Month: October 2014

Wasting Time Dying

Mark Noonan2 Comments

You might have heard the story of Brittany Maynard, the 29 year old newlywed who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and who plans on killing herself on November 1st. It appears that her decision to kill herself in a very public manner is in service to her ideological desire that the laws of the United States be changed to make it easier for people to kill themselves. This is a very sad – pathetic – story to hear.

Upon first hearing the story, my first thought was: what a waste of time. The time this lady is spending on planning and marketing her death is time which she could well spend more usefully. You know, loving her husband, her family and her friends. Doing things as she is physically able. Perhaps even developing ideas to help other people who will be faced with her problem in the future. Each minute she spends on her death is a wasted minute – she won’t get them back.

Here is the news flash for everyone: we’re all going to die. Not a one of us will get out of life alive. To greatly concern one’s self with death is morbid. After all, none of us know when we’re going to die – not even Brittany Maynard. Oh, sure; she’s planned it for the 1st, but she could just as well get hit by a bus tomorrow, or her cancer could take a vastly worse turn and finish the job by October 31st. On the other hand, she might not get hit by the bus – and her cancer could take a vastly better turn and instead of having six months to live, maybe she’d have nine. Or twelve. Or even two more years – but if she goes through with her plan, she’ll never know, and her family and friends will be bereft, perhaps long before they should been.

In the old days, the Catholic Church would not bury a suicide in consecrated ground. To modern ears, this seems harsh and unreasonable, but the thought behind it was this: a suicide is the worst sort of murderer because a suicide murders the whole world. To kill yourself, when not an act of merest insanity, isn’t the act of a brave man, but of a coward – a self-centered coward, at that. Because life isn’t working out as a person wants, that person has decided to kill everyone, and every thing. No person is loved enough, no sunset is beautiful enough, to keep the suicide willing to endure just one more day.

For people like Ms. Maynard, the argument is this: “I don’t want to suffer pain and debilitation, nor do I want my friends and family to endure the pain of my long, slow death”. To me, that argument is a lot of nonsense. My mother endured a painful and debilitating death from COPD – many was the time my heart was wrung with pity for her suffering. Many is the time she wished for an end to it all. But had she offed herself in say, June of 2003, then I wouldn’t have been able to make her that last dish of my special mashed potatoes shortly before she died in December of 2003, nor would she had been able to rally herself painfully to make for me one, last batch of mom’s pea soup in October of 2003. And after she died, after one last, terrible night of suffering, all I wanted was five more minutes – even knowing they would have been painful minutes, and as my mother loved me, I’m sure she wished she would have given those five, painful, additional minutes.

We must keep in mind that, in reality, none of us can predict the future. We simply do not know what might happen. Just because someone says something terrible is going to happen by such and such a date doesn’t mean that it actually will. Life is what it is. No one is assured a soft life, nor any easy exit. In a more or less painful manner, we will all die. It is our duty – out of love for God and gratitude for our existence – to live our lives from first to last with as much dignity as we can. We are to pour ourselves out in love for one another, until God calls us home. Not, most assuredly, only until it is no longer easy or convenient for ourselves.

I feel sorry for Ms. Maynard and I will pray for her. Pray that she will see where the true act of love lies and hope that, in the end, she’ll trust in God, rather than the assertions of doctors, or the counsels of fools that November 1st should be her last day on earth.

For another take on this, go here – where another dying woman urges Ms. Maynard to reconsider.

Understanding Obama, and the Liberals

Mark Noonan23 Comments

Now, I don’t know if any of this is true, but I’d bet money that it is. Here are some things I bet that Obama – and most liberals – believe:

That ancient Egypt was made up of black Africans and is the fountainhead of Greek civilization.

That Greece and Rome were relatively insignificant in the development of higher civilization, having stolen what they knew from other, non-white civilizations.

That Islamic civilization really did advance science and learning.

That Judeo-Christian, Western civilization is no great shakes – it’s science and learning were hijacked from other civilizations and it’s contribution to the world is war, pestilence, imperialism, racism, sexism and slavery.

Given this, it is no surprise that Obama scorns Israel and Britain and seeks closer alliance with entities like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or the mullah’s in Iran…nor surprising at all that faced with the easy task of closing our borders to people from Ebola-infected areas, he says “no”. We’re not all that great – in fact, we’re terrible and the non-Western world is great. We have everything to learn from them, and must un-learn all that our Judeo-Christian civilization has taught us. We must do this if we are to survive, because only by placing ourselves at the feet of superior, non-Western civilizations can we develope the basic decency to be worthy of survival.

