Pope In An Intellectual Wilderness

Capitalism, Christianity, Communism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intellectualism, The West

I once read a papal encyclical: John Paul’s. With his 1998 encyclical, Pope John Paul sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness. Who else spoke with unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Pope Francis. He’s too dumb to consider such abstractions.

That Jorge Bergoglio is shaping up to be a bit of a bumpkin is no surprise. He hails from the Latin American strain of Catholicism. And he, Pope Francis, is threatening to undo what Pope John labored to achieve: “steer liberation theology away from the influence of Marxist social analysis.”

In the 2015 encyclical, the Holy See saddles the richest nations with the blame for the despoliation of the earth, when the truth is that the developed world’s advanced technology has helped clean-up the atmosphere, the oceans and the waterways. It is the developing nations—China, India—that despoil the earth and its creatures most. The earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” not in Canada, Germany, or the US (except for where illegal immigrants tread: see “Illegal Immigration’s Negative Impact on the Environment”).

The love for the earth, its creatures and our pets (parrots, dogs, cats) is a distinctly Western sensibility.

The Catholic Crisis Magazine can’t help but take a swipe at the anti-intellectualism of this pope’s “close advisors”:

… the hortatory Cardinal Maradiaga of Honduras said [this] with ill-tempered diction: “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.” From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors. And that’s putting it kindly.

Recommended reading:

“On The Line: The Impact of Immigration Policy on Wild Life and on the Arizona Borderlands”

“Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises” By George Reisman (The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics)

Israel: A Quality Society, Not A Suicide Pact

Israel, Judaism & Jews, Terrorism

“Ten Hours of Walking in Israel as a Woman in Hijab” (via Target Liberty) serves as a remarkable testament to the quality and tolerance of Israeli society. So conclusive and vivid is this video depiction that words pale by comparison. It is a rather long clip. My tolerance for text-less material taking time to get through is limited. But, here, a picture in time is indeed worth a thousand words.

Editor Robert Wenzel disagrees, writing this at TL:

In commerce, there is peace.
What Corey Gil-Shuster didn’t film is what occurs at Israeli government checkpoints.

Checkpoints? The reason there is “peace in commerce” is because those manning checkpoints care about the security of their Israeli countrymen, Jew and Muslim, to ensure that hijab-swaddled individuals do not have vests of explosives under their garb.

Would you feel at ease in a cinema or a supermarket where hijabs went unchecked?

Kudos to the Israelis.

A Candidate To ‘Kick The Crap Out Of All The Politicians’

Business, Celebrity, Crime, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Media, Politics

“A Candidate To ‘Kick The Crap Out Of All The Politicians’” is the current column, now on The Unz Review. An excerpt:

Since he announced for president, real-estate tycoon Donald Trump has distinguished himself from the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls.

Trump claims he opposed the invasion of Iraq. If this is true, it would make him better than almost all his Republican competitors, who mulishly continue to justify the most disastrous military campaign in American history (besides the War Between The States).

Decisive and to the point was Trump about liberalizing ties with Cuba: “It’s time!” he stated. The man who wrote “The Art of The Deal,” however, would rather a “deal” with Cuba favored ordinary Americans and Cubans, and would know how to “deliver the goods.”

We inhabit a world of managed, not free, trade. Trump is no rent-seeking political rat like every other Republican competing for the throne (besides Ben Carson, who is similarly motivated). Better than any self-interested politician, Trump can probably negotiate winning deals on all Treaties in Force, to the benefit of Americans.

“I’m really rich,” Trump swanked disarmingly. Being independently and stupendously wealthy means that this American individualist can continue to march to his own drumbeat; be as blunt and bold as he wants and pander to nobody.

“His fellow GOP presidential candidates,” explained Trump, are “totally controlled by their donors, by the lobbyists and by the special interests. If we have another politician, this country’s going down. … I’ve watched the politicians, I’ve dealt with them all my life. They will never make America great again. They don’t even have a chance.”

In the productive, non-parasitical economy, Trump has been enormously successful. Career politicians have created the hot mess that is America. The Founding Fathers wanted regular citizens to serve the public, not live off it as a vocation. Such upstanding Americans were to return to their careers after serving.

The consummate homo economicus, Trump is a rational actor in the market place. Unlike the rest of the GOP contenders who’re guided by political calculations; Trump speaks like a man to whom rational economic choices are second nature. …

… Read the rest. “A Candidate To ‘Kick The Crap Out Of All The Politicians’” is the current column, now on The Unz Review.

UPDATED: Dylann Roof, Evil Coward (Old South African and Rhodesian Flags)

Crime, History, Racism, South-Africa

Hate-crime perps are manifestly stupid, venal and cowardly. Dylann Storm Roof, 21, is no different. For an hour, he sat among peace-loving Christians who welcomed him into the their Charleston church without hesitation. Having sat in on a lesson in scriptures and soaked up the love, Roof then got up and sprayed the devoted with bullets, killing nine.

In a dredged-up image, Roof is seen wearing pins of the “flags of apartheid-era South Africa and colonial British-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.” “Incongruously” so, quips the Afrikaner activist site Praag.org—incongruous because the Afrikaners fought the British colonizers.

Roof is as ignorant as the MM (malfunctioning media) and its accomplices (Southern Poverty Center), who are attempting to further marginalize the South African and Rhodesian white minorities (most of the latter have been purged by black “freedom fighters”) by associating the alleged killer with the once internationally flown flags of these defunct countries.

An example of the ignorant smearing of entire societies as criminal enterprises is the dumb riff by Vox.com. (Don’t expect the writer to know that before Mugabe, Rhodesian blacks were the best educated Africans, even surpassing Indians. Under Mugabe, they’re starving.)

In any event, Dylann Roof is one “evil, not ill,” criminal. But so is the media and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

UPDATE (6/19): US “news” media have been depicting the Old South African and Rhodesian flags as the equivalent of Nazi insignia. Sean Hannity has just mentioned the display of these flags as a predictor of a disturbed mind, on the verge of an eruption. This is such rubbish. These anchors would think nothing of flying the ANC’s old flag.