Three Irreverent Songs, From Worst to Best

Three examples of songs disrespectful of religion immediately come to mind.  The first, and worst, is Joan Osborne's "One of Us," which is a nearly atonal ditty wherein Ms. Osborne opines God might be a "slob" riding a bus, whose only communication is with the Pope.  Thus, "One of Us" is the Rock for Choice anthem of disbelief.  Second, Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" begins with mock classical instrumentation that leads into a typical 80s pop song.  What is remarkable about the Madonna song to Estase is that the character in the song apparently intends to have her baby.  Given the star's personal life, it is surprising that the song doesn't point to an abortion.  And for all its debatable morality, the Madonna song has more going for it than the Joan Osborne one.  Third is my favorite, the Electric Light Orchestra song "King of the Universe," which is only slightly disrespectful to religion.  As a matter of fact, I have more religious feeling from "King of the Universe" than from such dreadful ecclesiastical offerings as "Gather Us In."  Lyrically, nothing is truly heretical about "King of the Universe," and only the song's grandiosity suggests it is a tongue-in-cheek song about the Almighty.  Appearing on the 1973 album On the Third Day, "King of the Universe" can be seen in its context of songs about death as a reflection on mortality and the meaning of life.

Commentarius de Prognosticis: What Is Wrong with the Roman Jurisdiction in America

Commentarius de Prognosticis: What Is Wrong with the Roman Jurisdiction in America
This says it all.

Sfears of Influence

I wish to introduce a new term.  Political scientists and diplomats have long discussed spheres of influence.  This term means geographical areas which are important to different states, e.g. Afghanistan is in Russia's sphere of influence.  My new term is sfear of influence.  A sfear of influence is a topic which although vitally important to a person or person, is something that circumstances make incredibly uncomfortable to acknowledge.  An example of a sfear of influence would be the issue of homosexuality to the Catholic Church.  Formally condemned by the Church, it is, nevertheless, the orientation of many of its priests.  Another example of a sfear of influence would be taxes on the rich for the Republican Party.  While economic growth requires that capitalists be able to accumulate money without it being sapped by well meaning or not-so-well meaning politicians, tax fairness for the rich is a Republican sfear of influence because the Democrats are all too willing to pretend that Republican tax policy is motivated only by a desire for people like Mitt Romney to avoid paying their "fair share," which according to President Carter meant paying 70% of one's income as taxes.

Restore-DC-Catholicism: CCHD - A Different Sort Of Prostitute

Restore-DC-Catholicism: CCHD - A Different Sort Of Prostitute
Yet another example of why Campaign for Human Development is a bad,bad cause to donate to.
On a different topic, extremists of all stripes are one reason for my retreat to the eighteenth century.  When Estase was a student at UIUC, there was a repellant character in the law school who liked to parade around in a Hitler outfit and hand out anti-Semetic pamphlets.  The College Republicans loathed him because he made our lives Hell.  Every would-be Mao Zedong liked to pretend that Matt Hale was somehow like us.  The fact of the matter is that every time there is some psychiatric case that flips out, the Salon types start talking right-wing terrorism.  Matt Hale ended up going to prison for trying to put a hit out on a Federal Judge.  So, obviously, being high functioning enough to be a law student doesn't exclude acts of utter idiocy.  Debbie Schussel claimed Holmes, the Aurora CO shooter was associated with Occupy, which may account for the media losing interest in the case.  The MSM will do anything to further their goals, even if that means soft-pedalling a story they were excited about a week ago.  The Matt Hales of the world are a boon to leftists, because they distract people from their own lunatics.

An Appeal

I received this letter from my favorite charity, Edmundite Missions www.edmunditemissions.org. Their snail mail address is 1428 Broad Street, Selma, AL  36701.

