Thursday, December 15, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Ben Stein comments on 'Christmas Trees'
"The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary.
My confession:
I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are, Christmas trees.
It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, ‘Merry Christmas’ to me. I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn’t bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu . If people want a creche, it’s just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.
I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat.
Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren’t allowed to worship God ? I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.
In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it’s not funny, it’s intended to get you thinking.
Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her ‘How could God let something like this happen?’ (regarding Hurricane Katrina).. Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, ‘I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?’
In light of recent events… terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.
Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about. And we said okay.
Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.
Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with ‘WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.’
Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.
Are you laughing yet?
Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you’re not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it.
Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.
Pass it on if you think it has merit.
If not, then just discard it…. no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don’t sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in.
My Best Regards, Honestly and respectfully,
Ben Stein"
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Greed, Capitalism, and Hipsters
Via Erick Erickson and Redstate, October 12th (emphasis added by me):
"About the only thing these hippies, hipsters, senior citizens who never grew up, and college trust funders out protesting can agree on is that greed is bad. They want the whole capitalist system pulled up by the root and replaced with something else because of greed.
What they either do not understand or choose to ignore is that greed is not a capitalist invention. Greed exists because people do. Greed exists in capitalist societies, socialist societies, and communist societies.
All men are created equal and all men are born into this world as sinners. One of those sins is greed.
The few people who claim to be without greed are typically greedy for the praise of others or full of pride at not being greedy. Pride is a far worse sin than greed because pride is the root of most every sin.
But of all the varieties of greed out there, what the hippies do not seem to understand is that greed in a capitalist society is far less pernicious than the greed in the systems they advocate, be it socialist or communist.
Greed in a capitalist system takes the form of money — lust for it, the acquisition of it, and the hoarding of it.
Greed in socialist and communist systems takes the form of power. Just as a CEO has a house in the Hamptons while his workers make vastly less than he does, the Politburo member has a dacha on the Black Sea while his constituents wait in a bread line half starved.
In a capitalist system, one can take a risk, dare to compete with the greedy 1%’er, and quite possibly become one of those 1%’ers. And when unable to do it alone, a group of people can pool their money together and compete with the rich.
In the communist system these kids are advocating, the powerless cannot compete with the powerful. And it is hard to pool power together to compete against power, because while a CEO might be able to pull off a hostile take over of your company, the greedy communist can kill you with his power. One can escape a CEO of one company for the CEO of another company or become their own CEO. One must go under barbed wire and dodge bullets to escape their communist masters.
What these dirty urban hipsters want is a form of greed themselves. They don’t want the rich capitalist to have his money. The hipsters covet power. They are greedy in their own way for their own power. They want the power to set the salaries of the CEO and determine, based on their own sense of fair play, what is and is not fair and what is and is not just.
What the hipsters want is far more dangerous than what the top 1% in this country have — the hipsters want the power to control all our lives through force of government. The capitalists just want to sell us things.
There are very few, if any, capitalist systems that tend toward totalitarianism because of competition and the ability of money to flow to others as monopoly enterprises become inefficient and collapse. Socialist and communist systems tend to become totalitarian over time because power, unlike money, is much more easily hoarded.
In a capitalist system there is greed. But that greed necessitates the capitalist produce a good or service the rest of us want. And we can always say no. There is no saying no to the communists.
Communists, socialists, and capitalists all have poor people in their systems. But the odds are greater that more people are poorer and hungrier the further removed from capitalism they go. And in all, there is greed."
For more by Erick Erickson, visit RedState.com
Saturday, September 3, 2011
We Need MORE People!! - 'The Real Population Bomb'
When you hear someone complaining about "overpopulation," reach for your wallet, because you're about to be had.
Via CatholicLane.com's Colleen Carroll Campbell:
In 1968, Stanford biologist Paul R. Erlich opened his bestselling book, “The Population Bomb,” with this declaration: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can be done to prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….”
Erlich’s doomsday scenarios never came true. Nor did his wish for a strict population control program in the U.S., one enforced “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” Today, demographers fret about a catastrophe Erlich never saw coming: a global birth dearth that threatens to transform much of the world into an economically depressed geriatric ward.
