Well, given how mysterious cats are, this comes as no surprise. I kind of figured that they had some magical powers. Apparently, those powers involve mirrors.
In all seriousness, that's a Gemini image with this prompt: "generate a photorealistic image of a cat sitting in front of a mirror."
Gemini does a good job with images, but I didn't think it would get the mirror image right.
Along with BDaddy and Ohioan, I spent a few years working for the DoD. If you haven't been a DoD employee and you haven't gone through the procurement system, you need to understand how thoroughly the processes have evolved to prevent Uncle Louie from getting an undeserved contract padded with a zero or two at the end.
A $40,000 set of software licenses typically took 6-9 months to procure so you would begin the paperwork for your renewals just about the time the current set of licenses arrived. If, while the paperwork was working its way through the system, some of the forms were updated, you had to take your procurement out of the system, use the new version(s) of the form(s) and then resubmit. It was unbelievably cumbersome.
The Biden regime funneled nearly $20 billion dollars into newly founded environmental groups, according to the New York Post.
Kamala Harris handed over a check for nearly $7 billion to a group called Climate United Fund.
The group does not appear in the IRS’s charities database, and has no federal filings.
The non-profit fund had only been incorporated five months before the check was handed over.
The cash for the charity came from a huge $370 billion climate slush fund of taxpayer money overseen by Clinton political consultant John Podesta.
The Biden administration funneled at least $20 billion dollars into environmental groups, most of which had only recently been founded, The Post has discovered.
In one case, former Vice President Kamala Harris handed over a check for nearly $7 billion to Bethesda, Maryland, based group Climate United Fund, which does not appear in the IRS’s charities database, and has no federal filings.
The non-profit fund had only been incorporated in Delaware on November 30, 2023, according to public records, five months before Harris handed over the cash in April 2024...
However, because the company is so new, there is no publicly published accounting of how it plans to spend the $7 billion.
Forget about $40K of software licenses, this is enough money to buy a complete aircraft carrier. They followed no procurement processes that I ever saw. I was on a couple of contract selection boards and they were insanely rigorous because you knew that the losing bidders were bound to sue you if they could.
Not here. This level of corruption is positively Biblical.
.jpg) |
| Billions with a "B." |
... when it comes to Christian theology.
We recently had a Gospel reading from Matthew 5 which has this section:
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.
During Mass, it was asserted that this is the only way to proper peace on Earth, to peace between nations. Like nearly all attempts to take Jesus' words and turn them political, to generalize them to groups, it makes zero sense.
If Pakistani Muslims gang rape half the girls at your local high school, do you then introduce them to the other half? Clearly, no.
Jesus is talking about individuals. If you are struck by someone, don't hate them. He's not recommending suicide, he's recommending not escalating the situation between you and someone else. He's definitely no recommending total capitulation to a national enemy.
When we ask the Euros to spend more money on their militaries, we're not helping or encouraging them to fight the real enemy. Russia can't project power more than 80 miles from their borders. The real enemy is this.
I$lamic scholar Abu Waleed says, "We transform the UK into an I$lamic state, and will impose humiliating laws on Christians and other non-Muslims to make them want to convert to I$lam." pic.twitter.com/ohg2tt7lMh
— William Smith 🇬🇧 🏴 (@IamWilliamSmith) February 25, 2025
If Germany has 10 panzer divisions, how do you use them against that? What does an A-10 warthog do against a Muslimah with 5 children?
What kind of military do you need to fight a Lebanese Civil War?
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| Beirut, circa 1975. |
When we ask them to build more tanks, planes and ships, who are they building them for if the birthrates are heavily stacked in favor of Islam?
In Canuckistan, they're prepping for the surrender ceremonies.
This is an actual advertisement for a Canadian burger chain. pic.twitter.com/mvxlqxItam
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) February 27, 2025
Spanish is the language of the poorly-paid, unskilled help.
It might be my top pet peeve to hear foreign languages spoken at Costco and the gym. It drives me so utterly bonkers at the gym that when I hear people speaking another language, I stop what I'm doing and go where I can't hear them to continue my workout. At our local Costco, English is spoken by less than half the people talking loudly in the store. Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic and who knows what else dominate.
It doesn't bother me to hear foreign languages in a foreign country. It's the utter disrespect for America that gets to me. If you wanted to speak Spanish or whatever, why did you bother coming here?
There's a corollary to this and that is that foreign language speakers are way overrepresented in the category of loud, rude people. At the gym, everyone wears small, workout headphones. These are the ones with adequate sound quality and poor noise cancellation properties. We listen to music, books or podcasts. If we wanted to hear you talking loudly to each other or having phone conversations, we wouldn't be wearing headphones. I am tired of having to hear this while I lift or tread the infinite mill:
Y ENTONCES LE DIJE, NO PUEDES TRAER ESA ENORME ROEDOR A LA DUCHA CON NOSOTROS PORQUE NECESITA VESTIRSE PARA LA QUINCEANERA DE MARÍA Y NO TENEMOS TIEMPO PARA SECAR SU PELO.
It is for that reason that this warmed the cockles of my heart this morning and warm cockles are always a good thing.
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That link is behind the WaPo paywall, but it hardly matters. It's a good bet we could all write the article ourselves and end up with 90% of the content the WaPo provides. What's the point?
What's the point of any of this?
China and the developing world are constantly increase their climate-destruction, such as it is, and no amount of carbon neutral fiddling by the West is going to stop it, if it's even happening at all. Further, these mountains of studies seem to be punctuated by annual claims that we only have n years to save the planet where n is an integer between 1 and 10. Deadlines come and go and the only results are more studies and more fear spasms.
At some point, the returns on the research have got to diminish to the point where spending that same amount of precious S&T funding studying the absorption properties of kitchen sponges would be a better use of our resources.
If greenhouse gases are going to change the climate, then the climate is going to change. If eighty gazillion dollars of research has yet to be able to predict actual catastrophes, but only comes up with new, hypothetical ones, then eighty one gazillion isn't going to make much of a difference.
The WaPo and other credulous, science-illiterate agitators in the newsmedia can cry all they want about the Trump Administration not paying for yet another report by weather researchers to yet another global conference on climate. These events just can't be making enough of a difference to warrant the diversion of research funding from every other field of study into the bottomless pit of predicting climate doom.