"Dear Estase,
       'What am I supposed to do?  I can't serve this kind of food to hungry people for lunch.'  Mary Gayle told me.  'The Food Bank sent us chocolate fudge sauce, diapers and gallons of distilled water.  They even sent us bags of charcoal!'  When she described the serious shortage of healthy food at a time when children are out of school, I immediately drove over to the Food Bank to see for myself.
      With temperatures well above 100 degrees and the humidity so high that it fills your lungs, Bosco provides nourishing meals to the sick and working poor with young children, for a brief lunch hour, out of the merciless Alabama sun.  Without a doubt, Bosco saves lives.
     Unfortunately, upon entering the warehouse of the Food Bank, I soon discovered the lack of food was even worse that I thought.  'We're getting less than half the USDA food products we got a year ago,' the Food Bank Director told me.  'Instead, we're receiving truckloads of questionable products and nonfood items.  Sometimes, a delivery will have no food at all,' he said, pointing to the pallets of diapers, dish soap, nondairy creamer and teeth whitening strips.
     Looking around the warehouse, I was shocked by the stacks and stacks of empty pallets, where canned vegetables once stood.  The shelves were stocked with boxes of cookies, chips and snack cakes, all empty calorie foods, not the kinds of food to keep a child or an elder strong and healthy.  Are we to feed snack foods to 320 people who depend on Bosco every day, 365 days a year?
     We walked up to a pallet filled with packages of candies, which made me cringe, as I thought of the drastic results of this food shortage.  For the last few months, I have watched the Bosco Food Kitchen bills stack up and now I wonder how we will ever pay the increasing costs, when we are forced to purchase all our meat, rice and vegetables from commercial grocery stores in Selma, at much higher prices.
     The frail and sick like 80 year-old Mrs. Mae Young, crippled with the painful curled hands of rheumatoid arthritis, spends her days on the front porch of her shack, alone and suffering through the blistering heat, far out in the country.  She tells me that her only smiles come from the sight of the Edmundite Missions truck bringing her a bag of food and a word of encouragement.  I simply cannot turn these impoverished people away and I know you would not want me to.
     Currently, the Food Bank can no longer provide the nourishing food we must have!  And I can't come up with the additional funds to purchase food at full price.  This terrible situation is why I'm humbly coming to you for your help.  Without you, it is now impossible to feed those who turn to the Edmundite Missions for life-sustaining food.  The hamburger, rice and vegetables we need to serve soup at Bosco for a month costs $30,612.  Without help from the Food Bank, it will cost an extra $167 a day, in addition to the amount it already takes to feed these hungry people.
     I join the Edmundites in daily prayers, asking God to bless you abundantly.  My prayers are filled with hope that your generosity to feed the poor, whom God loves, will continue.
                                                              In Christ, I remain,
                                                              Chad McEachern
                                                              Missions Director"

Men of Business v. Men of Genius

"Wit and humour are the dress and ornament of the mind;  but honesty and truth are the soul itself, and the difference in a man's care of his reputation for one and the other is just in proportion that being robbed bears to being murdered."  Richard Steele quoted in Sir Richard Steele by Willard Connely , p.305 (1934)

The kind of elegant prose Estase refers to as Burkean should perhaps be described as Steelesque instead.  Richard Steele was probably not as well educated as Joseph Addison or Jonathan Swift, and his unfavorable qualities included trading on the labor of African slaves in the West Indies, gluttony, lechery, and what would today be seen as alcoholism.  That last characteristic was common to many of the great men of his time, notably Lord Carteret.  His educational deficiencies were the source of much malevolent fun for Dean Swift, who probably would have thought himself one of the first deserving of that title of Liberal aristocracy coined by John Stuart Mill, the "Man of Genius."  While not even seeking the title of a man of genius, Steele preferred to call himself a "Man of Business,"  meaning that though he was unable to make puns in Greek, what he possessed instead was a knowledge of things as they really are.  Even today, the Leftist intelligentsia disdains all forms of practical knowledge, and while precious few of those today could make puns in Greek, they ascribe great weight to such unpractical studies as Sociology or Law, which also explains why a higher percentage of faculty in fields such as Engineering or Economics are conservative.  The phrase "conservative sociologist" is nearly an oxymoron.  Indeed, the ranks of the Occupy movement would be empty but for the large number of college graduates with degrees in Sociology or Gender Studies who find themselves with no productive work, but $40,000 in debt to pay off.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, Part Three

