Good and Evil

Mangione reviewed Kaczynski’s book, Industrial Society and Its Future, on Goodreads. He rated it four out of five stars and offered measured praise for it in a public post.

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For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men.

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Albuquerque is in the top 20 most dangerous cities in the world, per capita.

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1,000 Israeli strikes on Syria last night.

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Good and Evil

The CEO murderer will stimulate a lot of discussion, including moral reflection. Remember Kaczynski had a lot of support from American academics.

Here is an article (the source I can't remember), written about another topic, that has application.

Biden's speech at the UN was a sad farewell. As Israel ramped up its attack on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, Biden prattled on about his hopes for peace. If possible, he projected a sad, discouraged optimism about a world with unfocused threats. Global warming was mentioned 6 times, Iran twice. The UN was quiet; you could not hear the explosions in Lebanon, the gunfire in Ukraine, or the war engines of China.

We want to think that the line between good and evil is clear and that individuals fall into one camp or another. In The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.”

Because the line between good/evil is not as straightforward as we wish, an essential principle for organizing society is, in F. A. Hayek’s words, to ensure that a “bad man can do least harm.”

Many know these famous words by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Those who deny this truth of human nature often believe that giving “good” people – those possessing the right ideology – enough power to control others solves the problem of organizing society.

Solzhenitsyn’s famous line doesn’t appear until page 746, and most people are unaware of the context. The famous sentence begins, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good…”

Who disclosed this truth to Solzhenitsyn? It was his own experiences in the Gulag.

In the same section of his book, he wrote, “Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings.” He then draws out what he saw in himself:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.

Insightfully, Solzhenitsyn saw the fallacy of using good intentions as a guide to action: “In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.”

The worst villains can delude themselves into thinking they are doing good. We should not be fooled into believing that freedom can be preserved by relying on good people’s good intentions.

Take an honest look at your stream of thinking and notice how self-interested it is. Yes, notice your thoughts of kindness and generosity toward others, too. But there is no reason for society to trust your good intentions, or mine, with the power to control others.

To find goodness, Solzhenitsyn had first to see his darkness. And then, having done so, a path to goodness opened up: “And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.”

Following his famous sentence about “the line separating good and evil” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”

That the line between good and evil oscillates is a truth Solzhenitsyn expressed repeatedly. In Volume 1, he wrote:

During the life of any heart this line [between good and evil] keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.

Clearly, Solzhenitsyn wanted us to understand our work is never done. Cultivating our goodness is the work of a lifetime.

In both Volumes 1 and 2, Solzhenitsyn repeats Socrates’s admonition, “’Know thyself.” In Volume 2, he added, “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.”

It’s not only the other guy Solzhenitsyn was writing about. Evil can come through any of us if we don’t work to recognize and choose against it. Solzhenitsyn would say we are deluding ourselves when we think evil is only out there. This is a truth that continues to be vindicated.

Recently, Jonathan Mayo compiled new details of the November 2008 terror attack when ten youthful terrorists from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba murdered 164 people in Mumbai, India. Their targets were ordinary Mumbai residents, people at a Jewish Center, and visitors at a famed hotel catering to tourists.

What stood out about the attack is that, in real-time, the ten terrorists were in communication with controllers, messaging them from Pakistan.

Mayo reports that while terrorists were at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, they received messages that the controllers in Pakistan “are furious there is no sign of a fire at the Taj.” The controllers phoned the youthful terrorists: “Nothing is going to happen until you start the fire. When people see the flames they will begin to be afraid. And throw some grenades, my brother. There’s no harm in throwing a few grenades.”

The terrorists in the hotel seemed “overwhelmed by the opulence of the hotel and [told] their handlers: ‘There are computers here with high tech screens! It’s amazing!’ The controller [insisted] they ‘start a proper fire’ immediately.”

After the attack, one terrorist at the train station drove to a police roadblock and said: “Please sir, I have done what I came to do. Please kill me.” The young man told police that “his father, a street seller, sold him to [the terrorist group], telling his son: ‘We’ll have money, we won’t be poor anymore.’”

The line between good and evil, even in the youthful terrorists, was moving in real-time.

Solzhenitsyn’s testimony helps us see that evil cannot be eliminated, but, in his words, “it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

If Solzhenitsyn is correct about the potential for evil existing in each of us, then Thomas Sowell, in his book A Conflict of Visions, has an important warning:

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. Their prospects of growing up as decent, productive people depends on the whole elaborate set of largely unarticulated practices which engender moral values, self-discipline, and consideration for others."