But don’t tell that to Simon Ross of Britain’s Optimum Population Trust, a population-control group that recently blasted millionaire celebrities David and Victoria Beckham as “bad role models” for welcoming their fourth child into the world.
“One or two children are fine,” Ross told Britain’s Observer last month, “but three or four are just being selfish.”
Father of four Al Gore apparently agrees — at least, when it comes to other people’s families. In June, he touted “fertility management” as an answer to our global woes and recommended that we ‘stabilize the population” and “empower women” by discouraging baby-making.
Nancy Pelosi, a mother of five, shares Gore’s enthusiasm for limiting the size of other people’s families. In 2009, she defended the inclusion of taxpayer funding for birth control in her party’s proposed $825 billion stimulus package because, she said, “contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”
Pelosi’s remarks sparked criticism from many fiscal experts, who noted that a nation’s economic strength depends on maintaining a workforce large and productive enough to pay its bills — including bills for those social welfare programs that Pelosi and her colleagues love to create and expand. If Pelosi gets her wish and America’s birth rate drops precipitously, who will pay the debts that Washington politicians are racking up these days? And who will support tomorrow’s retirees if there are too few young workers to keep Social Security afloat and too few children and grandchildren to provide privately for the nation’s exploding population of elders?
It’s true that global population remains on the rise: We are expected to hit the 7 billion mark later this year and the world’s population will grow by about a third over the next 40 years. But as demographers such as Phillip Longman and Nicholas Eberstadt have noted, that growth will be driven by declines in mortality and an increase in elders, not children. And it will not continue forever. Both Longman and Eberstadt predict that falling birth rates eventually will translate into worldwide population declines — potentially irreversible ones — that Longman says may prove more drastic than the growth rates that so alarmed activists like Erlich in the first place.
The possibility of such demographic decline may sound appealing in theory: Fewer babies mean more wealth for the rest of us, right? Not so fast, says Longman.
“Population growth is a major source of economic growth,” he writes in his 2004 book, “The Empty Cradle.” “More people create more demand for the products capitalists sell, and more supply of the labor capitalists buy. Economists may be able to construct models of how economies could grow amidst a shrinking population, but in the real world it has never happened and businessmen know it.”
Businessmen may know it, but too many politicians and anti-natal activists do not. So they continue to brandish their tattered copies of “The Population Bomb” and harangue parents of large families for contributing to what they consider the ultimate form of environmental pollution: human life.
In their zeal to preserve the planet from the scourge of babies, these activists overlook the fact that humans are problem solvers and producers as well as consumers. They forget that the solution to poverty is not to eradicate poor people, but to use human creativity, innovation and solidarity to create a broader distribution of the Earth’s resources and to reform the corrupt political structures that stop citizens in developing nations from accessing basic necessities.
Although Erlich’s acolytes may be hopelessly locked in the 1960s when it comes to their population views, more demographers and economists are recognizing the truth our ancestors knew well: that children are not burdens but blessings, keys to our future prosperity and guarantors of our social safety net.
For a nation on the brink of insolvency, that’s reason enough to congratulate the Beckhams and the millions of parents like them who are making sacrifices today to raise up a new generation that will benefit all of us tomorrow.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
What Do Superheroes Tell Us About Ourselves?
"Why are superhero movies so popular? Are comic books simply another reliable source of familiar pop-culture franchise fodder, along with TV shows, cartoons and anything else we grew up with? Another source of escapist spectacle to divert us from the sorrows of a world of terrorism, war and economic woe?
Partly, yes. But superheroes also fill a cultural niche that belonged 60 years ago to Westerns and 25 years ago to Star Wars. Superheroes have become a major strand in today’s pop mythology — stylized, larger-than-life stories about heroes whose adventures give shape to ideas about the world we live in and how we live in it, about who we are and who we aspire to be.
What do today’s superhero movies tell us about ourselves? Among other things, we’re more skeptical these days about heroes and heroism. In contrast to the stoic confidence of the typical Western hero — or even of Christopher Reeve’s Superman, who as late as 1978 could unabashedly say, “I’m here to fight for truth, justice and the American way” — today’s heroes have feet of clay and have to grow into their heroic roles.