"Arafat continued the mufti's legacy by recruiting Nazis and neo-Nazis for Fatah and the PLO.  In 1969, the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, who was an SS officer in the Mauthausen extermination camp.  Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was found supplying arms to Fatah.  Belgian Jean Tireault, secretary of the neo-Nazi organization La Nation Europeene, also went on the Fatah payroll.  Another Belgian, neo-Nazi Karl van der Put, recruited volunteers for the PLO.  During the 1970s, German neo-Nazi Otto Albrecht was arrested in West Germany with PLO identity papers after the PLO had given him $1.2 million to buy weapons. 
     Like al-Husseini, Arafat was a ruthless murderer whose career was built on terrorism and violence.  In continuing this tradition, Arafat introduced his longtime PLO associate Hani al-Hassan to Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu in October 1972, saying:  'This is my brother. . . He is the one who, just a few months ago, prepared our answer to the Olympic Committee's decision not to allow a team of Palestinian athletes to participate in the Munich games.  He is the brain who put our organization's name on the front page of every single newspaper.'
     Arafat was referring to the September 5, 1972, massacre of eleven Israeli athletes by a team of PLO terrorists during the Olympic Games in Munich, a brutal deed that shocked the world.  So did the murder the following year of Cleo A. Noel, U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his charge d'affaires, George Curtis Moore, another crime executed by Arafat's PLO.  Arafat was directly implicated in the October 1985 seizure by Palestinian terrorists of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which a disabled Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, was singled out for killing, a terrorist act that Pope John Paul II publicly condemned as 'a grave act of violence against innocent and defenseless persons(p134-35).' 
     In creating Hamas, the organization's founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a devoted admirer of al-Husseini, formulated the concept that Palestine should 'become the central battlefield' between the forces of radical Islam and Israel and its Western allies, in a radical Islamic jihad against Israel, America, and the pro-Israel West.  Participation in the intifada, argued Yassin, the first stage of this holy war, would bring about Israel's eventual destruction and the establishment of a nationalist pan-Islamic state in Palestine.  The creation of this state, the very type al-Husseini had envisioned, would in turn be the precursor of a global holy war, waged by Hamas and the leaders of radical Islam against Israel's allies in America and the West.  Thirty-two years after his death, the vision of al-Husseini was to be affirmed as Hamas assumed the leadership of the Palestinian people.  Following the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections held on January 25, 2006, Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, gave a speech in Damascus in which he declared:  'I bring good tidings to our beloved Prophet Muhammed:  Allah's promise and the Prophet's prophecy of our victory in Palestine over the Jews and over the oppressive Zionists has begun to come true.'  The leaders of Hamas continue to seek to undermine and reverse the work of the more moderate Palestinian nationalist factions, some of which have reluctantly accepted Israel's right to exist.  The opposition to Israel's existence is much more intransigent in Hamas than it is today among some secular Palestinian nationalists.  This is an intransigence that the mufti would have shared(p139-40)." From Icon of Evil:Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam, by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann  

Burkean Rhetoric?

The following is the kind of prose Estase would almost associate with Edmund Burke, and how he wishes he wrote.  It is from Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout.  Nero Wolfe gave the kind of dialogue one would associate with Georgian Britain, where his investigator Archie Goodwin speaks like a film noir gumshoe.  It is this juxtaposition that makes the Nero Wolfe mysteries so much fun.

