In Pursuit of Virtue – Late November Edition

Happy Belated Thanksgiving, everyone! There is no better earthly reason for a holiday than to celebrate a virtue and reflect on how it can push each of us toward being an unselfish person. During the homily at a Mass led by a family priest this weekend, we reflected on how gratitude is a wellspring of other virtue, while ingratitude (entitlement, as the celebrant noted so aptly) is a direct source of a myriad of vice. There will never be enough hours in the day to thank all of those people that we need to, nor enough life in 10,000 years to pay all of our benefactors back. I suppose it is alright to allow God to do that, though every time I have seen an attitude of gratitude in a person, it has improved them to their core. I hope you had a good holiday and had a chance to reflect on what you are thankful for, as I did, surrounded in family and friends. We are all much more blessed than we will ever realize, but we must always try…

My particular prayer of thanks was for opportunity. The circumstances of the time in which I am alive, my parents who have fostered it, and the gift of free will have allowed me to see the world, become more educated than most people in history, and determine my life’s path in a way few others have been able to. Of course, that can relate to this post. I have more links and information at my fingertips than I could ever hope to have the time to access. But damn it I will try. Here are a few things I am thankful to have run across, contra and feisty as they may be…

• Prediction: Obama wins the 2012 election. A few reasons speak to this: Obama’s approval rating is still at a number that campaigning could push into the positive range. The Republican candidates bicker about trivial issues, and though I have my ear to the ground on politics, I can hardly tell you what differences exist among them (though I can tell you which countries most all of them would like to invade). Finally, Ron Paul. There are rumors of him running as an independent, but even if he does not, his voter base is incredibly loyal. I will be writing him in. If he does not get the candidacy (which he won’t, since the media still ignores him almost toally), he will split the vote for conservatives, and Obama’s win will be easy. 2012, here The One comes…
• The Sokal Affair was an occasion by which a professor was able to show how bias and scientific momentum is prevalent even within peer-reviewed academia. It explains the requirement of absolute orthodoxy that the scientific community maintains on climate change, and indicates that little will change in climate “science” if the momentum continues.
• Malthusians and greenies be damned, here are 5 myths about the world population.
• When you create monetary incentives to do something, the occasion of that something will increase. Food stamps are no exception, and the economy is increasing their prevalence significantly. 
• Organ sales should be legalized. Win-win for everyone, and freedom to boot!
• OWS really doesn’t get it. OBAMA IS NOT YOUR FRIEND, PEOPLE!!! In fact, he is the antithesis of what is good for the people of this country, in more ways than ten.
• I do plenty of Democrat-slamming around here, most conjecturous. Take this one how you will, but it is fact: Democrats are much less likely to go to church than others. The implications of this fact are your own to hash out, but there it is…
• Iran has barely managed to enrich radioactive elements for the purpose of nuclear reactors, which requires somewhere around 10% enrichment. Nuclear weapons take over 90%. The idea of Iran getting a nuke is propaganda, plain and simple.
• History remembers empires most often negatively. We are blessed to be able to gather and speak freely as we do, though the same is not true of those outside our borders that we apply force toward. A future is being created that puts the U.S. on the path of being remembered as a brutal empire, and here are a few reasons why.
• It is claimed that public school teachers are underpaid, despite the fact that they have much more vacation time than other occupations and have some of the most powerful unions in the country. A new study dispels the myth, concluding that they are paid over 52% more than they would be paid on the market. Keep in mind the fact that private school test scores are higher across the board, as well. But no schools very seriously challenge the love of the state that most of us have today, and it is killing the ability to think of solutions other than “Problem? The state will take care of it!”
• Lord Keynes response to the objection that stimulus effects would be very short lived and put an economy at a lower state than before was that “in the long run, we’re all dead.” The CBO admits it today, too: the economy will be worse off in the long run because of our fiscal policy. The theory as to why is that the money spent needs to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the productive economy, which is struggling under the weight of a burst bubble (in our case, the housing bubble). The money is then spent in a place that is necessarily less productive than the sectors of the economy from which it was taken, since it is being spent to do that which the economy did not already do (generally because doing so would have been inefficient). This is why bailouts and stimulus programs do not work over the long term, though they might produce indications of consumption in the short term. They will never work, because they always funnel from the productive areas and put them to unproductive use.
• The obsession with income inequality is Marxist nonsense, and it has nothing to do with standard of living. Tom Woods explains when inequality is wrong:
  
• The FDA’s purpose is to protect us from evil capitalists that will poison our ingestables if they are not restrained. Unfortunately, one aspect of government intervention in the area of the pharmaceutical industry is to push drugs – and companies like Merck are getting rich because of it, despite a significant lack of testing of the products.
• I am thankful that I am a U.S. citizen, as I would hate to be on the receiving end of some of the terror that our hegemonic foreign policy spreads around the world. We can now hit any target in the world within a few hours. Do you feel more safe? Because it is probably making things worse:
  
