From the LRC blog

• The left hates the poor. More here and here.
• Michael Moore doesn’t get the market.
• He profits from it while attacking it. Predictable.

Labels: libertarianism, politics

Two more religious ones

• Serbian monk raises wolf. It seems clear that right relationship with God and right relationship with nature are normal. It’s good to know that the stories of St. Seraphim and the bear or St. Francis and various animals are not things of the past. Added to the blogroll: Glory to God for All Things by Fr Stephen Freeman, IIRC an ex-Anglican. There’s so much good here it’s hard to choose one link.
• Communication without community. From Fr Methodius.

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith

Haddonfield Fine Art and Crafts Festival
Third row: Grace Church, Haddonfield. I think a Catholic rector passed through in the good old days. It has Stations of the Cross and a hanging Sacrament light. The other church is First Presbyterian. Fifth row: матрёшки. Sixth row: I like Orlando’s work. Seventh row: Jurassic Park: Donna and the dinosaur.

Labels: Anglicanism, Russia

Eirenikon is back

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith

Dumbing down the US Naval Academy
Pat Buchanan on this story

Labels: politics

Ukrainian pol who tried to revive paganism killed by lightning
He seems to have been an old Soviet pol who, after Communism fell, like the Nazis latched onto hyper-nationalism and, as part of that, pre-Christian religion. God have mercy on him.

Labels: history, politics, Russia

From Joshua

• Godwardness: no-frills Catholicism with American soldiers in Korea, 1951.
• The alternative tradition in America, part II (part I).
• Summing up: It is possible that Sarah Palin was both unfairly mistreated and personally attacked by the media and many on the left, and that her family was rather ruthlessly and mercilessly run through the ringer ... and that she’s a not particularly bright, not particularly curious, once libertarian-leaning governor who sadly devolved into a predictable, buzzword-spouting culture warrior when she was prematurely picked for national office by John McCain.

Labels: history, politics, the Catholic faith

Minimum wage

In a free market, demand is always a function of price: the higher the price, the lower the demand. What may surprise most politicians is that these rules apply equally to both prices and wages. When employers evaluate their labor and capital needs, cost is a primary factor. When the cost of hiring low-skilled workers moves higher, jobs are lost. Despite this, minimum wage hikes, like the one set to take effect later this month, are always seen as an act of governmental benevolence.

Labels: politics

The most violent country in western Europe

Labels: England

£6m drive to cut teen pregnancies sees them double
Well, duh:

The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.

Labels: England

Stories we’re not hearing
Thinking man of the left Huw is not suckered by Obama

Labels: politics

From Joshua

• Town hits economic jackpot to become ‘Kia-ville’. I’m happy for the good people of West Point, Georgia, but heartbroken for America. How did America go from the world’s manufacturing powerhouse to a source of cheap labor for one of our protectorates, who, we should remember, kept its markets closed to our products for decades, while we guaranteed its defense?
• Justin Raimondo: McCarthyism revisited. Liberal anti-Communists, and the intellectual predecessors of today’s neoconservatives, recoiled at the sight of the populist McCarthy rallying millions of Americans against their own government and the elites who controlled it.
• What Ali G, Borat, Bruno and trying to make fun of Ron Paul have in common. More here and here. Also have a look at 21st-century Polish jokes.

Labels: film, history, Palestine, politics, Russia

From LRC

• GM is now a parody of itself. Warning: language.
• Religion and fundamentalist atheists (like some of the more obnoxious left-libertarians) who give anarchism a bad name. I give anarchism a fair hearing but of course that most anarchists seem to be atheists reminds me of Paul Goings’ point.
• Some ground rules for bailing out relatives.
• The house of cards that economic laws knocked down after 75 years. The story of housing fascism.

Labels: humour, libertarianism, politics, television

Mancession
From T1:9

The two-state solution, Israeli-style
From antiwar.com

Labels: Palestine, politics

A sketch of Pennsylvania
More. From Deacon Jim.

Labels: Pennsylvania, politics

From Mark Shea

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg: just enough of her, way too many of them. Her eugenics remarks which her NYT interviewer let go unchallenged, moving on to pro-abortion boilerplate.
• Palin’s children were a huge issue in the campaign, not because she “used them as props”, but because the existence of Trig Palin was a grave threat to the worldview of the leadership of the Democratic Party and its most entrenched supporters. The visceral and insane hatred of that baby and of his siblings was breathtaking.

Labels: politics

From 2006: 21st-century Polish jokes
Steve Sailer on Borat

Labels: England, film, history, Russia

Still more on Caritas in Veritate
George Weigel critiques:

There is also rather more in the encyclical about the redistribution of wealth than about wealth-creation — a sure sign of Justice and Peace default positions at work. And another Justice and Peace favorite — the creation of a “world political authority” to ensure integral human development — is revisited, with no more insight into how such an authority would operate than is typically found in such curial fideism about the inherent superiority of transnational governance.