All through Obama’s Presidency we have seen this – and we see it very often in the overall liberal mindset. Think about it: what we consider a bizarre ignorance on the left when they ignore viciously anti-woman activities in Islam, they don’t even see a problem: Islam is by its non-Western nature superior to us, and thus there simply can’t be anything wrong in their actions. If we see something wrong, then we’re just projecting our own evil on them and, indeed, if they are doing evil it is because they are foolishly emulating us. And the sooner we get in step with them, the sooner we’ll understand the real truth of what is going on, and improve ourselves up to their level, and whatever evil they are doing will cease once we stop exporting our evil to them.

Of course, there is raw, practical politics to deal with – and so we’re lobbing a few bombs towards ISIS to appease the hill-apes in the United States who don’t understand that ISIS, if it is evil, is our fault to begin with. Obama will some times make a move which is rational but only to keep his political viability strong enough to advance his prime desire: moving the United States away from a western civilization orientation and towards a non-western – moving us towards a mind-set, that is, which will despise what we have been and only live for the day when we become the “other”; when we will no longer bitterly cling to our guns and our Bibles and will become was wise and far-seeing as the peoples of non-West.

If Obama and his liberals get their way we will no longer be the United States we have been. The choice is rather stark for us: do we love being Americans? Do we love being of the West? Do we love having as a basis of our laws and customs Judeo-Christian ethics? Then we’d better figure out a way to completely remove the left from the ability to affect policy. If we don’t, then this United States of America will be fundamentally transformed, as promised.

Abortion and the Return of Moloch

Mark Noonan10 Comments

First off, for our liberals out there – who was Moloch? Moloch was a pagan god who went by various names in the ancient world, but the main point here is that Moloch was appeased by human sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of children. In case you ever wondered why the Romans, after defeating Carthage in the Third Punic War, destroyed the city entirely and sowed the ground with salt, it was because the Roman’s despised the Carthaginians, who worshiped Moloch – to the Romans, what sort of savage, inhuman people sacrifice children like that? If you want to get a sense of the horror the Romans felt, imagine a community of modern, American people getting dressed up in their best to go watch a baby being roasted alive. Since the downfall of Carthage and the later rise of Christianity, the very concept of human sacrifice has been anathema in the West – until recently.

Here was have an article by Sady Doyle which is urging all good liberals to cease defending abortion as a necessary evil, but promote it as a positive, moral good:

Katha Pollitt’s Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights is a deeply felt and well-researched book which argues that abortion, despite what any of its opponents might claim, is a palpable social good. Progressives, Pollitt says, can and must treat abortion as an unequivocal positive rather than a “necessary evil”; there is no ethical, humane way to limit abortion rights. The fact that Pollitt needs to make this argument in 2014, however, seems to indicate that pro-choicers have long been a little too nice for our own good…

Too nice for their own good? Goodness, it’s like the good lady hasn’t even checked to see just what sort of hatred, vitriol and violence is directed against pro-life people by pro-abortion. But, we’ll set that aside – the real issue here (and I do give her points for honesty) is that she’s of the view that abortion is morally good, and insistent that the pro-abortion movement say just that in public.

The article goes on for a bit about how sweet and wonderful abortion is – essentially asserting the view that pregnancy is a disease and massive, artificial medical intervention is necessary lest women have the unbelievable horror of pregnancy “forced” upon them, apparently in violation of the primary female activity, building a career in corporate America (yep, nothing says “freedom” better than being shackled to a cubicle for 8 hours a day…of course, it could be that Ms. Doyle doesn’t interact often with that part of the sisterhood which doesn’t make its living writing articles lauding abortion…). It is horrifying to read; to understand that in 2014 we have people who have so far gone into moral topsy-turvydom that evil is good and good, evil. Pregnancy to Ms. Doyle is a problem – and it needs a solution, and might as well make it a Final Solution, right?

I’ve long held the view that once you step off from morality, you’re doomed to just get worse and worse unless you step back to morality. Chesterton in one of his stories had a character point out that you can some times maintain a reasonable level of good (in spite of routine failures and sins), but you can’t maintain a reasonable level of bad – once you go bad, unless you repent completely, you’ll just get worse and worse. Once people asserted that human life is not uniquely valuable and legalized abortion, it became certain – unless we repented – that we would eventually start killing anyone who isn’t up to snuff. Now we see euthanasia for the ill and elderly, people advocating for children to be killed even after birth if they aren’t “fit”, and now a bald-faced assertion that killing is morally good – this being far different (and, morally, far below) the original argument of rare, sad necessity used to push abortion to legality. Given how far we’ve fallen, I don’t think that anyone can argue against my next statement:

Unless we repent and restore the sanctity of human life in law and custom, we will eventually start celebrating the murder of human beings.

