Despite my—so to speak—metaphysical biases toward empirical knowledge, I carry with me a human respect for `ideals’, loosely defined, so that I don’t like the idea that liberty is gained and held by a balance of weaponry between the citizenry and their government. I do accept the arguments in the end, partly because the number … [Read more…]
This essay is written in response to an article which is highly rational and not `conspiracy-minded’ according to the current mind-set: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever. This article deals with the price-fixing activities of money-center banks and allied financial institutions, activities which are proving to be wider ranging and larger in scale … [Read more…]
There’s a recently published essay, Sex After Christianity, which is interesting and insightful and tells a sketchy story of the loss of Christianity in the United States (probably the entire West), a story which might be sketchy but is more plausible than what you might gather from the way most Christians speak and far more … [Read more…]
The Library of Law and Liberty website has another interesting article, this time dealing with some of the thoughts of the American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray. In this article, ‘The True Sage of Woodstock’, Richard Reinsch writes: How can reasonable men and women reclaim equality over and above egalitarianism? The first principled step is to … [Read more…]
With a new pope to be elected soon, the Internet as well as print publications are filling once more with suggestions about radical or moderate reforms. “Let priests marry.” “Ordain women priests.” “Be more liberal allowing reception of the Sacraments.” “Allow divorce and remarriage.” “Allow artificial birth-control.” “Re-consider abortion, use of embryonic stem-cells, etc.” Similar … [Read more…]
Progressives have often founded and supported eugenics movements. This article,
We modern human beings have separated our minds and hearts from reality, our hands not nearly so much. We’re strange creatures who believe the Christian Creeds long enough to recite them at a Catholic or Orthodox Mass or to keep some of the creedal teachings in mind at other sorts of Christian worship services and … [Read more…]
A Non-dummy’s Guide to Understanding God’s Creation I’ve written before of Ortega y Gasset’s prophecies of the collapse of modern Western man into a condition of barbarian childhood. See Civilization for Dummies for a fairly recent essay on the subject. In that essay, I spoke about the importance of books to Western Civilization in particular … [Read more…]
Those who have enough sense not to watch modern movies might not realize that: Skynet is a fictional, self-aware artificial intelligence system which features centrally in the Terminator franchise and serves as the franchise’s main antagonist. Scarcely depicted visually in any of the Terminator media, Skynet’s operations are almost exclusively performed by war-machines, cyborgs (usually … [Read more…]
Readers interested in our dysfunctional higher education system might be interested in an essay from one of the websites of Liberty Fund. I’m certainly not implying that the lower levels are functioning at even a minimal level of competence, but the issues are somewhat different though overlapping. In any case, I can’t add anything of … [Read more…]