Benedict Option Endorsed by National Newspaper

...or, I don't know, is The Onion international? Either way, a wise Soup Ladeler interviewed by the premium press outlet had this to say about Christianity's future with young, cool people:

“Yeah, but as soon as the church is obscure and hip again they’ll come rushing back.”

Some people try to make Christianity more relevant by accepting various disordered yet fashionable lifestyles like homosexuality. Other people try to make it more relevant by withdrawing from society and into a to-be-defined type of bunker. One might be morally worse, but neither ends up working.

Carson Holloway on the Benedict Option

Catholics are practical people, even though we have some strange beliefs and practices. Carson Holloway provides practical advice about the Benedict Option and how the special snowflakes who live in the Benedict Option compounds will have to be protected from the wolves in our society even as the Hobbits in Tolkien's Shire were protected by his Dúnedain. Excerpt:

At the same time, I don’t see how, realistically, the Benedict option can be an option that excludes political activism for American Catholics. That activism will have to continue, for a couple of reasons.

First, Catholics will have to do what they can to help the larger society as long as they seem to have any chance of success. To take the most obvious example, Catholics cannot responsibly withdraw from politics while there is still some chance of effecting change with regard to abortion. If abortion kills innocent human beings, then Catholic cannot just shrug it off and walk away from the grubby business of politics. They will have to stay involved.

Second, I suspect that political activism will be necessary in defense of the Benedict option. Successfully living the Benedict option requires that the larger culture will leave you alone to do so. There are fairly powerful forces in the culture that would be happy to leave Catholics alone to do so. But there are also fairly powerful forces–forces of fanaticism–that won’t want to leave Catholics alone to live their lives according to their own standards. So the freedom to live the Benedict option is attainable but also in danger.

Accordingly, the Catholic enclaves will have to be defended by Catholic lawyers and political activists.

This all stands to reason for anyone who understands the history or the world and the nature of evil, which are of course inexorably linked. Some Catholics will have to opt to be sheep dogs to use Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's analogy, an analogy recently popularized by the American Sniper book and movie. These people will not have the luxury of Benedict Option-ing.

I am planning to write more extensively on just how closely the Grossman/Kyle sheepdog analogy matches Tolkien's view of goodness, evil and just warfare in his Middle Earth, mainly because it is amazing to me how many Catholics who claim to know Tolkien's philosophy on these matters utterly misunderstand it. This was evidenced in spades during the Facebook conversation I recently mentioned. But I just want to conclude now by pointing out that if things are bad enough to describe them in apocalyptic language, then how can the planned withdrawal to little enclaves and platoons be anything which can be described as strategic when you are basically broadcasting this intention where your enemy can hear you loud and clear? Or, well, maybe I'm not being invited to all the clandestine planning meetings where they discuss secret tunnel entrances, etc. That's probably it.

Evil and Stupid Misconceptions, Right

William McGurn's piece in WSJ shows the grasping quality of the defenders of the health care bill. Unwilling to discuss details of the bill, they attack the unbelievers with accusations of evil, stupidity and misconceiving. First he deals with Harry Reid's latest "evil" remark:

We saw it again in 2002, when George W. Bush characterized North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as an "axis of evil." Tom Daschle, a Democrat and then Senate majority leader, warned that "we've got to be very careful with rhetoric of that kind"; former President Jimmy Carter called it "overly simplistic and counterproductive"; and comedian Will Ferrell parodied it on Saturday Night Live. Soon the phrase became acceptable only in the ironic sense—as in the Chris Fair cookbook titled "Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations."

With all this history, you would think Harry Reid (D., Nev.) had ample warning. Nevertheless, the Senate majority leader invoked the e-word himself last week at an energy conference in Las Vegas, where he accused those protesting President Barack Obama's health-care proposals of being "evil mongers." So proud was he of this contribution to the American political lexicon that he repeated it to a reporter the next day and noted the phrase was "an original."

And then . . . nothing. No thundering rebuke from the New York Times. No outburst from Mr. Carter. In fact, it's hard not to notice that the good and gracious people who instinctively recoil at words like "evil" or "un-American" (the preferred term of Mr. Reid's counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi) have all been silent.

Yeah, well, Reid is a Democrat, so he has immunity. Next, he examines how Obama goes after the stupidity of a straw-woman he carries around to townhall meetings:

It's a point of view Mr. Obama inadvertently encourages when he indulges in, say, the trope about Medicare that has become a staple of his town halls. The president tells the crowd he's received a letter from a woman upset with his plans for health care. "She said, 'I don't want government-run health care. I don't want you meddling in the private market place. And keep your hands off my Medicare.'"

