On the Death of George Floyd

Fact 1: The death of George Floyd was not divisive. Everyone agrees it was murder.

Fact 2: Everyone wants the same thing for that cop: try him for murder, throw him in jail for murder. In fact, try and jail every cop who commits any crime. In fact, cops should be subject to special guidelines wherein they have to serve TWICE the normal penalty for any crime they commit. Get rid of "qualified immunity" for cops and politicians. SCOTUS invented that in 1982, and it has been an unqualified disaster.

Fact 3: The riots ARE divisive. Blacks are destroying the lives of other blacks. IF we are not supposed to stand by while whites kill blacks (and of course, no one should stand by), then why do you want us to stand by while blacks destroy blacks? That is exactly what the riots are doing. One black man died at the hands of a white man, and already over 170 black businesses in the black community have been destroyed, the lives of thousands disrupted and destroyed, by these riots.

Fact 4: The riots are not being caused by locals. This isn't local outrage, this is manufactured outrage, people who were imported, or who imported themselves, to destroy communities they are not themselves a part of. Shouldn't we be trying to stop that?

Fact 5: 50% of murderers are black males between the ages of 15 and 30, 50% of murder victims are black males between the ages of 15 and 30. Of the 3203 black murder victims in 2017, 2627 were black on black murder. That's 82% of murder victims being killed by their own community.

Most murders in the US result when two young men who know each other get in a fight and one kills the other. Half the time it is young white men, half the time it is young black men. But, since young black men only make up 6% of the population, yet commit 50% of the murders, it is pretty clear that young black men do this on a per capita basis far out of proportion to other young men.

Fact 6: Blacks are in FAR MORE DANGER from their own community than they are from cops. But, as Van Jones points out, racist whites - who tend to be white liberals - refuse to acknowledge the facts.

Conclusion: be careful
Now, I have undoubtedly upset some of you. Your feelings are raw, jaded, etc., and you want to deny one or more of the facts above, because you FEEL that there is something wrong.

Aristotelian logic says:
Facts are infallible.
Feelings are facts.
Therefore feelings are infallible.

Yeah, that is a valid line of reasoning, but it isn't true. "Valid" means you constructed the argument properly, according to the rules of logic. "True" means the conclusion accurately describes reality. But the conclusion does not do so. Why is the argument wrong? Because the terms don't match.

Now, facts are infallibly true, and you truly do feel the way you feel,

BUT

A fact is a statement that accurately describes external reality.
A feeling is an emotion that accurately represents your internal reflection/reaction to reality.

And your internal reflection/reaction absolutely can be wrong. You may not have all the facts, you may think about those facts in the wrong way. Your reactions, your emotions, your feelings can be totally wrong. Feelings are NOT infallible, feelings are often complete bunk, wildly inaccurate. You aren't infallible, so your feelings are not infallibly correct.

The facts are listed above.
They cannot be controverted.
Your feelings are facts, but your feelings are an internal state that don't necessarily match or accurately respond to external reality.

What is Worship?

From a friend of mine on Facebook: 

I asked a simple question in this new theological discussion forum I'm in. Answers so far are enlightening. It is a question I have pondered and meditated on for years and years. So, I thought I would ask it of my broad range of FB friends out here as well.

What is worship?

...Catholics have a very specific focus in answer to this question, or can, by pointing to the reality of what happens in the consecration at Mass. Non-catholics have the same general sense of personal union with God, but sometimes it seems diffuse in its expression because of a lack of a sort of experiential category.

My reply: To be fair, they can't afford to have a precise language. The purpose of the Mass, and all liturgy, and all the sacraments, is our divinization. "God became man so that men may become gods." That sentence, right there, sums up the entire purpose of everything in the Catholic Faith.

Throw that sentence in front of any Protestant and watch them run, wild-eyed, away from your "heresy". But that's what union with God requires - divinization. Can't get union without it. And Protestant theology has literally no mechanism by which to accomplish that, nor can they even create language to describe it because it is totally at odds with their "total depravity" theology.

So, all they can do is talk about "a sacrifice of praise" and such. They try plowing around the stump because they can't afford to acknowledge it.

Friend's response:

"I have brought 2 Peter 1:4 up repeatedly, in many contexts. In my experience, before being Catholic, there really are certain parts of the Bible that just go like water off a duck's back. They don't necessary meet any disagreement, just sort of like no handle, no way to pick that up."

My reply:  Right. Exactly. They literally have no words. Even though their particular denomination may not buy into total depravity, the fact is that their CULTURE does, at least to some degree. Apart from the Mormons, there is no Protestant culture that has the ability to even conceptualize what Peter is talking about.