"At least he might have.  Let's say his proposal was that he should, with your consent, remove Caesar and put another bull in his place.  He would take Caesar to the Osgood barns.  You would, during Tuesday, help to guard the substitute so that no one who would be at all likely to notice the deception would be permitted to approach too closely.  With the substitute once butchered, on Wednesday, the danger would of course be over.  On Thursday, Mr. Pratt and his guests, with trumpets of publicity, would eat the barbecued bull.  On Sunday, with the week expired, Clyde would present Mr. Pratt with irrefutable evidence that it was not Caesar who had been sacrificed and that he had therefore won the bet.  Mr. Pratt would of course explode with rage, but in the end he would have to compose himself and admit his helplessness and pay the $10,000, for if the facts were made public the roar of laughter would obliterate him.  Customers in a pratteria would say, 'Do you suppose this is really beef?  It may be woodchuck.'  Mr. Pratt would have to pay and keep his mouth shut.  He couldn't even take Caesar back, for what would he do with him?  Clyde Osgood would get the $10,000, and doubtless a part of his proposal would be that you get Caesar.  I don't know how that would work out, since officially Caesar would be dead, but there might be a way around that difficulty, and as a minimum benefit you could breed his exceptional qualities into your herd.  That, of course, is merely the outline of the proposal.  Clyde had probably developed it in detail, including the time and manner of shuffling the bulls.  The most auspicious time for that would have been after 1 o'clock, when you would be the one on guard, but you might have refused to involve yourself to that extent;  and therefore one possibility is that the shuffling was set for earlier and had actually taken place.  Caesar may be alive at this moment.  The bull who died of anthrax may have been only a substitute.  I offer that only as a conjecture;  obviously it is tenable only on the supposition that you agreed to Clyde's proposal and entered into his scheme. . . and you know more about that than I do.  But leaving that entirely aside, what do you think of the scheme itself?  Do you detect any flaws?" (p160-61)

SCOTUS Observations

Reading the Roberts opinion in the challenge to Obamacare has convinced me of a couple of things.  One, stare decisis is killing the coherence of the law.  Wickard v. Fillburn, like Jason Vorhees of Friday the 13th, refuses to die.  As long as it keeps being propped up, there will exist no practical limit to the abuse of the commerce clause.  Two, Estase is very happy he did not become a lawyer, as the pedantry of these arguments makes one long for the forthright simplicity of medieval metaphysics.  Three, although many commentators have excoriated Justice Roberts for the claim that the government may not force you to buy insurance, but may heavily tax you for not buying insurance, the really scary person in the room was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who not only believes in the broadly constructed commerce clause, but apparently also believes that the Federal Government has the right to coerce the states into expanding Medicaid into an entirely different program than what it originally was.  So, apparently, Justice Ginsburg does not see state governments and the Federal Government as relative equals, which is what federalism suggests, but she thinks that states are merely a dependent appendage of the Federal Government, which can compel the states to do whatever it bids.

Some commentators also act surprised that Roberts is a moderate.  I saw that right away when he was being confirmed, and said he believed in the right to privacy.  Anyone who is over the age of 13 knows that that meant that Roberts was saying by that that he would uphold Roe v. Wade.  So for people to now be surprised that Roberts isn't a Scalia is a little naive.

Catholic Church Conservation: Poacher turned gamekeeper put in charge of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

Catholic Church Conservation: Poacher turned gamekeeper put in charge of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Not exactly encouraging.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, Part Two