Steven Pinker echoed Solzhenitsyn when he wrote, “Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

It would be a foolish bet to expect that each person will grow up civilized and exercise their moral agency to turn towards good. Human cooperation and flourishing are enabled by moral traditions and the rule of law that constrains evil.

When unconstrained ideology triumphs over rights and morality, we quickly discover how fast evil triumphs over good.

In contrast, the extended social order created by the free market expands our opportunities to cooperate with others, and crucially, accepts human nature for what it is. The more we cooperate, the more we see our well-being depends on others. The thicker the interdependence, the greater the incentives to cultivate the good side of our human nature. (from somewhere)

Envy and its Relatives

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris hosted reality television star Kim Kardashian at the White House on Thursday to discuss criminal justice reform.

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Envy and its Relatives

Thomas Aquinas defined Envy as "sadness on account of the goods possessed by others." Envy is sadness! It turns inward. How is it different from jealousy?

Envy's subject is removed from the envious; the envious man knows he has no claim upon the envied subject. He may covet another's property but he knows it is not his. To attain it he would have to steal it. Jealousy is a different matter. Unlike envy, jealousy presupposes the right to what the other has. Othello was jealous of his wife's imagined affections for another; he felt, justly, those affections should be his.

So envy is the sadness over the attainments of another, and jealousy is the outrage over something misappropriated. The jealous man feels that something he might never have had has been lost to another.

In the redistribution world, wanting another's productivity--or the rewards of that productivity--is envy as the envious man has no legitimate claim to it. Taking it away from its rightful owner is a step away from envy as the sadness of envy is passive. And to take someone's production requires some kind of force.

So, what to do? A recent enhancement of envy politics is the transformation of envy into jealousy, the declaration of the production of another as actually rightfully belonging to someone else. So taking it is less theft. 

And, of course, as with Desdemona, sometimes accidents happen.

Vice

This is how I see mainstream media. The problem isn’t limited to race, gender, and sexual orientation, where Richard [Hanania] agrees that the media is crazy. The problem isn’t specific factual errors, either. The central problem is that the mainstream media’s standard operating standard is to use selective presentation to spread absurd views about practically everything that matters.--caplan

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Several rescue groups have withdrawn from their efforts in Turkey because of security threats

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The Richmond FBI prepared a memo on what it called “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” and the threat they posed, as a potential recruiting ground for ethnically motivated right-wing extremism.

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Vice

There is a remarkable evolution in the world's vision of virtue. The ancient Greeks felt that virtue could--and must--be taught. Such a notion in the modern West would be simply an inconceivable outrage.

The Atlantic has an article on the rising legalization of vice.

Vice has made some legal advances, mostly as part of a hands-off, libertarian, personal responsibilities theme.
Since the Supreme Court struck down previous restrictions on sports betting in 2018, 36 states have legalized it (26 of which allow mobile betting), and new ballot initiatives are proposed every year.

Only four states still prohibit all uses of marijuana. In 19 states, the recreational use of marijuana is now fully legal; all other states allow medicinal use of cannabis products.

Natasha Dow Schüll’s book, Addiction by Design, carefully documents how electronic slot machines are designed to get players addicted.

As much as 50 percent of revenue comes from “problem gamblers,” while one study showed that in 1998, only 4 percent of gambling revenue from video lottery games came from “responsible” gamers. Just as tobacco companies would go out of business if people used their products responsibly, gambling wouldn’t be a multibillion-dollar industry if it weren’t for addicts.

"Virtue is not simply doing good deeds, but also a set of dispositions and habits that must be practiced in order to flourish. Just as people can be sucked into addictions, we can also work to develop the virtues inside us so that we can be kind, generous, and self-controlled throughout our lives.

Driven by this rich view of life together, we should make it as difficult as possible to access things that impair our ability to make good decisions. It’s not the government’s primary job to protect people from their own worst impulses, nor is the state the primary source of our virtue formation. But we do recognize that policy plays a role in shaping the environment so that we can develop our virtues."

Sunday/Anger, Lust, and Oaths

                                    Anger, Lust, and Oaths

A tough gospel today wherein Christ attacks sanctimony, equates murder with anger, and says a man's word should be as good as his oath. It is the gospel that poor Jimmy Carter quoted that allowed him to be belittled (lusting after women in his heart.)

