MaybeToday.org

Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 6th, 2011:

Some pseudo-anonymous commenter calling him/her/it-self “rabbit,” commenting on David Thompson’s blog, on a post about an article written by an English genius who is advocating what is for all intents and purposes the public annexation of spare bedrooms in “under-occupied” English houses:

I can’t image that socialists are very good chess players. They can never seem to see more than one move ahead.

Priceless. Don’t even ask me how I ended up reading that post – never mind the comments – but this comment is priceless, because it is so true.

Quote of the Day for January 2nd, 2011:

Henri De Lubac, writing on the nature of the Church, in The Splendor of the Church, p. 237 in the 1999 Ignatius edition:

God did not make us “to remain within the limits of nature” or for the fulfilling of a solitary destiny; on the contrary, he made us to be brought together into the heart of the life of the Trinity. Christ offered himself in sacrifice so that we might be one in that unity of the divine Persons (Jn 17:19-23). That is to be the “recapitulation”, “regeneration”, and “consummation” of all things, and anything outside that which exerts a pull over us is a thing of deception (Jn 17:23; 1Cor 15:28). But there is a place where this gathering  together of all things in the Trinity begins in this world; “a family of God”, a mysterious extension of the Trinity in time, which not only prepares us for this life of union and gives us a sure guarantee of it (Eph 2:19; 1Tim 3:15; 1Pet 4:17), but also makes us participate in it already.

As the new year begins in the waning of the Christmas season, it is good to recall just what the Incarnation was willed by God to effect: the “consummation” of all things in the very life of God. And it is equally important to recall that it is through the agency of the Church that this transformation – this “theosis,” or divinization of created man – is willed by God to be effected in history. Let that mind-boggling truth be a daily reflection for the new year…

Quote of the Day for Thursday, December 16th, 2010:

Local man quoted in today’s Boston Globe, after he and his lawyers completed a successful $152M shakedown of tobacco company Lorillard, Inc., in a suit alleging the company was responsible for his mother’s smoking-related death at 54 in 2002:

“She was addicted,’’ William Evans said today. “Obviously, had she had a choice, she would not have smoked, and the record was clear about that. She made over 50 attempts to try to stop smoking and she was addicted. She had no free will.’’

Had she had a choice? She had no free will?

Is there a more brazen example of the lunacy that has spread its tendrils from the sanctimonious halls of academia into the barrios and slums of the modern underclass? It’s bad enough to not be able to grasp the difference between not having self-control and not having free will. It’s bad enough to go looking for a convenient third party to blame your problems on. But when a society allows this kind of legal larceny to go on, nobody’s means are safe from a clever enemy – and when the government is in on the scam like this, there is no place to turn for justice, except for a crapshoot appeals process within the same system that abets the larceny.

Mr. Evans may be a very rich man today, but the rest of us are just as much poorer – and in more than greenbacks. OK, he’ll probably never actually collect, but the principle of the whole stinking thing still stands…

Quote of the Day for Sunday, December 12th, 2010:

Boston Globe staff writer James Vaznis reporting on the latest round of hand-wringing concerning the performance of urban public school districts in the state:

Within Boston, the state identified 40 percent of eighth-graders at risk of not earning a high school diploma with their classmates in 2014. But that estimate may be low, Boston public school officials said. The district’s graduation-tracking system, which, unlike the state’s, examines several years of data and grades, indicated that just 19 percent of this fall’s ninth-graders were on track academically.

The biggest ticket being advanced to address this predicament? Raising the legal drop-out age from 16 to 18! So saith a “special state commission” in a recommendation commissioned last year, and presently under examination by Gov. Patrick’s office and “key legislators.”

Imagine that! Mandating two more years of vapid futility for kids who, according to this report, have by eighth grade been suspended from school as many as 30 times, and who average – average! – a 25% absence rate.

How can any sane person think that requiring indifferent – if not hostile – teenagers to sit in a public school classroom for two additional years is going to be of any “educational” benefits to the kids in question, or especially to the other kids who actually want to be there to learn something? The only ones who’d benefit from something like this are the liberal social engineers whose workloads and paychecks would be beefed up with additional public expenditures: school teachers, case workers, social workers, probation workers, etc.

Of course, it would also give everyone involved the opportunity to throw their hands up in the air and say:”We did everything we could… we have no idea what went wrong!”

