Regarding Libya, I follow Jim Manzi

I haven’t written about the now-underway U.S. military action in Libya, mostly because lots of other people are more expert on this topic than I. But for the purpose of exposing my biases at the start of this post, I’ll lay my cards on the table: I am against it. I assume the military phase will be devastating for the regime, and hope that the overall effort goes as well as is possible, but I think it’s a mistake for the U.S. to expend significant economic, human or moral resources in a military attempt to control the evolution of the conflict in Libya.

I understand the humanitarian impulse to help the underdog, but we have finite resources, and cannot hold ourselves responsible for the political freedom of every human being on Earth. As many others have said, the obvious problem with this action is that we must set the pretty gauzy-sounding benefits of influencing public opinion in the Middle East, avenging ourselves for the Pan Am bombing, possibly improving the lives of people in Libya and so forth, against the many ways that this could plausibly turn into a much more expensive proposition than is currently anticipated – and not only in terms of money. (It also seems very far from clear that in this case the underdogs are people who, once in power, would be materially better than the current government for Libyans, Americans, or just about anybody else.)

i think wisdom is recognizing limits (i.e. humility)

Etienne Gilson, in the Unity of Philosophical Experience, wrote: “Instead of being the central principle of his subjective synthesis, humanity became for Comte an object of worship, the positive God, the Great Being.” The same phrase appears in Daniel Mahoney’s Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: “True conservatism is obliged to be suspicious of ‘the religion of humanity’ in all its forms.” A humanity that worships itself is a humanity that can do with itself what it will. It is a humanity that has no limit for science and no definition of what man is.

Schall

I Miss Father Neuhaus

Found on the USCCB's website, of all places:

The message for Catholics, indeed for all people of conscience, is unmistakably clear: "Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection." We can in no way cooperate with a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, nor can we "take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it" (no. 73). On most issues in political dispute, people of intelligence and good will can legitimately disagree. Not so with abortion, euthanasia, and other laws that deprive our weaker brothers and sisters of the fundamental right to life. We can never, never cooperate with the taking of an innocent life.

That resounding no is premised upon an uncompromisable yes—yes to life, yes to those who need our care and protection, yes to God. Evangelium Vitae sees our world standing at a turning point as crucial as any in the long history of humankind. The third millennium will witness a flowering of the culture of life or a continuing descent into the abyss of the culture of death. In this prophetic love letter to the world, John Paul repeats the word of God spoken through Moses, "I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live" (Dt 30:19). We Christians have the great privilege and responsibility of persuading the world to choose life—for God's sake, for our sake, for the sake of humanity. "The glory of God is man fully alive" (Gloria Dei vivens homo).

This can't go on much longer

Rome fell not from a stronger enemy on the outside, but internal corruption. Here's more evidence history is repeating itself:

A soldier being court-martialed on a U.S. Army base near Seattle for the murder of three Afghan civilians has agreed to plead guilty Wednesday in hopes of earning a reduced sentence, according to one of the attorneys handling his case.

"My client is admitting on the record to three counts of murder, plus one count of conspiracy to commit assault and battery and one count of illegal drug use," said Geoffrey Nathan, a lawyer for Army Spc. Jeremy Morlock.

God help us.

A few clarifications:

I think this is evidence of the purposelessness of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya. It's not an isolated event.

And I understand that it's rare for a country to prosecute its own soliders. I do not find this to be a compelling justification for what he did, nor do I find it to be justification of immoral wars.

Ask yourself this

Robert George asking the right questions:

If you are a Catholic who sometimes watches network television, ask yourself these two questions: How often have you heard your priest preach on homosexuality and abortion? How often have you watched a preachy TV show or movie (or an interview with an actor or singer or other celebrity) pushing a liberal line about sex or abortion?

the courage to wander into the wilderness

I recently stumbled upon a blog called Catholic Phoenix that I really enjoy. It has lots of eloquent, thought-provoking contributors who write on everything from liturgy to poetry to teenagers to philosophy. And they're funny! You can't beat that. Anyway, I recommend this post on the Lenten longing for Easter. The author tells us how, after converting to Catholicism, he followed the older tradition of fasting the duration of Lent, which left him....hungry. Literally. And this hunger underscored everything he did for 40 long days. He writes

Penance during Lent seems to be the way that we submit to that [cleansing] purgative fire. Or rather, it is the way that we embrace it. We simply don’t get to the glorious promise of Easter until we have suffered, because the triumph of Easter was obtained only through Christ’s suffering. Indeed, His voluntary suffering. Fasting is difficult not only because constant hunger taxes our bodies. Fasting is difficult because it requires us to voluntarily suffer; we must choose to be hungry. In Practice in Christianity, Søren Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) argues that Christian suffering is Christian precisely because it’s avoidable. All who suffer because of Christ could quit their suffering by quitting Christ. But those who subject themselves to suffering subject themselves to Christ, who is our ultimate example of voluntarily suffering. With imitation in mind, Christians strangely fight the impulse to flee the burning house. Christians instead walk headlong into the blaze, hoping that their loved ones are somewhere nearby, consumed by flames.

