Charlie Kirk Was Stupid

"When people stop talking, that's when you get violence, that's when civil war happens."

Charlie Kirk was not only stupid, he was dangerously wrong.

He suffered under the delusion, a feminist delusion, that if we all just sat around a campfire and talked things out, then everything would work out and violence could be avoided.

This is nonsense. Once you have made your position absolutely crystal clear, once your opposition has absolutely no illusions about where you stand, then to the extent that your position contravenes his on a position of central importance, he has no choice. One of you will be fired, be removed. One of you will die. 

The Socratic dialogues is the story of a man who spent a lot of time trying to be as crystal clear as possible. The state executed him. President John Kennedy publicly pleaded, quoting Isaiah, "Come, let us reason together!" Isaiah was sawn in half, Kennedy was shot in the head. Charlie Kirk insisted on repeating his arguments over and over until his positions were crystal clear. He wouldn't stop, so he was shot. 

Poor communications permit compromise. The refusal to define terms, the willingness to engage in equivocations, allows your opponent wiggle room. As Sun Tzu says, "When you surround an army, leave an outlet free." Always give your enemy the means to escape, so he doesn't decide to die on his feet instead of on his knees. 

Crystal clear communications removes the enemy's ability to escape. Unclear communications allows the opponent to think he may have misunderstood, that perhaps you do share common ground and he can eventually bring you around to his way of thinking. But clarity... clarity is the death of this hope.

This is why bureaucracies engage in obfuscation. They are designed to make sure no one knows exactly what the government means or wants. Entire decades of foreign policy are built around deliberately refusing to clarify what America's position is on Taiwan or Korea. Israel won't say whether it does or doesn't have nukes. The examples could be easily multiplied.

This is the female mode of communication. Women are weaker than men, they will consistently lose in direct confrontations, so they obfuscate. They hint, they misdirect, they play mind games, redefine language, do whatever is necessary to avoid clarity, to give themselves wiggle room in front of a superior foe.

This is not the way men communicate. This is also why Ephesians commands men to die in the marriage. Women aren't capable of the direct, clear communications necessary to carry on a marriage. The Scriptures specifically deny that women are good at any of this. Women are described as honey tongued, smoother than oil, but more bitter than wormwood. According to Scripture, women are the source of infidelity and sin, not men.

According to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the person closest to a task should bear the most responsibility and direction for that task. Men have headship precisely because Scripture sees men as closer to the absolute heart of marriage, of personal relationships, the master of communications and interpersonal connections. Women don't have headship in a marriage because women aren't very good at being married. Women are not at the heart of marriage.

The traditional three purposes of marriage are: 

1. improving the sanctity of the spouses, 
2. the procreation of children
3. remedy for concupiscence

But procreation, which is the specialty of women, is not at the heart of marriage. If it were, Josephite marriages could not be a real thing. Yet the Church teaches that Josephite marriage, which shuns all sexual intercourse, is actually superior to a procreative marriage. 

If women were really better than men at communications, personal relationships, or marriage itself, then women would have headship. Women don't have headship precisely because they aren't good at any of these things. Women initiate 80% of the divorces because in general, women are lousy at communications, lousy at interpersonal relations, lousy at marriage. That is Scripture. That is why Scripture says men must die in marriage, but women must only submit.

In Holy Orders, the parishioner is required to submit to the priest, the priest required to submit to the bishop. The grace of the sacrament means the bishop is better at carrying authority than the priest, the priest better than the lay person. Marriage is also an ordo. So, similarly, in the ordo of marriage, the grace of the sacrament makes the man better than the woman at all these things.

But now I am communicating Church doctrine far too clearly. Yet, the heart of the Christian message is simply this: 

The minute Charlie Kirk insisted on clearly communicating his position, clearly repeating his position, clearly removing all possible doubt about what his position might be, he had to die. 

If you teach your children that they can "talk it out" without resorting to violence, you are either lying to them, or you are teaching them how to lie. If they really, truly, talk it out, someone is going to die.

Heddy Lamar Did Not Invent Frequency Hopping

 I'm just a little tired of seeing this trope on various social media platforms.

Heddy was a beautiful women, she ran naked through the woods and was filmed doing it, which was the basis for her later success, but she really did not have a head for engineering. She mostly just stole stuff from the men around her and acted as a marketing girl. 

It is true that Lamarr and her unlikely partner, the radical modernist composer George Antheil, hold a patent for an important radio-transmission method that finds its way into several modern communications technologies, including Bluetooth. But it is equally true that their patent was hardly the first in this area. It is further true that the earliest operational systems employing this technique were created after World War II independently of their patent, and the essential idea can be traced back nearly to the birth of radio itself.

And more:

Now incontestable evidence shows that the U.S. Patent Office itself dismissed the idea that Lamarr and Antheil were first to propose frequency hopping. David R. Irvin, a patent agent and engineer with 44 patents to his credit, has examined the original documents related to the invention, which are preserved by the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History

And still more:

Abstract: Analysis of primary-source documents archived by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the U.S. Patent Office refutes the widely accepted legend that actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil invented frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) communication.

Polytheism Guards Against Divorce

 According to Pew Research, Hindus have the highest rate of marriage and the lowest rate of divorce.

When the survey breaks down the various religious groups by marital status, the findings show that Hindus (78%) and Mormons (71%) are the most likely to be married. These two traditions, along with members of evangelical churches, also have the lowest rates of never-married members. Hindus also have the lowest divorce rate of any group; only 5% have been divorced.

So, apparently converting to Hinduism is a great way of assuring you have a long and happy marriage.

Also, if you want children, Christianity may not be the way to go. Again, Hinduism and Islam are apparently more "pro-life" than any Christian group.

The more ya' know, huh? 

Bacchanal and the Olympics

What does the Bacchanal have to do with the Olympics?

According to Livy, the Bacchanal was a murderous cultic instrument of conspiracy against the Roman state. Livy points out that seven thousand cult leaders and followers were arrested, and that most were executed. He considered the Bacchanalia scandal to be one of several indications of Rome's inexorable moral decay. The earliest version of the Bacchanalia was open to women only. The cult held particular appeal to those of uneducated and fickle mind (levitas animi), such as the young, plebeians, women and "men most like women". It was confined to the Italian peninsula.

The Olympics, on the other hand, were officially sponsored and recognized by all participating GREEK city-states with a universal peace treaty. Greek athletes modelled themselves on the physical competitions of the gods themselves. It was restricted to an all-male audience, and only the strong were permitted to compete and attend. The point of the games was to win prizes by displaying the highest ideals of masculine honor and courage.

In short, Bacchanal, a privately-funded Roman festival, has absolutely nothing to do with the Olympics, a multiple state-sponsored Panhellenic Greek festival.

Persons are Products and Always Have Been

The pro-life position is that human persons are not products, and should not be turned into a commodity. While that may be true in a theological sense, it has almost never been true in a practical sense. Humanity has commodified persons for all of history.

That's what slavery is, and slavery appeared in every culture on every continent for all of recorded history, universally.

Out of the entirety of history, there has been a period of only about a century when people were not commodifying other people. Between the English-American anti-slavery movement of the early 1800s through roughly the mid-1900s, cultures were forced to back away from slavery by European military fiat. During that same period, we were unable to widely implement abortion due to medical risks.

But that's all done with now. As Islam surges, slavery resurges, and as tech grows, abortion predominates. That golden century has passed. Persons are, again, products.

The Soul of the Matter: A Theological Problem

This is a problem for Catholic theology.

