Fr. Hans

The Holy Capitalists

New York Times DAVID BROOKS

What explains success? What forces drive some nations and individuals to move forward and grow rich while others stagnate? These happen to be the most important questions in the social sciences today.

In the scholarly arena, you see an array of academic gladiators wielding big books and offering theories.

Over here are the material determinists. Jared Diamond, with his million-selling “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” says the West grew rich not because of any innate superiority, but because Europeans happened to have the right kinds of plants. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, with his tome, “Civilizations,” argues that success is determined by climate and geography.

Over there are the cultural determinists. Thomas Sowell argues that ethnic groups develop their own skills and values and thrive or suffer as they compete, conquer and migrate. In his great opus, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” David Landes shows how cultural mores shaped European empires and the Industrial Revolution.
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Missourian: Real Science OR the Analysis of Dean’s Report

Real Science OR the Analysis of Dean’s Report

The article cited by Dean in support of his thesis refers to a group called “Clear the Air.”
You will find their website here: http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower/ A quick review of the Clear the Air website shows that the article cited by Dean is truly a conduit for the viewpoint of the group.

Clear the Air offers a report called “Dirty Air, Dirty Power’ for public consumption. This report contains repeated UNQUALIFIED ASSERTIONS of numbers of deaths “caused by power plant pollution.” Clear the Air also posts their source document called “Power Plant Emissions, Particulate Matter Related Health Damages and the Benefits of Alternative Emission Reduction Scenarios. You can find that report here:
http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower/docs/abt_powerplant_whitepaper.pdf.
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Climate change a symptom of spiritual disorder says patriarch

Ecumenical News International David Fines

Montreal, Canada, 28 November (ENI)–One of the world’s top spiritual leaders has issued a warning about climate change as representatives from more than 180 nations gather for a United Nations’ conference in Montreal on global warming.

“Climate change is more than an issue of environmental preservation,” said Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos I who is seen by many as the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians. “Insofar as human induced, it is a profoundly moral and spiritual problem.”
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Russia’s Muslims Want Christian Symbols Removed From Coat of Arms

Moscow News

A group of top Muslim clerics have demanded that Orthodox Christian symbols be removed from the Russian coat of arms and have complained about the Russian authorities and power-wielding structures allegedly refusing to abide by the principle of secularity, the Interfax news agency reported.

“This is not only a question of the Russian coat of arms. We can say that icons are all but put up on the walls of state offices,” Nafigulla Ashirov, chairman of the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Asian Russia, told journalists.
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Conservative Poland Roils European Union

NYT/International Herald Tribune GRAHAM BOWLEY December 7, 2005

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

BRUSSELS – When Polish members of the European Parliament placed an anti-abortion display in a parliamentary corridor in Strasbourg, France, recently, Ana Gomes, a Socialist legislator from Portugal, felt compelled to act, she said.

The display showed children in a concentration camp, linking abortion and Nazi crimes. “We found this deeply offensive,” Ms. Gomes said. “We tried to remove it.” A loud scuffle ensued as she and the Poles traded insults before the display was bundled away by Parliament guards.
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“It’s only a choice”; the great lie

I had a chance to hear her speak a couple years ago. I’m not easily moved by a speaker, but she is a compelling speaker. Her story is incredible and it’s hard to imagine anyone after hearing her speak continue to believe that abortion is only a choice over a “mass of tissue”.

Gianna Jessen was aborted at 7½ months. She survived. Astonishingly, she has forgiven her mother for trying to kill her.
By Elizabeth Day

Gianna Jessen grew up believing that she was born with cerebral palsy because she had been delivered prematurely in a particularly traumatic birth.

That was the story told to her by her adoptive mother and it was not until she was 12 years old that she discovered the truth about what made her different from the other children at school.

“I had an innate wondering,” Miss Jessen says. “I wasn’t satisfied for some reason, so I kept asking why I had this disability.