I’m not kidding – people who have fallen low enough to say that abortion is morally good will eventually want to celebrate it. It is the next step down, don’t you see? What would stop them from doing such a thing? They already hold life, itself, in contempt – only the most narrow and selfish interests move them…and if they are to have an abortion, why not make a party out of it? And they’ll do it when they kill the elderly, as well – in fact, I can easily see, given attitudes about the environment, that killing human beings can be seen as beneficial to the world…a small sacrifice to Mother Nature, right? That it is human sacrifice – heck, so much the better: in fact, when you abort your child (or off you grandmother), you are doing a good deed…you are helping to save the plant by reducing humanity’s carbon footprint!

We are, fortunately, on the cusp of an increasingly pro-life America. The young, especially, seem to be keen on allowing everyone to live (having been born in a time when they, too, could have been aborted at will, I think, has concentrated their minds on the matter). I do hope that this is the last, hideous shriek of the Culture of Death – but if these people do continue to have power, they will continue to press their case, and we might find altars to Moloch springing up here and there. The lesson here is for everyone who still claims to be “pro-choice”: you can no longer hold to that position. You really do have to choose – be pro-life, or be pro-abortion (or, more accurately, pro-death). Pro-choice was a phrase which allowed people to hide from the actual, moral choice required of them. It is now time to choose – which side do you want to be on? On one side, there’s the rather difficult task of getting everyone into the world, and then treating them decently until they die a natural death. On the other side, people who will kill because a person is inconvenient. Pick.

Obama Joins the GOP in Fighting to Defeat Democrats

Mark Noonan3 Comments

Geesh!

…Here are the four sentences that will draw all of the attention (they come more than two thirds of the way through the speech): “I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle’s pretty happy about that. But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.” Boil those four sentences down even further and here’s what you are left with: “Make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.”…

Democrats just spent the last 6 months distancing themselves from Obama and here comes The Smartest Man, Ever, to muck it up for them. The last thing Democrats need is a public reminder from Obama and each and every House and Senate Democrat is a mere rubber-stamp for Obama.

The truth will out, they say – and Obama has done truth a favor, for once. I don’t know what his intent was, but he’s made it clear what the 2014 stakes are. And GOPers are already running with it.

The Continuing Death of Science

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Some time back around 2006, I wrote an article on the then-Blogs for Bush about the death of science. Unfortunately, I can’t link it here because those old articles have all been archived and I’m not energetic enough to pester Matt to drag it back out. The basic premise of the article was that as science has strayed away from a rigid search for truth it has come up with so many bogus ideas that people have lost respect for it. One of the more egregious examples has been, of course, the whole anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hoax – but that was just one of very, very many (and, also, in the public mind AGW hasn’t been entirely discredited – it will be though, when we get to ten years past Al Gore’s “ice caps will be gone” prediction). I think that most of us who come here are old enough to remember when coffee and eggs were considered veritable poison – now, not so much. Time and time again “science” has been dragged out to tell us this, that or the other thing and it has turned out to be greatly exaggerated, when not flat out false.

Recently there has been a debate around Neil deGrasse Tyson and his abilities as a scientist. When it first came up, I first hadn’t the foggiest notion of who he was, because I just don’t watch a lot of TV (mostly home improvement shows because that is what the Mrs likes). Turns out, he hosted the reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. What started the controversy was deGrasse Tyson’s use of quotes from people – including former President Bush – which turned out to be bogus. And not just a little bit bogus, but incredibly, stupidly bogus. Ace of Spades has a good run down of it here. The bottom line of it all is that deGrasse Tyson, purported super-genius, (a) didn’t know what he was talking about and (b) when called out on it got all huffy and essentially demanded we forget about it and continue to honor him because he’s still so much smarter than us numbskulls – because Science, or something. Of course, an alleged scientist who doesn’t check his sources is, well, someone who isn’t a scientist, at all. He might be all sorts of things; might even be quite a clever fellow, but science is all about arriving at certainty as far as possible.

I hate to twist the knife here (well, truth be told, I don’t – its rather fun to point this stuff out), but the scientific method is a Christian invention. Specifically, a Catholic invention. Final twist: it was mostly developed by Catholic monks. You see, growing out of the Jewish tradition, the Catholic Church held that as the world was created by a Creator, and this Creator had a plan for his creation, the world then was comprehensible to the human intellect. In other words, by study, experiment and logical reasoning, we could come to understand the world as it is. This is actually quite different from all other civilizations, including the Greek which came closest to this understanding (but never developed a scientific method – and thus the Greeks, technologically, never advanced to an industrial civilization). Because monks sitting in their cells at the monastery knew that the world could be understood, eventually it was – the truth of it all was revealed. And passing out of the monastery, others picked up the threads and amazing things were learned and done. But it could only be done by strict adherence to objective truth. You can’t lie – even if your reputation is on the line. We’ve lost that.

