Thanks for making our point.

It appears that my hopes and suspicions about the effectiveness of Bloomberg's new anti-gun group might have been on target. Check this out. Excerpt:

The ad was released to coincide with a congressional hearing aimed at expanding federal firearm prohibitions pertaining to misdemeanor convictions and restraining orders. Yet the reaction to many who saw the ad makes clear that it does nothing so much as illustrate the limitations of those measures.

As the “ex” pounds on the door, he yells, “This is my house!” However unwittingly, the producers of the ad thus establish that the man would almost certainly be prohibited under current federal law from possessing a firearm, insofar as he cohabitated with the woman, and she had obtained an order of protection against him.

In any event, as far as the ad is concerned, the order appeared to provoke the man, rather than restrain him; the police could not respond in time to enforce it; and whatever legal repercussions the man faced for possessing a firearm illegally were manifestly not a deterrent. How this argues for the expansion of any of these measures is unclear.

On the other hand, the ad does make a rather compelling argument for the proposition that the only thing that could have saved the woman once the man burst through the door was her own exercise of the right to armed self-defense.

Reminds me of this Glock commercial. Which has sort of a silly ending. I'd much rather see the dude take a bullet and then bleed out while the ambulance was on its way. But that's just me.

The anti-gun lobby is purely political. They don't care about current laws on the books one bit, and their mindless followers don't even know what they are.

"It's not even close."

I feel somewhat like I'm waking up from a weird dream, an alternate reality. I've been driving to western Michigan and back every week for five months. It has kept me extremely busy. I wanted to spend every spare moment with my wife and kids and my weird hobbies which have nothing to do with scribbling on the internets. Now this contract is ending and I have all these thoughts in my head, like puddles after the rain, from the first half of 2014 which I never commented on here, though I wanted to. So forgive me if some of this stuff is "old news", old by our modern news-cycle standards at any rate.

Here's the first thing I wanted to remark on. Yes, Bloomberg is quite a thing. And obviously his new anti-gun project is something which I detest and I hope turns ultimately into a huge waste of time, money and resources. So I was going to opine that I suspect my hope is correct. There are plenty of Democrats who detest gun-grabbing and I believe this group is playing to a rather small gallery.

But when I got to the last two paragraphs, I thought I'd wandered into an amateur comedy club. The focus of my derision shifted as Bloomberg went full retard into religion:

Mr. Bloomberg was introspective as he spoke, and seemed both restless and wistful. When he sat down for the interview, it was a few days before his 50th college reunion. His mortality has started dawning on him, at 72. And he admitted he was a bit taken aback by how many of his former classmates had been appearing in the “in memoriam” pages of his school newsletter.

But if he senses that he may not have as much time left as he would like, he has little doubt about what would await him at a Judgment Day. Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, he said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

Stand back, St. Peter! The former Mayor of New York is heading straight in!

Al E. quipped that two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. Then he added the disclaimer that he wasn't sure about the universe. I'm wondering something. If you could earn a place in Heaven―and I don't believe you can―would you be able to if you weren't even sure Heaven existed? In other words, you weren't sure there was a God to be worshiped on earth? And if everyone in Heaven knows everything there is to be known as perfectly as each of their minds can grasp knowledge, will there be interviews at the Pearly Gates? Even with people as important as Michael Bloomberg? Possibly; journalists and video crews who make it there might not know how to do anything else.

I hope Bloomberg does go to Heaven, but I don't think he'll like it. There won't be any government and no ability to run anything or ban anything. There will be smokers there, no doubt, and obese people like St. Thomas Aquinas and plenty of firing of guns for fun, since they won't be able to hurt anybody. (Trust me on this last point.) But maybe Bloomberg's first meeting with G. K. Chesterton would be worth capturing on video.

"All bad writers are in love with the epic."

A well-read friend sent this quote from Earnest Hemingway during an email conversation about so-called Mystical Journalism. I'm chuckling—I'm afraid I can't write that phrase with a straight face.

