Catholic Ironies by Andrew Willard Jones. The Irony of Modern Catholic Historyby george weigel basic, 336 pages, $30 In The Irony of Modern Catholic History, George Weigel offers a comprehensive interpretation of the history of the Catholic Church’s encounter with modernity.
For Weigel, the fixed point in this story is the goodness of the aspirations of “political modernity,” by which he generally means liberalism. Political modernity aspires to freedom, prosperity, and solidarity. Weigel describes how the Catholic Church slowly realized first that liberalism was right, and second that Catholicism could help modernity realize liberalism’s aspirations in their true form. In Weigel’s telling, the Church thereby became a purer version of itself. Weigel’s story unfolds in five acts. In Act Four, the Church finally becomes itself. This story is well told and demonstrates a subtle understanding of the spirit of modern Catholicism. The Journals’ Sins Are The Editors’ Sins — Guest Post by Robert Yoho. If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed.
If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed. Mark Twain Corporate funding has made medical journals wealthy. When I trained 35 years ago, they were everywhere, but with the cash injection you will read about below, they have become a blizzard of paper on every surface of a doctor’s house and office. To scan the primary care articles alone would take hundreds of hours a month. One hour after Biden takes office, WHO reverses guidance on PCR tests… might not diagnose corona at all – non veni pacem. “Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology…Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.”
A Physician Puts Coronadoom In Perspective — Guest Post by Robert Yoho. WARNING: The COVID project announced record testing, which leads to record “cases”, i.e. positives.
The may move to mandatory quarantines in some places because of the political situation using the doom as an excuse. Robert Yoho is a physician who did not panic. My friend Stan Cohen is terrified of Coronavirus, and he plies us with horrifying stories. Although he is a professional with a graduate degree, statistics are not his specialty. Stan and everyone else are being tutored by talking heads who know no more math than a house cat. Army Face Masks: Why It Took So Long for the Army to Make Masks. The U.S.
Army has developed a new face mask called the Combat Cloth Face Covering (CCFC).The Army built the CCFC, which consists of a piece of cloth and head bands, in less than a year—a near record time for the service.However, the painfully slow development of something as simple as a face mask calls into question the service’s bureaucratic, hidebound procurement process. U.S. Army soldiers will soon be wearing a new face mask designed to protect them from COVID-19. Oh No! Hospitals Are Overwhelmed! Raging Surges Reported In…1957…2000…2003…2016… – William M. Briggs.
Hospitals do not build beds and ICUs for Worst Case Scenarios, such as the coronadoom apocalypse that has long been promised but has not yet arrived, a time in which everybody falls ill and has to be tended to in hospital.
The average ICU occupancy rate is almost 70%. Which means it does not take much to “overwhelm!” One. Same with bed numbers. Money is lost when most beds are empty most of the time. Reports are everywhere now about raging surges and surging rages of coronadoom “cases”, all of which ignore testing levels and disease severity. Let’s start with the most sober source, which is to say, not a corporate media site. The myth of the “model minority myth” probably tells us about the pervasiveness of lying – Gene Expression. Recently I was listening to a radio interview with an Asian American professor.
At one point she had to expound about the “model minority myth,” which refers to the fact that the public has a misimpression about the state of Asian Americans (after prompting from the white host). The idea is that while the public believes that Asian Americans are successful, often well-off, and disproportionately professionals, this is actually misleading and perpetuates the myth that they are a model minority. The problem is that it is not a myth. The public’s eyes are not lying. The term “model minority” is loaded, and comes out of a specific time, the 1960s, and was used in contrast with black Americans.
The popes against the revolution. The Church has consistently condemned doctrinaire laissez-faire forms of capitalism and insisted on just wages, moderate state intervention in the economy, and the grave duty of the rich to assist the poor.
Everyone knows these things because they are frequently talked about, and rightly so. But the Church has also consistently and vigorously opposed socialism in all its forms and all left-wing revolutionary movements, for reasons grounded in natural law and Christian moral theology. This is less frequently talked about, but especially important today, when much of what is being done or called for in the name of justice is in fact gravely immoral. Here are some relevant statements from popes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organized by topic.
Mission Creep and Wasteful Spending Left the CDC Unprepared for an Actual Public Health Crisis. Over the past three decades, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has seen its taxpayer-funded budget doubled.
Then doubled again. Then doubled again. And then nearly doubled once more. But spending nearly 14 times as much as we did in 1987 on the agency whose mission statement says it "saves lives and protects people from health threats" did not, apparently, help the CDC combat the emergence of the biggest disease threat America has faced in a century. Research – The Armed Academic. For popular articles / op-eds, click this link.
“Guns on Campus: A Defense” (with Kyle Blanchette) in Bob Fischer (ed), College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues that Affect You 2nd ed (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020) We have a strong moral right to defend ourselves, and guns are especially apt at helping us exercise that right. Whether we are inside the home or outside of it, we are morally entitled to defend ourselves against those who threaten our lives. We do not magically forfeit this right simply by changing locations. Well, That Was Different Because Shut Up – The American Catholic. Two Can Play That Game. Most young Christians are unfamiliar with their own intellectual traditions. They are disconcerted when persons of an unserious disposition taunt them with questions like “If God exists, then why is there evil in the world?” Or “If God made everything, then who made God?” It isn’t that these are bad questions, but that we have been answering them for centuries, and persons of the taunting sort aren’t listening.