In 2002, Lydia Fairchild, a mother from Washington State, faced a baffling and distressing situation when DNA tests required for public assistance showed she was not the biological mother of her two children—despite having physically given birth to them. The results raised suspicion of fraud or surrogacy, and authorities even considered removing her children from her custody. When she gave birth to her third child in a hospital under supervision, the same outcome occurred: DNA tests again claimed she was not the mother.

Fairchild’s legal battle intensified, and she stood on the verge of losing her children based on genetic evidence alone. Her attorney, Alan Tindell, began researching unusual biological conditions and came across a similar case involving a woman named Karen Keegan. This led to the discovery that Lydia was a chimera—a person with two sets of DNA. In her case, it was caused by absorbing a fraternal twin in the womb.

A cervical DNA test finally matched her children's DNA, confirming her biological relationship to them. This critical breakthrough not only saved Lydia’s family but also raised important concerns about the reliability of DNA evidence in legal settings. Her case became a landmark example of how rare genetic conditions like chimerism can challenge long-standing scientific and legal assumptions.

Lydia absorbed her twin. The first and most obvious theological question: what happens to the soul infused at conception? 

Different reproductive tract vs somatic DNA raises the question of whose DNA she is transmitting when she has children. Is the different DNA considered hers by right of conquest, for having essentially eaten her twin in the womb? This is not an isolated problem. About 8% of fraternal twins could end up with blood chimerism. In the case of triplets, the chance for blood chimerism rises up to 21%. True tetragametic chimerism (such as Lydia's case) is believed to be rare, with only 100 documented cases in the medical literature, but it may be more common than once believed. It is possible that up to 10% of singleton births may have started as twin pregnancies.

Lydia's case is a less obvious form of the even more pressing problem presented by Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins who share a common torso and common reproductive tract. Abby Hensel, one of the conjoined twins, married Josh Bowling. Now, the only difference between Lydia Fairchild and the Hensels is the latter has two fully developed brains. But, as noted, the Hensels do share a common reproductive tract.

So, if it was licit for Lydia to conceive, carry and give birth to children that do not share her DNA, then why would it not be licit for the Hensels to have children, especially since Abby and Brittany have the same DNA? In what sense is the Hensels' marriage valid, given that the two were already conjoined into one body, so that both women are having sex with one man, but only one of those women is married to that man? Is the other woman always committing adultery? Or is Josh actually married to both women? 

But if the Hensel's marriage is invalid, then in what sense is Lydia Fairchild's marriage valid? Unlike the Hensels, Lydia's reproductive tract is actually someone else's body. Now, true, the other body belongs to someone who is not ensouled and alive, as far as we know, but her reproductive tract is certainly not "hers" in the same way her somatic cells are "hers", are they? If we argue that a baby in the womb is someone else's body because of DNA, then Lydia's reproductive tract is also someone else's body because of DNA. If we argue that her reproductive tract belongs to her, then the baby in the womb also belongs to her in very much the same way, and the somatic argument against abortion collapses.

But, if we try to keep the pro-life somatic argument alive, and insist her reproductive tract is not hers because of its different DNA, then is having sex and conceiving with Lydia a form of necrophilia? The organs are alive, but the soul that animates the DNA is not the original infused soul, again, as far as we know. When a person dies (that is, when a person's soul separates from the body), individual organs within the corpse can stay alive for hours or even days. This is what allows for organ transplant. If we argue that the soul of Lydia's twin has departed, then Lydia's body has just kept her deceased twin's body on "life support" for Lydia's entire life. Thus, a strong argument can be made that having sex with Lydia really is really just necrophilia with her dead twin. The Catholic Church does not permit necrophilia. 

So, can marriage with a true tetragametic chimera be valid? Under what circumstances? And how would you know that you married a chimera if no DNA testing has been done? Is that grounds for an annulment? 

The Catholic Church isn't equipped to deal with this. 

Silicon-Based Persons

Jimmy Akins is not the brightest bulb on the tree. He is of the opinion that AI cannot be a person, cannot be ensouled by God. He's got absolutely no theological reason to hold this position.

Remember when the fake Bayside apparition claimed IVF children had no immortal souls, because the IVF embryos were created outside the human body? Condemned by the Church.

Consider that sperm and egg cells can now be created by manipulating normal somatic cells. It's called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), and it works: 

"Japanese scientists describe how they've already perfected IVG in mice. The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They've even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups."

Would a human being created this way NOT have a soul? Obviously, that's absurd. Any human being created this way would have a soul.

The question is, would God create and infuse a soul, create a person, in something made of silicon instead of something made of carbon? There's nothing in Scripture that says He won't. And if we can manipulate carbon-based materials to create a new human life, then what's so holy and sacred about carbon?

Alien life forms are not beyond the ability of God to create, and we participate in God's creation of new human persons, so why would He deny us the ability to participate in the creation of silicon based persons? Perhaps we are meant to participate in the creation of every new person, human or alien, so God is just waiting for us to figure out how to build the silicon soma so that He can create and infuse the necessary rational soul. 

Akins is just making up shit because he needs clicks, and he's more likely to get clicks from stupid and ignorant people than he is from others, so he's playing to his audience.

The Vaccine Paradox

1. Vaccines work.
2. Vaccines have negative sequelae
3. Diseases have negative sequelae

Discussion: at some point an effective vaccine will drive the incidence of disease so low, that your are more likely to be injured by the vaccine than your are to catch and be injured by the disease.

Consider polio. For the inactivated virus, the risk of anaphylactic shock is 1-2 per million doses. For the oral polio virus, the risk is estimated at 1 case per 2.4 million doses distributed, with higher risk for the first dose (1 in 750,000). This equates to a probability of approximately 0.00004% per dose, or 400 chances out of 1 billion. The attenuated virus in OPV can circulate and revert to a virulent form, causing outbreaks. This is rare, with fewer than 1,000 cases globally since 2000.

The global population stands at roughly 8 billion. In 2024, there were 62 confirmed cases of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) globally, all reported in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the only two countries where WPV1 remains endemic. Afghanistan reported 23 cases, and Pakistan reported 39 cases.

So, the polio vaccine has 400 chances out of 1 billion of harming you, while you have less than 8 chances per billion of catching and suffering adverse consequences from polio.

At this point, for most people in the world, the polio vaccine is far, far more dangerous than the probability of catching polio.

The 21st Century Information Barons

Information technology corporations own

• the data storage space, 
• the data transmission space, 
• the data analysis space, 

and those same corporations will soon start locking up the energy space in order to guarantee their holds on storage, transmission, and analysis.

Data determines everyone's future, so IT corporations determine everyone's future. They know this. The politicians also know this. 

For most of human history, the elite were the people who controlled communication with the gods or with God (for the monotheists). As technology advanced in the Middle Ages (500 to 1500 AD), via horse collars with heavy plows and three-field agriculture, the control of society shifted to secular kings, royalty who were not viewed as gods. The new agricultural and transport techniques permitted by literally harnessing the power of the horse permitted nations to develop military power without necessarily referencing religion.

Notice, that throughout the Middle Ages, religion is still important. In fact, it grows at an accelerating rate in Europe throughout this period, but the locus of power had already begun to split. This was reflected in things like the investiture controversy and the calling of the Crusades. The first four Crusades were powerful and called by Popes, but subsequent crusades, such as the Children's Crusade, were either not called by popes at all, or were essentially useless. While the Pope called the Albigensian Crusade, the northern crusades local royalty had already put those crusades in motion well before the Pope sanctioned them. By 1200 AD, religious power had already begun to fracture. 

As control of communication shifted from the clerical monastics to royalty, and subsequently to anyone who owned a printing press, knowledge of additional technologies, like gunpowder and time-keeping, also spread and shifted. The Church tried to control information by establishing an Index of Forbidden Books and by burning books in public ceremonies. It didn't work. 

