzac was still reflecting.  Still, considering how the hundreds of millions and billions of us go about our entire lives trafficing in these fictions and putting up with the appalling results and the incredible injustice of it, it's impressive that he noticed that.  The extent to which you can life a life compromised to Mammon while others and you think of yourself as good and viruous is on full display when the white-washing, white-supremacist, whited supulchres like any Republican-fascist who professes Christianity while being a full blown temple whore in the cult of Mammon.  Male and female temple prostitutes, such as the entire Republican-fascist caucus in the Congress, yes, including Liz Cheney, though some of them at least have the taste to not call attention to their hypocrisy quite shamelessly as Boebert or Taylor Greene.  I would say that at least a half or more of "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" are fully in with the Boebert-Greene side of things in that regard.  So are a number of the Democrats.  

I think that possessions tie us to the limits of life, especially lots of them, especially great wealth.  You can't carry that baggage to heaven.  Being tied to it in life, more tied to holding that excess than in sharing it with people who need basic sustainance - the poor who Jesus told the rich, young man to give the proceeds of selling his possessions to - is like the boxes chained to Marley in Charles Dickens story, they enslave you in life and enslave your soul till you purge your sins of omission.  It's like the mud on a rope that can be cleaned by pulling it through a knot hole, St. Macrina's analogy made on her death bed while she talked to her brother St. Gregory about the Soul and Resurrection.  Jesus said it was better to get rid of it and share the wealth now and avoid that.  David Bently Hart, currently one of the most prominent advocats of Christian universalism said that he believes in a hell of limited duration - making good arguments from Scripture for that point of view - but that hell is a terrible place and he hoped everyone avoided it.  I have to admit that I kind of like the idea that Bobert and Green and their ilk will have to get it purged from them, which I'll probably have to have purged from me.  Not everything that has to be given up like that can be sold for charity.

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"you sound as if there's something wrong with abortion"

Someone complained that I presented abortion as if there's something wrong with it even as I said it should be safe and legal and that no one had the right to tell a woman that she must remain pregnant and force her to be. 

I remember back in the primary season of 2008, when Hillary Clinton (my candidate in that election) was running for president, there was a similar slam against her when she sensibly said that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, implying that needing or wanting an abortion was something to be avoided.  

I asked one of the Women who were slamming Hillary Clinton (as I recall she was an Obama fan) if she really believed anyone ever aspired to be in the position of someday needing or even wanting to have an abortion, if any woman who was not pregnant wanted to be in a position to have an abortion.  As I recall the question went unanswered.

I doubt such a woman exists but, clearly anyone who aspires or wants to get into the position where she will need, want or have an abortion, to need such a medical procedure that could certainly not be considered as pleasant, would be rightly suspected of having rocks in her head.  

Wanting to be in such a position is as bizarre an idea as the rumors of "bug chasers," the gay men who allegedly wanted to be infected with HIV so they would . . . and I don't believe there were any . . . some of them reportedly wanted to "fit in" with the "HIV positive community."   Which thinking would have to rank as a really pathological mental disorder and resulting irresponsibility would mean that such people should probably be under custodial care.  I was never really convinced that such a thing really existed though if there's something the internet and unfiltered comment proves, practically every sick way of thinking is practiced by someone with access to a keyboard.  The Republican-fascist cult cultivates that among superannuated boys who spend all of their time online and can't get dates and spend their lives online whining to other such boys who obsessively blame all the wrong people for their unhappiness.  Such online whiners are certainly ubiquitous online, I spare you lots of such comments here because answering them all isn't healthy.   Just for completeness, there were also rumors of HIV people who aspired to infect others, which may have happened but I doubt it was more than a few extremely sick individuals.   Most HIV infection happen pretty much the same way that most unwanted pregnancies do.  Only I doubt anyone would present avoiding infection as a political controversy.

The challenge should always have be made to anti-choice people in the past fifty-years of trying to get the law to revert to forcing pregnant women to remain pregnant, if they were so opposed to abortions, why didn't they demand and encourage education and provision and use of effective, science based contraception after the passage of Roe v. Wade instead of opposing it. Why don't they now when it's AGAIN becoming obvious that when you make abortion illegal that only means that the abortions performed will be illegal, unsafe and deadly?  Clearly they don't really want to prevent as many abortions as possible because the widespread use of effective contraception is the only means of preventing as many abortions as possible.  If they really wanted to "end abortion" they would be the biggest, fattest proponents of universal education and provision of and encouragement to use contraception. When they were not and most certainly are not.