The sentiment reminds me of an absolutely breathtaking meditation on Jesus' seven last words from the cross called Death on a Friday Afternoon. I think I reread it every Lent, and each time I'm struck by the beauty and humility and sacrifice and love of our Lord, magnified and intensified under the lens of Father Neuhaus' incomparable way with words. Neuhaus urges readers to enjoy his book slowly, consciously digesting the implications of what happened on that Friday afternoon, rather than rushing headlong into Easter. It's so easy to just survive Lent, quietly checking off the boxes labeled "fasting" and "abstinence" and "prayer" without spending time savoring the taste of sacrifice while we hunger for our reward.

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” (Mt. 4:1) “If you are the son of God,” said the tempter, “command these stones to become loaves of bread.” (Mt. 4:3) Though “he was hungry,” Christ refused. Do you refuse? Or do you turn your stones into bread? Do you even have the courage to wander into the wilderness in the first place?

 Please say a prayer for me that I'll have the courage, and I'll say one for you.

President Obama's Draconian Budget Cuts

Among the cuts to the budget being made include:

* Milk purchases (-$60 m)
* DELAP (dairy) (-$290 m)
* Agricultural Research (-$71 m)
* USDA Single Family Housing Guarantees (-$173 m)
* USDA Farm Loans (-$26 m)
* Watershed Programs (-$50 m)
* Public Telecommunications and Facilities Program (-$20 m)
* EPA Homeland Security Activities (-$36 m)
* Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (-$125 m)
* Wildland Fire Suppression Program (-$250 m)
* HUD University Community Fund (-$25 m)
* EPA State Revolving Funds (-$950 m)
* EPA State and Tribal Grants - Watershed, Airshed, and Climate Change (-$187 m)
* Biomass Crop Assistance Program (-$100 m)
* National Park Service, excluding LWCF (-$105 m)
* Career Pathways (-$125 m)
* SCSEP (-275 m)
* FEMA State and Local Grants (-$425 m)
* FBI Construction (-$133 m)
* Rural Development S&E (-$20 m)
* HUD Energy Innovation Fund (-$50 m)
* Treasury Asset Forfeiture Funds (-$333)
* Animal and Plant Health Programs (APHIS) (-$27 m)
* HHS Community Economic Development (-$16 m)
* HHS Mentoring Children of Prisoners (-$24 m)
* Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund (-$276 m)

Think about the jobs lost ! The tragedy ! How can the president be so ruthless and cruel! Does he not care about the well being of American citizens - those left in the shadows by wall-street neocon capitalists? Where is the outrage?!

Planned Indeed!

I recommend whole-heartily the book "Unplanned," which is the recently published autobiography of Abby Johnson, a former director of a Planned Parenthood. The book has many virtues, but I think its chief one is this: through Abby's story, we can see the action of God in our lives. Abby [and her co-author] describes in detail how the pro-life cause profoundly affected her work at Planned Parenthood. Her story shows us the true effects of different styles of pro-life interventions and activism. So this book contains a very rare and very valuable vision of Divine Providence and Divine Action. It's not a set of arguments; it's a woman's recorded experience of God and His people.

Abby's story is inspiring to the would-be pro-life activist for a number of reasons, not least of which is the cast of characters featured in the story, namely the Coalition for Life folks and their 40 Days for Life campaign. I am of the opinion that this movement is the future of the pro-life movement. The legal cause is for all intents and purposes lost. This political reality does not justify voting for candidates who support the abortion regime, but it should temper our expectations for the future of abortion law in this country, at least in the near term. The fact of the matter is that the law is not going to change until the culture changes, and the culture is not going to change until it sees what abortion is. Only God can show people the truth of abortion. And it is clear to me that the greatest hope of being successful at this will happen with the 40 days for Life movement, and the evidence I offer for this claim is this excellent book. Check it out. And join a 40 days for life campaign!