Religion didn't just lose control of information, but of time itself. Cathedrals used to be constructed as enormous master seasonal clocks, but by 1800, the cathedral's time-keeping function began to be eroded by tech that had reduced the size and cost of clocks so they could be used even in homes. Society built itself around time that was no longer sacred. Religion no longer controlled the military. It no longer controlled time-keeping. It no longer controlled the transmission of information. 

Religion still exists, but the locus of power has shifted to those who controlled the technology that defines society. Advanced tech allowed secular politicians to step into the role that god-kings once held, that the priesthood and Church once held. But even as politicians rose to power, the corporations that controlled the technology rose to supplant them. England endured a 300-year long struggle between Parliament and the British East India Company, vying to see who would dominate. The EIC dominated agriculture and transport in multiple countries around the world, but  it wasn't enough. The EIC eventually lost. 

It's not clear who will win this time around. Many science fiction/fantasy novels posit a future in which corporations rule worlds. The tech companies have already vertically integrated data. If it can add  power generation into the stack, that should cover all the bases. Like priests, politicians will continue to exist, people will continue to vote for them, thinking the politicians can actually do something. But, like the priests, the politicians will be useless. Information technology corporations will rule the world. 

Israel is Antisemitic

 If Israel didn't exist, the enormous amount of antisemitism we are currently experiencing probably wouldn't be happening. 

Between 1795 and 1918, Poland ceased to exist. After WW I, the League of Nations brought Poland back into existence, taking territory from Germany, Austria and Russia in order to accomplish the deed. This created an enormous amount of anti-Polish hatred during the inter-war period in those nations, as both Russia and Germany viewed the League of Nations intervention as outright territorial theft. Poland was seen by many Eastern European Axis supporters as an illegal state, created out of whole cloth by the Western Allies who had conquered them. 

So, what was the very first act of WW II? Germany and Russia invaded Poland and repartitioned it, taking back the territory that the League of Nations had stolen from them.

That whole sequence of events worked so well, that after WW II, the UN repeated the mistake. The UN tried to bring Israel back into existence, with similar consequences. But the attempt to reconstitute Israel failed for an even more foundational reason. Poland had been out of existence for less than two centuries. Israel had been out of existence for nearly two millennia. The new Poland had never lost its majority Catholic population, but that wasn't true for Israel. The original Israel was a religious state built around Abrahamic faith. But the 20th-century version of Israel was created by secular atheists, socialists who weaponized Christian ignorance and stupidity in order to guilt the West into attempting to recreate the country. Ben-Gurion himself saw socialism and Zionism as two sides of the same coin. 

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Zionist socialist ideology has nothing to do with post-Temple Judaism. And post-Temple Judaism has literally nothing to do with Temple Judaism. The current state of Israel is founded on socialism and nominalism, the idea that words are just interchangeable labels. But words mean things. As Lincoln pointed out, if you call a dog's tail a "leg", that doesn't mean a dog has five legs. 

The current state of Israel has literally nothing to do with any preceding entity, much less any Biblical entity. Israel is a bullshit country that exists by fomenting antisemitism in other countries in order to force Jews to emigrate to Israel "for their own safety". Apart from redefining "Jewish" (which is also a constant work-in-progress), it was, and still is, the only way to keep the Jewish population at high enough levels to justify the existence of the country. Recall that between 1948 and 2010, the country with the largest Jewish population in the world was the United States, not Israel. 

Israel can only work if Jews feel unsafe everywhere else and think their only hope for safety lies in moving to Israel. Wherever non-Israeli Jews live, Zionists must drive them out of that location and into Israel. 

In December, 1938, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the state of Israel, specifically said, "if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people." This was not just rhetoric.

In 1945, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans from Germany to England, even though the necessary permits had been secured and these children were in grave danger of death due to the harsh winter. Zionists also managed to stop another group of roughly 500 children from reaching France, where rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven. 

As 1930's Germany demonstrated, the best way to drive Jews out of an area is to make it impossible for Jews to live there. Antisemitism serves the political purposes of the state of Israel. Antisemitism is a nation-building activity for the state of Israel. Zionism is functionally antisemitism run by a nation-state actor for their own political purposes. Seeing the Zionist success, Palestinian-wannabees imitate it. This is why both the Muslims who attack Israel and the Jews who defend it are so politically insane that both sides literally sacrifice their own children in order to attain their nation-state objectives. 

Parents who care about their children move to safe locations to raise them. Israel is not a safe location. Only politically insane people would move to Israel/Gaza/West Bank, or stay there, to raise a family. Raising a family in that area necessarily involves you, as a parent, to be willing for your own children to be killed so that the greater good of the nation-state can be attained. This attitude is purest socialism, the elevation of the state above everything, including the family, just as Marx and Engels commanded.

But this is not a surprise. Again, most people in the 21st century forget that Israel was founded as a socialist state. Most conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, find it impossible to grasp that nearly all modern Jews are extreme leftists, generally socialists. Jews always vote for the most extreme left-wing candidate available. Christians are so blinded by Biblical references that they literally cannot see that post-Second-Temple Jews are not Biblical Jews, or that the 1948 socialist-founded state of Israel is nothing at all like ancient Israel. 

Christian conservatives created the phrase "Judeo-Christian morality" in order to facilitate conversion of Jews to Christian faith. It didn't work. But the Christians used their invented phrase so frequently that they successfully fooled themselves into thinking there was some commonality between Jewish and Christian worldviews. In fact, Judaism shares as much, if not more, of a worldview with Islam than it does with Christians. Jews can worship in mosques, but not in churches. Most medieval rabbis agreed that Jews could pray with Muslims, but not Christians. According to this Jewish expert, the Torah says Jews must kill Christians. Jews and Muslims share a morality that Christians consider self-centered, even bordering on narcissistic. 

Zionism is antisemitism. Period. 

Subverting Nature

"The entire leftist regime is an artificial construct reliant on the subversion of nature via a leviathan capable of wealth extraction. They treat the return of the natural order as an existential threat because it is"

While the sentiment is, in a certain sense, laudable, it is also pretty selective. Part of that same "subversion of nature" is air-conditioning, vermin control, antibiotics, combustion engines, fresh oranges in winter, etc.

Putting a uterus into a man's body is the leftist version of putting air-conditioning into private homes. When even genetics can be manipulated (thus the leftist hard-on for mRNA vaccines), then there are no limits.

It's a real existential question. Are we subverting nature? It's not like we aren't still bound by the laws of physics and chemistry. It's just our power in physics and chemistry, our intimate knowledge of THOSE laws, allows us to manipulate biology to a hitherto unequalled degree.

The "natural order" is that our lives are brutish, painful, disease-ridden and short. Pretty much EVERYONE rejects at least some part of the "natural order." That's why we wear clothes and use fire to cook our food. The question is whether there is a line that can/should be drawn.

The whole transgenderism push is insane for those of us who see biology as a fundamentally different science than physics or chemistry. But, to those who see biology as a mere extension of physics and chemistry, who see biology merely as an application of physics and chemistry, than a uterus transplant into a man is no more "subversion" than any other application of physics and chemistry we have hitherto made.

And it is probably as likely to be something we can stop as any other technology has been, which is to say, it can't be stopped. 

The Israeli Grift

 Israel gave over one billion dollars to Hamas via Qatar. Think about that. Hamas' charter states it intends to wipe out Israel, yet Israel funnelled over one billion dollars to this known terrorist organization.

