Free Speech on Campus, British Style

Tip of the petasus to Biased BBC.  St. Andrew's University has a conservative organization,which, according to tradition, has something they call a heretic burning to commemorate Guy Fawkes Day.  Typically, political organizations pick a member of the other team to burn in effigy.  The Brit Cons chose Oh Blah Blah for the honor this year, and predictably the BBC pretended that this is racist.  Was it bigotry against WASPs to call George W. Bush Hitler, the Smirking Chimp, or a retard?  Civility in politics is all-important to the left, except where their opponents are concerned.

National Legislature

"'Tis not therefore for Kent or Sussex, Lewis or Maidstone, but for the whole nation, that the members chosen in these places are sent to serve in Parliament:  and tho it be fit for them as friends and neighbors (so far as may be)to hearken to the opinions of the electors for the information of their judgments, and to the end that what they shall say may be of more weight, when everyone is known not to speak his own thoughts only, but those of a great number of men;  yet they are not strictly and properly obliged to give account of their actions to any, unless the whole body of the nation for they serve, and who are equally concerned in their resolutions could be assembled."  Algernon Sidney Discourses on Government, p 565.

"If we degrade and deprave their minds by servility, it will be absurd to expect, that they who are creeping and abject towards us, will ever be bold and incorruptible assertors of our freedom, against the most seducing and the most formidable of all powers(p216). . . if we do not permit our members to act upon a very enlarged view of things;  we shall at length infallibly degrade our national representation into a confused and scuffling bustle of local agency."  Edmund Burke Guildhall Speech

Purple Shirts Against Walker

Estase just read that the recall election against Wisconsin Governor Scott Brown is costing the Cheeseheads nearly eight million Dollars.  A vendetta waged against anyone whose judgement counters the public employees' unions.  At least Wisconsin, unlike the People's Republic of Illinois, has politicians who can stand up to greedy public employees.  Illinois has been broken by the fact that it has to pay two or three pensions to some retired teachers.  No state can afford to pay one retired employee more than one pension, and it is immoral to expect the public to pay one person more than one pension.  Ask a military retiree whether anyone seems interested in paying for their healthcare, and then look at a schoolteacher living like a crowned head of Europe.

Burke and Kant Defended

Immanuel Kant takes a beating on the Accepting Abundance blog today that is predictable.  Immanuel Kant's catagorical imperative is a secularized form of Christian morality that AA (no, not the twelve-step group) finds fault with.  I will defend Kant because he was a contemporary of Edmund Burke who I always thought had some affinity with the thought of that great parliamentarian.  If you reject Christianity (and there were many such characters in the time of Burke and Kant, from Collins and Voltaire to D'Alembert and Bolingbroke), your arguments cannot be answered by simple recourse to "the Bible says thus-and-such" or "the Catholic Church says thus-and-such."  If there were no athiests and revolutionaries in the eighteenth century, there would not have been a need for a Burke or a Kant to try to defend Christian morals without explicit appeals to revelation.  Kantian ethics are one fork in the road, and the scary thing is that the second fork in it is Hegelianism--the unapologetic embrace of atheistic statism instead of traditional modes of government.  Incidentally, another favorite of Estase's, the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge was Britain's first popularizer of Kantianism.

Androgyny, Immaturity, and Alcoholism

A tip of the old petasus to Fr. Powell at Hanc Aquam:  Cardinal Bertone disowns the recent report of the Pontifical Council on Peace and Justice calling for a global economic authority.  Probably a smart move, as we all know how friendly to Catholic values the UN has been.

One book I should eventually pay some attention to is Kay Hymowitz's Manning Up, wherein she discusses the perpetual boyhood many men in the post-feminist world suffer.  We all know the grown men who seem uninterested in marriage until their thirties, or those with an obsession with pornography.  Reportedly, Ms. Hymowitz calls "Knocked Up" a fairy tale for child-men, wherein an immature drug-addled loser is saved by a beautiful woman he happens upon who teaches him to want marriage.  The subject of mature masculinity has always been something of a mystery to Estase, since he grew up without a father.  The maturity level of most other undergraduate men in the early 90s seemed pretty low.  Estase always saw most of his contemporaries as being so insecure about their own masculinity that the way they asserted themselves as men was by putting down other young men as homosexuals, and pursuing lives of drunkenness and repeated meaningless sexual encounters.  Happy Veterans Day!  The military may be one part of society where the god of feminism and the god of pornography have made only half-measure victories.