This was an actual post today on X by the Prime Minister of England.
Stabbings are on the rise in England with migrants doing a good portion of them. For the progressives, the solution is common sense knife control laws.
Seriously.
This is what happens when you follow your ideology to its logical collusion and it turned out to be complete twaddle.
I think they also need common sense machete laws.
☪️🇬🇧 Machete fights in Londonistan pic.twitter.com/Er6i79KMMs
— Nestor (@UncleNestor22) April 21, 2024
Jordan has been absolutely en fuego lately as his thread-pulling accelerates and his understanding of reality becomes deeper and more complete. This video is an outstanding description of the utter sinfulness of the Christian NGOs and Christian leadership with respect to the 4-year invasion of America by the illegals.
The US Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) preened about how we all need to respect the dignity of every human person as it came out in strident opposition to mass deportations. Just as Jordan described, they took the Lord's name in vain, wrapping themselves in the appearance of Christian charity as they kicked everyone in the groin.
The illegals were convinced to make the 1500-mile trek, taking Honduras as a nominal starting point, getting robbed, assaulted, raped, murdered or perhaps just dying from natural hazards along the way.
The Mexican cartels made billions as human traffickers because the illegals had no choice but to pay them to cross into the US.
Low-skilled American workers got replaced in their jobs or lost access to employment opportunities with the influx of illegals willing and able to work for less, paid cash under the table.
American cities got hit with massive, unsustainable and unpayable bills to house the illegals.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The whole time this was happening, the Christian NGOs kept chanting Matthew 25:40.
Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.
It's all pharisaical rubbish. It's their whitewashed tomb as they clothe themselves in the words of Christ while purposefully harming their fellow citizens and the migrants at the same time. Dig this from a speech by Cardinal Christophe Pierre.
We are prophets when we announce, by our actions and our words, the truth that will transform society: namely, that God loves his people, and that he desires all people to experience their dignity as his children, as well as solidarity with one another as brothers and sisters in the human family. We announce this prophetic message both through our direct social ministry and through our political involvement. In our direct social ministry, we do the works of mercy as a way of revealing to the poor and the excluded their human dignity in Christ. In our political involvement, we reject the narrow self-interest and political gamesmanship that is too often displayed by our leaders.
My God, the thing is so saturated with the kind of sin Jordan describes that it must have oozed out of his pores as he spoke. The Cardinal went on to quote our top pharisee, Pope Francis.
“I find it greatly disheartening to see that migration is still shrouded in a dark cloud of mistrust, rather than being seen as a source of empowerment. People on the move are seen simply as a problem to be managed. They cannot be treated like objects to be moved about; they have dignity and resources that they can offer to others; they have their own experiences, needs, fears, aspirations, dreams, skills and talents.”
By the time that our execrable Pontiff spoke these words, everyone in the Vatican knew about the tens of thousands of white, working-class, British girls who had been gang-raped by Muslim migrants. He knew this was happening and just kept going on and on about the human dignity of the migrants.
The British girls, like our own young, urban, black men who need access to the bottom rungs of a career ladder, meant absolutely nothing to these people. All they cared about was the chance to dress up their actions in Christian pieties and parade themselves around in front of their friends.
They took the Lord's name in vain over and over and over.
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"I care about the migrants because I'm doing the work of Jesus." |
Ben Shapiro's take on NASCAR going woke works perfectly for the progressive Catholics who populate the NGOs and our leadership and why they went all-in on supporting the invasion. They weren't doing things for the sake of the migrants or their fellow citizens, they were simply posing for each other.
I'm hoping this sparks some comments from Tim, Ohioan and Mut as well as anyone else who is interested. This is a really long post, but I think it's worth it.
I thought this was a fascinating conversation between Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein. They're both compelling characters and the topics were wide-ranging. At one point, Joe brought up the growing doubts about Darwinian evolution. Fortunately, there are transcripts online of the Joe Rogan podcast, so I didn't have to go through any technical gymnastics to get these excerpts.
Here, I will edit for brevity, but that link will take you to the source. Search on Darwin and you'll immediately get the relevant bit. Emphasis in the text is mine.
Joe: We have to talk about evolution because one of the things that Tucker Carlson said on the podcast was essentially that He can't like prove evolution. It's not real. He doesn't believe in evolution as it's taught.
Bret: He said well, he said a couple things. It was a little confusing. He said that you know, we see evidence of adaptation, but we don't see evidence of evolution and that we've really gotten beyond the Darwinian model. We've essentially come to understand that it's not right.
It's an argument for intelligent design, I think. First of all, I want to clean up a little bit of what he said just so it's
I don't really think he means we see the evidence for adaptation but not evolution. That's not coherent. I think what he means is we see evidence for what we would call microevolution, but we don't see evidence for what we would call macroevolution. This is a commonly believed thing in intelligent design circles.
I think people want the career evolutionary biologist to break out a bunch of examples from nature that make the case. Very, very clear so that they can relax.
Tucker's concern isn't based in science, and they can go back to feeling comfortable that, you know, the Darwinists have it well in hand.
That's not where I am.
I could do that, but I don't feel honorable doing that. I think, as a scientist, I should not be in the business of persuading people. I want you to be persuaded. I want you to be persuaded by the facts. I want them to persuade you. But I don't think I'm allowed to persuade you. I think that it's effectively PR when I attempt to bring people over to Team Darwin.
Further, as I'm sure I've mentioned to you before, I'm not happy with the state of Darwinism as it has been managed by modern Darwinists. In fact, I'm kind of annoyed by it. And although Tucker, I do not believe, is right in the end, there is a reason that the perspective that he was giving voice to is catching on in 2025.
And it has to do with the fact that, in my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are... Telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.
So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I'm annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism. I think they know.
I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a creationist worldview was always a threat that it would reassert itself. And so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation as it was presented than it ever was.
Joe: What is wrong with Darwinism? What do you think that Darwinism is doing itself a disservice by saying?
Bret: There are several different things that are wrong with it. The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell about how it is that mutation results in morphological change is incorrect.
This is a very hard thing to convey, and I want to point out that if the explanation for creatures is Darwinian, that does not depend on anybody understanding it, and it does not depend on anybody being able to phrase it in a way that it's intuitive.
... (Here there is an example of forms morphing into other forms) ...
So what that means is there are chemical differences between an excavator and a sports car.