“She tried to break it to me gently and then, just as she was about to tell me, I said ‘I was aborted, right?’ She said ‘Yeah, you were.’ And my reaction was ‘Well, at least I have cerebral palsy for an interesting reason.’ ”

That was 16 years ago. Miss Jessen is now a pretty, fresh-faced 28-year-old with wavy shoulder-length red hair. She speaks with eloquence and composure, in a soft southern American accent, her forehead crinkling slightly as she talks.

But while her outward appearance might have changed, her inner determination to overcome even the most insurmountable challenges has remained absolutely constant.

From the very beginning, Miss Jessen survived in spite of herself. Her mother, Tina, a 17-year-old single woman, decided to have an abortion by saline injection when she was seven-and-a-half months pregnant (there is no legal time limit for abortion in America).

But in the early morning of April 6, 1977, the abortion failed. Against the odds, the baby had lived. A nurse called the emergency services and the child was taken to hospital. She weighed only 2lb and the abortionist had to sign her birth certificate.

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Liberal Multiple Choice

Liberal conflict about multiple abortions. Free registration required.

The New Republic Garance Franke-Ruta Post date 11.25.05

When Amy got pregnant during her freshman year of college, she knew that, at 18, she wasn’t ready to be a mother. So she had an abortion. “That was a very easy decision to get to, but a very difficult emotional experience, both before and after,” she says from San Francisco, where she now lives. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.” Six years later, she says, she was living and working in New York City when, after a condom failure, she found herself with a second unwanted pregnancy. “That time, it was like, ‘Oh, no! This sucks. Let me just take care of this.'” She had another abortion. “Oh well, that’s over,” she recalls thinking immediately afterward. “And then I didn’t think about it very much.” She didn’t talk about it very much either, and, even today, she is loath to reveal it. “I rarely talk about the second abortion because of society’s judgments about women who have a second abortion,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re allowed one mistake.'” But not two….

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The poverty of American cities and French suburbs

Christian Science Monitor Patrick Chisholm December 1, 2005

Big-government solutions pull poor people in, and push employers out.

A hurricane exposes the poverty of America’s inner cities, and the champions of big government make political hay out of it. Riots lay bare the underclass in Paris’s suburbs, and the French are astounded that such a thing could exist in their country.

In fact, Democrats have long controlled almost all of America’s inner cities. The Brookings Institution recently ranked the 50 largest cities in the United States according to their concentrations of poverty. A quick check reveals that the 10 cities with the highest concentrations of poverty have Democratic mayors, with the exception of New York City (whose Republican mayor is something of an anomaly in a Democratic-dominated city). By contrast, the few Republican big-city mayors hail mainly from cities with the least concentration of poverty.

This tells us that there is something terribly wrong with the statist policies that Democrats, and to an increasing extent Republicans, favor. The tragedy of the riots in France, where similar policies prevail, illustrates the same point.

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Latest On Legalizing Infanticide in the Netherlands

From Wesley Smith blog.

The Dutch Government is moving to expeditiously legalize infanticide. It has now created a commission to create the rules for the legal killing of “seriously suffering” babies. This is a tremendous violation of human rights. Shame on the Netherlands and the general lack of protest around the world.

The “patriarch of bioethics” Joseph Fletcher once called infanticide “post birth abortion.” Apparently the Dutch agree. Note this quote from a high official, “We wanted to respond to the needs of doctors to create clarity in how to deal with ending the life of seriously suffering newborns as well as the legal consequences of late abortions,” Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner and Junior Health Minister Clemence Ross-van Dorp wrote in a letter to parliament.

For shame.

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Mao more lethal than Hitler, Stalin

WorldNetDaily.com Jon Dougherty November 29, 2005

Expert says Chinese leader’s policies led to death of 77 million countrymen

A noted expert in calculating the number of deaths caused by authoritarian regimes says the late Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung’s policies and actions led to the deaths of nearly 77 million of his countrymen, surpassing those killed by Nazi Party founder Adolf Hitler and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin.

R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science and a Nobel Peace Prize finalist who has published dozens of books chronicling so-called “democide,” or death by government, said the new Chinese figure – nearly double his previous estimate of about 38 million – was based on what he believes was Mao’s duplicity in China’s great famine of 1958 to 1961.

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