Bad-boy cockiness and womanizing are common weaknesses. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in the popular Iron Man movies created the template here, and Green Lantern’s Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), an irresponsible, self-destructive skirt-chaser, comes off like Stark’s screw-up kid brother. The movie introduces Hal with a one-night-stand/morning-after bedroom scene overtly reminiscent of a similar incident early in Iron Man, though without the pointed moral critique of that film’s treatment.
The young Charles Xavier of X-Men: First Class, played by James McAvoy (The Conspirator), isn’t nearly as flawed a character. Altruistic and idealistic, he already exhibits some of the nobility of the older Xavier, played by Patrick Stewart in previous X-Men movies. Yet he’s also brash and somewhat lacking in self-awareness, as well as being a rather flagrant ladies’ man who isn’t above using his telepathic powers when hitting on women.
Arrogance and recklessness are major themes in Thor. From the outset, the son of Odin (Chris Hemsworth) revels in the acclaim of his fellow immortals and surreptitiously leads a foolhardy attack against Asgard’s enemies against his father’s explicit orders and desire for peace. This temerity leads Odin to exile Thor to Earth to learn humility.
On the other hand, not only is Thor refreshingly free from the womanizing weaknesses of other heroes, its hero treats the film’s love interest, Jane (Natalie Portman), with unfashionable courtesy and respect, going so far as to chivalrously kiss her hand twice — a mark, presumably, of Thor’s noble Asgardian upbringing. (Despite this, the film fails to establish an emotional bond between Thor and Jane, and the climactic smooch that she plants on his lips falls flat. But that kiss is as far as it goes between them, and he doesn’t initiate it.)
Captain America’s Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) benefits even more from his cultural milieu, embodying the ideals of the “Greatest Generation”: responsibility, modesty, respect, fortitude. Like Thor, he treats women with respect, though it’s true that prior to the “super-soldier serum” that transforms him into Captain America, the 98-pound weakling Steve hadn’t had much opportunity to be a ladies’ man.
Judging from Thor and Captain America, we can appreciate heroes who are gentlemen, not playboys. Perhaps audiences just find them easier to accept when they aren’t products of our own time and place. Gallantry is a virtue we as a culture can admire from afar but can’t relate to; with great power comes great temptation, and many people more or less assume that men like Hal Jordan, Tony Stark, and to an extent the young Charles Xavier probably won’t fare much better than Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods or Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Xavier’s story is set during the Kennedy presidency.) Yet we can imagine, and appreciate, gallantry in a historical or mythic context. Perhaps this indicates some awareness that our cultural standards or expectations are too low.
Perhaps Captain America offers the best depiction of what makes for a good hero: being a good person in the first place. (Cap’s old-fashioned virtue hasn’t hurt him at the box office, either: Captain America has already outgrossed Green Lantern as well as X-Men: First Class, though it may not be able to catch Thor.) In this summer of raunchy comedies, it’s gratifying that audiences are still interested in a hero who is (along with Superman) one of the genre’s biggest Boy Scouts.
Like others of his generation, Steve’s character was tempered in the forge of the Great Depression as well as the shadow of world war. Next year’s Avengers movie will throw this Greatest Generation warrior into the mix with the Tony Stark generation. What will that show us about ourselves and the world we live in?
I’m almost afraid to find out."
For more cultural commentary, visit NCRegister.com.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Caesar Must Obey God
An article from Fr. Frank Pavone, of 'Priests For Life':
An important theme of Old Testament history is the way in which God's people Israel related to the other nations surrounding them. The people of the covenant were not to follow the idolatrous practices of those nations. Israel, after all, had the benefit of God's revealed law. The other nations did not.
One thing that the Israelites wanted to imitate, however, was the fact that other nations had a king. At one point they demanded of Samuel the prophet, "Give us a king!" Upon consulting the Lord, Samuel was told, "They have asked for a king---Give them a king." But God also gave this essential warning: both the people and their king have a king in heaven! The well-being of the entire nation depends on the obedience which both the king and his people give to the King of heaven. (See 1 Samuel 8:1-22 and 12:13-15.)
The Lord Jesus expressed the same theme in Matthew 22: 15-22. When asked whether taxes should be paid to Caesar, Jesus asked whose image and inscription was on the coin. "Caesar's," came the answer---The Lord then said, "Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God" (Mt. 22:21).