The Hezbollah explosive comms op was run side-by-side with this overwhelming Israeli financial support for terrorism. On Oct 7, "music festivals" were run near both the West Bank (Abu Gosh, Oct 3-7) and the Gaza Strip (Supernova, Oct 7), while Israeli military forces stood down. 

Hamas/Gaza fell for it and ran the inevitable terror op on Oct 7, generating 1100 Jewish corpses. Suddenly, 1100 deaths was given the same label as 6 million deaths and the "new Holocaust!!!" became the excuse to wipe out Gaza, invade the West Bank (which had done absolutely nothing), invade southern Lebanon, bomb Syria and permanently annex the Golan Heights. 

Coincidentally, all those areas either had total fertility rates (TFR) which threatened Israeli sovereignty or occupied territory the Israeli government had long coveted, or both. 

But, fortunately, the terror attack, which Israel paid over a billion dollars for, allowed Israel to obliterate Gaza's TFR and also allowed all the above land to be invaded by or claimed for Israel. What a strategically fortunate tragedy! What luck that Israel had apparently prepared for it for years by giving money and explosive comms to the right people! 

The Education Grift

People are complaining about grade inflation again. They simply don't understand how education works.

You have to understand that education actually has nothing to do with education.

McDonald's LOOKS like a fast-food franchise, but it's actually a real-estate company that happens to sell fast food:

Former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn, is even quoted as saying, “we are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.”

Rental car companies arbitrage the difference between buying new cars in bulk, then reselling each car individually. Rental fees are just gravy collected between the purchase and the resale.

Education works the same way. Educational institutions exist to suck in state and federal funding. The students are just there to plump up the funding levels. In lower education, it's about butts in seats, in higher ed, it's about warm bodies signing for loans. In both cases, the state and federal money goes into the admin and faculty pockets - that's the point.

That's why there are more administrators than teachers. The administrators who grease the paperwork, the admins are the REAL money-makers. The teachers are just the grift to get people in the front door. 

In higher ed, the students sign for the loans, the college admins/faculty get the cash, then the students are on the hook to pay the loans back. It's the perfect grift. To keep the marks from finding out they've been grifted, you have to pass as many as you can, make sure they get their graduation ceremonies and framed pieces of paper. I've worked middle school, high school, college - it's all the same. You are REQUIRED to pass a certain percentage of each class, or your life is made into hell or you are fired. So, yes, of course, grade inflation. 

And, yes, of course, student IQ has to drop in higher education because the colleges must keep the same number of students at least (better if more each year, but at least the same number) signing loans and grants. The same amount of money must keep flowing in or the doors close. So, as the success of contraception and abortion drives the raw number of students lower and lower each year, the colleges must allow in a larger and larger number of unqualified students. That, or a larger and larger number of foreign students. Or, better yet, both. But they all have to pass, or people will stop coming, so appeal to their egos (DEI) and make sure they pass (grade inflation). 

That's also why most institutions of higher education have mostly adjunct faculty. There is no such thing as adjunct administrators, just adjunct faculty. The faculty aren't important, they can be part-timers, and in most institutions, more than 70% of classes are taught by part-time faculty. But all the admins are full-time, because the administrators who maintain conformance for government loan and grant guidelines are the ones actually bring in money. The classroom costs money, the admin suite brings in money. The classroom is a loss-leader for the back-end administrative profit center. 

Once you understand the economics, it all makes perfect sense. The system is designed to produce the results you see. If you thought it was supposed to do something else, well, then the system works.

This Is Of God

Hinduism dates back to at least 2300 BC in the Indus Valley civilization. Some scholars suggest origins as far back as 4000 to 10,000 BC

Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, in the late 6th century BC.

Taoism was founded in the 6th century BC, with the teachings of Lao Tzu considered its foundational inspiration.

Zoroastrianism was founded by the prophet Zoroaster (also known as Zarathushtra) in the 6th or 7th century BC

Jainism was founded by Mahavira (c. 599–527 BC).

If we insist on arguing that any religion which survives millennia of sin and divisiveness must be of divine origin, then since all of the above still exist, all of these theological systems are of divine origin.

Indeed, it is pretty clear that Islam is nowhere near collapsing, and is only 600 years younger than Christianity, so Islam is likely also of divine origin.

Obviously, this is a ridiculous argument. Christians should really stop mouthing this nonsense. It is not a defense of the Church, it is just a public exhibition of the Christian's complete ignorance concerning the histories of other theological systems. Making this argument just makes Christians look really stupid. 

Why Pope Leo?

The world's cardinals have elected South Americans twice in a row. 

They are clearly concerned about South America.

During the decade Pope Francis was in office (elected 2013), Argentina's Catholic population fell from 76% to 49%.  That clearly didn't work, so now they're trying a more conservative version of Pope Francis. That won't work either. 

Watch Peru's statistics over the next decade. If it drops - and the Catholic population percentage in South America will most definitely drop during Pope Leo's pontificate - then what happens? 

I've got nothing against Pope Leo. I'm sure he is a good man and will be as good a Pope as anyone can be. But this kind of thing has been tried before. During World War I, the French were certain that technology could not overcome the human spirit. Vital impetus, or "élan vital", a belief in the power of a strong, offensive spirit to overcome any obstacle, turned out to be much less effective than a wall of high-velocity lead spewed out by machine guns and the power of tons of explosive from long-range artillery shells. 

Similarly, a marvelous papal personality is not going to overcome technology. If anyone were going to succeed by force of personality, it would have been John Paul II (1978-2005). 

A 2012 document reported that for more than a quarter-century [Poland's] church attendance and declarations of religious faith have been stable, decreasing only minimally since 2005 when the grief related to the death of Pope John Paul II led to an increase in religious practice among Poles. In a 2012 study, 52% of Poles declared that they attend religious services at least once a week, 38% do so once or twice a month, and 11% do so never or almost never. Meanwhile, 94% of Poles consider themselves to be religious believers (9% of whom consider themselves "deeply religious"), while only 6% of Poles claim that they are non-believers.

But even during John Paul II's reign, the percentage of Catholics regularly attending Mass dropped consistently from year to year, until it fell off a cliff:

The new data, released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a state agency, show that in the 2021 census, 27.1 million people (71.3%) identified themselves as followers of the Roman Catholic church. That was down from 33.7 million (87.6%) at the last census a decade earlier.

The election of John Paul II solved several pressing European problems in the late 20th century. Among the most significant? He kept the Catholic population from melting away in Poland. The cardinals gambled that Pope Francis could solve similar problems in South America. That didn't work. So, they're trying again with a Peruvian candidate. Below is a graph of Catholic percentage in Peru's population:

Pope Leo XIV is supposed to solve the problem of  the disintegrating Catholic population in Peru and in South America as a whole. It can't work. Pope John Paul II got away with it due to a unique set of circumstances surrounding communism, trade unions and Catholic Faith. That's not going to repeat in Peru or any other South American country. 

Given his apparent good health, and the advances that will be made in medicine over the coming decades, Pope Leo XIV will probably have a fifteen to twenty-year pontificate. By the time the next papal conclave convenes, South America will no longer be majority Catholic. All eyes will be on Africa. The next Pope will be African, because it will be a hotspot by then, and the cardinals will have given up on South America, just like they have already given up on Europe and North America.

The Status Quo Can't Quo

Capitalism depends on growing global TFR and growing population. That's gone.

Capitalism was a SUPERB ride, gave us everything we have, but it can't work anymore. We don't have the population growth to make it work. We won't have it for the foreseeable future. For all we know, capitalism might be giving us both obscene wealth and absurdly low TFR.

Socialism, anarchy, communism, have always been worse than useless. Mercantilism stopped working in the mid-1800s.

