The Dish

New Orleans, Louisiana, 2.20 pm

Now there's a topic for some interesting dialogue. The Catholic church proclaims that wanking is as serious a sin as gay sex because all sexuality is designed to be exclusively procreative – both as a matter of divine will but also, critically, because this is readily apparent to anyone by reason alone. (See George, Robert, or my first couple of chapters in The Conservative Soul.)

Man on woman (on top, of course) sans rubber or pill is the only way – the only way – for sex to achieve its natural ends and benefit the human being under natural law. This, I have to say, has always struck me as bizarre. I speak only for males here but Shaw was certainly right in saying that 99 percent of men masturbate and 1 percent are liars. I once caused a little stir at Notre Dame by pointing out that every priest in the audience was masturbator, as of course they all were. The natural cause of this is obvious: the male body produces far, far, far, far more sperm than can ever possibly become babies.

And the erotic impulse from puberty on (especially from puberty on) is one of the most powerful natural impulses we have. The Church insists that we nonetheless resist any temptation to do what comes naturally to any boy who discovers the best new toy he will ever have and let all this sperm soak our pajamas night after night. The fine distinction between this and just getting it over with seems somewhat exotic to me. A reader makes another point:

Recently scientists have determined that, at least in a man's older years, masturbation seems to have some preventative properties in relation to prostate cancer. Indeed, some doctors are now prescribing "masturbation therapy" to men over fifty. If further research sufficiently determines the health benefits of masturbation, will the Catholic Church endorse it on that basis? Even more importantly, can I get a return on the several hours of Hail Marys I said in penance in my teenage years?

Nature is an elastic concept. The Church's grasp of it remains umbilically linked to the biology of the thirteenth century. And its allegedly celibate clerisy is the only group allowed to examine it. Hence what most adult, intelligent human beings regard as the hilarity of the hierarchy's claptrap. And hence too the impossibility of actually changing it.

So we continue to live in the late Soviet period of Catholicism. They pretend to make sense; we pretend to believe them.

 

“’I have done that,’ says my memory.

‘I cannot have done that’ – says my pride, and remains adamant.

At last – memory yields,” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §140.

Felix Salmon is in Davos:

It’s not like CEOs and billionaires (and billionaire CEOs) need any more flattery and ego-stroking than they get on a daily basis, but Davos gives them more than that: it allows them to flatter and ego-stroke each other, in public. They invariably leave even more puffed-up and sure of themselves than when they arrived, when in hindsight what the world really needed was for these men (it’s still very much a boys’ club) to be shaken out of their complacency and to ask themselves some tough questions about whether in fact they were leading us off a precipice.

What's stunning to me, and instructive, is the distinction Tom Friedman makes today between what he calls "sustainable values" and "situational values".  I think that distinction is too kind to the bankers. What he means is what human beings used to call – before "values" replaced "virtues" – good and evil.

From the time I was in college, every person who really wanted to become rich – and I mean rich – went into investment banking. In the 1980s, this was the apex of career goals. No one I knew quite understood how these bankers went on to make exponentially more dough than anyone else could, but most of us didn't much care. The idea of working with all those money-grubbers when I could eke out a living writing or reading or acting and speaking seemed horrifying to me. And I didn't envy their money, and still don't.

After all, the amounts they get become meaningless after a while. A human being can only consume so much before it becomes absurd or soul-destroying. Their vast and disproportionate wealth I thought of as a hideous prison for them. I didn't envy them – not because I am somehow moral or Christian, although I'm sure my Catholic values prodded me in that direction (how could someone whose favorite saint is Francis of Assisi really get upset at my friends becoming rich, bored suits?). I didn't envy them because I would never ever want to live that kind of life.

Now I realize, of course, that their own moral wasteland became so vast that it threatened to eclipse all those struggling to make an honest living. And that changes the equation, doesn't it?

The theories of self-regulating markets that guaranteed no collapse turned out to be profoundly flawed – as most intelligent conservatives (Posner, Bartlett, et al.) have now observed. And the oh-so-clever mechanisms the bankers invented to give themselves more and more and more turned out – surprise! – to be mathematically flawed. And those of us who'd saved for retirement, paid our mortgages punctiliously, paid our taxes without armies of accountants to squeeze every last drop from Uncle Sam, and worked to build real things … we became their victims. That's when the temptation for vengeance comes in. But when we then rescue them and burden ourselves with more debt, and they turn around and do all they can to restore the insanity that brought us all so low, and enrich themselves some more, we enter a new period.

I have no doubt there are many good men and women working in the banking sector. But the system is so corroded with vice, with selfishness, and, most importantly, with contempt for the common good, it needs real reform. I like what Obama has proposed and what the chairman of the Bank of England is now endorsing. I think the bailouts were necessary, just as I think the stimulus was necessary. But passing the toughest financial regulation bill we can at this point seems to me to be an urgent priority. The diffuse anger out there is a function of this deep sense of injustice – and it's correct.

We need to make banking not just boring but as profitable as any other sector in the economy: no more and no less. We need to remove the mystique that led us to this morass. And we need to do it to rescue capitalism itself from its own hubris and naive belief that economics can operate in a vacuum without virtue.

Chait still thinks health care has a better than even chance of passing:

In my opinion, the issue is in a similar place as last summer, when the national media was also declaring reform dead, or on life support. But the structural dynamic remains the same — Democrats understand that they have to pass this bill or face even deeper electoral catastrophe than they're likely to suffer anyway.

But the Democrats seem so useless they are incapable even of acting their own self-interest.

James Cameron surpasses his own $1.843 billion box office record. Thanks to the superfans:

John Kiriakou, formerly of the CIA, now admits that his statements on the effectiveness of waterboarding are unsupported by the evidence:

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," [Kiriakou] writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence." But never mind, he says now.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

In a word, it was hearsay, water-cooler talk.

"Now we know," Kiriakou goes on, "that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied."

Indeed. But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn't have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn't. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: "In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own."