The coin belongs to Caesar, for it bears Caesar's image. Human beings belong to God, for they bear God's image! The implication of the passage is that "What belongs to God" includes Caesar himself! Caesar must obey God.
Both the passage from 1 Samuel and from Matthew's Gospel teach what the Second Vatican Council commented upon at length, namely, that separation of Church and state does not mean separation of God and state. If you separate the state from God, the State disintegrates. While the Church does not have a political mission, she nevertheless has a political responsibility: to bear witness to those moral truths without which the common good---which is the very purpose for which governments are instituted---cannot survive.
These moral truths are basic and go beyond the bounds of any denominational beliefs. Because they are truths, they must shape public policy.
Not only do individuals have a duty to obey God, but so do governments.
Christians have a duty to be politically active: To register and vote, to lobby and educate candidates and elected officials, and to speak up about the issues that affect the common good. The US bishops have stated it beautifully: "In the Catholic tradition, citizenship is a virtue; participation in the political process is an obligation. We are not a sect fleeing the world, but a community of faith called to renew the earth." The Church does not set up the voting booths, but when we go into the voting booths, we don't cease to be members of the Church! If we don't shape public policy according to moral truths, why do we believe that moral truth at all?
Now is the time, now is the challenge. No longer are we to think of our religion as a purely "private matter." Christ taught in public and He was crucified in public. Now risen from the dead, He places us in the public arena, with the commission to make disciples of all nations (See Mt. 28:18-20). May we not fail Him or our nation.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
'Still the Only Solution to the World's Problems'
Dennis Prager in 'National Review':
There is only one solution to the world’s problems, only one prescription for producing a near-heaven on earth.
It is 3,000 years old.
And it is known as the Ten Commandments.
Properly understood and applied, the Ten Commandments are really all humanity needs to make a beautiful world. While modern men and women, in their hubris, believe that they can and must come up with new ideas in order to make a good world, the truth is there is almost nothing new to say.
If people and countries lived by the Ten Commandments, all the great moral problems would disappear.
Or, to put it another way, all the great evils involve the violation of one or more of the Ten Commandments.
Here is the case in brief for the Ten Commandments (using the Jewish enumeration which slightly differs from the Protestant and Catholic):
1. I am the Lord your God
There are moral atheists, and there are immoral believers, but there is no chance for a good world based on atheism. Ultimately, a godless and religion-less society depends on people’s hearts to determine right from wrong, and that is a very weak foundation. Plenty of people have died in history in the name of God. But far more have been killed, tortured, and deprived of liberty in the name of humanity and progress or some other post-Judeo-Christian value. Religion gave us an Inquisition and gives us suicide terrorists, but the death of God gave us Nazism and Communism which, in one century alone, slaughtered more than 100 million people. All the founders of the United States — yes, all — knew that a free society can survive only if its citizens believe themselves to be morally accountable to God.
2. Do not have other gods.
The worship of false gods leads to evil. When anything but the God of creation and morality is worshiped, moral chaos ensues. No one is godless. Either people worship God or they worship other gods — nature, intelligence, art, education, beauty, the environment, Mother Earth, power, fame, pleasure, the state, the fuhrer, the party, progress, humanity. The list is almost endless. And no matter how noble (false gods are often noble), when they become ends in themselves, they lead to evil.
3. Do not take God’s name in vain.
People have misinterpreted this commandment. They think it prohibits saying something like, “Oh, my God, what a home run!” The Hebrew literally means “do not carry” the name of the Lord in vain. In other words, we are forbidden from doing evil in God’s name. Only when thus understood does the rest of the Commandment make sense — that God will not “cleanse” (i. e, forgive) the person who does this. Thus, the Islamist who slits an innocent’s throat while shouting “Allahu Akbar” is the perfect example of the individual who carries God’s name in vain and who cannot be forgiven. These people not only murder their victims, they murder God’s name. For that reason, they do more evil than the atheist who murders.