Friendly Fire, Part Two

Toure (don't you love people with only one name) has opined that Herman Cain making advances on a blond should be scary.  Yeah, if you're the Grand Wizard and you live in Missisippi.  What kind of a brother (oh yeah, the kind with one name!) brings up nasty racial and racist stereotypes?  Need I say, friendly fire?  Hat tip Adrienne's Corner.  Father Zuhlsdorf has another example--John Courtney Murray and Robert Drinan, both Jesuit priests and intellectuals, confabed with the Kennedys in 1964 to advise them on how to reconcile their opportunistic pro-choice positions with their ostensible Catholicism.

Archdiocese of Cincinatti Kills Blog

Rich Leonardi's excellent "Ten Reasons" blog has been silenced by his bosses at the Archdiocese of Cincinnati because he dared question his bishop's support for Campaign for Human Development, a left-wing fraud that pretends to be a Catholic charity, but actually gives money to bottom-feeders at labor, environmental, and even Marxist organizations.  As a result of the nature of CCHD recipients, the groups supported are usually pro-gay and pro-abortion.  (For more information, go to www.reformcchdnow.com)  See also the report by American Life League on CCHD.

Illinois' Entirely Wonderful Governor

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn gives an award to a woman who attacked the pro-life Republican opponent Bill Brady in the 2010 race.  The only hitch is it is an award for the pro-abortion Personal PAC.  This is another sign that Illinois will continue its official hostility to all opposed to abortion, a trend that kicked into overdrive when previous Governor Rod Blagojevich made an executive order that all pharmacists be required to dispense abortion drugs, conscience claims notwithstanding.  Cardinal George and the bishops of Illinois have registered their complaints, which count for very little in Illinois.

Kicking and Screaming

ACLU is making policy.  According to William Cox of the Alliance for Catholic Health Care, the mandate forcing Catholic hospitals and institutions to cover contraceptives and abortion in their health plans was DESIGNED to affect Catholic institutions.  The secularists strike again.  If you are a Catholic, and believe contraception and abortion are wrong, then you are just a flat-earther, and the liberals will drag you into the twenty-first century.  Hat tip to Elizabeth Scalia.

 Republicans must want no one but either liberals or scumballs as their candidates.  The obvious pro-life candidates, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum have been killed by the establishment types at Fox News.  Rick "Gardesil" Perry and Herman Cain have very real creditability problems.  Mitt Romney is Oh Blah Blah's doppelganger, virtually identical in politics to any liberal.  And who does Fox News try to resusitate?  Newt Gingerich?  You've got to be kidding me.  Gingerich is so much of a RINO, they have been talking about making him a zoo exhibit.  Mr. "Global Warming/Paul Ryan-is-too-far-to-the-right" is going to be the conservative knight in shining armor?  Mr. "I cheated on two wives" is going to speak about family values?  Maybe Jesse Ventura has the right idea--Obama is going to get reelected and this country is toast.

Democrats for Despotism

Reading The Education of Henry Adams has given me another analogy for Oh Blah Blah--William Ewart Gladstone, whose liberalism did not stand in the way of his supporting the Confederacy.

Gladstone replied the next day:"He was glad to learn what the Prime Minister had told him;  and for two reasons especially he desired that the proceedings should be prompt:  the first was the rapid progress of the Southern arms and the extension of the area of Southern feeling;  the second was the risk of violent impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire such as would prejudice the dignity and disinterestedness of the proffered mediation."(p155)As morals, one could detect no shade of difference between Gladstone and Napoleon except to the advantage of Napoleon.(p156)No one knew so well as he that he {Gladstone}and his own officials and friends at Liverpool were alone "making" a rebel navy, and that Jefferson Davis had next to nothing to do with it. . .Never in the history of political turpitude had any brigand of modern civilization offered a worse example.(p.157)

The erudite Mr. Gladstone, intellectual upholder of all things liberal and enlightened, proposed to help destroy the Union in order to let Napoleon pursue imperial expansion in Mexico.

The only resolute, conscientious champion of {Lord John} Russell, Napoleon, and Jefferson Davis was Gladstone.(p.163)

And what did Gladstone, the liberal champion and would-be classical expert have to say about almost destroying the American Republic?

I really, though most strangely, believed that it was an act of friendliness to all America to recognize that the struggle was virtually at an end. (p.165).