Christ is presenting a revolutionary thought here, that of the desire being equivalent to the act. Remember, Jewish teaching did not hold desire as sin because it could not be measured.

His basic point is that responsibility goes beyond the letter of the law to a man's essence, his soul.


A Poison Tree
by William Blake

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Taking a Bullet

Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal.--Sowell

In April, U.S. auto sales were down 6.1 percent.  That was the worst decline in 8 years.
Car sales are down in Germany. Car markets in Europe continue to struggle with new EU emission regulations that began last September. These regulations have been the main scapegoat for an industry in Europe that clearly has been grinding to a halt for months now, with manufacturers claiming that the regulations have caused production and sales bottlenecks. 
The economics of self-inflicted wounds.

Amazing stuff on the internet. This is a take on the current world situation from a pro-Russian website I found: 
"The Empire has suffered painful defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, but one has to admit that these are “tough” countries to crack.  The Empire also appears to have lost control of Libya, but that is another complex country which is very hard to control.  We also saw all the pathetic huffing and puffing with the DPRK.  But, let’s be honest, the USA never stood a chance to bully the DPRK into submission, nevermind invading or regime-changing it.  Syria was much weaker, but here Russia, Iran and Hezbollah did a world class job of repelling all the AngloZionist attacks, political and military.  Besides, I for one will never blame Trump for not listening to Bolton and not triggering WWIII over Syria (yet?)

But Venezuela?!

No Hezbollah or Iran backing Maduro there.  And Venezuela is way too far away from Russia to allow her to do what she did in Syria.  In fact, Venezuela is in the proverbial “backyard” of the USA and is surrounded by hostile puppet regimes.  And yet, tonight, it appears that the US puppet Guaidó has failed in his coup attempt." (emphasis unchanged)

WashPo recently counted 10,000 lies by Trump but an economist, looking only at the first one hundred economic "falsehoods" WashPo listed, found 27 out of 100 Trump comments to be "defensible if not unimpeachably accurate." So WashPo is lying?

Apparently this is the Year of the Cicadas, an every seventeen year event. This, and Trump  too. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Trump's discussions with Putin is allowing a vicious dictator to seem to be a sensible, reasonable man compared to us.

An end to the Aids epidemic could be in sight after a landmark study found men whose HIV infection was fully suppressed by antiretroviral drugs had no chance of infecting their partner. The success of the medicine means that if everyone with HIV were fully treated, there would be no further infections.

And, on the Ebola front: The death toll from an Ebola outbreak in Congo rose above 1,000 on Friday, with attacks on treatment centers continuing to hamper efforts to control the "intense transmission" of the second-worst epidemic of the virus on record. "Attacks on treatment centers."

An interesting discussion recently with a businessman from Canada who has a new Corporation that he has registered in the United States rather than Canada. The reason he did so was the Canadian system demands that all of his papers be duplicated in French and this was so expensive and so annoying and the Americans were so much easier to deal with that he just moved the company here.

Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss America are all Black women.

Mayor Pugh is out in Baltimore, not because she behaved criminally and unethically but because she was too obviously corrupt; she put all of the others at risk.

Wal-Mart has 440 Satanic items on its online catalog.

There is growing use of “diversity statements” to making hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.  “Professors and other faculty members are asked to pledge their commitment to 'equity' and 'inclusion' and to demonstrate how they have acted to fulfill this pledge in the past,” Christian Schneider wrote in a New York Post op-ed.  The University of California  demands that all professors applying for tenure-track positions “write a statement on their commitment to diversity, showing, for example, their ‘record of success advising women and minority graduate students,’” reported by something called RealClearInvestigations. At Vassar, tenure-track candidates have to report their “contributions to social justice.” Applicants at the University of Minnesota-Duluth must “demonstrate ability to support the university’s commitment to equity and diversity.” Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington and the University of Nebraska all instruct their professors on how to write effective diversity statements….Faculty at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences were recently required to submit reports detailing their actions in support of “diversity, inclusion and belonging.” The teachers’ ability to demonstrate "wokeness" will affect the assignment of future bonuses, per the school’s dean.
We don't know if they have to memorize chants or anything.

On this day in 1970, at Kent State in Kent, Ohio, 28 National Guardsmen fired into a group of antiwar demonstrators on the Kent State University campus, killing four students, wounding eight, and permanently paralyzing another.

