Media & Culture

Public Health Leaders Should Be Carefully Scrutinized

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Quote of the Day for Sunday, November 5th, 2010:

Matthew Hanley over at The Catholic Thing on Thursday, commenting on the public reaction to Pope Benedict’s recent statement on condom use in the Peter Seewald book, in a post entitled Misrepresenting Benedict’s Bravery:

The New York Times tells us the pope’s words, in the newly published book Light of the World, were received with “glee from clerics and health workers in Africa, where the AIDS problem is worst.” The pope as anachronistic obstacle to global health has long been a fashionable narrative. But consider: decades of robust condom promotion (and other technical interventions) utterly failed to curb Africa’s AIDS epidemics, and common-sense changes in sexual behavior accounted for Africa’s handful of AIDS declines.  Is one misrepresented remark from the pontiff now to do what lavish and sophisticated condom campaigns couldn’t?  Public health leaders should be carefully scrutinized. They, not the pope, are explicitly charged with containing epidemics.   

Although I think the post tries to tries to say too many things in its allotted space (a temptation I can sympathize with), the most important point Hanley makes is the implication of culpability on the part of public health officials who have stood around fondling themselves for decades while this epidemic has wasted millions of human beings, too afraid (either of hurting other people’s feelings, or –more likely– of being perceived as uncool) to state the obvious if unwelcome truth: this disease is spread almost entirely by immoral behavior – especially by disordered sexual licentiousness and lack of self-control – and can be avoided and defeated only by a rejection of the narcissistic public morality that promotes such soul-destroying indulgence as normal and acceptable behavior.

It’s far easier, of course, to ban Happy Meals than to criticize socially toxic sexual immorality, though the discrepancy of dereliction therein implied clearly constitutes gross criminal negligence on the part of our public health “leaders”.

via FirstThoughts

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Music

Celebrating Christ’s Redemption and Immortality?

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Quote of the Day for Saturday, December 4th, 2010:

Handel and Haydn Society Artistic Director Harry Christophers, from the Conductor’s Notes in the program for this season’s performance of Handel’s Messiah:

When listening to our performance, take note of [librettist Charles] Jennens’ amazing contribution. We need only look back to mediaeval carols where texts take us from Christ’s nativity through to his crucifixion and resurrection but Jennens takes us further – his is a unique journey which takes us from prophecies of Christ’s coming through the Nativity to Christ’s suffering, his resurrection, ascension to the Kingdom of God and finally to that amazing and jubilant epilogue celebrating Christ’s redemption and immortality.

Huh? Such palaver is the price one pays, I suppose, when the chattering class wanders into the sanctuary.

My wife and I yesterday took in, for the first time, the Handel and Haydn Society’s annual performance of the Messiah – their 156th consecutive year of performing it in Boston! H&H is a very talented ensemble, and the performance of guest alto Catherine Wyn-Rogers was memorable, yet I must confess to having had a hard time getting comfortable during much of the show.

concert-messiah-smI was haunted all night by the probably well-founded suspicion that most of the assembled – of both performers and audience – were engaging this magnificent musical setting of these sacred texts as if it were some kind of fashionably quaint fairy tale, which could just as well have been swapped out for some Italian opera with a snow-elf intoning candy-cane cantatas.

Not surprisingly, good folk complained back in Handel’s day that the theatre was no place for the presentation of such content. I understand the sentiment: I love the piety of the work, but when the presentation substitutes artistic sentimentality for its inherent piety, it is like salt that has lost its flavor.

In one of his many teachings that sounds too offensive to modern ears to be much remembered or mentioned these days, the Lord tells us: "Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you” (Mt 7:6, RSV). Again, that might sound harsh, but it’s self-evident that Christ was actually being charitable, as he, by nature, always is. Offering strange fire has never worked out well for anyone.

I tried to enjoy the concert, and I am still trying to reconcile the experience into a true satisfaction, but I can’t quite escape the sense that the aesthetic magnificence obscured a careless trampling of the Pearl of the Word. What you mean matters more than the aesthetic form of what you render, needless to say.

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Politics & Economics

“I’m sure the panel did what it was asked to do, but it was asked to do the wrong thing.”

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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.

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Politics & Economics

“And the real problem is us.”

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Oklahoma Senator Dr. Tom Coburn (R), addressing his fellow members of the President’s Deficit Commission, as they wrapped up deliberations Wednesday:

As a physician, I’m trained to find the real problem… What’s the real problem – not the symptoms, but what do the symptoms and signs lead me to is what is the real disease. And he real disease is we’ve abandoned the concepts of our founders. We’ve created reliance instead of depending on self-reliance; we’ve created government programs that are unaffordable; we’ve abandoned limited government; we’ve abandoned the enumerated powers. And now we’re in trouble. And nobody’s looking at what the real problem is. And the real problem is us.