Labels: politics, the Catholic faith

Classical liberalism and Mill’s liberalism
From Joshua

Labels: books, England, history, libertarianism, politics

From RR

• Switzerland may seize UBS data, guard it from US DoJ thugs.
• Obama drafts contractors as immigration cops. Is this what the people who voted for him really wanted? I think many voted for a figment of their own imaginations and of course he was more than happy to let them. Because of his colour nobody was really listening to him and again he was fine with that. So much for the dream.
• EU official: no chance of settlements deal with Israel.
• Long live Palestine.
• The equaliser: old man in wheelchair shoots at robber.
• Why torture is evil. So much for the pro-life great white hope Antonin Scalia.
• UK: taking a stand against the hyper-regulation of life.
• I had other plans on the Fourth: are the Tea Parties a scam? Republican operatives and agent provocateurs? “I believe we need to spend a little more on illegal immigrants, get them the (expletive) out of our (expletive) country and close the borders down,” Wurzelbacher said. “We can do it.” Bye.
• State-school horror stories. Political correctness (racialism) including dumbing down tests (to force equal outcomes) at the expense of kids’ safety and, yes, education. BTW that ‘African flag’ probably wasn’t really African but the Marcus Garvey tricolour of a back-to-Africa leader who AFAIK never actually went back to Africa. Makes sense at a joke of a school where the Spanish teacher doesn’t speak Spanish.
• Why the left misjudges GOP sex scandals. Because Christians, you know, forgive people.
• The fallacy of pre-emptive violence.
• Classical liberalism and the fight for equal rights. Busting this bit of common knowledge: progressives and leftists, the conventional narrative goes, fought the good fight while conservatives and libertarians either sat it out or sided with the bad guys.

Labels: England, libertarianism, Palestine, politics

Theologians don’t get economics
A left-libertarian has a go at Pope Benedict over his economics encyclical but if you filter out all the anti-Romanism (which makes libertarians look bad, no thanks) and his nonexistent alternative to the truth the Pope preaches, he has a point: mater, sì, magistra, no (on matters not de fide — orthodox Rome is not the personal cult of the Pope). There is no more such thing as Catholic economics than there is Baptist geology.

What the Holy Father and Jim Wallis’s kind don’t get is:

Each of us acts to promote our self interest — even the Catholic hierarchy. That motivation can lead to good and to bad but seeking “the common good” is more likely to lead to bad results than good.

Labels: libertarianism, politics, the Catholic faith

There should be no special privileged class of protected groups in a democracy. A crime is a crime — period.
Camille Paglia via Rod Dreher

Labels: libertarianism, politics

From Steve Sailer

• The diversity recession or how government trying to force equal outcomes in mortgage lending contributed to the housing collapse.
• Palestine: Joe Biden is kind of a bozo. Funny how he was brought on board specifically to impart foreign-policy gravitas to the newcomer from the South Side of Chicago.
• We’re in deep state. Matt Taibbi on the collapse and Goldman Sachs.
• If Palin were a man, there’d be a wife to deal with the kids, so the Governor could get back to thinking about about non-family, non-local topics. This is all totally obvious, but nobody is supposed to mention stuff like this anymore. Echoing Becky?
• Actions, consequences and the totally preventable Aids outbreak. It’s not the state’s job to protect people from themselves but...

Labels: Palestine, politics

From Joshua

• Obamageddon.
• ‘St Guinefort’ and annoying church neocons. Woof.
• Pro-choice, anti-woman.
• Chesterton on the mountain and the abyss. Christ and Buddha.
• McNamara: from the Tokyo firestorm to the World Bank.
• Clinton’s war on Serbia. Lest we forget.

Labels: history, politics, the Catholic faith

Papal encyclical Caritas in veritate
A few notes:

14: Paul VI reflected on the meaning of politics, and the danger constituted by utopian and ideological visions that place its ethical and human dimensions in jeopardy.

28: Openness to life is at the centre of true development.

17: A vocation is a call that requires a free and responsible answer. Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. The “types of messianism which give promises but create illusions” always build their case on a denial of the transcendent dimension of development, in the conviction that it lies entirely at their disposal.

26. Relativism... does not serve true intercultural dialogue.

29: The deliberate promotion of religious indifference or practical atheism on the part of many countries obstructs the requirements for the development of peoples, depriving them of spiritual and human resources.

32. The dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner.

35. The market is the economic institution that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their needs and desires.

It is in the interests of the market to promote emancipation, but in order to do so effectively, it cannot rely only on itself, because it is not able to produce by itself something that lies outside its competence. It must draw its moral energies from other subjects that are capable of generating them.

36. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.

The Church has always held that economic action is not to be regarded as something opposed to society. In and of itself, the market is not, and must not become, the place where the strong subdue the weak.

Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically human relations.

37. The Church’s social doctrine has always maintained that justice must be applied to every phase of economic activity.

62. Every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses fundamental, inalienable rights that must be respected by everyone and in every circumstance.

Labels: politics, the Catholic faith

Speed traps and parking meters
From the LRC blog

Labels: politics

The LRC blog on the Pope’s new encyclical

Labels: libertarianism, politics, the Catholic faith

Bull pulpit

The traditional news media are now fully embedded members of the Pentagon’s long-war sales force.

Labels: politics, television

From Joshua

• Classical and modern liberalism’s common root? Interesting but I’m not about to raise the drawbridge on classical liberalism.
• Chesterton’s old liberalism.
• The evil of Versailles 90 years on.
• Obamaspeak. I’ve heard it in person. Orwell’s famous edict “Good prose is like a window pane” is what I try to do at the newspaper and will be doing nonstop from 1pm today until early tomorrow morning (2am?).

Labels: books, England, history, politics