Vox Popoli

Events will prove you wrong:

We imagine we can ditch Christianity and yet the good things we have inherited in our way of life will continue. They will not. Christianity formed Western civilisation and is so consubstantial with it that if Christianity goes, the lot goes with it. Let TS Eliot, writing in 1934, give us a text to think about this Easter: “Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?”

What would be amusing if it wasn’t tragic is the way that parochial Americans who don’t know the first thing about Europe point to the dying European countries, especially the Scandinavian ones, as evidence that secular post-Christianity is viable. The rector’s article also shows how foolish it is for Christians to think that there will not be severe consequences when the Church follows the lead of Man.

The comments following the article are particularly interesting. It is amazing how many idiots genuinely believe that the Enlightenment was a significant factor in forming a Christian civilization that predated it by centuries. The Enlightenment was, and is, nothing more than a destructive perversion of Christianity that led to the horrors of the French Revolution, the October Revolution and the future evils of the European Union.

It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It never has been:

Both parties are quick to employ our military. It’s the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party – each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.

And why is the military the only policy tool that works? Because it doesn’t have to do anything but break things and kill people. That’s the one thing that government is perfectly capable of handling. Why so many people want more of it, when there is centuries of evidence demonstrating that all one ever gets from it is more broken things and more dead people, is something I will never understand.

Ben Bernanke defies the common Keynesian position:

It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s infamous ‘liquidationist’ thesis, that weeding out “weak” banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks – which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed – felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view. In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. …

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

This jocular statement has never gotten the widespread attention it deserves, even if the current Fed Chairman errantly attributes this demonstration of Fed responsibility to the famous monetarist when it was actually the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard who first made the conclusive case in his 1963 book America’s Great Depression. It’s interesting, however, to see how Bernanke is, despite his promise, following the same general model that his predecessors did. I’ll have more detailed analysis of this in a future Voxonomics to see just how closely the Fed is imitating history, but needless to say, this doesn’t bode terribly well for the future.

I have to say, I’m really impressed with this timely step by WorldNetDaily, even though I knew nothing about it. If I understand my principles of socionomics, this is a definite bear sign as a broadening interest in technical analysis usually indicates volatility and a down market.

Here’s the first experiment in Voxonomics… although apparently not in podcasting per se. For a variety of reasons, the RSS feed I created doesn’t appear to be validating. I’m not sure I’m going to do this every week or not, we’ll have to see if it’s of any interest first.

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

But whatever would we do without a public school system that can barely move half the students that enter it even with social promotion? If you tried to design an even half-way rational means of educating a child, just what aspects of the present system would you retain? And as the CPI fiction shows, these are far from the only federal figures being severely fudged.

Joseph Farah realizes the wisdom of not blindly supporting Republicans:

How bad would McCain be? I’ll put it this way: Worse than Bush. Are you ready for that? I’m not. All things being equal, I’d rather watch the Democrats destroy America for the next four years, holding out hope that a new kind of Republican leadership might arise to fight back in 2012.

If you can’t get a republican Republican, then let the Democrats pillage and burn for four years. That way you’ve at least got a chance of putting things back in order, as both Bushes have proved, all electing a democratic Republican president accomplishes is to ensure that the government pillaging is followed by even more pillaging. If you’re going to have democrat-style rule anyhow, let the Democrats take the responsibility for it. It’s true that one shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But John McCain is not good and the perfect should always be the enemy of the bad.

Two elderly women accused of killing two transient men with a car so they could collect nearly $3 million in insurance money were videotaped talking about the scheme while in FBI custody, the prosecutor said in opening statements Tuesday…. Truc Do, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said the women befriended the two men and took out insurance policies on their lives, then drugged them and ran them over to make it look as if the two homeless men had been killed in hit-and-run accidents.

It doesn’t matter how old she is, if a woman is overly friendly or uncharacteristically solicitous, keep your guard up. It’s strange how men find overly friendly men to be creepy in the extreme, but then are suckered readily by an overly friendly woman. Perhaps it’s my Scandinavian upbringing, but if someone I don’t know is smiling a little too broadly at me, I tend to put one hand on my wallet and the other on my gun.

Indifference and suspicion, that I can handle. General goodwill towards the world, as with the Italians, that’s fine too. But a smile combained with an inexplicably particular interest is the sign of the human predator.

But it could have been worse:

Hearing the most important gun rights case in nearly 70 years, the justices on Tuesday spent 98 minutes engrossed in a lively debate about British and American legal traditions relating to the right to bear arms, especially in self-defence. By the end of Tuesday’s session, it appeared clear that a majority of the court would rule that the US constitution protects the right of individual Americans to “keep and bear arms” – but that federal, state and local governments will retain some powers to regulate firearms.

It’s absurd, to be sure, but that’s what I’m expecting them to announce.

While I don’t think 2001: A Space Odyssey has held up terribly well – I watched it a few months ago as well as reading the later books in what somehow turned into a series – I considered The Fountains of Paradise to be one of the truly great science fiction classics, and “The Nine Billion Names of God” to be one of the best short stories the genre has ever produced.

While Kelly’s working on finishing her response to my response, I shall content myself with mocking one of the Rational Response Squad’s hangers-on. I note with some amusement that he’s genuinely convinced of my “ignorance”:

I won’t make any more comments on Day’s supposed understanding apart from his suggestion that there was no feudalism in Europe – what more can I say? Hats off to him for being just as ignorant as that theist someone mentioned in the RD fora, who said that there was nothing bad about the Dark Ages, and that at least kids got a decent education…

From the Medieval Sourcebook:

“The usefulness of feudalism as a term is at present under intense discussion among historians of the middle ages, with the majority of experts now rejecting the term.

Feudalism was not a word used in the middle ages. It has had two quite distinct meanings in recent usage. The first meaning – promoted by radicals during the French Revolution and developed by Marxist historians – refers to a social system based on a society in which peasant agriculture is the fundamental productive activity; in which slavery is non-existent or marginal but peasants are tied to the land in some way; and in which a small elite defined by military activity dominates.. This is probably the most important meaning in modern popular usage.

For most of the 20th-century, professional medievalists have given the term a quite different meaning [see F. Ganshof, Feudalism for a classic summary]. For medieval historians the term has come to mean a system of reciprocal personal relations among members of the military elite, which lead ultimately to parliament and then Western democracy.”

It was the nonexistent Jacobin concept of a feudal society that Kelly has in mind, of course, since the other directly contradicts her argument. It’s most amusing that the atheist commenter should bring up the so-called Dark Ages, for as I point out in TIA, it hasn’t been considered a valid concept by professional historians for more than seventy years.