bellocian

An article in Foreign Policy, Bring Back the Draft, argues that mass conscription as “the only way” to win the “war on terror.” The author ends with the rather Orwellian point, “Indeed, the reinstatement of the draft is not an invitation for more war; it may be the best chance for peace” — after arguing “at the moment, the United States simply has no other option. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan, crucial in the global fight against Islamist terrorism, simply cannot be accomplished with current force levels. Looking beyond Afghanistan toward the long-term struggle with radical Islamism, the United States is going to need larger standing forces”.

The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, American’s largest creditor.

The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Americans  lost their jobs every day.

In addition, December’s job losses were revised up by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000.  The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000.  If this keeps up, Obama’s promised three million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses.

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US policymakers have ignored the fact that consumer demand in the 21st century has been driven, not by increases in real income, but by increased consumer indebtedness.  This fact makes it pointless to try to stimulate the economy by bailing out banks so that they can lend more to consumers.  The American consumers have no more capacity to borrow.

With the decline in the values of their principal assets–their homes–with the destruction of half of their pension assets, and with joblessness facing them, Americans cannot and will not spend.

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Adding to the brewing disaster, Obama has been deceived by his military and neoconservative advisers into expanding the war in Afghanistan, a large, mountainous country.  Obama intends to use the draw-down of US soldiers in Iraq to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan.  This would bring the US forces to 60,000  — 600,000 fewer than US Marine Corps and US Army counterinsurgency guidelines define as the minimum number of soldiers necessary to bring success in Afghanistan–and less than half as many as the army that was unable to occupy Iraq.

The Iranians had to bail out the Bush regime by restraining its Shi’ite allies and encouraging them to use the ballot box to attain power and push out the Americans.  In Iraq the US troops only had to fight a small Sunni insurgency drawn from a minority of the population.  Even so, the US “prevailed” by putting the insurgents on the US payroll and paying them not to fight. The withdrawal agreement was dictated by the Shi’ites.  It was not what the Bush regime wanted.

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One would think that the experience with the “cakewalk” in Iraq would make the US hesitant to attempt to occupy Afghanistan, an undertaking that would require the US to occupy parts of Pakistan.  The US was hard pressed to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq.  Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan?

One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment.  Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home.

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To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Stephen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspiracy–Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks, and Mona Charen–are ecstatic over Obama’s appointments. They don’t see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney.

Not only are Obama’s appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel Lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran.

The unreality in which he US government operates is beyond belief.  A  bankrupt government  that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.  According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02092009.html

I just read Thomas Woods article, Fed Up, in the American Conservative on the popular uprising against central banking. This is the American tradition I identify with. As Woods says in the video I just posted below, the Fed, the Central Bank, is the lifeblood of the Empire. If you want to stop the war machine, you have to go after the money machine. Thus, I support the Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act introduced by Rep. Ron Paul.

Of the many parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, one has eluded all coverage: Both attended Catholic school as children. In fact, while JFK may have been the Irish Catholic from Boston, he spent less time at the Canterbury School in Connecticut than did young Barry (as he was then called) at St. Francis of Assisi in Indonesia. — William McGurn, Obama Should Acknowledge His Roots

Well that’s interesting, and probably explains why he carries the Miraculous Medal in his pocket. It’s reported that for Obama the medal is one of several good luck items. Nevertheless I wear that medal and whenever I pray — O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee — I will think of Obama and pray for his conversion, if not to the faith, at least for a coming around on the matter of life issues.

Santo Tomás de Aquino

Oil on canvas by Francisco de Herrera el Mozzo

Today is the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval Dominican philosopher/theologian. For Chesterton he was one of the two or three greatest men who ever lived, and we shouldn’t be surprised if he turns out, apart from sanctity, to be the greatest of all.

Certainly the Angelic Doctor reached transcendent heights on the wings of faith and reason, as demonstrated in his Summa Theologica, and belongs in the company of Plato and Descartes and Kant.

So too Thomas belongs in the company of a great cloud of witnesses because of his love for Our Lord and particularly beautiful is his devotion to the Holy Eucharist in his prayers and hymns. Nearing the end of his life, Thomas gave up writing considering it “as straw compared with what has now been revealed to me” — widely thought to be a vision of the glory of God.

While thinking about Saint Thomas today I remembered the conversion of a notorious Serbian abortion doctor who personally performed tens of thousands of abortions, as many as 35 a day, for 26 years. I have included an article recounting the doctors encounter with Saint Thomas below, but that too reminded me of a rather ironic quote, in no way meant to be disparaging, from the novelist and M.D. Walker Percy (the emphasis is mine):

The current con, perpetrated by some jurists, some editorial writers, and some doctors, is that since there is no agreement about the beginning of human life, it is therefore a private religious or philosophical decision and therefore the state and the courts can do nothing about it. This is a con. I will not presume to speculate who is conning whom and for what purpose. But I do submit that religion, philosophy, and private opinion have nothing to do with this issue. I further submit that it is a commonplace of modern biology, known to every high-school student and no doubt to you the reader as well, that the life of every individual organism, human or not, begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with the chromosomes of the ovum to form a new DNA complex that thenceforth directs the ontogenesis of the organism.

Such vexed subjects as the soul, God, and the nature of man are not at issue. What we are talking about and nobody I know would deny is the clear continuum that exists in the life of every individual from the moment of fertilization of a single cell.