The whole purpose of the communion of saints is to introduce divinization at a child's level of understanding, without the need for precise language. The Protestants don't even have that much, thus they don't even have the symbolic language of the cult of the saints to build on.

Now, to be fair, if you told most Catholics about divinization, they would ALSO call you a heretic. I've had FUS grads tell me that divinization is heresy, and I've had to point out CCC passages to break it to them. Most individual Catholics literally have no words for it either.

But Catholic CULTURE endorses divinization, and Catholic theology DOES have actual, precise language to describe it, so Catholics are more able to handle the concept once the precise language is brought forward.

You know, back in the first century, Catholicism was a mystery cult, like all the other theological systems. A mystery cult is a system whereby the candidates who wish to enter are not told everything until after they have already committed to it and entered. That's how Catholic teaching worked.  Candidates would be taught for a couple of years about the basics of the Faith, but they wouldn't find out about the Eucharist, they wouldn't even know the Eucharist existed, until AFTER they were baptized.

As catechumens, they were never permitted to attend a complete Mass. As soon as the homily ended, they were ushered out, the doors were locked by certain women in the assembly (deaconesses - that was pretty much their only job) and only the fully formed Catholics were allowed to be present for the consecration.

Thus, it was only after their Easter baptism that the catechumens were finally allowed to attend a COMPLETE Mass, it was only then that they found out about the consecration of the Eucharist. They would be soaked from their baptism in the baptistry outside the church, they would be smelling sweetly from the baptismal chrism, each clothed only in a white robe, they would enter the darkened nave, the room lit by hundreds holding candles to light their way. Holy Saturday readings were a summation, a completion of all they had learned, followed by a Holy Saturday homily that taught them, for the first time, about the Eucharist.  This was the very last lesson imparted to them before they saw their very first consecration and received Jesus for the first time.

It took literally years of education before the pagan Romans, Greeks, even the Jews, had built up the vocabulary necessary to understand what they would experience on Holy Saturday night at their very first complete Mass.

Well, I got news for you - we still ARE a mystery cult. We don't teach RCIA candidates about the sacraments and divinization until roughly Lent, at the earliest. We cannot teach it any earlier. We have to build up in the catechumens and candidates a vocabulary and culture that allows them to grasp 2 Peter 1:4.

Sure, pretty much all of them know, walking in the door in August, that Catholics teach the Eucharist is the flesh of Christ. But they do not understand the implications of what that means: divinization. We hold that back until the very end. They need to have the cultural vocabulary built up before they can get a handle on this last, this supreme, teaching.

So, they don't understand what worship is, not really, until they fully grasp and accept divinization, which is union - UNION - with Christ.

Friend's response:

And of course there are a whole lot of the Catholic baptized who have never really experienced mystagogy (or evangelization) at all, and so the sacramental experience is sometimes reduced to mechanics and ceremonies amidst (or, kind of "next to") stirrings of faith. What I try to wrap my head around is "how to be" in the face of all of this reality.

Exactly. All you can do is try to give them the vocabulary, the culture. Feed them milk, not meat. Answer their questions about statues and idols and Mary and yada, so that they can see the language makes sense, even if they can't understand what the language says yet.

On Foreign Aid

What's the difference between sending foreign aid to a foreign country vs sending checks to foreigners who are living in this country?

Well, when we do the latter, the money stays in the US. Since the aid goes directly to the foreigner without any foreign government middle man, waste and corruption are greatly reduced.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

So, if we are going to spend money on foreign aid anyway, I would much rather it go to illegals in this country. It's a lot more efficient than our usual shenanigans.

Marx and Engels on Race

In 1894, for example, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the German economist Walther Borgius. In it, Engels noted, “We regard economic conditions as that which ultimately determines historical development, but race is in itself an economic factor.”

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”    ~ Karl Marx, The Jewish Question (1844) 

In his 1877 Notes to Anti-Dühring, Engels elaborated on the subject of race, observing “that the inheritance of acquired characteristics extended … from the individual to the species.” He went on, “If, for instance, among us mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child and in no need of proof from evidence that is solely the result of ‘accumulated inheritance.’ It would be difficult to teach them by proof to a bushman or to an Australian Negro.”

Marx used the word "nigger" in the original German:

Eine der großen Entdeckungen unsers nigger

And again in reference to Ferdinand LaSalle:

wenn nicht seine Mutter oder Großmutter von väterlicher Seite sich mit einem nigger kreuzten)... Die Zudringlichkeit des Burschen ist auch niggerhaft

Here's the original text, go to page 786, and the translation:

It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.