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

OK, the friend was Pikkumatti. The quote is from Death in the Afternoon. With regard to false epic quality, Hemingway could have exhibited that by titling his famous book about Spanish bullfighting Death in the Afternoon and Me.

Obama screws the CIA

Remember the mock outrage about the Valerie Plame non-story? Well check this out from Redstate. Excerpt:

It appears Barack Obama inexperience and amateurishness has just started bonfires on the bridges connecting him to the American intelligence community and delivered a huge, HUGE psychological win to Al Qaeda.

People tell me the President’s rush to acknowledge the attack on the CIA in Afghanistan and mourn the deaths openly, publicly, and via press release is a huge no no. The CIA and greater intelligence community would prefer not to have the attention put on them. Additionally, because the President took the time to draft a blanket statement focused on the CIA in general instead of individually and more privately focusing on the families of the victims, it acknowledges the CIA’s work in Afghanistan, acknowledges that the attack has an impact on the CIA, and gives the terrorists a new recruiting tool — “you too can cause America to publicly mourn the loss of their spies.”

To you and me this may not seem like a big deal. But I’m told this is hugely significant and shows just how out of touch the Obama administration is with the intelligence community. I’m told that no other President has issued such blanket statements of public mourning directed toward an attack on the CIA and thereby having the White House itself confirming an attack on our intelligence community.

Then he links to this piece of devastation. It turns out that Obama had been at least to some degree warned about the Christmas sausage bomber incident. Excerpt:

Presidential aides are concerned that Obama will somehow be unfairly accused of dropping the ball on the fight against terrorists in Yemen—a country where, in fact, the evidence suggests that Obama, as early as last summer, ordered a significant increase in U.S. intelligence activity. In the weeks before the Christmas incident, several U.S. officials have told NEWSWEEK, Obama authorized a major expansion in U.S. intelligence, military, and material support to Yemen's government—an escalation that some officials acknowledge could be characterized as a new covert war. But Obama's public and private actions in expanding counterterrorism operations in Yemen may not help him avoid answering further questions about what intelligence agencies told him—and didn't tell him—about possible threats to the U.S. homeland in the days and weeks before the alleged underpants bomber boarded his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Italics mine. Because President Bush was never unfairly accused of anything, was he?

John Zmirak on Human Dignity and Current Debates

The hat tip goes to our friend Carol McKinley for pointing out this excellent piece by John Zmirak. It reminds me of another one of his articles which I linked to regarding "misguided compassion". Those Zmirak skewers here are no less misguided than the Earl of Longford; here's his initial characterization:

When asked, "What's your favorite thing about being a Catholic?" some well-instructed souls will cite the Eucharist, while others will speak of their devotion to Our Lady.... Reading what many Catholics have to say on economics and politics lately, it seems to me that if these folks answered honestly, they'd have to say: "Being Catholic gives me a high-minded rhetoric of noble-sounding values, a sense of moral superiority, and unrestricted license to speak and write as a crank."

I really beg everyone to read this entire thing. John Zmirak is not a Catholic blogger, but a Catholic writer, and a well-informed Catholic writer, not a hack theologian or amateur apologist. Plus he's always funny, which makes his writing pleasant, and he's always succinct, which makes reading him worthwhile. Following are some excerpts and my own short commentary on his insights which are rooted in the meaning of what the Church proclaims about Human Dignity and not based on chimerical vagaries bearing titles like "living wage" or "economic justice".

I've had my disagreements in the past with the learned Thomas E. Woods Jr., but as someone who has taken the trouble to read seriously in the discipline of economics (I wrote a book on the subject in the light of Catholic social teaching), I share with him a violent frustration at Catholics who grandstand about "distributive justice" and offer Rube Goldberg schemes for re-engineering our country's economy, without knowing or caring how wealth is produced in the first place. Our country's relatively recent, hard-won, and fragile prosperity they treat as if it had descended in pennies from heaven, and the only question now is how to divide up the windfall fairly. All property and all labor, they take for granted, is owned in common. It may suit the State to allow you to hold a "title" to your house, or keep some portion of your wages. But fundamentally you belong to the U.S. Congress, just as a Russian serf and every stick of furniture in his house was the property of the tsar. Left-leaning bishops who wish to make this point note that Creation was given to man in common; they leave out the fact that our labor is our own, and that taxes enforced by the threat of imprisonment can mount up to a kind of slavery. (Medieval serfs paid only 10 percent of their wealth to their feudal lords; you and I pay up to 50 percent when federal, state, local, Social Security, and sales taxes are added up -- which means that half our time is spent working with a bayonet at our backs.)