There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: the onset of individual life is not a dogma of the Church but  a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the thirteenth century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment. — Walker Percy, A View of Abortion, with Something to Offend Everybody

The Spanish daily “La Razon” has published an article on the pro-life conversion of a former “champion of abortion.” Stojan Adasevic, who performed 48,000 abortions, sometimes up to 35 per day, is now the most important pro-life leader in Serbia, after 26 years as the most renowned abortion doctor in the country.

“The medical textbooks of the Communist regime said abortion was simply the removal of a blob of tissue,” the newspaper reported.  “Ultrasounds allowing the fetus to be seen did not arrive until the 80s, but they did not change his opinion. Nevertheless, he began to have nightmares.”

In describing his conversion, Adasevic “dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence.  The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night he asked the man in black and white who he was. ‘My name is Thomas Aquinas,’ the man in his dream responded. Adasevic, educated in communist schools, had never heard of the Dominican genius saint.  He didn’t recognize the name”

“Why don’t you ask me who these children are?” St. Thomas asked Adasevic in his dream.

“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,’ St. Thomas told him.

“Adasevic awoke in amazement and decided not to perform any more abortions,” the article stated.

“That same day a cousin came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend, who wanted to get her ninth abortion—something quite frequent in the countries of the Soviet bloc.  The doctor agreed. Instead of removing the fetus piece by piece, he decided to chop it up and remove it as a mass. However, the baby’s heart came out still beating. Adasevic realized then that he had killed a human being,”

After this experience, Adasevic “told the hospital he would no longer perform abortions. Never before had a doctor in Communist Yugoslavia refused to do so.  They cut his salary in half, fired his daughter from her job, and did not allow his son to enter the university.”

After years of pressure and on the verge of giving up, he had another dream about St. Thomas.

“You are my good friend, keep going,’ the man in black and white told him.  Adasevic became involved in the pro-life movement and was able to get Yugoslav television to air the film ‘The Silent Scream,’ by Doctor Bernard Nathanson, two times.”

Adasevic has told his story in magazines and newspapers throughout Eastern Europe. He has returned to the Orthodox faith of his childhood and has studied the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.

“Influenced by Aristotle, Thomas wrote that human life begins forty days after fertilization,” Adasevic wrote in one article. La Razon commented that Adasevic “suggests that perhaps the saint wanted to make amends for that error.”  Today the Serbian doctor continues to fight for the lives of the unborn.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=14322

I was watching Democracy Now! this morning, and it’s news to me that President Obama was featured on the cover of Ms. Magazine wearing a t-shirt that says, “This is what a feminist looks like”. Certainly Obama embraces a kind of feminism, the sort only Ms. Magazine would recognize. Camille Paglia once wrote that the Gloria Steinem’s of the world see the world “simplistically divided between feminist and anti-feminist”.

But what if we saw the world divided between pro-abortion feminists and radical feminists? I admit these are not very useful categories for mainstream use but I think the distinction is useful when thinking about the question of feminism. Many on the side I identify with — the pro-life, pro-woman side — tend to see the pro-abortion feminists as radical when what they probably mean is that they are extremists in their devotion to abortion.

In this context radical literally means going to the roots. As Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life often remarks in her lectures, the dirty little secret of women’s studies is that the first-wave feminists were vehemently anti-abortion because it is “exploitation”, “murder”, and even “genocide”. The third-wave feminists have largely admitted that abortion is a taking of human life. It’s the second-wave feminism of the Gloria Steinem’s of the world that seem to be in denial, stuck in the dark ages when a human fetus is a “blob of tissue” or whatever unscientific rhetoric they use these days, and would uphold abortion as the sacramental end-all of the feminist movement.

And in another sense radical means that “we must reach the root of the evil…” (Susan B. Anthony) The founding mothers wanted prevention and not merely punishment, and I think that’s the goal of the pro-life movement as well. The way forward is to go to the roots of the evil of why women get abortions and address those difficult issues. We don’t want a world where abortion is save, legal and rare. But a world where abortion is uneccessary and unthinkable, as the women of Silent No More tell us.

The founding mothers of feminism challenged unjust laws such as Dred Scott that said black slaves were property of their white owners without rights or protections, and that they were not persons under the law. In the same way they challenged the chattel status of women under the law. The contributions of first-wave feminists in overturning these laws cannot be overstated. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said it was degrading for men to treat women as property and that it was no better for women to treat their offspring as property. Thus radical feminism desires to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 rather than uphold Roe as the center as Obama did when he taught constitutional law.

So if we view feminism in a radical way, I cannot say that President Obama looks like much of a feminist to me.

It has been estimated that between 1949 and 1989 over 800,000 people were forced to leave Ireland. Something in the order of half of this outflow occurred during the 1950s. The peak was reached in 1955 when 55,000 young people left our shores. In a census taken in 1956 the population of the country fell to 2.8 million the lowest ever recorded and led one author to question “Are we becoming the Vanishing Irish and would we survive as a race if something wasn’t done to stem the outflow”? Those who stayed had to suffer continued hardships, isolation & social exclusion. The rural communities were decimated by the impact of emigration. Many of those who stayed in this decade did so in silence as they watched family members and friend’s leave. Now in a new millennium these people have passed on and their homes stand as a monument to a bygone age. — David Creedon via wood s lot

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Finally upgraded this blog! I had some trouble posting here, but I look forward to writing again!