Certainly Women who don't want to be pregnant would be better off if a pregnancy that would result in them choosing to have an abortion never happened, if they weren't ever in a position to have to make the decision of whether or not to have one.  And, by the way, BOYS AND MEN WHO DON'T OR WON'T BE RESPONSIBLE PARTNERS AND FATHERS WOULD BE BETTER OFF NEVER HAVING MADE SOMEONE PREGNANT.  I don't see any huge movement among men to be responsible in their role in it, especially those who are anti-choice.  Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump. . .  I would bet that a large number of wealthy, conservative male opponents of legalized abortion would not act according to that position if they or their sons impregnated someone they didn't want to spend their money supporting or risk their reputation on.  I think it's a safe speculation that a number of them have coerced or paid Women to have abortions in those scenarios, though more have just abandoned their responsibility, which also contributes to why Women choose to have abortions. Clearly they should have been using condoms but didn't want to.

So the position I took, that the best outcome would be if no woman who didn't want be pregnant never was to start with makes the most sense.  The kind of sense it would take for someone like Hillary Clinton to express but which, even now, I hardly hear anyone expressing.  Any "pro-choice" advocate should certainly be able to navigate the issue to the point where they would understand that even better than the choice to end a pregnancy through abortion would have been to avoid ever being pregnant to start with.  To understand that is certainly not the same thing as or anything close to wanting to make abortion illegal, it is to face the full reality of the issue.  But, since I know the people who got mad at Hillary Clinton over saying that were, almost exclusively, college-credentialed, it's clear that people with that educational background can find navigating to such a conclusion something of a challenge.  I find that's generally the case when you allow ideology to determine the direction of your thinking.  When the consequences for other people of your lefty position end up in the same place as your opponents' you really should notice that you really aren't that far apart from them.  The consequences are what counts.

Camels And Needles - A Sermon By Fr. Dan Donovan

THE MOST IMPORTANT thing I did on a computer this weekend was to transcribe a sermon that Fr. Dan Donovan gave last Tuesday on The Daily TV Mass from Toronto.  I will risk posting it as I transcribed it, hoping I did it right.  I'm going to forego extensively commenting on it because I couldn't do it justice except to say this way of seeing things with its consequences for economic inequality is more likely to produce equal justice than what I've been criticizing for the past week.

Today's Gospel follows immediately on Matthew's account of the rich, young man who asked Jesus what he must do to enter into eternal life.  When Jesus answers keep the commandments, the young man answers he has done so all his life.  Jesus then invites him to sell all that he owns, give the money to the poor and join Jesus as he travels throughout Galilee proclaiming the good news of the nearness of the Kingdom of God.  When the man heard this, Matthew tells us he went away grieving for he had many possessions.   That the man grieves is revealing.  He clearly is not indifferent to the invitation that Jesus has made to him but he's unable to accept it.  His wealth means that much to him.

As the young man turns Jesus turns to the disciples and says, "Truly, I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." To underline just how difficult it can be for those who possess great wealth to enter eternal life Jesus declares that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God."

Taken literally the saying seems to affirm that for the rich salvation is impossible. 

Over the centuries People have tried to soften  what Jesus is saying by claiming there was a particularly narrow niche in Jerusalem called "the needle," a gate through which a camel might pass with great difficulty. In fact there was no such gate. What we have here is the kind of exaggerated and shocking language that Jesus sometimes uses, for example like cutting off one's hand or tearing out an eye if they cause us to sin. Such language is meant to catch our attention, to stop, make us think. In this case think about how money and great possessions can undermine our relationship with God.

This is the way in which the disciples understood what Jesus was saying. Hearing it, Matthew says the disciples were greatly astounded and said, then who can be saved? For mortals, Jesus declares, the salvation of the rich is all but impossible but for God all things are possible. Salvation is ultimately a gift, something that God pours out on us if we turn to him and recognize our need for that gift.  

As crucial as this reference to grace is, it does not take away the difficulty Jesus said the rich have to enter the Kingdom.  The issue of wealth and riches and the way they can make our relationship to God more challenging comes back a number of times in the Gospels. They report that Jesus spoke about it on various occasions. The early Church, for its part, struggled with and sought to integrate it into its teaching.

It is not easy to apply what Jesus said here to ourselves, given the world and complex culture in which we live.  With the exception of the very rich it is by no means self evidence who in our culture might be among those of whom Jesus is speaking.  What is it about wealth, we might ask, that makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility in regard to it. The basic challenge in what Jesus said is something we have to deal with as individuals, families and societies.  

We need to begin by thinking of what we possess and what we might be being called on to share with others. The more we focus on money and on our efforts to amass ever greater sums of it the more we will be tempted to think of ourselves as different from others. To think of ourselves as superior to them. We can begin to think and act as if we were the source of our own wealth, we lose a sense of how much we have received from others, from God and family and from the culture and country in which we have been born and educated.  And in which we have been able to be as successful as we have been from a monetary and from other points of view.  