This is why whenever I hear the phrase "giving back to the community" I intone the same mantra: "I gave at the office."

What's missing from these people's happy, totalitarian picture is something fundamental to the West, a fruit of Christian culture that it took Vatican II (yes, you read me correctly) for the Church to fully recognize: the fact of human dignity. In the early Church, up through the first writings of St. Augustine, the Church asked only for liberty of worship, confident that the gospel would sway people on its own. In his later years, frustrated by the intransigence of the Donatist heretics, Augustine changed his mind and asked the now-Christian emperors to "compel them to come in." Building on Augustine's later work, many popes and countless Christian kings used the coercive power of the State to persecute heretics -- arguing that the free will of these individuals was outweighed by the danger to the souls they might lead to hell. Besides, they said in a phrase that became a little bit infamous, "Error has no rights." Since no one has a right to do what's wrong, how can those with false beliefs have a right to hold and practice an inaccurate religion? Do they have the right to lie about the gospel?

At Vatican II, the Council Fathers were more concerned about the very real persecution of Christians throughout the Communist bloc than the duty of (now-deposed) Catholic monarchs to uphold orthodoxy. They reframed the question as follows: Error may have no rights, but the person holding the error does. In Dignitatis Humanae, the Council teaches that the dignity of the human person forbids religious coercion by the State. Pope John Paul II was not, I think, misguided when he apologized for the actions of his predecessors that violated this precept.

Now—this is the key paragraph, and it might provide a dividing line for modern day American Conservative Catholics and modern day American Liberal Catholics on issues such as health insurance reform, wage laws, the environment and the role of government in general:

Nor does human dignity stop at the church door. Throughout the Catechism, the Church insists on the rights of the human person to liberty of thought, association, and action—within the limits of justice and the countervailing rights of one's fellow men. Only when our actions violate justice—not charity, but justice—is it right to use the violent, coercive power of the State to curb and restrict them. Indeed, it is only justice that can be enforced by the State. Mandatory charity is as moot as mandatory faith or hope.

If you have a problem with this, go back and read Dignitatis Humanae again, the first paragraph should do in a pinch if you are short on time.

Then he concludes beautifully by explaining the prudential nature of the current debate. I think Zmirak has explained Pope John Paul II's apologies better than just about anyone else I've heard on that oft-misunderstood topic.

Any Roman Catholic decrying the government's use of coercive tactics—the torturing of terrorism suspects comes to mind—should extend their disapproval to the kind of economic coercion imposed by the kind of out-of-control government redistribution being discussed and proposed currently in our nation. It consitiutes an affront to the same human dignity possessed by all, only on a much larger scale.

Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage.

Great comment thread over at Vox Nervosa

More inadvertant comedy from big Catholic Obama supporter, Morning's Minion. Come join the pile-on.

Even if you can't bear to comment on a topic that's as old and stale as Arnold's Hummer joke, the comment thread is a great read. It's also more evidence of why Vox Nervosa can only be taken seriously about 3% of the time. I don't know why Mr. Minion doesn't just tape a kick me sign to his back.
Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage

Bush tried

Lew Rockwell points out that Ron Paul predicted the Fannie/Freddie crash.

Wow, 2003. What a prophet! Ron Paul is usually right on financial issues and that's why I'm glad he's in congress.

But predictably, Mr. Rockwell doesn't mention that the Bush Administration foresaw what was coming an tried to stop it also. In 2003.

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

...but was thwarted by Dems such as Barney and Melvin who threw out the timeless and well-beloved canard, "Bush is just twying to huwt to poow people!!"

"These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

"I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing," Mr. Watt said.