Our New World Without Kith or Kin. The Japanese word kodokushi roughly translates to “lonely death.” The term might be a touch poetic for what it actually describes, conjuring as it does the romantic image of an individual stoically riding off alone into oblivion. An existential cowboy leaning in his saddle towards the darkening horizon, embodying all the heroic maverick energy that our contemporary world so highly values. The apotheosis of freedom in current Western society being a complete atomization of self, an undoing of all the bonds which constrain us, kodokushi almost sounds like something to aspire to. The material reality of the “lonely death” is grim. Disgusting, even. Scholars who study demographic shifts refer to what happened in relatively wealthy, Western countries after the Industrial Revolution—a decline in both death and birth rates—as the First Demographic Transition. Began emerging in the West after World War II.
There Are No Such Thing As Gays (Or Trannies) – William M. Briggs. Yours Truly is a statistician; indeed, the Statistician to the Stars! I call myself that because I perform probability analyses for money (and only for the best people). Yet I used to call myself a physicist, because physics was what I was doing at the time. And every now and then I call myself a cook, though this term has been hotly disputed. With cause. Besides statisticians, there are butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. The Bizarro world of left-wing politics. I have only a little to add to what others have already said about the Kafkaesque Covington affair.
There were, as you all know by now, three main parties involved. Counterintuitive Trends in the Link Between Premarital Sex and Marital Stability. American sexual behavior is much different than it used to be. Today, most Americans think premarital sex is okay, and will have three or more sexual partners before marrying. What, if anything, does premarital sex have to do with marital stability? This research brief shows that the relationship between divorce and the number of sexual partners women have prior to marriage is complex. I explore this relationship using data from the three most recent waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) collected in 2002, 2006-2010, and 2011-2013. Academia Deep-Sixes Study For Noticing Men And Women Are Different. Prelates and Pederasts
Five Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution: Part II - The Catholic Thing. Five Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, Part I - The Catholic Thing. The Metaphysics of Democracy by Thomas Joseph White. American Thinker: Top Ten Reasons I Am No Longer A Leftist. Our friends at americanthinker.com have a fantastic column by Dr. Danusha V. Will granddaughter pay the price of fight for equality? How technology cheapened sex and made men less marriageable. Family scholar Mark Regnerus has attracted a lot of interest as well as some controversy with his recently published book, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage and Monogamy. This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone - NYTimes.com. PORING through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” I found myself over and over again turning pages and saying, “I had no idea.”
What is the Mess We Are in, and How Did We Get Here? Peter Turchin Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies - Peter Turchin. The death wish in the contemporary west. Commentary: Evidence points to another Snowden at the NSA. America's Main Problem: Corruption. National Security Notice. The Left Has It Wrong When It Comes to Sex Ed. For the past several decades, teen pregnancy in the United States has been on the decline. Mirror of Justice. Mirror of Justice. Mirror of Justice. Podcast: Skewed Sex Ratios and Dating.
LMS Chairman: Patriarchy and symmetry. Women Dislike Having Female Bosses More Than Men Do - Businessweek. LMS Chairman: How Feminism made men into jerks. Edward Feser: The two faces of tolerance. A User's Guide to Godless Liberalism, Part I. The Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools. The War Men Won't Fight - EpicPew.
21 Signs That Americans May Be The Unhappiest People In The World. Video from NBC Archives: Modernist Bishop James P. Shannon vs. Faithful Peritus Mons. Rudolph G. Bandas. After the Synod: A Church Divided? Political Correctness Reigns: Half of College Students Hide Beliefs From Profs. Denis Dutton. Shock video: Violent mob of topless pro-abort feminists assaults praying men, tries to burn Cathedral. Why Re-Colonization? Commonweal Orientation. Is the Ambiguity in Synod Documents Intentional? Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’ Men Are More Disinclined to Marry Than Ever - A Reflection on a Serious Problem - Community in Mission.
If You Don’t Think Americans Have Lost Our Freedoms, READ THIS. The Right's Reefer Madness. Dominic Bouck, O.P. Study: US Congress Literally Doesn’t Care What You Think. 'Od's Blog - People of the Lie. A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 1) Destroying the family is good for business. Jesuit On Birth Control - A Prophecy FULFILLED. Is It Time for the Benedict Option? Posts on Porn - Waiting for Godot to Leave.
Pornography - Gateway to Communion and Liberation. Men Have Forgotten God. The Impact of Porn - By The Numbers. 351 Studies from 13 Nations Prove Benefits of Households with a Dad, a Mom and Their Kids. Voegelin diagnosed the Neoconservatives’ disease. Theporneffect.com. The Goodness of Adultery, Fornication and Homosex? So What SHOULD We Tell Our Kids About Sex? The Winning Strategy. AMS Calls on U.S. Defense Department to Review Army Reserve Training Material for Anti-Religious Content. What ISIS Really Wants. Fools or Liars? - The Catholic ThingThe Catholic Thing. David Bentley Hart Jumps the Shark: Why Animals Don’t Go to Heaven. Land Of The Free. On Baltimore – waka waka waka. The Economist on the man crisis. The Deadly Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Modernity and the Privatization of Purpose. Malcolm Pollack - This And That. Pulling up Roots From Reality – A Review of a Cogent Analysis of the Post Cartesian West. How the West Really Lost God. Top 10 Legal Rights and Issues Everyone Should Know About. Moldbug’s Gentle Introduction. EXPERIMENTS IN THE LABORATORY OF CONSUMERISM 1959-67. The Largest Vinyl Record Collection in the World. David Brooks to Grads: Be Really Good at Making Commitments. That Time David Brooks Sounded Like A Thomist. 10 Episodes of Television Every Catholic Should Watch - EpicPew. CAN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AVOID THE FATE OF THE WHIGS? Gun Control Charts! The Eponymous Flower: The War Against Reality. THE HERETICAL (OR CHRISTIAN-INFLUENCED) VIEW OF MODERN MARRIAGE. Marriage, Procreation and Historical Amnesia. ‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers. 52 Of The World's Most Widespread Myths And Misconceptions, Debunked.
Crunchy Granola Catholics.