But they're not the story of the differences in what those two creatures do. The chemistry differences are incidental.
Now, when we tell you that the differences that a bat became a flying mammal because it had a shrew-like ancestor, and that shrew-like ancestor had a genome spelled out in three-letter codons, those three-letter codons specify amino acids of which there are 20, and that the difference between the bat and the shrew is based in the differences in the proteins that are described by the genome.
We are essentially saying that the difference between the bat and the shrew is a chemical difference. It's not a simple chemical difference the way it was when we were talking about excavators and sports cars, but nonetheless, it's a biochemical difference, right? The difference in the spelling of its proteins and structural proteins and enzymes and all of that stuff.
I don't believe that mechanism. Is nearly powerful enough to explain how a shrew-like ancestor became a bat.
There's a whole layer that is missing that allows...
Evolution to explore design space much more efficiently than the mechanism that we invoke.
(The mechanism is) random mutation, which I believe in. Random mutation happens. Selection, which chooses those variants that are produced by mutation and collects the ones that give... The creature an advantage. There's nothing wrong with that story. That story is true. Okay, random mutations happen, selection collects the ones that are good, and those collected advantageous mutations accumulate in the genome. All of that is true.
What I'm arguing against is the idea that that transforms a shrew into a bat.
What you need to get a shrew turned into a bat is a much less crude mechanism, whereby selection, which is ancient at the point that you have shrews, explores design space looking for ways to be that are yet undiscovered more systematically than random chance.
I believe there's a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer.
What we did was we took the random mutation model.
And we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is. And we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces on the basis of those random mutations. And we skipped the layer in between in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet codon in nature.
Joe: So there's an information stored in the genome that is motivating it to seek new forms?
Bret: Nope, not motivating, allowing it.
Joe: Allowing it. Allowing it. So what's the motivation to seek new forms?
Bret: Oh, the motivation was there. It's primordial. Right. So the point is, let me try by analogy.
Darwinists will tell you that evolution cannot look forward. It can only look backward. And there's a way in which that's just simply true. On the other hand, a Darwinist will also tell you that you are a product of evolution and you can look forward.
Right? So if evolution can't look forward but it can build a creature that can, then can evolution look forward?
I think it effectively can. So my point is that random mutation mechanism is in a race to produce new forms that are... Better adapted to the world than their ancestors?
What if it can bias the game? It can enhance its own ability to search, right? If you lose your keys, you don't search randomly, right? You go through a systematic process of search, and that systematic process of search results in you finding your keys sooner than you would otherwise.
So we should expect evolution to find every trick it can access to. Increase the rate at which it discovers forms that would be useful in the habitat in question. And this is simply that. I'm not really saying anything that extraordinary, right? If I say, you know, do you know that computers, all they do is binary? Well, that's true.
But if you then imagine that that means that the people who program computers do it in binary, well, there was a time when that was true. But it's not true anymore. It's not how you do it.
There's a much more efficient way to program a computer, and it involves a programming language, which a computer itself can't understand. But you can build a computer that can either interpret the language in real time, or you can build a computer that can accept the code as it's spit out by a compiler.
These are mechanisms to radically increase the effectiveness of a programmer. But it all comes out. Binary anyway, in the end. That's really what I'm arguing, is that there's the initial layer of Darwinian stuff, the random mutation layer that it looks like what we teach people.
There's another layer, which we're not well familiar with, and it results in a much more powerful capacity to adapt than we can explain with that first mechanism, which is why guys like Tucker Think there's just something these Darwinists, they keep telling me that the shrew becomes a bat.
And then they go on this rant about the random mutations and the triplet codons and the, you know, mutations that actually turn out to be good. It's just not powerful enough. And they're not wrong.
They're detecting something real. And frankly, you know, Tucker is the layperson example of this. You've had Stephen Meyer on, you know, he's actually. He's a scientist who's quite good, and he's spotted that the mechanism in question isn't powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains.
Joe: What do you think that force is?
Bret: It's not a force. So I don't know how much of this I've made clear. If you fill in the missing layer, it's purely Darwinian.
None of this establishes that Darwin had it.
It's another Darwinian mechanism, right? I mean, and let me, this is, there's nothing strange about this. If you think about the way a human being works compared to, let's say, a starfish, a human being has a software layer. A cognitive layer in which the human being is born into an environment.
And that environment could be, you know, a hunter-gatherer environment of 10,000 years ago, or it could be a modern environment. And the human being doesn't have to be modified at the level of its genome in order to function differently in those two environments. It has to be sensitive to the information in those environments so that it can become adapted to them developmentally.
Right? So development is one trick that the genome uses to make a human being more flexible than other creatures. Right? You do not come out of the womb being ready to do human stuff.
Right? You are profoundly hobbled by not having a complete program. But it means that the program you develop can be highly attuned to your particular moment in time and location in space. That is...
The Darwinian mechanisms that store information in the genome solving an evolutionary problem in a different way. So this is already a second layer that doesn't function like that random mutation layer.
So evolution should be expected to find all of the cheat codes and to build them in. Because any creature that has access to all of these different ways of adapting more rapidly or more effectively, will outcompete the creatures that have fewer of these things. So you should expect, what I often say is, we have to remember, we are not looking at Darwinism 1.0.
You're looking at Darwinism 10.0. You're looking at a highly sophisticated evolutionary structure that is the result of all of the discoveries of the prior structures. And that includes some things that... Modern creatures can do, but it also includes an evolution of enhanced evolutionary capacity, including things like culture.
A couple of things jumped out at me as I listened to them talk.
First, in mathematics, you most certainly are trying to convince people. That's what proofs do. I don't understand how that cannot be said for physics, chemistry or biology. How is that supposed to work? Do we just share massive spreadsheets of experimental data with each other and everyone comes to their own conclusions? How does peer review work in such a world? It sounds like a cop-out.
Second, it was a bit of a stunner for Bret to admit to the flaws of Darwinian evolution. I have liked Bret since he first came on the scene in the Evergreen State imbroglio, but this deep honesty and integrity surprised me. Well done, Bret!
Thirdly and finally, Bret tries to hold on to Darwinian evolution by an appeal to magic. Apparently, there is an unknown motive force working at the molecular level that gives the necessary turbo boost to Darwinian evolution, allowing shrews to turn into bats and, for all we know, back down to shrews again.