We lost it as we shifted from being a Christian to a post-Christian civilization and the very concept of truth began to waver and grow thin. Two thousand odd years ago one well educated man asked, “what is truth?”, and for a long time after that Christians provided the answer – and in adherence to that, massively advanced human learning. Round about 150 years ago, that started to fade. We started to lose our connection not just to truth, but to a desire to know the truth. People started to doubt there was even such a thing as truth – or even such a thing as things which could be quantified and studied and understood.

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of men and women involved in science who are still out there finding the truth about things – but what we popularly know as “science” these days is a product of a very unscientific method. Its not whether a thing is true or false, but whether or not it supports a position, obtains a grant, burnishes a credential that gets it into common currency. What got deGrasse Tyson into trouble was a quote attributed to former President Bush which made out that he was an idiot – and this in service to a particular goal: making people like deGrasse Tyson seem smart and worthy of our respect; and, furthermore, making people who disagree with people like deGrasse Tyson seem utterly contemptible and not to be listened to under any circumstances. Some real scientist is out there working on a method to transport people to Mars – but he isn’t going to get the TV show, isn’t going to have the best-selling books and won’t be consulted on public policy. That sort of thing is reserved for “scientists” who will just make stuff up which, once again, supports a position, obtains a grant, burnishes a credential.

First and foremost, before you do anything else in life, you have to define your terms. That is, you must assert a dogma – and then find out whether your dogma has anything to support it. You must find out if it is true. Its no good saying you’ll find the truth and then assert it – you have to assert something and then see if it is so. You find out the truth of it by, variously, logical thinking, observation and experiment. You do that to the best of your ability and you’ll find out soon enough if your dogma is worth keeping – or whether it needs to be modified, or tossed into the scrap heap. But a rigid adherence to truth is the key – if you don’t believe that absolute, objective truth exists, then you’ll never get anywhere – well, except perhaps to a pile of money, a TV show, and the utter contempt of people who actually think.

I am not a scientist – don’t have the patience or the self-discipline for it. Most people don’t – and just because someone has a science degree doesn’t mean they do, either. The only way to tell if someone is a scientist is by what the produce. By it’s fruit shall the tree be known – if the fruit is a useful device or a solid explanation of events, then you’ve got a scientist on your hands. If its a bag of gibberish which is making its author a millionaire, then you don’t have a scientist – and you don’t need to be a scientist to tell a true scientist from a charlatan; you just need common sense and a little time to think things over in the light of truth.

And, so, science is still dead – killed by hucksters who want money and fame at the expense of the service of truth. It may still come back, one day – if we, on the whole, re-discover a desire for truth; an acceptance that some things are absolutely truth all the time, and some things are false no matter how you dress them up. Of course, that would be a rather earth shaking change in our society. In fact, most people would be flabbergasted by a society in love with truth – and a lot of people wouldn’t like it, at all.

Ebola and the Empty Government

Mark Noonan6 Comments

Now that 80-100 people are being monitored for ebola in Texas, doesn’t it seem to be time to restrict travel from west Africa? Not according to the Obama Administration. I cannot understand this attitude. I tried to think of it in terms of maybe Team Obama thinks it would be racist to restrict travel from west Africa – but I don’t think any rational person would really believe that. Is it just that the Obama Administration doesn’t care? After all, its almost certain that if anyone in America dies from ebola, it will be among the lower classes…no one who lives in Manhattan and is an Obama fund raiser is likely to get it.

It is just bizarre. It would cost Obama nothing to restrict travel and would pretty much guarantee that no Americans in the United States catch it. Short, simple, no cost – and they won’t do it. Maybe it just goes in with the Obama attitude that the United States isn’t worthy of defense? Oh, I know he makes his speeches saying that while he’s President, America’s enemies better tremble in their boots, but lets face a fact here: the only reason we’re bombing in Syria is because the video beheading of Americans played a role in Obama’s cratering approval rating. ISIS could have beheaded 1,000 Americans and if Obama’s poll numbers held steady, we wouldn’t be bombing. The ebola outbreak is illustrating something about Obama: if he and his cabal aren’t threatened, nothing serious will be done.

It is almost as if they don’t see themselves from an American perspective. Citizens of the world, indeed…and while Obama is out there striking poses, the actual business of government isn’t getting done. There’s no one home – the store is not being minded. Now I begin to understand how the Secret Service could get so out of hand – no one was watching it; only when it started to risk Obama’s political fortunes was any attention given to it. We’d just better hope that at crucial moments doing a rational thing polls well between now and 2016 – because if it doesn’t, it won’t get done. Our government is empty – a mere collection of disparate forces rolling along without a plan or pilot.