The Canard that the Pro-Life Movement isn't really "pro-life"

The charge that the pro-life movement isn't really pro-life, frequently leveled by proponents of unlimited government, can be frustrating. Ryan Anderson and company call it a lazy slander. I prefer canard, but both terms apply equally well. The facts about the pro-life movement's support for life at all stages - from conception to natural death - speak for themselves. Mr. Anderson and company recount a few of these facts HERE at The Public Discourse. After detailing some of the great work pro-life advocates regularly do, they ask the obvious question: why are pro-life advocates accused of being indifferent to life after birth? As they say, it's probably the overwhelming conviction

"that “caring for the born” translates first and always into advocacy for government programs and funds. In other words, abortion advocates appear to conflate charitable works and civil society with government action. The pro-life movement does not. Rather, it takes up the work of assisting women and children and families, one fundraiser and hotline and billboard at a time. Still, the pro-life movement is not unsophisticated about the relationship between abortion rates and government policies in areas such as education, marriage, employment, housing, and taxation. The Catholic Church, for example, works with particular vigor to ensure that its social justice agenda integrates advocacy for various born, vulnerable groups, with incentives to choose life over abortion.

Yes - and there's a simple reason the pro-life movement is not a movement for more government. If the pro-life movement would incorporate into its platform a decidedly pro-government stance, it would narrow itself. It would have mixed motives and would end up excluding more people. These are people who would support laws illegalizing abortion, but would not necessarily support the other policies of the movement. In other words, the pro-life movement leaves other political issues out of its explicit purpose to maintain focus and to be maximally inclusive. And as Ryan Anderson et al note, it couples this with real charity work done without any legislation or taxpayer dollars. AND IN FAIRNESS all of this is not to say that one cannot be a part of the movement and support policies that make the government omnipotent. It's just that those policies cannot become a part of the larger pro-life movement itself (for the aforementioned reasons).

Gendercide

Interesting to see a secular magazine take up an obvious but unmentionable problem: sex-selective abortion. From the article:

It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide. Women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. In 1990 an Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at 100m; the toll is higher now. The crumb of comfort is that countries can mitigate the hurt, and that one, South Korea, has shown the worst can be avoided. Others need to learn from it if they are to stop the carnage.

In Defense of Mothers Who Raise Their Children

As the father of a new baby I frequently hear things like this said to my beautiful wife:

"I'm a feminist graduate of an all-women's college who has vowed to never change my name or end my career to raise children full time--though I would never undervalue the work that many women do in their home."

This upsets me and seeing it print I feel compelled to record the reasons for my distaste. Perhaps other people have experienced this type of remark, too. This type of remark never fails to offend.It is simultaneously condescending and arrogant. "I will never end my career to raise children full time." The unstated but implicit premise is that raising children could never be as significant as one's career - such a choice only foolish, simple women would make!. This remark is then followed up with what can only be called a lie: "but I would never undervalue the work many women do in their home." It's not that what mothers do in their home isn't important - it's just not as important as a career. The truth is that one cannot simultaneously proclaim that motherhood and raising children is "the most noble work" and say on the other hand I would never raise my own children because I have other more important work to do.

Slow Down!

Each week is long, and each day is too short.

Life These Days

The fundamental fact of our time is the gradual encroachment of principled individualism — or unregulated personal freedom — into all areas of our lives. Every moral and communal certainty, except those that can be justified through contract and consent, has been transformed into a question. Every human attachment seems basically voluntary. The great institutions that shape the character of human beings — the family, the church, the community, and the country — are weakened and still eroding. Young people who have grown up in this cultural environment are deprived of what it takes to develop firm moral bearings — and, with them, a sense of purpose. New students arrive at college not knowing who they are or what their lives are for.

-Peter Lawler

i think it's a series of tubes?

"What is the internet, anyway?" queries the ever-eloquent Bryant Gumbel in this circa 1994 clip dredged up by Patrick Madrid. I love that no one can really answer his question, the jury is out on what the @ sign is, the email address is "violence at NBC," and that it all devolves into Bryant making snide comments about a coworker.

I think, Mr. Gumbel, that Sen. Stevens can best answer your question:

The Most Powerful Man in America is...

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

He makes the rules!

Did Anyone Else Grow Up with Raffi?

Then you may be interested to know that he has, in his later years, turned into quite the strange philosopher and social activist! Raffi has a website from which he articulates a vision for human life which he calls "child honoring":

Child Honouring is a philosophy—a vision, an organizing principle, and a way of life—the children-first way of sustainability.

Child Honouring starts with three givens

* The early years are the most important—early childhood is the gateway to humane being.
* We face planetary degradation that is unprecedented in scope and scale—a state of emergency that most endangers the very young, and that requires a remedy of equal scale.
* This crisis calls for a systemic response in detoxifying the environments that make up the world of the child.