• I have always thought Wikipedia was a good source, and several studies have determined that it has the accuracy of Britannica Encyclopedia, roughly. Here is an article worth a peruse therein – Urban legends about illegal drugs.
• Police can wear cameras, but in many states you cannot. No comment. Is it more evidence of the militarization of the police that has taken place since 9/11? Or more of a surveillance state that is amassing strength? The TSA is expanding to a police role, and the people are already starting to submit to its absurd integration into more of our lives. It will get far worse before it gets better, that is, if it gets better at all, since the sheeple seem not to care.
• The free market works to deter banks from adding costs to ATM card fees (that were an unintended consequence by legislators’ implementation of the Frank-Dodd Bill) when the masses decide to do something about it. No additional law was needed to stop the addition of charges that happened as a result of laws in the first place. All that was needed was consumer awareness and action. This is how it should be.
• Replace the term “capitalist” with “corporatist” and you’ve got yourself a good theory there about who rules the world!
• It has come up before, but here is another study: While the majority of the country suffers from the economy’s slump, legislators’ wealth is up 25%.
• Babies in the womb can aid the mother’s healing by sending stem cells to her aid. Life is almost as strange as magical fiction, sometimes…
• Freedom to contract is a very important concept in a free society. Dr. Tom Sowell takes the time to address why the lenders of payday loans with high interest rates are not evil, but merely exercising freedom of contract. Then, he takes some time to give a feminist-egalitarian-statist an intellectual beatdown:
  
• Christians should not pray to the state by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
• Having food on the table is another aspect of life in the West that we cannot be thankful enough for. But the government does pay farmers not to grow food, encouraging artificial scarcity. Further, many of the foods that you eat cheaply are financed by tax revenues. Both of these circumstances lead to less food existing for other countries, countries whose inhabitants are starving because of it. We need to end subsidies, and we need to do it now. The food industry’s alliance with government makes Wall Street look like petty amateurs. Not only is it bad economically and internationally, the intrusions such as into sugar production have had horrible health effects since everything is now corn-based.
• Don’t even get me started on the corporatism of the mainstream media and its domination by a few huge companies…
• An ND professor’s genius has made some semblance of sense of the free will of the masses. It is beautiful, I am sure, but I shudder for the ways it could be abused, especially given the fact that the title of the article already presumes the knowledge could be used to control others through force…
• Ayn Rand did not go far enough in her estimations about the state (since she contradicts herself), and she is in error when she says that vice needs be made virtue to advance man’s true potential. Even while some of her conclusions turn out agreeable, that is.
• The 1920s could have wrought another depression, but the government did nothing and we came out very quickly.

3 Responses to “In Pursuit of Virtue – Late November Edition”

1. CompassRose says:

   November 28, 2011 at 11:50 am

   I confess I have not yet read the link on organ sales, but I strongly suspect that Church teaching would be foursquare opposed to this for the following reasons (one could also take the same approach on ABC here, but given your partial rejection of that argument, I'll go this way):

   1) The church is opposed to elective maiming (which is what this falls into as a category). Maiming for the sake of the greater good OF THE CORPORAL BODY is of course acceptable (e.g: amputating a gangrenous limb, infected appendix and the like). Removal of a left arm because one thinks of it as evil is unacceptable, as is trepanning. The overriding logic here is that the body is a gift from God, one which we may NOT dispose of in any way we see fit; we are charged to care for it as a good steward. The entire body of moral teaching supports this conclusion. (this is also why surgical birth control is illicit. . .but let's not get lost in that. . .).

   2) The commercialization of the human body is fraught with slippery-slope peril. I think this sufficiently self-evident that I need not go further.

   And YES, I will read it, but I am in haste right now. . .

   Reply
2. Kev says:

   November 29, 2011 at 7:37 am

   FOR SHAAAAAAAAAAAME. On me! I didn't even think about it. Hmm…

   If it is immoral to harm yourself, of course doing it for the greater good would be wrong still. But is it? What of flagellation? Tattooos? I should have thought about this one more…

   I don't know if that would mean I am against it though. I would see prostitution legalized, but would NEVER advise my kids to do it. Does legality mean morally acceptable? To most people today, probably "yes," though in an ideal world the two would be almost completely unrelated…

   Am I way off, here? Thanks for the thoughts!

   Reply
3. CompassRose says:

   November 29, 2011 at 12:10 pm

   Legality is Caesar. Morality is God. The twain often meet, as well they should. But to say something is legal is not to say it is automatically licit. Given time, I could probably construct a moral argument against taxation, but it is clearly legal.

   Now, we do NOT want to become Kennedy Catholics that say; "My conscience is opposed to this, but I can't let it dictate my public office." The hell you CAN'T, you moral coward!!! (Kennedy, of course) This is why I have a special loathing for Kennedy, Pelosi and the like. It's one thing to silently follow your conscience (a la Thomas More) and entirely another to publicly sell it down the river like those two odious dirtbags.

   Yeah, and as for piercings and tattoos, that is interesting. There is a line there. . .somewhere. But for me, this is more like pornography in the sense of, how do you define it? I dunno. I just know it when I see it. A tattoo in and of itself, just one, no big deal. Some loon whose painted his entire face and turned his earlobe into a car tire IS a big deal, and gone over the line.

   Wherever that line is.

   Finally, the donation say, of a kidney to a needy relative (or anyone) is just that; a donation. There is no commercialization involved. And no moral prescript that says you MUST donate. It's a heroic choice to sacrifice for another, but we're not obligated to do so.

   Reply