We need a new paradigm. Maybe Trump's tariffs are it. I don't know. Now, make no mistake. I despise Trump as a human being. I have never voted for him and never will. Furthermore, if a politician were doing this, I would scream bloody murder. Politicians are empty-headed fools. They don't understand what they are doing half the time. 

But Trump isn't a politician, he is a business man. He may not be likeable, but he isn't stupid and he is very experienced. He routinely negotiated huge deals with some of the biggest sharks in one of the richest countries in the world. For him, tariffs are not politics. If he implemented tariffs, it is part of a larger negotiation. He's playing a game. I don't know what the game is. And while I wouldn't trust Trump in many, many situations, if he's arguing the American side in a business negotiation, I trust him ahead of any politician.

Again, is he right in this? I still don't know. But what everyone is doing simply cannot continue. We no longer have population growth, or even people attempting to grow the population. This is not normal. Something has to change. The economics we have used up to this point cannot work. 

The TFR is dropping, and no one knows how to fix it. Keep in mind, Christianity has been completely unable to assist with the problem. Christianity has been essentially moribund since industrialization came on the scene.

The Enlightenment was a reaction to the increasingly obvious failures of the Christian world view to explain reality. Christianity arguably created the scientific paradigm, but none of the religious structures in any culture have really survived contact with the scientific paradigm, and that includes Christianity.

Judaism birthed Christianity but became a postage stamp as a result. Christianity birthed the scientific paradigm and has become mostly irrelevant as a result. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity - none of it works, not now. Capitalism has never been shown to work with a decreasing TFR. The social safety nets that capitalism and growing population allow cannot survive a dropping population. Once the social safety nets collapse due to population collapse, the economics will collapse along with it. Nobody knows how to fix this.

Going forward, for the next century at least, something will have to change. The economics, the TFR, the safety net, the work we do... something has to change. The status quo can't quo. 

The Problem with Embryo Ownership

 First Things has published an essay with the same name, in which the author bloviates about the moral problems with IVF, which are - admittedly - legion. But the author fails to address the central problem.

God participates in IVF by creating and infusing the human soul.

He doesn't have to, but He chooses to.

So... what do you do with that?

Now, you can argue that this is part of God's magnificent freedom, part of His gift to human persons. After all, in an act of pure love, God created and formed the universe. He lets us do whatever we want with this universe. He holds it in existence from moment to moment, while our sin abounds. If we turn lead into bullets and fire a bullet into someone's skull, He will hold that bullet in existence and allow it to smash open a brain pan. It's a radical freedom to give us suzerainty over the universe like that. 

But this is a bit different. This isn't just God holding some pre-existing something in existence. This is an honest-to-God act of ex nihilo creation. During the IVF process, God creates a new human soul and infuses it.

Think about that.

He has to actively take part in our attempt to create a new human being. He has to actively create the new human soul out of nothing and infuse that newly created human soul into the attempted embryo as part of the process. God is as much an active participant in this process as the lab tech infusing the sperm. God ACTIVELY PARTICIPATES in the creation of the life of the new human embryo. If He did not, the embryo would never form.

Christians don't believe souls pre-exist conception, so that makes God an ACTOR, a PARTICIPANT in the IVF sequence. And He appears to be fine with it, because He makes sure the human soul is present and operational.

So... what do you do with that?

Four Cups, Pure BS

Scott Hahn's book, The Fourth Cup, turns out to be pure bullshit. The Seder ritual Hahn wrote his book about was developed long after the destruction of the Temple, long after Christ was crucified. It was invented by rabbis who never sacrificed in the Temple, nor did they ever actually even see the Temple. They couldn't, because the Temple had already been destroyed centuries before. Arguably, Judaism died out when the Second Temple was destroyed and animal sacrifice, the centerpiece of Judaism and Hebrew worship, was completely eradicated. 

Remember, neither Jesus nor the apostles nor even Paul ever met a Jew who didn't participate in Temple sacrifice and Temple maintenance. Every adult male Jew in the world was required to come to the Temple at least three times a year to assist in Temple sacrifice. Every adult male Jew was also required to contribute a half shekel to Temple maintenance before the first of Nisan each year. From Noah, through Abraham's first vision, for all of Hebrew history, animal sacrifice was the centerpiece of Hebrew worship. When the Temple was destroyed and Temple sacrifice eradicated, the Hebrew religion was also thereby eradicated. When the last Levitical priest who had offered animal sacrifice died, Judaism ceased to exist.

The Seder as we know it, and as it has been practiced since the sixth century, was not an organic development of Temple Judaism. The Last Supper could not have been a seder meal. 

That Jesus ate a meal in Jerusalem, at night, with his disciples is not so surprising. It is also no great coincidence that during this meal the disciples reclined, ate both bread and wine, and sang a hymn. While such behavior may have been characteristic of the Passover meal, it is equally characteristic of practically any Jewish meal.

Not only the Seder, but the entire rabbinic-Talmud system was an invention created long after the Temple was destroyed. It was invented in a manner very similar to the way Joseph Smith invented Mormonism and Mormon ritual, tacking it onto Christianity as best he could. The rabbinic-Talmud system was invented by Rav Ashi (352–427 AD) and Ravina II (d. 475 AD), two lay people who had nothing better to do with their time but write down a layman's thoughts on how best to read the Torah. Rav Ashi or Ravina II writing commentary on the Torah was no different than Martin Luther (Ph.D. in theology) or John Hus (MA in theology) writing down their commentaries on the New Testament. In terms of divine inspiration, the versions of the Talmud the two Ravs wrote down have roughly the same theological weight and insight as Luther's Table Talk. 

The rabbinic-Talmud system they developed is as authentically Jewish as Mormonism is authentically Christian. Today, roughly 20% of the people who claim to be Jews reject both rabbinic authority and Talmudic authority. They reject it for the same reasons Christians reject Mormonism: they know both systems were manufactured by men long after the fact. 

But this invented system of Talmudic "Judaism" is the system from which Scott Hahn lifted his four cup theory. Keep in mind, rabbis are not descended from Levitical priests. Rabbis are just lay people who gave themselves authority and pretended it was theirs to take. In 1935, fully 80% of the Christian "ministers" in the United States had only a high school degree. Some had less. But during that same Prohibition period, a substantial number of American rabbis had no formal education at all. 

“if you said you are a rabbi, who was going to say you weren't a rabbi?” Okrent continued. “There were rabbis with names like Kelly and Hosanna Han and there were black rabbis. There was a real racket.”... Basically, anyone – no matter how unlikely – could say they were a rabbi because there was no recognized standard for the rabbinate...A dozen Jews or even non-Jews can get together and call themselves a Jewish congregation. They can proceed to elect one of themselves or anyone else, male or female, Jew or non-Jew, as their “Rabbi” and there is absolutely no authoritative, central Jewish body that can dictate to the pseudo-congregation what qualifications its rabbi must possess, or even interfere in any way with its management.

As even those who call themselves Jews today readily admit,  

The original ordination, passed down from Moshe to Yehoshua and continuing from teacher to student, was lost in the year 358 CE

This is how the rabbinate has always operated. As long as twelve people agree that you are a rabbi, then you are a rabbi. That's why it was important Jesus have twelve disciples. A rabbi, like an American congregationalist minister, is anyone who (a) decides to call himself that and (b) can convince a few people to agree that he is one.  

Instead of taking this authority for themselves in 1830 AD like old Joe Smith, they did it in 400 AD. Only the Ashkenazi (Eastern Europeans) buy into this nonsense. Unfortunately, Ashkenazi make up about 80% of the people who pretend to be Jewish today. Ashkenazi come from Eastern Europe, so the Ashkenazi rabbi-Talmud system is the only kind of "Jew" that Europeans know. As a result, everyone descended from Europeans thinks rabbis and the Talmud are normal and "Jewish". They aren't. America's view of Judaism is no more an accurate view of Judaism than what America's view of Christianity would be if everything Americans knew about Christianity was what the Mormon Church taught. 