So, like Harry Reid and Obama wanting to wave the white flag in 2007, Gladstone wished for the defeat of the American arms for only the most noble of intentions.  And that thing of allowing non-democratic governments (France, Al-Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood) to triumph, well it was all for the best.  Don't you get it--they were pursuing despotism to vindicate democracy!  

Is Denis Leary Going to Hell?

Sure, his recent Comedy Central special called the Pope a Nazi.  But is his calling priests and nuns homosexuals really going that far?  Most convents stopped being about Jesus about the time that they stopped wearing habits, and started spending all their time at anti-nuclear weapons rallys.  Even I refer to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious as the Lesbian Crack-addict Women Religious.  Last week, another blog I would hat-tip if I could remember which one it was, profiled a Dominican nun who escorts women into an abortion clinic.  Let me repeat this for effect.  A woman whose health care and living expenses are paid for by the Catholic Church spends her time making sure pro-lifers cannot annoy women about to kill their babies.  So is Mr. Leary too far off when he says nuns are lesbians?

As far as calling priests sodomists, Mr. Leary isn't doing anything the rest of the liberal media hasn't done.  Or anything gay rights activists haven't done.  Maybe one shouldn't drop the soap when showering with Mr. Leary.  The Jesuit rag America is always agitating for the acceptance of sexually active gay men as Catholic priests, so which came first, the chicken or the egg?   Sure Denis Leary is an irreverent slimeball, and an unfunny paddy, but what else is new?

The Mixed Constitution

Aristotle, as many of us know, said that of the three types of government, any one could be either wonderful or horrible.  A monarch could be very good if his unlimited power were to be used for the public welfare, but if he were a tyrant, there could be no greater nightmare.  An aristocracy could use their wealth and education to benefit all, or simply to benefit themselves.  Pure democracy could either be noble and benefit all (if its practitioners were in control of themselves), or base and self-destructive (if they worked to the least common denominator). 

Because of these good characteristics, my friend M. Tullius Cicero called for the mixed constitution, something that was a little of all three.  Wisely, the American founders took the advice of Tully and Aristotle, and gave us a Constitution with three elected bodies.  The President was the executive--an elected King, if you will.  He would do the thing that kings used to do to so great an effect--make foreign policy.  Madison et al also gave him the right to approve (with exceptions) laws made by the other, parliamentary bodies.  The first of these parliamentary bodies created by Mr. Madison and the boys at Philadelphia was to be a purely democratic element--Congress.  Congressman would serve shorter periods, so that they would be in touch with the old vox populi.  Since spending money is the most dangerous thing any government does, Congress would be entrusted with that.  So for aristocracy, the Senate was created, a wise body of old lawyers who would be elected by state legislatures for longer terms. (That is, before a huckster named Lorimer made the process seem inherently corrupt, and there was a Constitutional amendment to change to popular election.)  The bailiwick of the Senate is confirmation of Judicial appointments of the President.  Of course, the Senate also ratifies House bills, but in analog to the House of Lords, it is the role in counterbalancing the President's power that is the Senate's raison d'etre.   The President, House, and Senate are supposed to be the mixed constitution of the United States.

Sunday Mornings With an Eugenicist

Hat tip to Aliens In This World.  Wallace Kuralt, father of CBS personality Charles Kuralt, was a North Carolina Welfare official who forcibly sterilized women in the 1950s and 1960s.  And never had any regrets about it.


And on an unrelated topic, here's a message to Democrats.  Extraconstitutional means ILLEGAL.  Estase thought it was an abberation when Governor Perdue of North Carolina wanted to suspend 2012's elections (see my previous blog, "Septennial Act Redux"), but now Congressman Jessie Jackson Jr. is advocating that Oh Blah Blah overrule Congress and act as a dictator, claiming that the legally elected U.S. Congress is on a par with the Confederacy!?!   OK, Congressman, let me explain this to you.  We have two elected branches of government under a little thing called the CONSTITUTION.  The idea of it is that neither can act independently of the other.  See also "Checks and Balances."  What you are calling for is a dictatorship, pure and simple.  Were you elected by the dupes of Shiitown to create a dictatorship?  Why don't you shut the hell up and let your father be the only idiot in your family? 

From Burke to Kirk and Beyond...: Obama and Catholics

From Burke to Kirk and Beyond...: Obama and Catholics
This says everything that needs to be said on the subject.

