The Meaning of Estase

Why do I use a pseudonym?  I was reminded again last week when someone commenting on another blog called me a lying bubba Bellarmine.  Ah, the decency and fair-mindedness of liberals!  Where debate fails, use slander and insult, huh?  Catholic bloggers are not above outing a pseudonomous blogger.  The reason I don't blog under my Christian name is because people like this cannot be trusted. At all.  People aren't above lying about a blogger's activities to make them lose their job.  If they could, they would fill your inbox with gay porn.  Because that's just the kind of scum they are.  What does Estase mean?  I'm a stubborn S.O.B. that won't shut up, that's what it means.

Justice Thomas on Natural Law

"Howard Metzenbaum was the other kind of senator, and I already knew how he felt about me.  It would have been charitable to call him unlikeable, though he went through the motions of civility during my visit.  At one point he actually tried to lure me into a discussion of natural law, but I knew he was no philosopher, just another cynical politician looking for a chink in my armor, so all I did was ask him if he would consider having a human-being sandwich for lunch instead of, say, a turkey sandwich.  That's Natural Law 101:  all law is based on some sense of moral principles inherent in the nature of human beings, which explains why cannibalism, even without a written law to proscribe it, strikes every civilized person as naturally wrong.  Any well-read college student would have gotten my point, but Senator Metzenbaum just stared at me awkwardly and changed the subject as fast as he could (p.221-22)." "As for natural law, I knew perfectly well that it was nothing more than a way of tricking me into talking about abortion, since many Catholic moral philosophers saw the two things as intimately related.  But my interest in natural law was different, and I hoped I could quell any anxieties resulting from it.  If some senators found the subject silly or radical, I was prepared to oblige them by discussing the silliness and radicalism of the Founding Fathers who had written natural-law philosophy into the Declaration of Independence.  Why shouldn't a federal judge be interested in what the founders thought about natural law--and why shouldn't a black man be interested in the fact that the philosophical underpinnings of the Constitution had been in direct conflict with the peculiar institution of slavery, thus fueling the earliest efforts to free my forebears (p231)?"  Clarence Thomas,My Grandfather's Son

Neo-Con and Neo-Cath

A Jewish woman in Minnesota used several anti-Catholic phrases in reference to a judge dealing with her litigation, perhaps a result of the old, continuing problem with Catholic anti-semitism, which continues even today, as the representatives of the Vatican were the only ones not to walk out when the Iranian representative addressed a UN conference on colonialism with a tirade about how the Shoah didn't happen and Israel is illegitimate.  For anti-semites, the term Neo-Con refers to Jewish conservatives.  To the merely ignorant, a Neo-Con is anyone who isn't Ron Paul.

Neo-Cath is a term of abuse directed at anyone who is 1)Catholic and Republican,or 2) accepting of other faiths.  Estase isn't the biggest fan of the SVC, but if anything was good about it, it was the end of Catholicism claiming to be the only legitimate religion, something that in and of itself created hatred of Catholicism.  Perhaps Henry Morton Robinson, author of the novel The Cardinal, was the first Neo-Cath.  After all, Robinson's novel depicted a Catholicism that opposed racism and abortion, one that was consistent with democratic government.  The traditionalists haven't accepted the fact that we cannot rely on Hapsburg monarchs to rule us;  that day has come and gone.  Like it or not, democracy is the modern alternative to total authoritarian statism.  The Church should not spend too much time pining for monarchy, after all, Britain's monarchs made priests hide in cellars.

Continuing Deevolution

Bela Pelosi complained that by opposing the contraception coverage in Obamacare, the Catholic bishops are acting as lobbyists.  Which might be a good objection if the same Catholic bishops had been attacked by Mrs. Pelosi for supporting any measures she also happened to support, such as comprehensive immigration reform (amnesty) or Obamacare itself, which to a large extent was supported by Catholic bishops.  

The defense appropriations bill apparently authorizes the military to arrest any American, in America, and hold them without trial, until the GWOT is resolved.  The Constitution is dead, and Dick Cheney had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Endorsement

Mitt Romney for President!  Sure he's wishy-washy, created socialized health care in Massachusetts, and looks like a Ken doll, but he is soo acceptable to the people who write for east coast newspapers.  And you know who should be his veep?  Newt Gingerich!  Yes, Mr. Life-Begins-At-Implantation!  Mr. I-Left-My-Wife-On-Her-Deathbed!  There's a team America can believe in!

Whatever you do, primary voters, stay away from Bachmann and Santorum!  People of principle and integrity have no place in American politics.

Rights Preceeding Constitution?

First Things.com has an excellent Hadley Arkes column called "Natural Rights Trump Obamacare, or Should,"  wherein the excellent Mr. Arkes raises the excellent, and ignored, question of whether conservatives can/should go beyond black letter constitutional law in defending freedom and the right to life.  It is a pressing constitutional and moral question:  do our legal rights start and end with the constitution?  It is even more pressing, as the Balkinization blog offers a new piece of liberal obfuscation-- the term "sail originalism," which seems like living constitution under a different name.  It is a commonplace of conservative and libertarian legal commentary that the commerce clause has been perverted by Supreme Court decisions since the New Deal, but it is probably impossible to return to original intentions of only regulating interstate commerce.

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.