Coburn seems like one of the real decent people in Washington. I think what he says here, in understated terms, about the fragility of the Republic is really important to grasp. Every government, under every conceivable form of government, is a transitory form of order: imperfect both in its form and in its practice. But a society can hold together under an imperfectly established and implemented government, as long as the level of corruption and systemic disorder does not rise above a critical mass.

When the members of a republic begin turning on each other by voting themselves "rights" to their neighbors’ property, it seems to me that the point of critical mass has already begun to be reached in that level of systemic disorder, and that any such society will necessarily begin, as Coburn puts it, to “rot from within.”

I don’t subscribe to the idea that our society’s most serious disorders are fiscal in either origin or solution, but I don’t doubt for a minute that the current model of fiscal order is an immoral one, which discourages and even squelches the practice of virtues, from industriousness to honor to charity, supplanting them at every turn with vices ranging from sloth to envy to greed. We need to establish a public order that encourages and rewards virtue, lest we leave our children a society poised on the brink of a new era of class warfare. That process has to begin by grappling with Leviathan, and resisting its creeping absolutism and pretensions of supremacy over communities large and small.

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Politics & Economics

“Mr. Ambassador, enter the Orient Express and go back to Istanbul, your wonderland!”

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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…

 

Politics & Economics

Where the Streets Have No Shame

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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!
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Church

Reconciling the World

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

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)

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Politics & Economics

the M stands for “magic”

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

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.

 

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Politics & Economics

“We Want the Whole Thing Consigned to the Dustbin of History”

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

Perusing Fausta Wertz’ blog this afternoon after posting the Warren Buffett link, I came across a fabulous screed from the proceedings of the European Parliament. Honestly, I have no idea who this bloke is. Fausta identifies him as Nigel Farage, MEP. But, whoever this Brit is, may God bless him and his family forever! Our stodgy Congress could use a bit of this kind of seriousness. There may be no Emperor, but he still has no clothes:

 

One really important thing Mr. Farage seems to me to get right is his assertion that the faux universality and corporatizing of the Euro mindset – as attractive as it may be to the intelligentsia and liberal political class – leaves the more locally grounded and particular-focused folks who don’t fly in the jet set “robbed of their identity,” with nothing to give them a communal purpose except for nationalism, and the violence that history assures us surely trails in its wake. Perhaps, though, he could have added football as another available rallying beacon. Isn’t that a pretty picture?

I know the nation state is not politically inevitable, but the EU is not the second coming of Christendom – and it can never be, because the liberal order lacks the coherent (and coherence) at the center, around which a culture could be built and sustained.

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Politics & Economics

Waiting for Permission to Do Good?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

So, the uber-wealthy Warren Buffett is complaining again that he pays too little in taxes:

“I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes; we have it better than we’ve ever had it.”

Buffett on ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour

The duplicity in all this is just staggering. As a commenter at HotAir noted, Warren Buffett makes a significant amount of money selling tax shelters, such as life insurance, through his Berkshire Hathaway vehicle, and would stand to make an additional personal fortune should the high-end marginal tax rates increase, leading the wealthy to (predictably) look to shelter more of their wealth.

Even more to the point is the fact that Buffett can give as much of his money to the Feds as he wishes right now; he doesn’t have to wait for Congress to tell him to. Fausta Wertz captures it perfectly in a post from Friday:

To the best of my knowledge nothing prevents anyone from writing a check to Uncle Sam for any amount, be it small or large. He doesn’t need to claim a tax deduction if he doesn’t want to. The IRS is not going to haul him off to jail for that. Correct me if I’m wrong.

So, if Warren Buffett thinks he’s not paying enough, let him show us, in a grand gesture to end all grand gestures, just how much he is willing to pay. He can put all his money – every red cent of it – where his mouth is, and leave the rest of us in peace.

Fifty billion ought to pay for a government program or two.

I have no way of knowing whether Buffett believes his own BS, or if this is part of a straight-up scam, but I do know for certain that he is more concerned about how the government can collect other people’s money than he is with how it can collect his own.  There’s no way around that, and his lack of unilateral action to correct what he professes to be an injustice is a stark indictment. What is he waiting for, after all? The whole point and purpose of implementing (or expanding) confiscatory taxation is to confiscate other people’s money, and assign its management to Those Who Know Better (or, more nakedly, to the power brokers).

The more I reflect on the social ramifications of taxation policy, the more I come to understand what a poison taxation is to culture once its level exceeds that of meeting the common requirement of civic duty. Cultures need virtue in order to thrive, not coercion and compulsion.

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