Weird Priorities

Estase was watching Pop-Up Videos on VH1 when he heard something bleeped out of a video that he was surprised at.  I've noticed that many networks (IFC) do not even bother to bleep out the sex verb beginning with "F" and ending with "K."  Another network (Spike) thinks it is acceptable to use the misogynistic and obscene word "pussy" to describe weak men.  So when a Gwen Stefani song where she self-deprecatingly refers to herself as a "whore" was edited so that word was no longer in the video, it made me really wonder.  What exactly makes "whore" more obscene than "pussy?"  The first word appears in the Bible, whereas the second most surely does not.  It seems really nuts to censor a word meaning prostitute in a world that seems OK with prostitution (think academics who want to call them "sex workers").

Septennial Act Redux

The Governor of North Carolina has suggested the extraordinary and bizarre step of skipping the 2012 Congressional election to allow the current Congress to continue its work.  While Estase is the last person who wants a return to Pelosism, this is so obviously unconstitutional I can't believe a Governor would even hazard such an opinion.   What it reminds me of is the Septennial Act that skipped the Parliamentary election due in 1716, and allowed the Parliament elected in 1713 to continue until 1720.  The reason for this move was overtly to prevent the anarchy of a change in power in the wake of the 1715 Jacobite uprising, and covertly just an attempt for the Whigs to keep their enemies out of power.  Most historians are dubious about whether skipping an election was legal for eighteenth century Britain, even considering the Stuarts were on the cusp of starting a civil war in England, one that conceivably could have either, according to your point of view, rescued her from Hanoverian domination, or imposed French-style absolutism.

Real Problems Unaddressed

Two topics present themselves today.  The first is the article referenced in This Ain't Hell, But You Can See It From Here where a NYT writer referred to military retirement benefits as a "welfare program," as though military retirees were like Social Security recipients, or, worse, welfare recipients.  This is truly odd, almost like the liberals I've heard who act like people in the Army are no different from people in some make-work program like Americorps.  It is a characteristic of modern liberals to pretend that those who are police, firefighters, or military are somehow nothing more than those so stupid that the only way they will have anything is if liberals deign to pay them for putting up with all the crap involved in keeping the rest of us safe.   See also Michael Bloomberg's decision to keep first responders away from the 9/11 Commemoration.

The second is Mel Gibson, who apparently is involved in making a film about the Maccabean uprising.  ADL made a strongly worded statement about Mr. Gibson that reiterated the false claim that Passion of the Christ was anti-semetic.   I am not defending Mel Gibson, because he has since proven himself to be something quite unlike what you would expect from someone who makes a religious film.  I saw Passion of the Christ.  The villain was me.  The point of the film isn't who called for His execution (Saducees), or who killed him (the Romans), but how He died because of human evil, which lurks in every one of us.  No one ever said that the film inspired us to hate Italians, though some of the most sadistic cruelty was done by Roman soldiers.  But the saw is out!  Anti-semetic!  Anti-semetic!  The people in this world who hate Jews either live in places like Saudi Arabia, or are the denizens of certain faculty break rooms at major universities. 

What these stories have in common is the common thread of finding enemies where there are none, while the real problems go unaddressed.

Diligite iustitiam: Robert George: Remarks on Natural Law at Notre Dame

Diligite iustitiam: Robert George: Remarks on Natural Law at Notre Dame
George and Finnis brought Natural Law back into repute.

Friendly Fire

Coming right off of the John Corapi scandal, now Fr. Frank Pavone is under financial scrutiny.   He apparently has been forbidden to administer the sacraments outside his own diocese.

The Tucker Carlson circus "The Daily Caller" stoops to a new low--attacking Sarah Palin by sharing a crude sexual remark made by boxer and numbskull Mike Tyson.  Hat tip Riehl World Politics.  Now, is it just me, or is a political blog a strange place for any type of sex joke?  And why is it the business of a conservative to demolish other conservatives?  Aren't there enough lefties to do the job?  If a conservative has a problem with another conservative, isn't there a more constructive mode of discussion than character assassination?  This comes after similar unfair slams by Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. 

Facts, Schmacks!

Semper Vigilans tells us that PBS is covering up for Oh Blah Blah's history gaffe Thursday night, where he claimed Lincoln founded the Republican Party.  This is the kind of thing that would have been big news if it were Michele Bachmann who said this. PBS has become an instrument of public indoctrination, bereft of token conservatives like Ben Wattenburg and William F. Buckley.  Only the hard left would mourn the loss of PBS.