"In consultation with the mufti, the Nazi leadership had created a special Einsatzgruppen Egypt, a mobile SS squad, under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, which was to carry out the mass murder of Palestinian Jewry.  By the summer of 1942, anticipating a German military victory in the Middle East, the Einsatzgruppen Egypt had been standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine, attached to German general Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, where it would have begun killing the close to half a million Jews then living in Palestine.  This Middle Eastern death squad was led by SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Walter Rauff, one of Eichmann's most trusted deputies and a confidant of al-Husseini's(p60).  The mufti never attempted to disguise his Nazi beliefs or his wartime role as a mouthpiece for Hitler's genocide in the Arab world.  His role in the extermination of the Jews of Bosnia, and his oft proclaimed desire to exterminate all the Jews of Europe and Palestine, cannot be excused simply as anti-Zionism.  It may be a coincidence that the decision to carry out the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe followed soon after his arrival in Germany.  From the mufti's perspective, it was providential.  In fact, only two months after his initial meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941, the infamous Wannsee Conference took place, in which the Nazi leadership produced their plan to systematically exterminate European Jewry(p62).  So, too, Marshal Tito's government in postwar Yugoslavia did not demand al-Husseini's extradition and indictment as a war criminal at Nuremberg, despite overwhelming evidence of the mufti's collaboration with the Nazis, his role in the murder of thousands of Bosnian Croatians and Serbs, and his recruitment and formation of the Muslim Bosnian Waffen-SS Division that had been instrumental in the extermination of 90 percent of Bosnia's Jews.  Tito understood that if he was to forge a united Yugoslav nation, the Muslims in Bosnia--many of whom had fought under the mufti during the war as members of the Handschar Division of his Bosnian Waffen-SS, and who constituted a not insignificant portion of Marshal Tito's constituency--must not have any excuse to resist his plans.  The Muslim community of Bosnia, Tito recognized, remained unswervingly loyal to the mufti, even after the defeat of Nazi Germany.  Thus, although there was a consensus that Haj Amin al-Husseini was guilty of war crimes, a convergence of political realities in the postwar world prevented him from being brought to justice(p64).  The mufti himself was one of the first to call for a holy war, ordering his 'Muslim brothers to murder the Jews.  Murder them all.'  This same call was made by his friend the sheikh of Al-Azhar.  'The hour of the holy war has struck,' proclaimed the sheikh.  'All Arab fighters must look upon the struggle for Palestine as a religious duty.'  As the Arab League's secretary general, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam Pasha,  candidly put it:'This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.'  Al-Husseini's spokesman Ahmad Shuqairy, later to become the first chairman of the PLO, announced that the goal of the new Arab war against Israel was 'the elimination of the Jewish state.'  Jerusalem, the mufti told his supporters and friends, would soon become Judenrein(p93).  Much to the anger and outrage of al-Husseini and his allies in the militantly anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's moderate prime minister Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha made it known that he did not want to send Egypt's army into combat against Israel.  For al-Husseini and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, this was an unforgivable sin.  For this crime, Pasha fell to an assassin's bullet as he left his office in Cairo on December 28, 1948.  A member of the Muslim Brotherhood fired the shot.  Al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood had conspired secretly in his assassination, as they would conspire together in the assassination of King Abdullah(p96).  The impact of the jihadist ideologue Sayyid Qutb on the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has been well documented.  Qutb had a particularly important influence on terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.  As a student at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah in the late 1970s, bin Laden first became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood while studying religion with Sayyid Qutb's brother Mohammed, one of the university's most prominent teachers of Islamic studies and the chief interpreter of Sayyid Qutb's written works(p98).  Icon of Evil:  Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann

Update (7 JAN 2013) Tip of the petasus to Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag.  An article in the Egyptian newspaper Rose-El-Youssef lists six prominant members of the Obama administration with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of which is Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Policy Development Arif Ali Khan, whom is described by Rose-El-Youssef as being a Qutb-ist.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, Part One