Hey, why not?
Here's my problem, one where I am open to corrections. I had thought that molecular chemistry was a pretty well-understood thing. Bret seems to be arguing that there is a layer on top of molecular chemistry that we don't understand. Further, he is making an argument of faith. That motivating force is necessary to preserve Darwinian evolution and that's why it exists.
Nature abhors a vacuum and, apparently, it abhors a vacuum in Darwin's theories most of all.
So tell me, scienceological thinkerists, where your thinkerations lead you.
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| It seems relatively clear to us, but I'm a simple man and Cat is a simple cat. |
Superstar VP JD Vance is catching some flak for having spoken harsh truths to the Euros recently. He told them mass immigration has harmed them and free speech is a good thing. Having severely damaged their countries by opening their borders and now trying to silence the public who is complaining about it, the secular royalty of the Euro administrative class pouted and fussed.
I watched the full speech and thought JD went a bit easy on them. The mathematics of immigration and fertility ought to scare the brie out of the Euros. Instead, they're refusing to admit that diversity is not their strength and they're doubling down on it. Dig what's going on in Ireland, of all places.
NEW footage of Clonmel migrant/refugee plantation in Tipperary.
— MichaeloKeeffe (@Mick_O_Keeffe) February 15, 2025
Two days ago the Irish government announced they will no longer publish the names and locations of migrant plantations.
Meaning sites like this could be built anywhere without our knowledge.
Ireland is in trouble. pic.twitter.com/Puc2UBvpgN
Ireland never had an empire nor did it engage in any colonial practices. This isn't historical karma, this is a sickness. It's the performance art of white self-hatred. Like Douglas Murray said in The Strange Death of Europe, if you practice being a masochist long enough, eventually you'll meet up with a sadist and the results will be ... poor.
Like this.
I would have liked JD to be a bit more blunt, but I was really happy with the general tone of his remarks. I'm thinking his speech was just the opening salvo in a powerful barrage of blunt truth-telling.
Dig this.
ADMIN POST.
— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) February 15, 2025
Syrian illegal immigrant laughs and gives one finger salute after stabbing members of the public in Austria this afternoon, killing a 14yr old boy.
European "leaders" cried because JD Vance pointed out the facts of what's happening to Europe.
Proven right again. https://t.co/Ib0f9JfJHI pic.twitter.com/XycqmKPM7C
Pope Francis, when he isn't earning his title as The King of the Unforced Error, frequently shares utterly incoherent thoughts like this.
Jesus Christ, loving everyone with a universal love, educates us in the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception. In fact, when we speak of “infinite and transcendent dignity,” we wish to emphasize that the most decisive value possessed by the human person surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society. Thus, all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.
In case you didn't want to click on the link, and I'm not quite sure why you would, this is part of a letter from Francis to the American bishops bolstering their position on the need for Americans to provide free hotels, food and necessaries to the illegals. All humans are worthy of respect and dignity, including the illegals, ergo we must support them indefinitely.
The letter is utterly incoherent in a way only possible within a cultural bubble. It is transparently evident that no one of independent mind edited the Pope's twaddle. Had it gone through such an edit, they might have caught the internal contradiction of the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception. We got into this mess precisely because the Church flipped us the bird and allowed its numerous NGOs to act as Quislings, opening the gates of America to the invaders by providing manpower for processing and welcoming the invaders, manpower the government did not possess in anything like sufficient numbers.
Were it not for the Church, Pope Francis' Church, the invasion would have been logistically impossible. That the Catholic NGOs and their favored subcontractors waxed fat and prosperous, gorging on Federal dollars, didn't hurt.
Pope Francis and his team disrespected Americans and is now pompously demanding we respect the dignity of the illegals by continuing to pay and pay and pay. The fundamental logic of his letter disintegrates by its own hand.
So much for the pope's vaunted synodal process where leadership is supposed to listen to the laity and take in all ideas. Pope Francis puts the "no" in synodal.
I worked with ChatGPT and came up with a hymn and a limerick to fit the moment. Here's the limerick. The hymn still needs some work.
There once was a bishop quite queer,
Who lectured his flock with a sneer,
"You’re hateful, you know,
For not giving your dough,
As the migrants are already here!"
It are my blogiversary! Hooray! Cake for everyone!
Err, well, except for you. I don't have enough cake, you understand.
Something interesting is happening with my blogging these days. The purpose of this blog has been to learn. I learn best by writing, hence the fruits of the blog have been what I believe to be a better understanding of the world.
A good example is the way I read this essay by Roger Simon. As an aside, I met Roger in person at the very first Blog Expo. I even got a photo with him, planning to photoshop KT into it, but still haven't done that. Roger thought the idea was funny and played along.
Anywho, here's the snippet from that essay where Roger astutely sums up what Elon and his wizards are discovering about Federal spending.
The American taxpayer, it is already clear, has been fleeced for decades by this deliberate financial obscurantism at a level beyond comprehension, a significant part of which fits easily under the old category of featherbedding, especially for loyalists of both parties. When it is finally added up, it will more than justify the title of this article.
Government spending transparency has simply not existed in any of our lifetimes, not even remotely. The legislators themselves have little idea on how money they authorize is ultimately spent. Most apparently don’t care—at least they act as if they don’t—as long as their patrons get their portion of the payout.
I believe that through my blogging, I have come to understand the moral calculus of what has happened to us as a nation with respect to our insane spending.
As I've said many times recently, money has no meaning when it comes to government spending. The ability to print money out of thin air with seemingly no ill effects has made any attempt to rein in the handouts an act of Scroogish heartlessness. Because money simply precipitates out of thin air, it is immoral to deny anyone anything. More to the point of Roger's essay, there is no payoff to any scrutiny of the spending.
This is how you end up with transgender comic books in Honduras or whatever that insane USAID line item was.
The spending, of course, is not without consequence. Those consequences have been building up like flood waters behind a failing dam. As the Argentinians, Weimar Republic and the Confederacy all discovered, printing money is a good idea until it isn't.
Some people can see it coming and understand that uncontrolled government spending is a moral evil. Those who cannot, think any limits on the spending are cruel.
There's a benevolent way to look at both sides. Both are trying to do the compassionate thing. My argument is that the pro-spending side's moral equations have been polluted by decades of seemingly penalty-free profligacy. It's understandable that they cannot see the approaching calamities. They are still wrong, but they're not all driven by sinister motives. Most of them are just mistaken.