Quote of the Day for Friday, Dec. 3rd, 2010:

J.E. Dyer, posting in the Green Room over at HotAir (cross-posted here), on the misplaced priorities of the Presidential Debt Commission, in an article titled: Debt Reduction Versus Government Reduction:

Members of the public who object to the proposed measures will be denigrated as whining and irresponsible. Some of them probably are. But that’s not the point. The point is that, in the debt-reduction panel’s plan, gouging American households to pay down the debt is being done instead of reducing the size of government.  We should eliminate whole federal agencies and many pounds of regulatory tomes before we ask Americans to choose between saving for retirement and buying a home, or between paying for medical care and sending kids to college.  Life by itself imposes choices on us; but when government gets into the business of picking and choosing, or forcing canned choices on us, the silly, subjective question of who’s “being a big baby” actually starts infecting our political decisions.  That is 100% detrimental to communal life.

Our contributor benefits are unsustainable. But they are part of a larger problem of unsustainability created by holistic, prophylactic government. We could actually afford both Social Security and Medicare a lot better if government regulation weren’t actively suppressing business formation today; if government regulation didn’t drive every aspect of the cost of medical practice up; if government regulation didn’t drive consumer prices up and make COLAs necessary; and if government regulation didn’t divert so much worker compensation from worker income to employers’ other mandated, per-worker remissions (non-Social Security/non-Medicare) to the government.

A presidential debt-reduction panel should not be proposing to us that Americans accept a reduced lifestyle so that the current footprint of government doesn’t have to change. As we say in the military, that’s bass-ackward. It’s what this panel has just done. I’m sure the panel did what it was asked to do, but it was asked to do the wrong thing.

I think she’s spot-on. Just as the TEA Party’s eponymous focus on taxation somewhat clouds the fact that problematical public spending is what drives the need for taxation, the current focus on debt reduction obscures the fact that the scope of governmental activity is what drives the deficit spending leading to debt.

The proposal put on the table is basically one that says: let’s try to do the same thing only cheaper (budget cuts), and by shifting some of the debt off of the public books onto the citizenry (increased taxation) by forcing them to either compromise their long-term financial security & independence by taking on personal debt and/or reducing savings, or to scale back their household spending and giving, therein shrinking the economy, and exacerbating the whole bloody mess.

An economically bright outlook depends on families investing in their futures and in their communities, not the machinations of a political class ready and willing to sacrifice everything else to secure the perpetuation of its own comfortable status quo.

Quote of the Day for Thursday, Dec. 2nd, 2010:

Maybe Europe is not a lost cause after all? Perhaps my disillusionment with the post-modern political and cultural character of the Old World has been unduly overwrought? Between this dressing down by Austrian MP Ewald Stadler and the Nigel Farage tirade in Brussels the other day, perhaps I should be holding to a firmer hope for a European future worthy of its past.

Not that I have any illusions about these guys representing majorities, but: Who woulda’ thunk? An MP on the floor of a 21st century European Parliament demanding Turkish accountability for the gruesome murder of a Catholic Archbishop! And the Poles didn’t even have to show up! Maybe the Turkish Ambassador will think twice in the future before accusing Austria of religious intolerance.

This is a thing of beauty…

Quote of the Day for Wednesday, Dec 1st, 2010:

Elizabeth Scalia, posting an “On The Square” piece yesterday at First Things called Rationing Bono & Other Gaia-Saving Ideas, asking why the planet’s room mothers and former Vice-Presidents, who jet off to fancy places to hold “Save the Earth from the Earthlings” summit meetings on a regular basis, never seem to suggest solving the crisis of our impending planetary doom by outlawing things like sporting events, and rock concerts – like the current obscenely indulgent U2 tour, for example:

As we read the dire news out of Cancun, that food and material goods may need to be rationed among the little people, for the good of the earth, we may take comfort in knowing that, before we retire to our cold-water flats, we will still be permitted to expend large amounts of our hard-earned cash for the privilege of being entertained and lectured by extremely wealthy musicians who inveigh against greed and endorse big-government solutions to social and environmental problems, even as they move their assets to tax-reduced locations, and fly their multiple 747’s and drive their scores of trucks to their next profitable, ephemeral gig.

It is a funny sort of global crisis that requires sacrificial amends and rationing—with the accompanying restrictions on earnings and opportunities—from some people, while others are permitted to continue living their lives and making their profits pretty much as they always have.