"The Mufti's close working relationship and friendship with Adolf Eichmann, as well as with Heinrich Himmler, is well documented and indisputable.  Following the capture of Eichmann in May 1960, the speculation about the relationship between these two men became a subject of active public discussion.  In a press conference held at the time of the Eichmann trial, on May 4, 1961, al-Husseini denied any connection with Adolf Eichmann during World War II.  Indeed, he claimed at this press conference that he did not even know who Eichmann was until he read about his capture in the newspapers.  In fact, the mufti and Eichmann not only knew each other, but collaborated actively in their years of service to the Third Reich.  At the Nuremberg trials, Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann's senior deputies, would testify that the mufti "was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.  I heard him say that, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz."  On this visit to Auschwitz, al-Husseini reportedly urged the guards in charge of the chambers to be more diligent and efficient in their efforts.
     One can only imagine how the mufti must have rejoiced as he toured the Auschwitz death camp complex.  What he witnessed was indeed, in his mind, the final solution to his Jewish problem.  With a sweeping audacity that was almost too bold to grasp, Hitler had determined simply to eliminate his perceived enemies.  As he examined the details of the process that led to extermination, al-Husseini realized that he would not have to transport his Jews anywhere.  The Jews were concentrated in the Tel Aviv/ Jaffa region of Palestine.  No railroad cars would be needed for transport.  No "selection" would be necessary.  No Jew would be needed to work or labor in any way for his Arab state of Palestine.  All that the mufti would need would be the technical assistance of his good friends Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann to construct factories of death to eliminate the Jews from Palestine once and for all.
     As the mufti left Aushwitz to return to Berlin, he could only marvel at Germany's ruthless efficiency in solving its Jewish problem.  With a smug certainty, he marveled at his good fortune in living at a time when he was blessed with such a superb ally and friend in the person of Adolf Hitler.
     Eichmann and al-Husseini admired each other tremendously.  Eichmann, as Dieter Wisliceny recalled in his testimony at Nuremberg, "was very strongly impressed with the Mufti."  The mufti, in turn, reciprocated this admiration.  When he spoke of Eichmann in the presumed privacy of his diary, al-Husseini observed that he was a "very rare diamond, the best savior of the Arabs(p51-52)." 
     "For the mufti, as for al-Gaylani, however, the common enemy was not just Great Britain, but the entire Allied cause.  The mufti often called upon the Muslims of the world to help Germany in the holy war it was waging against the British and their Western allies, especially the United States.  Some of his radio broadcasts were devoted specifically to condemning American policy in the Middle East.  In a radio broadcast from Berlin in March 1944, he denounced American policy with regard to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine:  "No one {would have}ever thought," he thundered, "that 140 million Americans would become tools in Jewish hands. . . . How could the Americans dare to Judiaze Palestine?"
     Many of his most passionate radio broadcasts were classically anti-Semetic, designed to incite hatred and violence against radical Islam's greatest enemy, the Jews.  On November 2, 1943, at the public rally to protest the Balfour Declaration, al-Husseini used German radio to broadcast one of his most virulently anti-Semetic messages:  "The overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God's chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals," al-Husseini declared, "makes them incapable of being trusted."  In this broadcast, which included an inflammatory tirade against both the Jews and the British, interspersed with citations of Koranic texts against the Jews, the mufti said of the Jews:  "They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals. . . . The divine anger and curse that the Holy Koran mentions with reference to the Jews is because of this unique character of the Jews(p53-54)."" Icon of Evil:Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann 

Battle of the Books: Liberty as the Absence of Force

Thus the word {liberty} is either a misleading appeal to passion, or else it embodies or rather hints at an exceedingly complicated assertion, the truth of which can be proved only by elaborate historical investigations.  'The cause of liberty, for which Hampden died on the field and Sydney on the scaffold,' means either that Hampden and Sydney were right in resisting Charles I and Charles II, respectively, or else merely that they did as a fact die in resisting those kings.  The first assertion obviously requires, before it can be accepted, a full account by way of proof.  The second tells us nothing worth knowing except a bare matter of fact, and would be consistent with Hampden's having been shot when trying to rob on the highway and Sydney's being hanged for highway robbery(p121).  Yet this definition of liberty, which is in exact agreement with Mr. Mill's own views as expressed in his chapter on Liberty and Necessity, in the 2nd volume of his Logic,  is the very foundation of my book.  Liberty is a eulogistic word;  substitute for it a neutral word--'leave', for instance, or 'permission'--and it becomes obvious that nothing whatever can be predicated of it, unless you know who is permitted by whom to do what.  I would ask Mr. Morley whether he attaches any absolute sense whatever to the word liberty, and if so, what it is?  If he attaches to it only the relative sense of 'permission' or 'leave,' I ask how he can make any affirmation at all about it unless he specifies the sort of liberty to which he refers?  Of course, liberty may have positive effects.  Give all men leave to steal, and no doubt some men will steal, but this does not show that liberty itself is a definite thing, with properties of its own, like coal or water(p233, James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Liberty Fund ed.) 

Catholic Marxism

Petasus tip to Catholic Herald.UK.  Bishop Reinhard Marx, author of Das Kapital (not to be confused with the Das Kapital written by Karl Marx) says that it is time to abandon capitalism.  The article did not give any specifics about how or where Bishop Marx was educated.  If his education was, as is typical for clergymen, in theology, one wonders why the Bishop is holding forth on a topic he lacks familiarity in.  This is an all too common problem with the Catholic episcopacy, which holds forth strongly held opinions about biology, economics, law, politics, and other topics they really shouldn't specialize in.  A good example of this is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), who offer an opinion about virtually every topic under the sun, which only means that their emphasis on vital issues like abortion is drowned out by the plentitude of remarks they make about everything else.