I can see that clearly when I read essays like Roger's because I've been writing nonsense here for 19 years.
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| Here, Cat and I wonder if we've gotten it all wrong. Truth be told, Cat is a good deal more self-assured than I am, but that's natural for Cat. |
My father was an Air Force pilot and when some event or deadline was coming up, he used to say that you were "running out of runway," meaning that if you didn't take off soon, you were going to end up crashing.
One time, flying out of Japan to attack targets in North Korea, he almost did run out of runway. His B-26 was so overloaded with munitions that he barely made it airborne and over the breakwater in the ocean at the end of the runway.
Among the many things he taught me, that one in particular has stuck with me. It was reinforced by Arthur Gordon's interview with Rudyard Kipling retold in Gordon's excellent book, A Touch Of Wonder. Here's the relevant excerpt.
He talked of ambition, of how long it took fully to master any art or craft. And of secondary ambitions: the more you had, he said, the more fully you lived. “I always wanted to build or buy a 400-ton brig,” he said reflectively, “and sail her round the world. Never did. Now, I suppose, it’s too late.” He lit a cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. “Do the things you really want to do if you possibly can. Don’t wait for circumstances to be exactly right. You’ll find that they never are.”
I've tried to make this point with our kids several times. These days it's in regard to having children. Women run out of runway sooner than they think and they don't really know where the runway ends. They may find themselves aged out of potential motherhood at 32 or it may be 42. Either way, there is a season for all things and a finite length for all runways.
I realized recently that I'm in that same boat. Well over a decade ago, I took my first solo vacation in Dixie. I flew into Atlanta, rented a car and over several days, I made my way to Houston. I visited places in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. For some reason, I fell in love with Mobile and that love affair has only grown deeper. For the past year, I've been working with a realtor, looking at potential vacation homes there.
We found one. Wife kitteh and I are going to see it next week and put an offer in on it if all goes right. Wife kitteh was afraid of the transaction until she realized that nothing was at risk. We will sell a rental property here in San Diego and transfer that net worth to a rental property in Alabama. Our new property won't appreciate as fast or earn as much, but we don't need the money. There's no financial risk. At worst, our net worth will stay right where it is.
I, however, had a very different apprehension. Is this the right decision? Jacksonville has similar water features, is on the Atlantic Ocean and is big enough for an NFL team. It's about 6 times the size of Mobile. There's more to do, see and experience.
Bay St. Louis in Mississippi has similar water features, similar homes and is closer to New Orleans.
Baton Rouge has LSU and if you go south a bit, very nice homes.
Is Mobile the spot?
It doesn't matter any more. I'm out of runway. The Alabama property will be a place for activity and my body is aging out of activity. It's getting difficult to do certain things as my joints and muscles stiffen and decay with age. I figure I've got about 7-10 years left to do anything.
Of all my candidate choices, Jacksonville might be the best, but I don't have time to spend a year or more learning the area and finding a house. Yes, there might be a better place than Mobile, but I love Mobile and that's good enough to pull the trigger on this.
Do the things you really want to do if you possibly can. Don’t wait for circumstances to be exactly right. You’ll find that they never are.
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| It's time to stop dithering. This will do fine. We'll only own it for a decade at most. |
You know that old gag, right? When someone tells you not to think about elephants, you can't stop thinking about elephants even if elephants had been the farthest thing from your mind.
I was talking to ChatGPT about my stories this morning, trying to figure out why, after discussing my characters' motivations, it kept bringing up ideas I had told it to discard. For example, the actions of the maidens in my Arthurian stories are always rationalized in terms of feminine agency and independence even after we'd come to an agreement about the primacy of sexual interdependence. The girls were feminine and needed a knight, but the prose always mentioned agency and independence, if only to justify their femininity.
I finally figured out how to ask ChatGPT why it was happening in a way that gave me a meaningful response. Here's what it said.
What’s happening is actually tied to how I process context and language. When you provide detailed discussions involving keywords describing the rationale behind those traits, my system interprets that context as important to include in the output—even if your intention is to avoid drawing attention to it. Essentially, the system assumes that if you’ve mentioned something repeatedly, it’s central to the scene or discussion.
By having long conversations about cultural evolution in a primal world, I had poisoned the AI with ideas alien to my stories.
If I don't want it to think about elephants, I should simply not mention them.
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| Unlike you, he is not thinking about elephants. This is a Gemini image. It's nice, but it doesn't give the same flavor as the ChatGPT ones. |
Our debt is crushing. We now pay more in interest payments on the debt than we pay for defense. If we don't cut spending, we'll find ourselves in a series of Argentinian-style credit crises.
USAID is a fun punching bag because it's been run for a long time by lefties who thought they were utterly untouchable. Still, that's not where the real money is. The real money isn't in the Department of Education or a lot of the other standard targets of the right.
No, the real money is in entitlements. We won't be able to get the deficit and debt under control until we tackle entitlement spending.
So why start with the small fry like USAID?
Well, when the time comes to have a conversation about cutting entitlement spending, it will be a heck of a lot easier to have that conversation after you've cut absolutely everything else to the bone and beyond.
... is what we've had for some time now. A government drunk on printed money.
About 6 years ago, I penned this one: Life's Pricing Structure Is Broken. In all immodesty, it's one of my favorites. Here's a snippet apropos of today's post.
What does it do to an individual when they discover that they can print money to spend, year after year?
What kind of car would you buy if you could print money? Me, I'd buy a Lotus. You might buy a Ferrari. Why don't you do it now? I don't have a Lotus because it would take me a year to earn it. The Lotus would represent a year of my life. If I could print money in the Catican, the Lotus would represent ... nothing.
Our pricing structure is broken. We no longer connect sacrifice with possessions.
Now check out just two of the things DOGE as uncovered from USAID.
I could conceivably understand sending money to Somalia to assist in building roads and digging wells, but sending money to Canadian universities and British Broadcasting is profligacy for its own sake. Money had no value, so it was sprayed all over the place, directed by malignant idealogues without oversight.
The list goes on and on and on and this is just USAID. Wait until they get to the Department of Education or Health and Human Services. Those will be eye-watering. I have no idea who was shelling out the coin for the illegals, but I do know that Catholic NGOs raked in nearly $3B over the last 4 years, flipping all of us the bird and assisting in the invasion of our country. Lutheran NGOs weren't far behind.