But these fifth-century AD lay people who called themselves "rabbi" are the people who wrote the Talmuds. Just as a group of congregationalist ministers might gather today to write a Scripture commentary, so a bunch of lay people who claimed authority after the Temple was destroyed and the Levitical priesthood disbanded, wrote down what they considered to be the correct way to interpret the Torah. The results don't have to be imagined - the results are the Talmud.

However, let us ignore all this. Let's pretend the rabbis really do have authority, that the really are actually Jews. Let's pretend the Seder ritual they invented really is really accurate and not just something they wrote down because they were grasping at the few straws left to them after the true Jewish style of worship, animal sacrifice, i.e., the Hebrew worship offered since Noah and Abraham, had been completely crushed, eradicated, destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth. 

What about Hahn's four cup theory then? Well, Hahn's theory depends on the Seder being a prophetic foreshadowing of the Crucifixion, and the four cups being a prophecy of Christ's passion, when it is actually no such thing. 

Just where did the rabbis themselves determine the idea of instituting four cups of wine? The rabbis wrote these instructions in Tractate Pesachim during the time of Roman rule in Israel, and during that time it was customary at Roman feasts or banquets (known as symposiums (sym – together, posium – drinking wine)) to begin the festivities by drinking wine.

Tractate Pesachim, part of the Mishnah, was compiled around 200 CE in Palestine by Patriarch Judah haNasi and his school.

The tractate Pesachim was written at least 200 years after the Catholic Mass had already begun being celebrated. The Mass certainly was based on the Seder meal, but the structure of the original Seder meal isn't actually known. The oldest documents describing the Seder may not actually be doing that. After all, even: 

the Book of Deuteronomy clearly stipulates that the Pesach sacrifice may not be made “within any of thy gates” but rather at the Temple. (16:5-6)

so it has literally been impossible to celebrate any kind of Seder since the 70AD destruction of the Temple. But even what we do know of the Seder as it was practiced when the Temple still stood is not.... harmonious:

The Passover Seder is one of the most recognized and widely practiced of Jewish rituals, yet had our ancestors visited one of these modern-day celebrations, they would be baffled. Not only does our modern Seder wildly diverge from the Passover of old: during antiquity itself the holiday underwent radical changes. Below we chart as best we can - considering the shortage of historical documentation - the origins of Passover, from the dawn of Israelite people to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE

What we know of it tells us it originally only had two, or perhaps three, cups, not four. 

The obligation to drink four cups of wine on the seder night was another rabbinic provision introduced within several decades after the destruction of the temple (Talmud Pesachim 109b). 

The Talmud is written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and exists in two versions: the vastly studied Babylonian Talmud, compiled by scholars in Mesopotamia (Babylonia) around 500 CE, as well as the Jerusalem Talmud, compiled earlier, around 400 CE, but much shorter, incomplete and in consequence, for centuries studied less frequently. Usually, ‘the Talmud’ refers to the Babylonian Talmud.

But the tractate Hahn used to develop his four-cup theory does not restrict the Seder to four cups:

On the eve of Pesah close to minhah one may not eat until nightfall. Even the poorest person in Israel must not eat [on the night of Pesah] until he reclines. And they should give him not less than four cups [of wine], and even from the charity plate.

There's also a fifth cup, that Hahn doesn't mention:

Rabbi Tarfon says: over the fifth cup we recite the great Hallel.

So, Hahn's theory is a Just-So story, based on nonsense from a bunch of random lay people making up and writing down random "Jewish" rituals centuries after Judaism's destruction. They didn't even invoke an angel delivering golden tablets. They simply invoked divine inspiration for Rav Ashi:

Rav Ashi's composition of the Talmud is considered divinely inspired, reflecting his spiritual greatness. Rav Ashi, a pivotal figure in Jewish history, completed the Babylonian Talmud in the 5th century CE, a text central to Jewish law and tradition.

But notice, in order to consider Rav Ashi and his Talmud divinely inspired, we have to EXPLICITLY REJECT the authority of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

CCC 66 "The Christian economy, therefore, since it is the new and definitive Covenant, will never pass away; and no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. Neither the Jerusalem Talmud nor the Babylonian Talmud nor the rabbis (i.e., lay people) who compiled and interpreted both, can be considered by Christians to be divinely inspired, much less considered to be contributions to Christian public revelation. In order to buy into Hahn's theory, we have to assume some level of authority on the part of the Jerusalem Talmud and its tractates. Yet we also have to acknowledge that, from a Christian perspective, or even from the perspective of many "Jews" who reject the Talmud, the rabbis have no authority, nor is their compilation of either Talmud, or the rituals described within, endowed with any authority. 

From this mid-sixth century AD theological dog's breakfast, Hahn simply grabbed ritual passages, added a Catholic veneer, and sold it to Catholics, making a ton of money by doing so. 

Which, good for him, I guess. After all, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. 

Unequal Outcomes

 Thomas Sowell observes, "Much of the social retrogression that took place on both sides of the Atlantic is traceable to the central tenet of the prevailing social vision, that unequal outcomes are due to adverse treatment of the less fortunate."

Many Christians assume poor people are poor because the rich are mistreating the poor. After all, Jesus gave us the story of the rich man and Lazarus, a story constantly harped on by Christian Fathers and Doctors of the Church. But none of Christianity's preachers spend much time on the tower of Siloam, in which the laws of nature inflict unequal outcomes on the victims. Natural calamity is either attributed to Satan's malevolence (e.g., Job) or quickly passed over without direct comment (e.g., the man born blind). Job and the man born blind both suffered, but the wealthy were not the cause of their suffering. 

While Christianity opposes the wealthy adversely treating the less fortunate, Christianity actively promotes unequal outcomes. When someone chooses to be an idiot (e.g., the adulterous woman), Jesus absolves the idiot of the consequences of being stupid. The adulterous woman acts to pull down destruction on her own head, in much the same way that the blind Samson pulls down a building on his own head, but the former is forgiven, as long as she promises to stop acting the fool, while the latter is celebrated as a Hebrew hero.

Yet, just as God uses mud to heal the blind man, so do the rich (wealthy in intellect or resources) develop and use tools to protect everyone from natural calamity. Technology better than money, for we benefit immediately from technology in a way that we do not from money. I may be born rich, but the wealth buys me nothing until I purchase something. However, if I am born into a high-tech society, I benefit from that society from the moment of my conception. Indeed, insofar as the pre-conception lifestyle of my parents influence my conception, I benefit even before my conception. 

"Stressful events could change your genes in ways that can be passed down to future generations. Yes, that is correct, stress and genetics can be passed down. In most cases, the effects seem to last just one or two generations, but further research might find longer-lasting impacts."

Industrialization and technology is the rich man's way of showering good things upon Lazarus. The rich use tech to drive down the physical cost of everything, thus showering their wealth on the maximum number of poor. There is no parable that corresponds to this, apart from, perhaps, the workers in the vineyard or the investment parable of the talents. Since these positive effects of capitalism, technology and wealth distribution have historically not been well-understood by ordained men, it is never the subject of sermons, and therefore never noted.

Then again, God is often willing to use the natural world to punish people. Famine, plague, war, death... these are often explicitly referred to in Scripture as God's just retribution upon the wicked. God scourges the child he loves, and Scripture teaches that suffering is necessary to make a man perfect. In this case, when unequal outcomes are due to adverse treatment of the less fortunate, it may be precisely because justice is being served. We are told of the people who called upon the Lord Jesus and were rewarded, but not all who call upon the Lord are, for not all who cry "Lord, Lord" will be rewarded.