                              Taking a Bullet

The LA Times had a big article on the California "bullet train." The high-speed rail network would transform California as it connected Los Angeles with San Francisco — ​cleaner air, less congested freeways and airports, and more limited suburban sprawl with a whole new style of housing around rail stops. 

When California shifted its bullet train plan into high gear in 2008, it had just 10 employees to manage and oversee design of the largest public construction project in state history. It would take them only 12 years to bore under mountains, bridge rivers and build 520 miles of rail bed — all at a cost of just $33 billion. But significant portions of this work have been flawed or mismanaged, according to records reviewed by The Times and interviews with dozens of people involved in the project. Ten years after voters approved it, the project is $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule.


$44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule.

There seems to be a distinction between the abstract plan and the practical implementation. Plans call for the trains to share commuter tracks, moving at much slower speeds and being subjected to delays. The agency originally estimated it would cost $332 million to buy up properties to build the route. But cutting through orchards, vineyards and dairies with vast and sophisticated irrigation and trellis systems proved profoundly more complicated than was expected. The land acquisition is now budgeted at $1.5 billion and tied up in endless litigation. In 2016, engineers said they had to dig a 13.5-mile tunnel through the Diablo Range because their earlier plans cut too close to the San Luis Reservoir. But boring through the unstable mix of hard sandstone, weak shale and boulders has put the estimated cost of that single stretch between $5.6 billion and $14.4 billion.

Even Morocco, with an economy just 4% the size of California’s, managed to build high-speed rail linking Casablanca, Rabat and Tangier.

Oh, well.

But the incentives for building the line is instructive.

The rail authority’s consultants are politically powerful and made major contributions to support the 2008 political campaign for the bullet train bond. They have staffed their ranks with former high-level bureaucrats, and their former executives have occupied key government posts.

Engineering and construction firms contributed $837,000 to the bond campaign, second only to the $1.6 million spent by various unions, according to a Times review of campaign filings. WSP, a professional services firm, put $107,000 into the campaign. There was no organized opposition to the bond measure. It passed with 52.7% support.


The key phrase here is "There was no organized opposition to the bond measure." Here a select few campaigned for a project that would benefit only them. And they were generous; they only wanted enough to get rich on. The rest of the project they gave to us.

Sunday/Taum

A NYT article about the Taum children was published last year. It is an account, through the memories of one of the children, of what happened there in the early 1900s. It will come up again because it is a terrible story and the Church, which was involved, has had new horrible stories about children.

Taub is a large community in Galway and was the site of what was originally a workhouse which became a home for unwed mothers and a storehouse for their children. A lot of kids came through there. A 796 graves of children are there as well. 

"The Tuam home was not alone. Children born out of wedlock during this period were nearly four times more likely to die than “legitimate” children, with those in institutions at particular risk. The reasons may be many — poor prenatal care, insufficient government funding, little or no training of staff – but this is certain: It was no secret.

In 1934, the Irish parliament was informed of the inordinate number of deaths among this group of children. “One must come to the conclusion that they are not looked after with the same care and attention as that given to ordinary children,” a public health official said.

Thirty died in the Tuam home that year.

In 1938, it was 26. In 1940, 34. In 1944, 40." (nyt)

That is to say these children were not actively killed, they were just not cared for as much. And the nuns who ran the place were responsible. But they were not alone.

These children had mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts. The government knew. So did the Church. Thousands and thousands of adults knew.

"Taum" comes from a Latin word meaning "Burial mound."

American Airlines

We demand a lot of airlines; safety is a lot. There is no margin, no 96% safe. Air travel is an all-or-nothing event.
But it is actually not, any more than surgery is. One can have a great appendectomy, survive and do well. That does not allow the surgeon to place  misery, insincerity and down right meanness in the greater context of the surgical success. But that is exactly what these airlines do.
Last weekend my wife flew in to Miami to connect to Key West. The flight left on time but landed late and the connection the airline booked was missed. That left her and several others from her flight in a quandary. They were soon joined by others from other late flights. (Included was a couple with two infants.) It was late--after ten--and there were no facilities available. No food. No drink. And no transportation. Just ten to fifteen people of various ages--infants included--trapped in front of an American Airlines desk presided over by one woman available to process the marooned victims and reschedule them for the next day's flights. What then evolved was an individual and precise explanation to each victim as to why the airline had no responsibility for anything the victims would undergo. Had they been trapped beneath border guard searchlights they would have been handled in a more charitable manner.
The coup de grâce was delivered by the attendant when her shift was up and it was time for her to shuck the inconvenience the travelers created for her. She handed out vouchers to each victim for transportation and lodging and she left. Tellingly she looked away as she did in a surprising moment of guilt: The vouchers turned out to be dummies--there was nothing at the end of the phone line.
The survivors were left to sleep on the floor.
It is easy for the racist cabby to say, "Stop complaining. I got you here." But a civilized society demands more. It--we--demand some personal involvement, some personal responsibility for the well-being of others. That is how civilized people behave and it should be second nature in us. When it is not, when some huge aberration of total disinterest to the wellbeing of others becomes a routine element in a people or group, or becomes formally institutionalized in some legalistic checklist, the people involved deserve a lot more than disrespect in return.