And yes, that's 3 billion with a "B."
Money had no meaning, so a culture of wild spending grew like kudzu until we found ourselves sending $2,000,000 for sex change operations in Guatemala.
Short answer: Yes.
Here's the deal. The Federal budget is law. It is a bill, passed by the legislature, signed by the president which makes it a law. You cannot spend money in defiance of that law without facing a court case that you will most certainly lose.
However ...
However, modern budgets, or, to be more precise, monstrous continuing resolutions, do not typically call out specific items. As Mark Steyn pithily put it in his analysis of ObamaCare in his book, America Alone, the bill gave the HHS Secretary insane levels of discretion to direct not just spending, but regulations. From an interview he gave Hugh Hewitt, Mark's description of the leeway given the Secretary of HHS:
The secretary shall determine this, the secretary may determine that, the secretary may, shall and determine anything she wants off the top of her pretty little head.
Modern continuing resolutions are rife with that sort of thing.
The budget, such as it is, gives large blobs of money with only moderate direction to the agencies which then spend it in pursuance of the intent of the law, more or less. Watching what DOGE has uncovered about the way USAID spent its money, sometimes the agencies lean towards the "very much less" end of the more or less scale. Here's where it gets fun.
The new administration can come in and cut any spending not expressly protected by the law which is the budget. If USAID is given $50B to further American interests across the globe with not much more direction than that, the new administration can burn all of the existing projects to the ground without any fear of legal reprisals. That's an extreme example, but you get the idea. The budget is indeed law, but if it's not explicit, the agencies can change direction any time they want and still be in compliance with the law.
Also, it is not against the law to not spend all the money you get. According to ChatGPT:
Many federal agencies receive funding through annual appropriations, meaning the money is only available to spend during that fiscal year. If the funds are not used, they typically expire and return to the U.S. Treasury.
Emphasis mine. That jives with my recollections from the dim past.
We can use the vagueness of the budgetary laws to cut the deficit. That's what DOGE is doing right now.
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| Thank goodness! |
The strategy for cutting the deficit is simple. While it is illegal to spend more than you were allocated and it is illegal to not spend on items expressly called out by budgetary law, there is no reason you have to spend the rest of the money. Any money not spent goes back to the treasury, lowering the deficit.
If there’s an explicit statutory authorization for an outlay to a third party, they can go to court and get their money
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) February 4, 2025
But if you’re a third party that was given a discretionary award/grant by an agency? ZAP!
... was a saying Ohioan and I used to use when we worked together on a business development team. Once a customer has decided to purchase your product, the only thing you can do from there on out is screw up the deal. Keep your mouth shut and let the customer do all of the talking.
I've had the occasion to use this advice myself twice recently. At work, there is a major program that has been instructed by their sponsors to integrate with my work. In fact, integrating with my stuff is their #1 priority right now. Their system is built on a rigid and brittle Oracle database with a clumsy front end, typical of such creatures. The database does some really good things, but it's being forced to perform tasks unsuited for databases.
I'm working in Jira which is tailor-made for workflows and project management. The other team must be 20 or so people. My team is me plus the SMEs from my customers. The comparison in agility between the two sides becomes dramatically obvious when we have integration meetings. Those are usually me and a dozen of them.
Since they have been told to integrate with me, I don't have to make a sale. Because their product is so fragile, they're realizing that this integration is going to break various aspects of their tool, requiring them to disable certain event triggers. I don't envy their task and I actually like and respect that team.
As I recalled the "don't talk" maxim, I began to think about what I was listening to as the other side tumbled through the implications of our integration. They were emotionally coming to grips with just what the integration meant. In addition, they had expected the first 3 months of our integration to be meetings and documents. Instead, they discovered they will be expected to produce a working product.
I have no problems with this integration. On my side, the work will take about a week, followed by live testing. On their side, just getting the team all going in the same direction will be a chore. By not talking past the point of sale, I wasn't getting in the way of their evolution of thought. My role now is to remove every impediment I possibly can and make myself available for consultations.
They're on an emotional journey as much as a technical one and such things cannot be rushed.
In my personal life, I've been looking at vacation property in Alabama for about a year. I'm in Foley right now on a 5-day jaunt. Working with a realtor here in Baldwin County, I think I've found the place. It's absolutely stellar, right on the river, in a good neighborhood with all the features I was hoping to find. It's got some quirks, but they're manageable.
Wife kitteh has been supportive, but has pulled up short when I've found good candidates. This is my dream, not hers. We missed out on a superb property about 9 months ago because she couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger. This time, she got cold feet when I told her about it over the phone. The next day, we talked and she was down with the purchase. I didn't press her because I love and respect her too much to do that. I let her describe her reservations and how she had overcome them. They weren't major, but she needed time to work through them in her head.
This was another case of not talking past the point of sale. When your customer or your wife makes a major decision, the emotional evolution can't be rushed. If you try to push people in these circumstances, chances are good they will get their backs up and scotch the whole thing.
By not talking and simply being supportive and understanding, you are giving them the space they need to process what is happening. They may never know you did that or appreciate it, but it will make a big difference in your relationship going forward.
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| This is the view from the back porch of one of the properties I saw. |
Dig this from the White House. Here's a few snippets of content from that web page.
Section 1. Policy and Purpose. Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.
Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.
Sec. 5. Additional Directives to the Secretary of HHS. (a) The Secretary of HHS shall, consistent with applicable law, take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children, including regulatory and sub-regulatory actions, which may involve the following laws, programs, issues, or documents:
(i) Medicare or Medicaid conditions of participation or conditions for coverage;
(ii) clinical-abuse or inappropriate-use assessments relevant to State Medicaid programs;
(iii) mandatory drug use reviews;
(iv) section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act;
(v) quality, safety, and oversight memoranda;
(vi) essential health benefits requirements; and
Sec. 8. Directives to the Department of Justice. The Attorney General shall:
(a) review Department of Justice enforcement of section 116 of title 18, United States Code, and prioritize enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation;
(b) convene States’ Attorneys General and other law enforcement officers to coordinate the enforcement of laws against female genital mutilation across all American States and Territories;
(c) prioritize investigations and take appropriate action to end deception of consumers, fraud, and violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by any entity that may be misleading the public about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation;
Every major insurer and medical group is going to get out of this business immediately. All of the kids who've been abused by the trans lunatics are going to be left on their own to find the drugs they need to continue their charade. There are going to be a whole bunch of desperately unhappy people out there, not least of all the ultra-progressive parents who allowed this to happen to their children. They're screwed.