In spite of the many differences among us, including differences in wealth, education and influence, differences, too, in health, general well-being, we all share a common humanity.  Made in the image and likeness of God we all have the same dignity the same rights the same needs and longings.  The same ultimate destiny in God.  The good things we have, family and friends, education and a rewarding job or profession, sufficient funds to provide for our needs and those of our family, these things should be available to everyone. While great wealth puts us in a position where we can help others and contribute in a significant ways to the creation of a society that cares for the poor and the disadvantaged it can also cut us off from such People and from efforts to build up a culture that is more sensitive to their needs.  

What Jesus has said about wealth and great possessions and the difficulty they create for entry into the Kingdom of God leads Peter to ask about the situation of the disciples, they have in many cases given up everything in order to join with Jesus. What will they receive in return?   Jesus evokes the end-times and the judgement that will be a part of them, those who have left family, home and much else in order to join with him, he says, will receive good things in this life and even more in the life to come. The life of those who embrace the Gospel and who commit themselves to living in accordance with it will bring in its wake a host of good things including peace of mind and heart and a sense of meaning and of purpose in their life.  Whether our means are great or modest a saying of Jesus quoted by Paul remains true, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

The Weird Things That Are Sins In The Kulcha Of Materialist Atheistic Scientism - Yeah, More Hate Mail

or, Skepticism The "Skeptics" Will Not Put Up With 

OF COURSE I accept that the only theory of how biological diversity arose in the history of life on Earth that makes sense of the evidence is that modern species evolved from what scientists would classify as different species, over millions, tens and hundreds of millions and billions of years.  The idea that makes the most sense of the currently available evidence of that evolution - which is only the tiniest fraction of evidence that must have once existed but now is not and never will be available for scientific study - is that all present day life is descended from a single, original organism.  Though that last theory, which I assume as a concept that doesn't even really arise to the level of a theory, isn't really based on the soundest of foundations.  I fully believe it as I fully admit that it is entirely conjectural because there is no real and direct physical evidence to base it in.

Even the broadest of the fuzzy details in evolutionary theory are based on far less of the necessary evidence than is available to physics or chemistry in the things that they study.  Its status as reliably durable and secure knowledge is absurdly less than that of the really hard sciences, especially considering the position it holds in the broader culture and even within the culture of scientists. "Hard" should be understood as in the hardness and durability of the conclusions reached.   Much of biology approaches the durability and reliability of physics and chemistry and is based enough on well done observation and quantitative analysis and so deserves to be considered as proper science.  Most of what gets said about evolutionary science is more properly seen as one or more of the following, conjecture, lore, wishful-thinking, ideological claims and posturing, in descending order of quality, honesty and deserving of respect as "science."  In the inverted morality of modern academia, that order is inverted and the shiftiest of it is granted the highest status.  Natural selection was born in and remains one of the sleaziest of ideological claims with the clearest of base motives found embedded in what is, largely, otherwise genuine science or close to it.  

I suspect that if you understood what I just said you will be morally outraged and if you were in my presence and heard me say that in a group of your fellow college-credentialed boobs you would be apoplectic and denounce me in what I'd then note is a parody of a Brit-costume-drama Inquisitor.  You would want to be seen and heard making that denunciation as gaining you status.  You probably would if you didn't understand more than that I had dissed Darwin with that and called into question something that has been, in its second most significant cultural presence,* nothing more than an anti-religious, specifically anti-Christian ideological weapon.   A weapon which those who use it can only attack a specifically modern heresy of Biblical fundamentalism which is not held by many, perhaps most of those who are religious or Christian by profession.  I grew up as a Catholic with parents who fully believed in evolution and who understood the Bible is not what fundamentalists or their foils, the materialist-atheist-scientistic hold it to be, a science textbook or a modern style history.  My mother had a degree in zoology, it never much had a negative  effect on her religious belief. We never discussed natural selection or Darwinism, though I have with other members of my family and I've even convinced one of the working biologists I'm related to to admit there were some pretty serious problems with it.  They work in an area in which there is little to no need for evolutionary conjecture, lore, wishful thinking or ideological claiming or posturing, there are many, many working biologists who are too busy looking what can be looked at, counting and measuring, etc. to bother with that ideologically polluted stream of their science.  

Just why the college-credentialed crowd puts so much moral stock in Darwinism is one of the more entertaining curiosities of the ubiquitous and decadent modernist culture of the college-credentialed.  In that, you must rigidly adhere to a belief in natural selection and elevate a rather unattractive and frequently dishonest man, Charles Darwin and his colleagues and heirs, inexplicably in the cases of those like Huxley, Pearson and even (according to Robert Richards and his publisher) the proto-Nazi  Haeckel, who are frequently morally atrocious, to positions of sanctity that require lying about them.  