4. Keep the Sabbath day and make it holy.
Leaving the world one day a week and elevating it above the others is the greatest vehicle to family harmony and to harmony with friends. One day a week without video games, without parents leaving to go to work or to do their own thing on the computer forces parents and children to spend time together and to actually talk. It even encourages couples to make love. It also weakens the institution of slavery. If even your servants get a day off because God commands it, that means you do not have absolute control over them.
5. Honor your father and mother.
The first thing every totalitarian and authoritarian movement does is try to undermine parental authority. That is why it is dangerous even in a democracy. Take our universities, for example. Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president, said that “the use of the university is to make young men as unlike their fathers as possible.” And that is exactly what colleges have been doing for over half a century. Instead of searching for truth and beauty, the universities have been alienating American youth from their fathers’ — and the Founding Fathers’ — values.
6. Do not murder.
If people lived by this commandment alone, the world would enter a heavenly state. At the same time, the commandment has been widely misunderstood. The Hebrew original prohibits murder, not killing. By mistranslating the Hebrew as “Do not kill,” too many modern Westerners have been taught that pacifism is moral and noble. It is neither. It is an accessory to murder, since it prevents pacifists from doing the only thing that stops mass murder — killing the murderers. The Nazi death camps were liberated by soldiers whose job was to kill murderers, not by pacifists or “peace activists.”
7. Do not commit adultery.
Observance or even near-observance of this commandment alone would end the formation of the underclass. No amount of state aid can do what marriage and commitment to a spouse do to end poverty and almost all social pathologies.
8. Do not steal.
This commandment prohibits the stealing of people, the stealing of property, and the stealing of anything that belongs to another. The first prohibition alone, if obeyed, would have rendered the slave trade impossible.
Protecting the sanctity of private property makes moral civilization possible. That is why the recent riots in London should frighten every citizen of the U.K. and the West generally. Just as the burning of books leads to the burning of people, so, too, the smashing of windows and the looting of property leads eventually to the smashing of heads.
The rampant violation of this commandment by the governments of Africa is the primary reason for African poverty. Corruption, not Western imperialism, is the root of Africa’s backwardness.
9. Do not bear false witness.
Lying is the root of nearly all major evils. All totalitarian states are based on lies. Had the Nazis not lied about Jews, there would not have been a Holocaust. Only people who believed that all Jews, including babies, were vermin, could, for example, lock hundreds of Jews into a synagogue and burn them alive. That similar lies are told about Jews today by Arab governments and by the Iranian state should awaken people to the Nazi-like threat that Islamic anti-Semitism poses.
10. Do not covet your neighbor’s spouse, property, etc.
The cultivation of class warfare — i.e., the cultivation of coveting what richer citizens legitimately own — inevitably leads to violating the other commandments, most particularly the ones that prohibit stealing and murdering.
There is only one way to achieve a Great Society, and it is not by creating a massive state that doles out other citizens’ money. It is by cultivating citizens who try to live by these Ten Commandments. They are as relevant today as they were 3,000 years ago.
Visit Dennis Prager at dennisprager.com or read his work in National Review.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
The Truth About The West Bank
Monday, July 18, 2011
Fr. James Farfaglia comments on The Mystery of Evil
Friday, July 15, 2011
"COEXIST"... until they try to exterminate you.
Pop quiz:
Can you name the most malicious, anti-semitic society of the last century?
If you answered "the Nazis," you may be wrong according to recent research.
Here's the story from The Blaze:
"According to a survey conduced by pollster Stanley Greenberg, 73 percent of Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza say they believe Jews should be killed “wherever they hide” — be it behind stones, or trees — per their Islamic Hadith.
80 percent of Palestinians also agree with yet another passage from the Hadith also contained in the Hamas Charter about the need to enlist Arab and Islamic battalions to stamp out the Jews."
David Horowitz has more to say on this matter as well:
"I have long said that Palestinians are more genocidal than the inhabitants of Nazi Germany because Hitler hid his plans for the Final Solution as he calculated that Germans were too civilized to embrace the evil he intended. Muslim leaders shout it from the rooftops — and now we have concrete evidence that they do so because they know their followers support it."
Now, I don't pretend for a minute to know the whole story here. I know as well as anyone that statistics rarely reveal the whole story, and that adjusting for specific language can dramatically alter the results of a given study.
That having been said...So... how about that two-state solution?