Below, Helen Joyce brilliantly analyzes the situation as it stood a week ago. Now that President Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the trans insanity, no amount of hopeless fighting is going to save the people who ruined their children's lives nor will it save the activists who encouraged it. The victims of the sexual degenerates who pushed trans, the kids who had their bodies poisoned and mutilated, are about to confront the reality of what has happened to them.
Helen didn't anticipate an attack on the trans illusion of this magnitude. That mirage has now vanished.
Thank God for President Trump. In his inauguration speech, he said that he believes he was saved by God from the assassin's bullet in Pennsylvania. I'm inclined to agree.
That’s going to be some earth shattering truth for some people. #LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder @Nicoletta0602 pic.twitter.com/Tj57193htl
— Leave it better than you found it (@AuburysNavy) July 11, 2023
... a leftist, Catholic bubble, that is.
This twerp has hit the news lately, fussing about the United States enforcing its laws.
The U.S. Catholic Church feels it has to speak out on President Trump's immigration policies, "which we see as going against some of the basic tenants of our faith, frankly — the fundamental right of every human person that need to be respected, no matter their origin, no matter… pic.twitter.com/ZkVk2cgD4D
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 23, 2025
Just in case you didn't want to click on the "more" button, and I don't know why you would, here is the full text of the post, giving even more vapid commentary from that airhead.
The U.S. Catholic Church feels it has to speak out on President Trump's immigration policies, "which we see as going against some of the basic tenants of our faith, frankly — the fundamental right of every human person that need to be respected, no matter their origin, no matter their situation," says Bishop Mark Seitz, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' committee on migration. Seitz also says Pope Francis "certainly is paying attention" to the administration's actions.
Of no particular importance to the bishop are the interests of black Chicagoans. Respecting them isn't really his concern.
One of my favorite Thomas Sowell quotes seems to be utterly foreign to the good bishop.
I don't see how you can come to any other conclusion than that the bishop and his bemitred cronies have no idea at all that trade-offs even exist when it comes to the illegals. Every one of these interviews that I've seen with the progs that dominate our cadre of bishops reveals a complete illiteracy when it comes to the legitimate concerns of American citizens. You can see that in the way the USCCB got mercilessly dragged in the replies to this post.
Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, issued a statement regarding Executive Actions that will “subject vulnerable families and children to grave danger.”https://t.co/yxr5Igh4jt pic.twitter.com/u22QEEcGGr
— U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (@USCCB) January 22, 2025
Here are just a handful of the replies that raise reasonable objections.
Where was the concern when the bishops of these countries from which these illegals came had no impact on the exodus? Where was the concern with the USCCB about rapes and trafficking of these individuals by drug gangs and criminals enriching themselves?
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Do you care about the grave danger of making the trip to get here? How about the vulnerability of the 300,000+ kids who are missing. This appeal to emotion is played out. Send them home.
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Stop gaslighting us. That is emotional and psychological ABUSE.
Catholic teaching DOES NOT require adherence to a political party’s solution to a problem, and it is a MORTAL SIN to pass rash judgment on a person’s intentions the way +Seitz does here. Just because we do not agree with how the Democratic Party wants to handle the migrant crisis DOES NOT mean that we dehumanize migrants. Stop this or we will #defundusccb and fulfill our obligation to support the Church through worthier causes.
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Any Catholic who supports open borders, including the pope, is complicit with the rapes, human trafficking, drug importation, enrichment of drug gangs, criminal and terrorist infiltration and deprivation of Americans of well paying jobs. PF is a hypocrite: (includes X post describing how the Vatican is cracking down on illegals attempting to enter Vatican City)
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What about our families? The non-criminal ones?
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I've heard NOTHING from these guys over the 350,000 missing children & raped/murdered women. I have heard about blank checks for money laundering where the money is being kicked back to govt helpers. As the Catholic NGO there said, "we no longer regard ourselves as "catholic"
It goes on and on and on in the replies. No response from the USCCB has been forthcoming and there's no reason to think one will ever come.
Then there's this.
Just think, the USCCB gets both the moral orgasm of "helping the less fortunate" and a massive tranche of sweet, sweet cash. It's a win-win!
Just on its face, it sure looks to me like the bishops have surrounded themselves with people who think just like they do. It's worth noting that the airhead from CBS in the top video doesn't raise any of these issues so he, too, must be living in a progressive bubble.
In short, every person needs to be respected and treated with dignity except for Americans who need to shut up, open their wallets and stop being bigots.
Catholic Charities of Louisville, KY wanted to get in on the payouts and so they did.
Administration for Children and Families grant (2022)
— RandoLand.us (@RandoLand_us) January 24, 2025
Amount: $298,308
Recipient: Catholic Charities Of Louisville Inc
Purpose: Common Earth Gardens (helps refugees find land to grow food)https://t.co/0zTOKvwU5h
... the jig is up.
In England last year, a fellow by the name of Axel Rudakabana walked into a children's Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport and began stabbing kids. He killed 3 and wounded others. The British news media posted pictures of Axel after the attack that looked like this.
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| He was described by the press as a Welsh Christian who sang in the local Church choir. |
Riots ensued as the British public assumed it was another Muslim terror attack. The authorities denied it and even jailed some people for posting hateful things to social media.
Recently, Axel's mug shot was released. He really looks like this these days.
The authorities found Muslim training and indoctrination materials aplenty in his car and at his home. He was exactly what the bigoted, white supremacists said he was. The authorities and the press knew the situation almost immediately after he knifed those girls. The jailed "hate speech" folks have not been released.
This all works so long as you have a media monopoly and the press act as your Praetorian Guard. Once that falls apart, your are exposed for the anti-white bigots and corrupt, progressive authoritarians you are.
Meanwhile, here in the States, PBS claimed Elon gave the Nazi salute.
They were immediately dragged into oblivion on X because it was plain for all to see that Elon had said "my heart goes out to you" as he was making those gestures.
Ok, so this is the new 'fine people' hoax.