Get it? The applause tells us the audience does: How dumb can this woman be?

Gibbs hits it from the misconception angle:

It's much the same with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. In his press briefings, Mr. Gibbs seems to suggest that all hard questions about health care are based on "misconceptions." Really?

Is the Congressional Budget Office's finding that the House plan would significantly raise health-care costs a "misconception"? Was it a "misconception" that the now-abandoned section covering end-of-life issues had an in-built conflict of interest between lowering costs and providing care for the elderly? And is it a "misconception" that Mr. Obama's ultimate goal is a single-payer system, when Americans can watch him on earlier videos saying as much?

Read the whole thing, it's funny yet revealing. He points out that everyone in DC is asking "what went wrong with the administration's sales pitch" without suspecting that it might be substance. He's right; they're trying to sell Americans a shit sandwich for a trillion dollars. If we don't want to buy it, they'll try to ram it down our throats.

One plus one is still equal to two

Anthony Bradley explains the relationship between the government-imposed minimum wage laws and unemployment in this piece. Excerpt:

When revenues decline, companies cannot afford to pay workers wages that are artificially set above their productivity and demand for their skills. Additionally, laying off capable workers is not preferable in the long-run because unemployed workers are not continuing to develop the skills and experience that enables them to increase their productivity or move beyond low-skilled and entry level jobs to those of higher pay.

Only economic history can provide the definitive narrative regarding the additional role the recent increase in the minimum wage is playing in the current surge in joblessness. Back in 2007, Congress voted to increase the minimum wage to $6.55 per hour effective July 24, 2008 and $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed a minimum wage increase because it destroys entry-level jobs, stunts new job growth, and harms small businesses. In a 2007 survey, the Chamber found that 60 percent of small business owners would not be able to off-set the cost of the minimum wage increase. That, in turn, would lead businesses to make tough decisions like slashing benefits, raising prices, and laying off workers.

Although many industrialized countries have minimum wage laws there are many exceptions, including Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Cyprus. Switzerland has no minimum-wage laws and one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. The latest numbers are 2.6 percent.

He ends by calling upon Congress and the incoming Obama administration to unshackle the private sector from these artificial regulations. That's a purely academic exercise 'cause it ain't gonna happen. Instead, if unemployment continues to rise, I'd be on the lookout for a new Pelosi dog-n-pony show whereby businesses are further regulated disallowing lay-offs, or mandating a longer notification period before laying off or suchlike. These actions would, of course, have the effect of scaring companies from hiring people without straight A's in gradeschool and 750+ credit scores. In other words, look for government intrusiveness to jack the unemployment rate up even higher.

Well, I'm white... where's my trust fund??

I heard Father Michael Phleger, the latest to go on a racist tear at Obama's nut-ball church, referred to as a "wigger". I'm not sure of the exact meaning of wigger, but I'm pretty sure it means "a person who wigs out." So I think he does indeed qualify for that description. Watch the video and tell me I'm wrong.



I guess now Obama has apologized for the racist remarks of this new albatross. It's become the new thang for them to do at the Trinity United Church of Christ, basically to flex their muscles while in the spotlight to increase their prestige and most likely their attendance numbers. Count the camera angles in this video -- there are at least four. Then the thing is edited and the finished product is really good with excellent sound quality. These people know what they are doing and are loving every minute of it.



So where is my effin' trust fund, dog?

Teddy Bear Messages

Found this CL piece by Kiera McCaffrey from a little over a year ago. The whole thing is spot-on and useful reading, but the paragraph which caught my eye describes the performance art equivalent to what I've termed the "Kevlar Sentence" which JohnMcG should receive credit for identifying. Viz:

Another group, Healing Alliance (formerly known as Linkup), turned to Jeffrey Anderson to educate them about effective lobbying techniques. Those gathered at the 2003 annual meeting of the victims' support group were instructed by the lawyer-turned-showman that teddy bears are the key to influencing elected officials. He told them that, should an advocate call on a legislator who is not in his office, the advocate only needs to leave one of the stuffed toys with a staffer in order to turn a missed opportunity into a successful appeal: "You tell them it represents the innocence of a child—the innocence that's been stolen—and I guarantee they'll remember you."

So that's what the prosecutor needed to bring to court to nail Michael Jackson. Teddy Bears!

Maybe as the funding, popularity and relevance of these bigoted groups continues to dwindle they could begin the ceremonial nocturnal burning of kerosene-soaked teddy bears in priests' yards so it's guaranteed that Catholics "remember" them.