But then, it is a funny old world, isn’t it?

Governmental Global Green Shills Explore Political-Class Alternatives to Rationing at 2010 Cancun “Save the Earth from the Earthlings” Summit – Backpacks Optional!

Quote of the Day for Tuesday, Nov. 30:

Hans Urs von Balthasar, from “The Sacrament of the Brother,” in The God Question & Modern Man, 1958:

The opposition between what is profane and what is sacred is indeed fully justified in its place, else there could be no movement. Yet in this openness and this reciprocally flowing movement the opposition is transcended by the unity of him in whom and for whom all things have been created, and who has therefore been charged by the Father to bring them home.

Nevertheless, a man will find God in all worldly things and especially in his brother who becomes his neighbor only if he is willing to seek and find God also in himself, in the sanctuary of prayer and the Word and Sacrament of the Church, and the Church has not so much to make propaganda in the world, but above all to pray and to remain in charity.

I’ve been reading mostly von Balthasar and de Lubac in my current Ecclesiology course, and von Balthasar had an arrestingly radical vision of the reach of God’s grace, and of the Church’s role in the manifestation of God’s love for the lost and forsaken in the world. I’ve read plenty od theologians who have presented awe-inspiring visions of God; I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone possessed of such an optimistic – and charitable – sacramentalism.

Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

2 Corinthians 5:17-20 (RSV)

Quote of the Day for Monday, Nov. 29th, 2010:

The ever-delightful Ed Morrissey over at HotAir, commenting today on Keynesian economics:

Think of it as a Cash for Clunkers economic plan on a larger scale.  The intention is to fool people into spending money in order to give the illusion of growth, and have that illusion somehow become reality through a process best known as FM; the M stands for “magic,” and you can guess what the F means.  The problem is that the interventions run out of steam quickly without addressing the actual issues of income and asset value that drives organic consumer spending.  Instead of increasing the size of the pie, we just cut it in different shapes.

Morrissey could  have added something about the long-term stifling effect of increased debt, or the ricochet effect of post-stimulus market forces tending back toward stabilization and equilibrium, but why quibble?

I couldn’t pronounce this woman’s name to save my life, but she does a serviceable job here of explaining how the politicians get it wrong. The next question is this: why do they so consistently get it wrong, and who is benefiting from that persistence? Honestly, I don’t see who does. Why the infatuation with consumer spending? Is there a political angle to that I’m not seeing? The pork angle I get. The consumer spending angle, I don’t.

Quote of the Day for Friday, November 26, 2010:

Rita L. Marker and Wesley J. Smith on euthanasia & euphemism, from a paper first appearing in the Duquesne Law Review Vol. 35, No. 1 (Fall 1996) pp. 81-107 under the title “The Art of Verbal Engineering, ” published on-line by the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force:

Today when mercy killing is discussed, it is couched in euphemisms — words of gentleness or the language of rights. Titles of euthanasia advocacy groups contain words like “compassion,” “choice,” and “dignity.” Even the Euthanasia Society of American has undergone name changes to present a more positive image. (In 1976 the Euthanasia Society of America changed its name to the Society for the Right to Die and, in 1991, it became known as Choice in Dying.)

No longer does anyone but its strongest opponent refer to mercy killing. The word “euthanasia” is generally avoided in proposals to legalize it. Old words are replaced or given different, vague meanings.

Like a constantly changing kaleidoscope, meanings shift ever so slightly, forming new patterns of thinking. Slowly, quietly — but inexorably — the previously appalling is transformed into the presently appealing.

The manner in which words are defined is key to achieving this transformation.

This is something that Dutch euthanasia practitioner Dr. M. A. M. Wachter, the ethicist/director for the Institute of Health in the Netherlands, knows well. Speaking at a 1990 international euthanasia gathering, he stated, “The definition builds the road for euthanasia.” He acknowledged that “euthanasia is the intentional ending of the life of another….It is always a question of terminating human life,” then went on to urge that careful attention be paid to definitions.

“Definitions are not neutral,” he said. “They are not just the innocent tools that allow us to describe reality. Rather, they shape our perceptions of reality. They select. They emphasize. They embody a bias. Therefore definitions constantly need redefinition.”

Definitions are indeed not neutral. But they constantly require re-definition, not redefinition…