Wisdom of the Inuit

This is a quote from an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Es­kimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat [for him]. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: 
'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.' 
The "humanity" the man was claiming was the idea that there was no calculation of his "gift," no "accounting." It is the accounting of debt that ruins the gift, that makes man a slave. This has become an important concept in the world of anthropology.

The Pope, Sentiment and Action

The Pope offers concerns about the world that are a distillation of the moral problems of the West. The care of the poor is the touchstone. Poverty is essentially a low tide of economic achievement. Many such situations are inherent to peoples and/or places and will not improve: The Eskimo is probably making the most of his options. Efforts by New York to improve the conditions of the Eskimo might make him physically more comfortable but also might make him less an Eskimo, like a displaced New Yorker. So what should be done?
It is kind of those with excess to share it with those with less but is it kind for others to take from those with excess and share it with those below subsistence? And how would that be done? Christ always placed such decisions upon the individual. Christ's gospel is filled with personal responsibility; He had disregard for institutions.
How is poverty to be defined? Many would say the intrusion of Europeans--despite the excess they brought--was a disaster for the impoverished hunter-gather North American Indian--not just in combat but in culture. Should the West duplicate such intrusions elsewhere? What about the relativity of poverty? A poor man in America would be middle class most other places; should that be considered? How should such decisions be made and who should make them? Worst, the history of centralized powerful entities making decisions such as these has historically been a nightmare. The agent of redistribution always, always become a monster. The practicalities of these problems overlook the underlying moral question as well: By what authority does one group demand the production of another?
Until someone starts talking about the problem of moving sentiment to action, the poverty cat will never get a bell.

American Symbolism

We need to replace Jackson on the $20 bill because he was a Native American killer. We need to keep Jackson on the $20 bill because he was an important military hero and a man who expanded the egalitarian leadership in the country.
We need to ban the Confederate flag because it was a symbol of rebellion and slavery. There is no need to ban the Confederate flag just because some crazies see it as a crazy symbol.

We need to ban rap music because it glorifies crime and misogyny. Rap music is artistic expression and cannot be suppressed regardless of its content.

What is happening here is opinions are becoming creeds. And these creeds demand divine-like purity. The founders of the nation owned slaves, or socialized with men who owned slaves or did not make a sincere effort to outlaw slavery so their remarkable accomplishment of the Declaration of Independence is tainted and the nation it created inferior. Lincoln did not outlaw slavery until well into the Civil War so he must not be much of a good guy. Worse, he on occasion denigrated miscegenation. Buzz Aldrin brought a consecrated host to the moon and took communion there; that is a violation of the separation of church and state and the moon landing is less of an achievement.

The most bigoted organizations in the history of mankind would include the American armed forces and the National Baseball League. Should we get rid of them?

Life is harder than this.

Arlington National Cemetery was founded by the victorious Union after the savage and destructive Civil War to bury its dead. There you will find Section 16. Section 16 contains the remains of hundreds of Confederate soldiers grouped around a modest monument to their devotion to "duty as they understood it" — a gesture by the Union of soldierly respect, without any concession regarding the purity of their cause.

New Year Thought 1/1/14

Paul's Letter to the Galatians says that Christ on earth means that all men are adopted sons of God, heirs to His infinite creation.
So every man, regardless of station or circumstance, wealth or heritage, birthright or appearance, sickness or health is equal in the eyes of God. There have been a lot of notions--from nihilism to castes, from divine right to class conflict, from Freud to Malthus--that have come down the pike since the beginning of recorded time but has there ever been a more radical, more hopeful, more optimistic idea than that? And could there be a better thought to start the new year?