Estase actually has something positive to say about an Illinois Democrat.  Dan Lipinski voted to outlaw sex-selection abortions, something that putative pro-life "Republican"  Ron Paul voted against.  While I still consider the Democrats The Abortion Party, at least the idea of targeting little girls for abortion strictly because of their sex gives some people pause.

Mark Kirk Update

And on the topic of Illinois' RINO Senator, with a petasus tip to Andy Martin. . .

www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-met-mark-kirk-20120529,0,46660129,full.story 

Michael Fumento, on an unrelated topic, apparently repents having been a Republican in a Salon.com piece.  Estase has ridiculed the hyperbolic excesses of Ann Coulter for years, but why Fumento decided to praise George Will and air his grievances at the same site that called Will a "hack" who promotes "toxic Republicans" escapes me.  Is the Occupy movement any less crazy and hysterical than the worst right wingers?  Was moveon.org particularly moderate when they called G.W. Bush Hitler?  

Update:  Monday, June 18th is the day the Senate is scheduled to vote on Andrew Hurwitz, architect of Roe v. Wade.  This man must be kept off the Ninth Circuit Court.  Senator Kirk?

Battle of the Books: Persuasion and Force

This quote is also from James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

On the other hand, when a priest says,'Vote as I tell you or you will be damned,' he employs force just as much as if he held a pistol to his parishioner's head, though the arguments through which the force is applied are more elaborate than in the other case.  A surgeon tells a patient that he will die unless he submits to a painful operation.  Is this persuasion or force?  No man would lose a limb if he were not forced to do so by the fear of losing what he values even more, but the surgeon would usually be said to persuade his patient, and not to compel him(p77).  There is one other point in Mr. Harrison's article which calls for notice.  He totally misapprehends the object of my chapter on the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual power, and he naturally misrepresents what I have said on the subject.  As to his misrepresentations, I have dealt with them as far as I thought necessary in foot-notes to the passages misrepresented, and I will only say here that they may be summed up in a few words.  Mr. Harrison supposes me to teach 'the paradox' of 'the essential identity of material and moral power,' in order to establish the conclusion that the 'State ought to be the Church,' that it is not to be a Pope-king, but only a King-pope.'  If Mr. Harrison had read the chapter in question with any care, he would have seen that I said nothing of the sort.  I admit as fully as anyone can the difference between temporal and spiritual power.  The one I say is the power which rests upon temporal sanctions, and the other the power which rests upon spiritual sanctions, and I think that when for this expression, Mr. Harrison substitutes the word 'hell,' he does me great injustice.  I mean by spiritual sanctions all the hopes and fears, all the feelings of various kinds which may be excited by the prospect of a future state.  What I deny is the right of positivists, who do not believe in spiritual sanctions at all, and who do not accept the distinction between spirit and matter, to make use of the word 'spiritual,' and I say that their theory becomes nonsense without it.  Again I do not deny, but assert, the distinction between persuasion and force.  What I deny is that this distinction corresponds to the distinction between temporal and spiritual power.  I observe indeed, in passing, that persuasion and force run into each other, as do many dissimilar things, but the whole of my argument shows that I recognise the distinction, as, indeed, Mr. Harrison himself proves from other parts of my book, thinking to catch me in a contradiction.  This, however, is unnecessary to my argument, and the passage which Mr. Harrison refers to as if it conveyed the substance of the whole chapter might have been struck out of the book without interfering with its principal positions.  The whole chapter forms a carefully constructed argument, and it is difficult to answer it without an equally careful consideration of it as a whole(p244-45).