Why that area of science?  One of the least impressive for the expression of durable, reliable or even practically important ideas is held onto as such a struggle worth our limited and so wasted time and effort and our limited and far from secure credibility?  One that is of little to no practical use in trying to save life on this planet from the effects of modern industrial pollution of the planet and from the weapons of mass destruction that science and technology have given us?  Those are the pressing questions, not if ol' Chuck Darwin was a saint among men.  Which he wasn't.

Why should it matter to anyone who wants to save bio-diversity - Darwin certainly didn't favor the diversity of the human population, read The Descent of Man and you'll see that, by the way - or even the future of the human population waste so much of those on that question?  It's as if reality and even the truth of the record of it didn't really matter to them, which, since their conception of "science" is so shoddy as they hold themselves as the great champions of science, isn't surprising, on reflection.  

That's the area of what you want to defend in which you have the strongest case, the attack on psychology, sociology, economics, etc. as pseudo-science is far easier to make.  

Economics is never sufficiently honest in what its claims are and is never done without being thoroughly enmeshed in ideology and self-interest and greed.  That Darwin based his theory of natural selection on a murderous  economic theory that elevated the British class system and the artificial, human made, very teleologically  motivated laws that created it to the status of a natural phenomenon is a line of attack on natural selection I have made and which does nothing to elevate it.  The embedded teleology of most if not all of the supporting arguments Darwin made for his allegedly non-teleological theory is an area I should go into more, someday.

Psychology alleges to study things that can't be observed, measured or analyzed, and when they can't and that incapacity is raised as a challenge, pretends that those things it can't do don't exist or don't matter.  Behavioral psychology and the psychology that demotes human consciousness to unimportance or even non-existence in the alleged study of psychology is something of an ultimate academic absurdity. That it could stand as an acceptable stand to take in a university impeaches the seriousness or integrity of modern academia.   Its history feeds off of the same roots that Darwinism does and it shares in every defect that the theory of natural selection has and adds myriads of others.

Sociology is based on a superstition that you can pretend to gather data which can never really be guaranteed to be accurately reported or accurately representative of a diversity within human populations and to figure out by statistical analysis something about the group allegedly described, usually presenting a numerical abstraction as "typical" of the population and, inevitably, presenting that as being good or at least some aspect of underlying natural conditions.  That superstition was also adopted by psychology.  

It was all part of the more general superstition that I laid out when I criticized the superstition of the "enlightenment" which took the validity of physics and science and turned it into the absurd belief that a parody of the same methodology that produced their discoveries was generalizeable to areas of far greater complexity in which that methodology would neither work nor the conjectures and substitutions required to pretend to apply them produce anything like reliable knowledge, replacing ideological claims for the reliable and testable conclusions that physics and chemistry and even biology could achieve when they were honest and diligent.

That ideology gained social status, probably most so through the economic, wealth and power enhancing utility of science, and, so, became more generalized in the culture of educated people and those who wished to be taken as such. If I had a dollar for every academic or scribbling, babbling "champion of science and reason" who probably couldn't balance an algebraic equation of one variable I'd probably be rich enough to be as obnoxious as a tech billionaire.  I could go into the shared ideological interests among them which had far more to do with economics and class than it did a real respect for the physical sciences.  That's ultimately why the boobs who wrote the First Amendment didn't make a distinction between The People having a right to the truth and that there was never and is not still any right to lie. Why they rejected the moral basis of any decent government that could ever be established in favor of the oligarchy favoring amoral, scientistic, secularist pose they took.  Rich people, those who aspire to be rich, most of all want to be relieved from moral responsibilities to the least among them, they don't like Jesus and the Prophets telling them to. They're who get power in non-egalitarian government and other centers of might, wisdom and wealth.  Academics also don't like being told not to screw their students, that accounts for part of it in that milieu.  

If you want me to post your comment, drop the invective and deal with what I said.  I'm not required to post anything I don't choose to.  If it amused me to fight with you as it sometimes does, I might do that too but I'm not in a mood to do much playing right now.  Global warming and the drought we're having is leaving me with little time for that.  The science behind global warming, the necessity of changing human activity drastically or it will end much of biological diversity and maybe finish us off is infinitely more important that re-fighting the fucking Darwin wars or defending the amoral and so immoral, indefensible pseudo-sciences or the cultural hegemony of materialist-atheist-scientism.  

* Its most significant cultural presence is as the origin of eugenics, modern scientific racism and the modern biological genocides of the Nazis and others.  In the United States, now, it is the basis of the "Bell Curve" style attack on equality and the struggle to right the wrongs of American apartheid.  It is basic to those who are pushing hard to reestablish Jim Crow, many of them with full academic credentialing and even many who sit or sat on eminent faculties.  I doubt one of them would agree with anything I said about this and I'm glad to disagree with them.  I don't want to be any part of that cultural milieu.