Child Honouring is a children-first approach to healing communities and restoring ecosystems. It views how we regard and treat our young as the key to building a humane and sustainable world. It is a novel idea—organizing society around the needs of its youngest members. The essence of its vision is expressed in A Covenant for Honouring Children and its underlying principles.

Its spirit is invitational—a call to imagine and create a diversity of child-friendly cultures. A child-honouring society would show love for its children, and therefore for all of us, in every facet of its design and organization.

Quite honestly I'm creeped out. But I guess it makes sense.

thoughts on ideology

I think that most political judgments are formed at root with underlying principles or assumptions, conscious or not, and these assumptions can be true or false. I do not think that all political opinions fall into different ideologies. The implication of this belief is that no ideology is really true and no ideology is necessarily better than any other ideology. Your ideology is what it is; it's like the color of your hair.

Ideology is something like an unwillingness to change one's mind when presented with something true that contradicts what you believe. Ideology also contains an element of having strong convictions about things you know nothing about.

But having a conviction about the way the world is, or holding to a set of principles upon which you base your political judgments is not, I think, ideology. I think there is such a thing as true political knowledge.

Alone Together

Here's a book I'm definitely picking up. It's called "Alone Together":

"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

Unoriginal Thoughts About The Death of Writing and the Impoverishment of Conversation

I think it's fair to say that the art of language is dying. We have replaced writing with instantaneous electronic communication and television. With Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and texting, what need have we for the written word anymore? And our habits with respect to books? I don't think I'm alone in thinking that there are fewer and fewer novels that we read, and even fewer written these days that are worth reading. Those new novels that are worth reading tell the same mundane story about the meaninglessness of modern life. This is largely because our culture has changed almost completely from a culture of the written word to a culture of frenetic images driven by the television, the radio, and the iGadgets. This is a deep problem with consequences that are becoming more corrosive (and so more and more apparent) as time progresses.

Human beings are social creatures that need communities, small and large. Communities are bound together by common creeds, or common beliefs. Beliefs are expressed in ideas and concepts, and the fundamental building blocks of these things are words. So one foundation of all true community life is language.

Our capacity for language is a function of our culture. We can be better or worse at communicating with one another. If words become increasingly subjectivized,that is, what each person means by a particular word is more and more idiosyncratic, we are less able to understand one another. And so we perceive rightly that we have less and less in common with our fellows. The decline of language, understood in this sense, is a social disease. It slowly makes our relations more and more incoherent, and as we become more and more incoherent, we become disorganized and isolated.

All of this is incentive to practice the arts of language: Writing, reading, and speaking. I'm not sure there's a social prescription for encouraging this practice. We could emphasize reading more seriously in our public schools, but this is only possible with the support of mothers and fathers. We can turn the TV off, but again, we can make no laws to this effect, nor should we want to. So I don't know what to do but to bring this to the attention of others - first to see if any agrees with me - and second to encourage others in the fine arts of conversation, writing, and reading.

I note in passing that this is also a limited justification of blogging. I think blogging can be helpful to the end of improving one's writing skills. But a helpful blog can only be publicly oriented; it cannot be merely a diary. It must be an attempt to explain to other persons ideas that can be held in common. I've never been a big writer, and I've never needed to be one. I've never had to write someone a letter because email has been a part of my life from a very young age. But this forum lets me practice writing and explaining myself to others. Even if no one really reads it.

Now, to more pressing things. My furnace just stopped working and tomorrow is supposed to be the coldest day of the year.

Obvious Signs of Demonic Possession

The title of this post is not intended to be hyperbolic. There's lots of reasons not to read the news. But sometimes, light has to be shined on the darkness. Such is the case here. Please don't read this if you are faint of heart. The story is that a doctor in West Philidelphia has rightly been charged with murdering babies.

WEST PHILADELPHIA - January 19, 2011 (WPVI) -- A doctor who gave abortions to minorities, immigrants and poor women in a "house of horrors" clinic was charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Why did he do it?

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, made millions of dollars over 30 years, performing as many illegal, late-term abortions as he could, prosecutors said.

Authorities found signs of further depravity and horror at his "clinic":

Early last year, authorities went to investigate drug-related complaints at the clinic and stumbled on what Williams called a "house of horrors."

Bags and bottles holding aborted fetuses "were scattered throughout the building," Williams said. "There were jars, lining shelves, with severed feet that he kept for no medical purpose."

The clinic was shut down and Gosnell's medical license was suspended after the raid.

Our culture is very sick. It's easy to see this when we look at the tragedy in Tuscon. It's harder to see the millions of babies slaughtered each year. May God bless the souls of the children this man took from this world, and may he have mercy on us all.