— Steve Skojec (@SteveSkojec) January 20, 2025
Elon giving a 'Nazi salute.'
So I'm going to arm you with the facts. Bookmark this. Download it. He literally said "my heart goes out to you"
That was the intent of the gesture.
Do not accept the gaslighting and the lies. pic.twitter.com/V48zJEqd9B
Again, this only works if you have a media monopoly and can control the social climate.
All of the accusations of racism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, science denialism and whatever else the progs have been using to silence us for years only work if there is no apparent groundswell of popular opposition. Once we gained the ability to communicate freely, thanks to Elon and Trump, the power of the progressives dissolved into nothing.
The fact that they're still trying to peddle this "he was a Welsh choirboy" and "Elon gave the Nazi salute" rubbish shows they have not yet adapted to the new reality where they will have to interact with us as equals instead of intimidated subordinates.
Let's say you were fairly well-versed in the Federal and state criminal code. If you had a close friend who you knew was embezzling from his company, would it be judgmental to go to him and let him know his actions were illegal and when he was caught, he was going to face some serious penalties? Of course not. It would be an act of affection, an act of love for the guy.
Did you invent the law or simply report on it to your friend?
From a Catholic point of view, the moral law is the same thing. People do not invent it, they discover it just like we discovered physics, chemistry and math. Through scripture, revelation and logical deductions, we've discovered the moral law that was written, not by man through a legislative process, but by God when He created the world.
In his excellent book, The Great Good Thing, Andrew Klavan discusses his conversion from atheism to Christianity.
Then, in my atheist reading, I came upon the writings of the Marquis de Sade. It marked a watershed in my thing. Nowadays, “the divine Marquis” is sometimes depicted as a naughty rogue who enjoyed what the British call “a bit of the slap and tickle,” a libertine who brought a needed dose of sexual freedom into a pinched an hypocritical era. That’s not how I saw him at all. Sade–from whom we get the word sadism–was a violent psychopath who brutally tortured servants and prostitutes for his own pleasure. (When even the French imprison you for your sexual practices, you know you’ve crossed the line!) He was also a philosopher of genius.
Sade understood that if there is no God, there can be no ultimate morality. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Unlike Freud and other atheists, though, Sade followed mad Hamlet’s logic with unswerving honesty. Without morality, he said, we are only responsible to our natures, and nature demands only that we pleasure ourselves in any way we like, the strong at the expense of the weak. “Nature, mother to us all, never speaks to us save of ourselves… prefer thyself, love thyself, no matter at whose expense,” he declared. And then, with wonderful wit, he added: “Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.” All of this, he illustrated with graphic passages of pornography depicting tortures, rapes, and murders in a way intended to sexually arousing. And his work is arousing. It’s also repulsive. And to my eyes, it’s evil.
Here, at least, however, was an atheist who outlook made complete logical sense to me from beginning to end. If there is no God, there is no morality. If there is no morality, the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all in all and we should pillage, rape, and murder as we please. None of this pale, milquetoast atheism that says “Let’s all do what’s good for society.” Why should I do what’s good for society? What is society to me? None of this elaborate game-theory nonsense where we all benefit by mutual sacrifice and restraint. That only works until no one’s looking; then I’ll get away with what I can. If there is no God, there is no good, and sadistic pornography is scripture.
But the opposite is also true. That is, if we concede that one thing is morally better than another, it can only be because it is closer to an Ultimate Moral Good, the standard by which it’s measured. An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will. The rain isn’t morally good even though it makes the crops grow; a tornado that kills isn’t morally evil–though it may be an evil for those in its way. Happy and sad events, from birth to death, just happen, and we ascribe moral qualities to them as they suit us or don’t. But true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God.
So we have to choose, Either is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God real.
Either way makes sense, if you’re speaking strictly about logic. I didn’t reject Sade’s outlook on logical grounds. I rejected it because I found it repulsive and I knew it wasn’t true just as I know that one plus two always equals two plus one, though neither I nor anyone else can prove it. So, too, I know that a Nazi who tortures a child to death is less moral than a priest who gives a beggar bread–and that this is so even in a world that is all Nazis everywhere. In the chain of reasoning that took me finally to Christ, accepting this one axiom–that some actions are morally better than others–is the only truly non logical leap of faith I ever made. Hardly a leap really. Barely even a step. I know it’s so. And those who declare they do not are, like Hamlet, only pretending.
After reading Sade, I abandoned atheism and returned to agnosticism.
Emphasis mine.
What Andrew is describing is the realization that there is a universal, objective moral order created by something above Man. That is analogous to the universal, objective legal code that governs American society. It is not judgmental to quote the legal code to your friend. It is also not judgmental to quote God's law to your friend since in both cases, you are not interpreting or inventing anything, you are simply reporting facts to him. There is no judgmentalism involved because there is no judgment.
Here is a snippet from the text of the California Penal Code covering embezzlement.
Every officer of this state, or of any county, city, city and county, or other municipal corporation or subdivision thereof, and every deputy, clerk, or servant of that officer, and every officer, director, trustee, clerk, servant, or agent of any association, society, or corporation (public or private), who fraudulently appropriates to any use or purpose not in the due and lawful execution of that person’s trust, any property in his or her possession or under his or her control by virtue of that trust, or secretes it with a fraudulent intent to appropriate it to that use or purpose, is guilty of embezzlement.
Quoting that is not judgmental.
Now, one could argue that the Catholic Church is making things up from whole cloth. That is a fair argument, but it is still one that requires logical proof and logical refutation of the entirety of evidence the Church can muster on its behalf, evidence that is more than just scripture and revelation.
You cannot replace a model of reality with nothing, but you can replace a model of reality with something better. Your "something better," however, will require you to prove that it's better.
Getting back to the point of this post, my fundamental argument against most accusations of "you're being judgmental" as a Catholic is that reporting the reality of God's moral law does not involve any personal judgment at all.
Now, if I decide to throw rocks at you because you have sinned in some way, that is an act of judgment and expressly forbidden by the Church, unless it is part of Caesar's* law, in which case the secular law takes precedent.
As long as I'm not throwing rocks, this takes a whole bunch of "don't judge" off the table.
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| I'm ambivalent about your recent behaviors, but Cat disapproves and is letting you know. |
* - Or Trump's law in our case. These fascist dictators are pretty much interchangeable.