Battle of the Books, Part One

Here is an account, similar to Finnis' Incommensurability thesis, but informed by Hume, thus without a Natural Law potential.  It comes from James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

To give a specific illustration, Hume's doctrine,'that personal merit consists entirely in the usefulness or agreeableness of qualities to the person himself possessed of them, or to others who have any intercourse with him,' and that,' every man who has any regard to his own happiness and welfare will best find his account in the practice of every moral duty,' is quite independent of religion in my sense of the word.  That up to a certain point 'true self love and social are the same' does not admit of serious dispute(p176).  Happiness has a very different meaning to a fierce pastoral tribe in Central Asia;  to an ignorant husbandman in Bengal;  to a cultivated modern European;  to a naked savage in Central Africa, to say nothing of the different conceptions of happiness which are formed by different individuals similarly situated.  But what does this prove?  Merely that morality is not fixed but varying, that there is no such thing as absolute, unchangeable morality, and that it is hardly possible that there should be moral intuitions, and this is the plain truth and the ultimate result of these speculations.  Bring any considerable number of human beings into relations with each other.  Let them talk, fight, eat, drink, continue their species, make observations, form a society, in short, however rough or however polished, and experience proves that they will form a conception more or less definite of what for them constitutes happiness;  that they will also form a conception of the rules of conduct by which happiness may be increased or diminished;  that they will enforce such rules upon each other by different sanctions, and that such rules and sanctions will produce an influence upon individual conduct varying according to circumstances(p225, Liberty Fund ed.)

Not Because Hume Didn't Try

The last post discussed John Finnis' claim that the Thomistic theory of desirable ends as the source of natural law, vis a vis the later opinion of Suarez that morals are rationally discernable and based on divine command.  It seems to have been the opinion of Finnis that somehow the desirable ends theory of Natural Law was impervious to the Hume's Dictum distinction between the way things are and the way things should be.  Of course, even Suarez was not really saying that Natural Law is simply doing things as they are currently done, he was saying that morals can be rationally inferred from nature, and there is a difference.  Estase sees a huge difference between the theory of Suarez and the theory that morality is somehow what is typically done.  What is typically done is customary, and Suarez would blush at the customary practices of the Jersey Shore.  What Suarez is getting at may be what Cicero implied in his works, a morality of realism based on what is naturally offensive, although Estase admits to little familiarity with Suarez.  Does Thomism survive Hume's Dictum?  If so, it's not because Hume didn't try.

Finnis on Hume's Dictum, etc.

"The substantive differences between the theory of natural law espoused by Vasquez and Suarez (and most Catholic manuals until the other day) and the theory espoused by Aquinas are scarcely less significant and extensive than the better-known differences between Aristotelian and Stoic ethics. . . .We can put Hume's attack on the ethics of his predecessors into perspective by the following summary remarks:(i)Aristotle and Aquinas would readily grant that ought cannot be deduced from is (whether or not Hume really formulated and adhered to that principle).  (ii)Both would go along with Hume's view that the speculative discernment of "eternal relations," even relations of "fitness of human nature," leaves open the question what motive anybody has for regulating his actions accordingly.  (iii) Aquinas would deplore the confusion (shared by Hume and Suarez!) of obligation with impulse or influence, and Hume's failure to see that reason is an "active principle" because one is motivated according to one's understanding of the goodness and desirability of human opportunities, including the opportunity of extending intelligence and reasonableness into one's choice of actions.  (iv)Aquinas would reject the assumption of Clarke, Grotius, Suarez, and Vasquez that the primary and self-evident principles of natural law are moral principles (in the modern sense of "moral"), or that they are initially grasped as principles concerned  with self-evident relations of conformity or dis-conformity to human nature.  (v)Aquinas, like Clarke and Hume, would reject the view that the will or imperative of a superior accounts for obligation;  like Hume he would reject Clarke's view that obligation is essentially a matter of avoiding intellectual inconsistencies;  and finally he would reject both Hume's view that it is a matter of, or intrinsically related to, a peculiar sentiment, and equally, the recent neo-Humean view that statements of obligation are merely prescriptions expressing a certain sort of commitment or decision."  John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, II.6, p47-48

The Fifth Column: Solidarity... With the USCCB

The Fifth Column: Solidarity... With the USCCB
If anybody wants an example of why I follow Steve Kellmeyer, this article says it all.