Christians argue that it is just for God to reject the pleadings of the latter, because only God can truly judge. For these people, God's justice triumphs over his mercy. So, if we act in God's image, we know that it is sometimes perfectly reasonable to apply unequal outcomes, even negative physical outcomes, to the less fortunate, to let our justice triumph over our mercy. The prevailing social vision has no way of adjusting for this fact, nor - to be perfectly fair - does Christian theology. We do know it is often appropriate to deal out justice rather than mercy, but since we do not have God's mind, we cannot know when it is in everyone's best interest to meet out justice instead of mercy.

Thus, the rich shower mercy indiscriminately on all via the widespread utilization of technology that lifts everyone out of the abject poverty all of mankind experienced prior to 1800. But when some of that rain does not reach every last corner of the desert in a way sufficient to meet the high standards of social justice warriors, that is seen as an assault by the rich upon the poor. No thought is given to how difficult it can be to send rain even into deserts. No, as with Job, the capitalist rich are instantly compared to the acts of Satan, and poor Job's afflictions are seen as unjust, even though the foolishness of the poor is as scarlet.

Love: Christianity vs. Capitalism

Up until 1800, the world's population was under one billion people.

For almost two millennia, the Catholic Church was the world's largest charitable organization. Despite the enormous good it was able to provide, the Church was unable to cover the needs of the world's population. By even 19th or 20th century standards, for that two millennia period, the entire world, including even princes and kings, lived in extreme poverty.

Since 1800, the world has grown to over eight billion people, but extreme poverty now afflicts less than 10% of the global population. In the 200-year period between 1800 and now, several diseases have been completely wiped out of existence, and many more have been reduced to near zero. For this reason, we can say that even the poorest person alive today is richer than anyone alive prior to 1800, if only because no one alive today can die of smallpox, none of their cattle will die of rinderpest, almost no one will catch polio or Guinea worm. Many infectious diseases have been entirely removed from whole continents of the world, and everyone benefits from a much better food supply, thus reducing the number of famines world-wide. 

In short, industrialization and capitalism has fed, clothed, housed, and provided medical care for eight planets' worth of people.

CCC 1766 "To love is to will the good of another." All other affections have their source in this first movement of the human heart toward the good.

If love is a decision to help others, then industrialization and capitalism has been better at showing love than even Christianity has been.

The interesting thing is this: capitalism only arose where Christianity had first furrowed the ground. Industrialization and capitalism were apparently the consequence of a Christian worldview, which recognized that willing the good of another actually improved one's own situation, for example, the Church spent all its resources helping the poor, and became unimaginably wealthy in consequence.

By the 1700s, economists began to realize that the best way to improve one's own economic situation was by providing goods and services other people needed. Willing another's good was not strictly necessary for success. The required elements were recognizing the needs of another and serving those needs. An emotional response to their needs was not important, the service of their needs was all that mattered. When you served someone else's needs, they would recompense you. This is the basis of capitalism and industrialization.

So, economists are not wrong to say that capitalism is, or can be, an essentially selfish system. Christianity provided the philosophical bridge which allows people to see the selfish advantage in helping others. It demonstrates the superior economics of assistance over looting. Christianity assisted the change in perspective in the sense that it provides a long-term perspective, instead of an emphasis on the short-term. Switching to the long-term perspective allows people to switch from looting to cooperation, which is the basis for capitalism. 

What the last two centuries has demonstrated is simply this: the long-term perspective does not need a religious element in order to work. That religious element may have been necessary for the boot-strap change from short-term to long-term, but like a rocket booster on a launch, it isn't strictly necessary to keep the ball moving forward. Christianity used Judaism as its launchpad, but for two millennia, Christianity has not needed Judaism for anything but eschatology. In the same way, capitalism needed Christianity for its launchpad, but events have demonstrated that Christianity is not strictly necessary for capitalism's success in making the world a more physically comfortable place for everyone.

Thus, in terms of strictly "willing the good of the other", even as an intermediate strategy to attain a different end, i.e., improving one's own lot", capitalism has turned out to be superior to Christianity at not just willing the good of another, but actually bringing it about, at least in a physical perspective. Capitalism loves others better than Christians do. Non-intuitive, but the facts are plain. 

Why Trump's Tariffs Are Stupid but Necessary

 Up until 1913 (when the income tax was instituted), 80-90% of federal revenue was tariffs. You can invoke Smoot-Hawley or 1930 all you want, but the US was neither the richest, nor the third most populous, nor the world's reserve currency then. Everything is different now. 

Although we are the world's reserve currency, we have a debt to GDP ratio of 124%. That is unsustainable. If we go bankrupt, the whole world goes bankrupt. Federal spending has to be cut. Interest rates must come down. Period. 

As the stock market declines, investors flee to treasury bonds, forcing the yield on those bonds lower. This year, almost $10 trillion will need to be refinanced. Every basis point that the yield declines translates into a billion-dollar annual savings in loan repayment. Thus, a 0.5% drop would save $500 billion over a decade. As of this writing, the yield has declined about 0.7 points. That’s a lot of money saved.

Average world salary is $18000/year. US average salary is $63000/yr. We are the 1%.

Are tariffs a tax on the American consumer? Sure. But if you believe in taxing the richest 1%, then you have to support the tariffs, because we are the richest 1%. 

Vietnam and Taiwan have already agreed to remove their tariffs against the US. Other countries will inevitably follow suit. Again, we're the third most populous nation, and one of the richest nations per capita, on the planet. We control the world's reserve currency. 

Everyone talks about saving the world. This saves the world. 

Biden vs. Vance

Is Joe Biden a worse Catholic than JD Vance, or vice versa? 

The Church teaches a hierarchy of sin. Some mortal sins are worse than other mortal sins. For instance, Aquinas taught that masturbation was worse than fornication or adultery, because fornication was ordered to the natural world and procreation, lacking only the marriage vow, while adultery was a violation of the vow, but still ordered to the natural world. Meanwhile, masturbation is not ordered to the natural world since it is rooted in fantasy and cannot lead to procreation.

Same is true of Biden vs Vance. Biden advocated murder and homosexuality, both of which are completely disordered. Vance does not advocate either. So, while you can take issue with either one, Vance is clearly the superior Catholic.

Why the Signal Breach Isn't What it Seems

Jeff Goldberg claims to have been part of a top-secret Signal chat. He provided evidence that he was. The question is, how did that happen?

One theory has it that the head of NPR, who also happens to sit on Signal's board, somehow engineered this. That is stupid absurd. Signal keeps zero metadata, all it has is phone numbers and even those can't be seen. This ain't Musk taking over Twitter, where meta data and user info abounds.

Signal is very nearly as anonymous and it is CERTAINLY as encrypted as any app out there. It uses AES and the Signal Protocol, both open-source, both as bullet-proof as anyone knows how to make encryption. There are no known backdoors or hacks to either method.

Signal encryption is end-to-end, which means it makes no bloody difference if your contact is in the Pentagon or the Kremlin. In neither case can outside parties read your messages. It makes no bloody difference what tower you connect to, whether the tower is compromised or not. The message was encrypted on the device BEFORE it was transmitted to the tower. That means the encrypted message still can't be read, even if the enemy entirely owns the tower. Same with receiving a message - only the endpoint device can decrypt it. 

