The fake shutdown, the problematic Pope, and more

• Shutdown kabuki. So let’s see: Obama seems to love insurance companies and wants to look charitable by stealing and spending your money through quadrupling your health-insurance premium or fining you, to fund useless high-deductible policies. Probably to keep funding the government, which is broke. (Spending less ≠ lowering the debt.) The Republicans, although really just as statist as the Democrats, sort of do the right thing and protest, offering to fund everything in the government except this ripoff that most Americans don’t want. The Dems answer that the GOP is mean wanting to deny people health care and stage this ‘shutdown’, keeping 83% of the government running, and publicizing closing beaches and monuments, using more government workers (rangers and police) to do so than before the ‘shutdown’, in order to scare the populace. Boehner and the GOP likely will cave, again, raising the ‘debt ceiling’. A little more of our freedom and our money, gone. (Made me switch to my company’s Blue Cross, which should be fine for at least a year.) So meanwhile, has the government attacked Syria while nobody was looking anymore? Also, cops in DC gun down an unarmed crazy woman who drove through a barricade. Zero civil-rights outcry from the left, predictably, even though the victim was black. It was probably a show of force to try to pre-empt real civil unrest.
• Hilary on Francis. Nothing important has changed, because nothing important can change. And: Catholics don’t depend on the pope for the Faith. That said: the Successor of Peter has decided to take over the task of demonstrating that the Traditionalist critique of the post-Conciliar Church was right all along. Right, all this is coming from the first Pope ordained after the council. Papal-infallibility pop quiz. The point is it’s really about church infallibility; the Pope is infallible only if he defends the teaching of the church. If he tries to change the church into what the Western left (the church’s bastard) wants, St Robert Bellarmine’s explained what that would mean: the act would put him outside the church, ipso facto no longer Pope. Because nothing important can change, the best approach is not to pay too much attention to Francis. Just hope he leaves our Mass alone. Again, in a pinch there are the Greek Catholics (largely left alone thanks to ecumenism; hey, make political correctness work for you for a change) and the SSPX (we have our Mass because of Lefebvre; maybe the young conservative after Francis will make Fellay a cardinal).
• From Dusk in Autumn: The late-’60s and ’80s left vs. the left now. Arguably better because they still had more of a sense of a common good, carried over from the golden era, and were populist, rather than today’s silly identity politics. Maybe it was more like the ‘Reformation’ vs. the mainline now. But it seems to me the balkanization was already under way (the Black Panthers for example). Yet I remember in the ’70s when mainstream secular culture was much ruder to homosexuals than conservative Christians ever have been.
• Godspeed, Scott Carpenter.