Marx's second daughter, Laura, married Paul Lafargue who, Engels said, had:

"one eighth or one twelfth Nigger blood".

In 1887, Paul was a candidate for the Paris Municipal Council, in a district which contained the Jardin des Plantes and the Zoo. In a letter to Laura (April 26, 1887), Engels said about Paul:

"Being in his quality as a nigger a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."

While Marx described his daughter Laura's husband, a man from a Creole Haitian-Cuban family with African, European and Caribbean ancestors, "African", "Negrillo", "Nigger" or "Gorilla“. The men agreed on this assessment in their conversations. In a Letter from Engels to Marx, October 2, 1866:

"I have arrived at the conviction that there is nothing to his [Tremaux's] theory if for no other reason than because he neither understands geology nor is capable of the most ordinary literary historical criticism. One could laugh oneself sick about his stories of the nigger Santa Maria and of the transmutations of the whites into Negroes. Especially, that the traditions of the Senegal niggers deserve absolute credulity, just because the rascals cannot write! . . . Perhaps this man will prove in the second volume, how he explains the fact, that we Rhinelanders have not long ago turned into idiots and niggers on our own Devonian Transition rocks . . . Or perhaps he will maintain that we are real niggers."

There were still, in Marx's view, be races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler.

Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism.

Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.

"True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's: "Give back Alsace and Lorraine". For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?"   ~Engels, The German, 1841

"...Allerdings ist es eine fixe Idee bei den Franzosen, dass der Rhein ihr Eigentum sei, aber die einzige des deutschen Volkes wuerdige Antwort auf diese anmassende Forderung ist das Arndtsche 'Heraus mit dem Elsass und Lothringen!' Denn ich bin - vielleicht im Gegensatz zu vielen, deren Standpunkt ich sonst teile - allerdings der Ansicht, dass die Wiedereroberung der deutschsprechenden linken Rheinseite eine nationale Ehrensache, die Germanisierung des abtruennig gewordenen Hollands und Belgiens eine politische Notwendigkeit fuer uns ist. Sollen wir in jenen Laendern die deutsche Nationalitaet vollends unterdruecken lassen, waehrend im Osten sich das Slawentum immer maechtiger erhebt?"

Engels described Slavs as non-historic people deserving of extermination.

(...)Justice and other moral considerations may be damaged here and there; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance? (...)

Following that, Bohemia and Moravia passed definitely to Germany and the Slovak regions remained with Hungary. And this historically absolutely non-existent "nation" puts forward claims to independence? (...)

Of course, matters of this kind cannot be accomplished without many a tender national blossom being forcibly broken. But in history nothing is achieved without power and implacable ruthlessness, (...)

To the sentimental phrases about brotherhood which we are being offered here on behalf of the most counter-revolutionary nations of Europe, we reply that hatred of Russians was and still is the primary revolutionary passion among Germans; that since the revolution hatred of Czechs and Croats has been added, and that only by the most determined use of terror against these Slav peoples can we, jointly with the Poles and Magyars, safeguard the revolution. (...)

Then there will be a struggle, an "unrelenting life-and-death struggle" against those Slavs who betray the revolution; an annihilating fight and most determined terrorism -- not in the interests of Germany, but in the interests of the revolution!      ~ The German, Engels, NRZ 15. Feb. 1849 

Engels liked the idea of a "Thousand year Reich" too

    This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom.

"Among all the nations and sub-nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and are still capable of life -- the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. (...)

This remnant of a nation that was, as Hegel says, suppressed and held in bondage in the course of history, this human trash, becomes every time -- and remains so until their complete obliteration or loss of national identity -- the fanatical carriers of counter-revolution, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution. (...)

Such, in Austria, are the pan-Slavist Southern Slavs, who are nothing but the human trash of peoples, resulting from an extremely confused thousand years of development. (...)
The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is progress." MEW a.a.O. 6, 176. 

"By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium -- by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilization as against barbarism, of progress as against stability. Even if the agreements were in Denmark's favor -- which is very doubtful-this right carries more weight than all the agreements, for it is the right of historical evolution"  ~Friedrich Engels, NRZ 10. Sep. 1848 (NRZ = Neue Rheinische Zeitung)

"The plentiful meat and milk diet among the Aryans and the Semites, and particularly the beneficial effects of these foods on the development of children, may, perhaps, explain the superior development of these two races."  ~ Engels, "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", Fourth revised edition, 1891, in Marx & Engels, Selected Works In One Volume, Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1980, p 464.