Signal may be "consumer-grade", but in this case that means Signal is as good or BETTER than "military-grade", which latter category is often decades behind the consumer industry due to the government acquisition train (cf, DOGE's work in the Social Security database, or the IRS software nightmare or NASA/Space Shuttle nonsense). Talk to any military personnel. When you mention "military-grade", they laugh. 

This Signal breach was solely, only, entirely, without question or any other concern, the fault of one of the people already in the Signal group chat. Can Signal be compromised via phishing scams? Sure. But so can EVERY encryption method out there, approved or not, authorized or not. This breach is not due to inadequate tech, it is human operator error. Period. 

Now, how did this happen?

The problem is the contact list inside the Signal app. Signal's contact list itself cannot be locked, but you can block individual contacts or groups and set privacy settings to control who can see your phone number. You can also set a PIN for account recovery and registration lock. 

If this was done on secure phones, the techs should have locked down that contact list. But to do that, they have to have a pre-approved list of numbers to load on the phones. Now, maybe that happened, but maybe Jeffrey Goldberg was on a pre-approved BIDEN list of contacts, so he might already have been on the pre-approved list. It might be that this is not the first classified Signal session Jeff has been involved with from the White House, it's just the first one WE KNOW ABOUT because he kept his mouth shut about the one's he attended under Biden.

Jeffrey Goldberg says Mike Waltz sent him a 'connection request' on Signal, but that's not a thing in Signal, so he's clearly lying about that. Everyone involved in publicizing this scandal on BOTH sides have demonstrated they don't know a damn thing about the actual tech or how it works, which is why he is currently getting away with that bald-faced lie.

Signal servers hold zero metadata, so it's not like the server was compromised, because there's no data on the server to compromise. The last time the FBI tried to warrant out contact data, Signal's CEO told them exactly that. Even Signal can't tell you what data it is transmitting or who is transmitting it.

Somebody on that chat either deliberately, or very mistakenly, added Goldberg to the chat. Could Goldberg have assigned some high official's name to his own phone number, to see if he could infiltrate a Signal communication? Yes. Is that felony fraud in communications? Yeah, probably. 

And that, boys and girls, is everything you need to know about Signal. I use it, I recommend it, and I continue to stand by the recommendation because I actually know how it works. If Jeff Goldberg did what was described in the previous paragraph, he needs to be jailed. Everyone needs to curate their Signal contact lists. But, again, that's human error, not Signal's error. 

How Education Actually Works

The reason educational institutions exist is to grab government loan and grant money and give it to administrators. That is the only reason any educational institution exists. It has no other reason to exist.

If you think it does, you are wrong. Grade schools, high schools, colleges, universities, all of it exists just to harvest cash from the government. That's it. Once you realize that, everything makes sense.

Of COURSE the administrative staff grows by leaps and bounds. The actual customer is the government. Students and teachers are just window-dressing. The point of the institution is to fill out the necessary administrative forms to get the government cash. Adding a teacher takes money away from the pot, it is an expense. Adding an administrator means one more person to fill out government cash forms - each administrator increases the pot. Administrators make the institution money. Teachers and students lose the institution's money.

A school's product is not an educated student, the product is government forms. The government pays you more cash for filling out more forms. Period. The students are just there so there are names that can be put on the forms. The teachers are there to fool the student into coming in and getting their name put on forms. The point of the whole process is to fill out the forms and sell them to the government for cash money. It's all one huge grift. That's it.

AI and The Demise of Universities

There are many reasons why the modern university is slowly decaying away, but AI will certainly number among them. According to Britannica, the first true university in the West was Bologna (1088 AD). Universities have spent over 10 centuries producing highly trained explorers in increasingly esoteric fields. One such field is how to efficiently determine protein folding. 

Universities have spent the last 60 years producing people highly trained in just this particular field.

In those 60 years, we discovered how to fold 150,000 proteins. In 2020, over the course of six months, AI not only discovered how to fold EVERY protein that exists (over 200 million), but it can also now outperform millions of years of evolution itself, creating new proteins with specifically tuned functionality. That's two years before the release of ChatGPT. Why does this matter?

 Think of the evolution of the airplane. We spent centuries trying to figure out how to make powered flight work. In 1903, someone finally assembled the pieces correctly. Look what happened:

• 1903 - Wright brothers' first flight (12 seconds, 120 ft).
• 1911 - first planes in combat
• 1914 - first commercial passenger service
• 1915 - first monoplane.
• 1919 - first transatlantic flight
• 1927 - first solo non-stop transatlantic flight
• 1936 - Douglas DC-3
• 1939 - first jet
• 1952 - first passenger jet
• 1957 - first spacecraft

It took roughly 16 years to transition from a 12-second, 120-foot flight to crossing the Atlantic, and another 12 years to do it non-stop, solo. Because we have a much higher population, and a better-educated population, tech moves faster now than it did in 1903. There are more people working tech now than there were in 1903.

 We've been thinking about AI for millennia, working on it directly for about a century, but we have only managed to put the pieces together correctly in the last three years. We're at about 1908 on the airplane chart.

With the advent of the automobile, people don't learn how to take care of horses any more. It is possible that with the advent of AI, people won't need "educators" any more. Not only are universities losing relevance as dropping TFR removes students from their classrooms, AI removes the need for highly trained people. We can afford to be more ignorant than ever, without any real loss of functionality. 

 

Marriage and Prenups

 This is why prenups are important.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/554387583700666

Every marriage has a prenup, even if it doesn't have a prenup. The default prenup is whatever the laws of the state and nation are. That might be straight 50-50 split, it might be split only 50% of property acquired during marriage, whatever. 

But, whatever it is, EVERY marriage sanctioned by a state or national government has a prenup. And the Catholic Church won't allow the sacramental marriage to take place unless you have first licensed the marriage through the government. So, the Catholic Church's insistence that a prenup is somehow damaging to a marriage is pure bullshit. 

The Catholic argument is, "Well, if you insist on a prenup, that's a sign that you don't expect the marriage to succeed, so that means it is not a sacramental marriage." And if I take out medical insurance, am I saying I don't trust that God will keep me healthy? This is not a minor argument. For centuries, buying insurance was seen as a sinful act, because you were not trusting in God's providence. When you bought insurance, you were betting on whether or not something bad would happen. Yet, if the Church recognizes the possibility of state-sanctioned divorce and subsequent Catholic annulment - and it most assuredly does recognize this possibility - then it recognizes that sacramental marriage vows do not always "take." 

Furthermore, it is commonly acknowledged that there is no way for the spouses to know if the vows actually worked. The Catholic process of annulment requires that the spouses show that some deficit of knowledge or moral agency was involved, at the moment the vows were exchanged, so that consent could not be given. That is, the Church requires that the putative spouses show they knew the vows wouldn't work even as they were making the vows. 

The process even takes into account the Dunning-Krueger effect, the possibility that the spouses were so deficient in knowledge that neither spouse was capable of recognizing the lack at the time both attempted to exchange vows. In fact, it could be that one of the two spouses is so deficient in understanding that they NEVER figure out the lack was there from the beginning. That is, one spouse figures it out and seeks the divorce/annulment, but the other one is never good with it and refuses to accept the Church declaration of nullity. And, in fact, since Church declarations of nullity are not infallible (that is, the Church could, indeed, be in error by granting annulment), even the Church recognizes that it may suffer from Dunning-Krueger when it tries to judge the matter.

But, if there is a Dunning-Krueger possibility, shouldn't the spouses have the possibility of protecting against that? A prenup is just marriage insurance, like health insurance, car insurance or any other kind of insurance you can morally take out. If I can take out insurance on the principle that God might not protect me from my own stupidity and ignorance when I operate an automobile, then why not take out insurance when I try to operate myself as a spouse?