Month: October 2011

Quotes For The Day

"I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that. I don’t know how much our contribution is to that, because I know that there have been periods of greater heat and warmth in the past but I believe we contribute to that. And so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing," – Mitt Romney, June 3, 2011.

"My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us," – Mitt Romney, October 27.

Quote For The Day

"Well, like I said, everybody has the same rights as everybody else, so homosexuals in the military isn't a problem. It's only if they're doing things they shouldn't be, if they're disruptive. But there's … men and women getting into trouble with each other too. And there's a lot more heterosexuals in the military, so logically they're causing more trouble than gays. So yes, you just have the same rules for everybody and treat them all the same," – the forgotten Ron Paul in an interview with the Iowa State Daily. 

The Pope Embraces Doubt

Benedict has included agnostics in his ecumenical gathering at Assisi, a meeting in the tradition of John Paul II. And his reasoning is powerful:

[Agnostics] are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace”. They ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false certainty by which these claim to know 800px-TheosAgapethat there is no God and they invite them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it. But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others …

[Agnostics’] inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible. Therefore I have consciously invited delegates of this third group to our meeting in Assisi, which does not simply bring together representatives of religious institutions.

Rather it is a case of being together on a journey towards truth, a case of taking a decisive stand for human dignity and a case of common engagement for peace against every form of destructive force.

My italics. The full text is here, and Michael Potemra’s moving engagement with it is here at NRO. Many conservative Catholics keep telling me that I am misreading Benedict, that his concerns and theology are really not that far off the concerns and theological discussions we have been having on this blog for years. And there are times when this is clear. Deus Caritas Est, for example. The concern for liturgy, ritual, mystery in faith. The embrace of the church as a counter-cultural force in a depressingly materialistic mass culture. Benedict’s conservatism is, we are told, merely a defensive neo-conservatism born of the failure of the Second Council to give the faith a new birth in Europe and the West. It is not pure institutional reactionaryism.

But it is equally clear, is it not, that the project of mere assertion of papal authoritah, the purging of Catholics with doubts and questions, the doubling down on a theory of natural law that simply does not reflect what modernity knows of nature (and therefore refutes itself), the profound corruption that allowed for the rape and abuse of countless innocents across the world, the scandal of the Legion of Christ … these have led to an even steeper collapse of the church in the West where its fate as a living truth still lies.

Benedict is at his best as a theologian, opening arms to other faiths and agnosticism to commit to the core principles of caritas and pax.

(Photo: “ὁ θεòς ἀγάπη ἐστίν” ó theòs agape estín (Greek; trans. “God is love”) on a stele in Mount Nebo. From Wiki.)

Life Without Stimulus

1.2B08

This is a challenging graph, to say the least. Martin Sullivan argues it proves the case against austerity as the pathway to growth:

Republicans constantly remind us that the Obama stimulus–the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009–did not work. They voted against it. In the United Kingdom the government is led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. His government did not adopt stimulus. Instead it boldly enacted an economic program that cut spending and raised taxes. The chart [above] shows the results and compares it to the U.S. experience. After three and a half years, U.S. GDP is just about returning to the pre-recession peak. That's awful. But it is far better than the U.K. where GDP is still five percent ($750 billion in US terms) below its pre-recession peak.

The US has one major difference and advantage, of course. It has the global reserve currency and is not vulnerable to the kind of currency collapse that the markets can impose on other countries running massive deficits and accumulating debt. The Tories were trying to avoid sliding anywhere near the jaws of George Soros again. Obama has less to worry about. Nonetheless, fiscal retrenchment in Britain has clearly not yet led to new growth. And its recent economic history is probably the most compatible with the US among Europe's big economies. 

Shooting An Iraq Vet In The Face

This footage is persuasive to me:

Has OWS deliberately put vets at the forefront of protests for propaganda purposes? Yes, they have. But that's a perfectly acceptable tactic for all sorts of protest movements, to frame an image of their movement to best effect. You saw this kind of tactic in the Arab Spring. You saw it in the Civil Rights movement, and, indeed, the gay rights movement. And yet, the degenerate Breitparts of the right have actually equated this non-violent protest by a man who served two tours in Iraq with Hamas, a terror organization that commits war-crimes and forbids any freedom of expression. The stomach turns.

Here's what we're finding. We're finding that OWS has reached levels of online interest that dwarf the Tea Party at its peak:

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We're finding that large majorities of Americans share its concern about rising inequality. Whatever David Brooks says, 66 percent in his own newspaper's poll support more taxation from the very wealthy and successful. And that's in a country that has just emerged from a bout of Steve Jobs worship. Americans are not anti-capitalism. They are opposed to what has happened to capitalism and to a non-corrupt democracy, as it has been revealed by the last three years. They are concerned about the collapse of social mobility in America, another crucial element in this polity's stability.

If the right sees this as a call to reform capitalism rather than abolish it, some common ground is possible. In my view, that common ground is where Obama needs to pitch his campaign tent.

Would Romney Goose The Economy?

Scott Galupo bets that a President Romney would have no choice but to enact more stimulus: 

He looks at the data. He sees that even if GDP grows at a healthy 3.6 percent for the first three years of his term, we won't reach full employment until 2017—that is, after his re-election campaign. Even if thinks he can ride that positive trajectory to a second term, he's going to want to be more aggressive about goosing employment numbers. He's not going to leave his presidency at the mercy of optimistic CBO projections.