Fairness Czar

The Washington Post searched the White House website for mention of the Buffett Rule and the AMT; the Buffett Rule is mentioned 17,400 times, the AMT fewer than 600. The Buffet Rule tax will take about 47 billion dollars from 22,000 wealthy households over ten years, the AMT will bring in 1 trillion dollars from millions of taxpayers most of whom earn less than 200,000 dollars a year over the same period.

Obama has said repeatedly that he favored the Buffett Rule even if it brought in less money; there is some poorly articulated reason that sounds a lot like reprisal but it is often stated as "fairness." But what is "fair" about the AMT which has accidentally become a middle class curse and why is the self-appointed "fairness czar" not fixing it?

"I'm always true to you darlin' in my fashion."

The problem with embracing fairness is the same as embracing chastity: You can not be spotty. You can not do it on even or odd days, during certain hours or under certain circumstances, or only with Billy.

New Moralists

There is a remarkable supposition in the democracy: The belief that some subsets in the culture can, justly, pass judgment on another. This is not universal; blacks cannot pass judgment on Asians, nor the educated on the uneducated. But politicians can pass judgment on economic groups.

For example, it is generally assumed that a group drilling and fracking for Marcellus shale will do so without any regard for the safety of the neighboring community and that the environmental and government groups that volunteer their concerns have both the right and the moral authority to intervene on the community's behalf.

The President can vilify a segment of the population solely on the basis of their tax bracket and that judgment is taken as serious and honest.

Senators can discuss destructive and malicious behavior on Wall Street in the most general terms and their opinions taken as pure as the driven snow.

If you run afoul of the IRS, you are guilty until proven innocent.

When did this disparity of morality develop? When did the dreadful gravity of politics attract virtue?

Penn State and the Rule of Errors

The career of Bill Buckner's career teaches a lot about life. He played 22 seasons in Major League Baseball, 2517 games, 9397 at bats, 2715 hits, was in the top ten in doubles ('81 and '83), had 174 homers, 1208 rbi's, top ten in stolen bases ('74 and '76), averaged .289 with an OBP of .321 and a fielding percentage of .991. He batted number two because he was an accomplished contact hitter. In 1985 he hit .299 with 16 homers and 110 rbi's.

This looks like a good career and he seems to have been an able player, certainly an above average number two hitter. But in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series with the Mets down to their last out, he misplayed a soft grounder to first which allowed the Mets to tie the game and eventually win it. In the seventh game the Mets won the series. Buckner is remembered for that single moment in his career--not for the other 22 years of accomplishment.

Baseball only gives errors for physical mistakes, not mental, emotional or character errors and, while most fans remember Buckner's error, if pressed, they will give him his due. Yet it is still a harsh reality in sports that defining moments may not be characteristic ones. But errors in judgment, errors in character and errors in virtue are invariably seen as characteristic ones. This fierce rule will ruin the lives of everyone at Penn State who has been involved in this mishandling of the Sanduskey scandal, will invalidate their accomplishments and destroy their futures.

Sunday Sermon: Deadly Sins or Different Values

Pale Gas is the mnemonic for the seven deadly sins (vices): pride, avarice, lust, envy, greed, anger and sloth. These were originally listed by Pope St. Gregory the Great but, of course, redefined by Aquinas who felt they were rather vices which led to sin. It is a shame that lust so dominates our cultural prohibitions because the other vices are vibrating and alive. They all deserve some thought. And these old thinkers thought about them so well.

Five are of the "inordinate desire" variety: "For one's own excellence"--pride (Aquinas changed this to "vainglory", the desire for the recognition of one's own excellence), of "possession or riches"--avarice, "sexual pleasure"--the old reliable lust, "of food and drink"--gluttony, "for revenge"--anger (vs. the righteous anger of seeking justice.)

Anger, the Achilles killer, is surprising as only revenge, an interesting sharpened point. And the church fathers struggled over pride and where it fell among fulfillment, ambition and achievement which explains St. Thomas' modification away from excellence and into the recognition of same. Envy is defined as "sadness on account of the goods possessed by others." Envy is sadness! And sloth is "sorrow in the face of spiritual good", not just laziness but "a malady of the will which causes us to neglect our duties." (Sheen, Fulton not Martin) Sloth is more than slobbering weakness or self indulgence, at its core is sorrow! Therapists take note.

The world is the lesser for the absence of these thinkers, high-minded, confident and clear. And it misses the debate on these qualities--or lack thereof. There is a frisson in just the reading of them.

Tension, drama, fullness are all impossible without confines, without a fixed point, without the right of judgment.