Charity must be Voluntary

I had a conversation with one of the members of the legislature the other day. I said, ‘I respect the fact that you believe in small government. I do, too. I also know that you’re a person of faith.

‘Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’

John Kasich, Ohio Governor and Presidential Candidate

 

Let's ignore the separation of church and state for the moment and just ponder this future conversation with St. Peter.

 

St. Peter: What did you do for the poor, John?

Kasich: I arranged for tax dollars to pay for their healthcare.

St. Peter: You took monies coerced from the citizens of your state and directed them to the poor to benefit you in the afterlife?

Kasich: What?  Coerced?

St. Peter: I presume the citizens were required to pay the tax or suffer some penalty of law?

Kasich: Well, yeah.  But it was for charity.

St. Peter: You realize it isn't charity unless it's voluntary?

Kasich: Funding through voluntary contributions isn't the way government does things.

St. Peter: Taking money from the person who earned it and giving it to the poor is not a virtue.  Good intentions do not change the fact that it was government-sanctioned theft.  How much of your money did you give to the poor?

 

Imagine if, instead of having government fund this directly, Governor Kasich funneled the money to a church-run charity that did exactly the same thing.  By his own admission, he is funding healthcare for the poor because he wants to have a good answer for St. Peter.  This is about his religious convictions, not secular governance.  Though it would have the same end by different means, there would be a firestorm of protest.  If the Catholic Church is all in favor of the government coercing the taxpayer to fund the poor - a task that was once handled by churches, shouldn't it be automatically opposed as a mix of church and state?  Hasn't government funding allowed churches to direct their money to other issues?  By taking the expense of supporting the poor from churches, isn't that a contribution to churches?

 

Government cannot engage in charity.  Everything government does is founded on its monopoly on the use of force.  Only government can 'legally' initiate force to make people comply.  Non-governmental entities that initiate force are called criminals.

Opportunity Missed

The Pope came to the United States and, as chance would have it, his visit coincided with a political effort to defund Planned Parenthood (PP), the major abortion provider in the United States.  A series of sting videos indicated that PP was profiting by selling the parts of the aborted fetuses.  Moreover, the Pope was scheduled to address the Congress where the Speaker, John Boehner, and the Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, are both Catholics.  The stars had aligned in the fight against abortion and the Pope pressed Congress on the issue... of climate change.

The Papacy is not necessarily political.  Though the very teachings of Catholicism come down on one side or another of a great many political issues (e.g. abortion, capital punishment, gay marriage, welfare, etc.), it is not incumbent on the Pope to lobby or cajole governments to follow these teachings.  Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.  But this Pope isn't that kind of Pope.  He has been more political than his predecessor and has taken a decidedly leftist view of the world.  Clearly, Pope Francis has embraced climate change and he takes a dim view of capitalism.  So one wonders why, when the table was set for a victory against abortion, he put his political capital behind climate change.

I'm not Catholic and may be missing something.  Perhaps someone who follows the doings of Popes is fully aware of the reasons behind this.  It's been my understanding that the Church has a very long standing opposition to abortion while this climate change interest is very recent.  Pope John Paul II spoke about it but it was not top of his docket.  Pope Francis has elevated it considerably.

White House Down

Having just watched Olympus Has Fallen, I decided to watch its competitor.  The events are surprisingly similar - not only do we have another president held hostage in the White House, we have a Speaker of the House become President.  However, this one is extremely political.  Whereas I did not know the party affiliation of the characters in Olympus, that is not the case here.  President Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) is a thinly veiled Barack Obama.  Really, the guy wants to pull troops out of the Middle East and is having high level talks with Iran!  The Speaker of the House is a wicked evil traitor who is in the pocket of the military industrial complex; his first order of business is to keep US troops in the Middle East.  Of course, President Sawyer's plan to withdraw all US forces from the Middle East is declared a success in the film's epilogue, with both Iran and Israel jumping eagerly at the opportunity.  All you need to do is give peace a chance.

Thanks to high-level traitors in the government, this White House take-over comes across as less ludicrous.  Agent Walker (James Woods), head of the Secret Service in the White House, would have the best chance of sneaking a special ops team into the White House.  Such a command position allowed him to undermine a proper response - misdirecting responders - so long as he was still viewed as loyal.  However, it seems highly unlikely that a man whose son was killed on an operation ordered by the president would retain that position.

 

The action was great and it was funny to see the buddy cop vibe between the president and John Cale (Channing Tatum).  There was a surprising amount of comedy in the movie.  The President switching to sneakers in the residence, a villain putting a call on hold, the Vice President's aide hanging up on the president's call, and even the White House Tour Guide was funny: "Tour's over."  If not for the overt political message, I'd have liked this film a lot more.

Olympus Has Fallen

One of two movies to premiere in 2013 with the premise of the White House being captured by terrorists, I found it generally disappointing though not as far-fetched as such an idea should be.  The fact that a lone man jumped the fence and got into the White House last year makes this much more plausible.

 

The movie supposes an impossible attack on the White House occurs.  An enemy airplane briefly dominates the Washington DC airspace and strafes the White House, killing most of the defensive forces on the roof and many on the ground.  Then a ground assault takes place with forty men with automatic weapons charging across the south lawn while being supported by 50 caliber emplacements from the street.  RPGs and suicide vests are used to breach fences and doorways.  Meanwhile, the President has retreated to his bunker, taking the South Korean Premier and his entourage with him.  Not surprisingly, the premier's security team are all plants and quickly subdue everyone in the bunker; Olympus has fallen.

The president (Aaron Eckhart) demonstrates repeated bad judgment that leads to a near catastrophe for the country at the end.  He ordered that the South Korean security team be included in the bunker despite a protest from a Secret Service agent.  He ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reveal a top secret code, since it was useless without the other two codes.  Then he ordered his Secretary of Defense to reveal the second code, since it was useless without the other code.  Then the enemy hacker broke the third code.  Who saw that coming?  But it gets worse.

The military has finally arrived on scene only a couple of minutes after the last Secret Service agent died in the White House and signaled, "Olympus has fallen."  Do they charge in to retake the place?  No, the bad guy tells them to stand down or he will start killing hostages.  The President, in a rare moment of good judgment, said," Don't negotiate" before he was shoved out of the camera.  General Clegg (Robert Forster) did not negotiate; he immediately acceded to the terrorist's demands.  He stood down his forces on the scene and allowed the terrorists to secure the perimeter and put together an anti-air defense system.  Speaker Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) arrives at the Pentagon to learn he is the acting president.  He also decides not to attack the White House and even complies with the terrorist demands that the 7th Fleet be withdrawn from the Sea of Japan and that US troops withdraw from South Korea.  He knows this will likely result in a war that will cost thousands upon thousands of lives but, in order to save a few hostages in the president's bunker, he does it anyway.  By their decisions, President Asher, General Clegg, and Acting-President Trumbull allow the terrorists to nearly achieve a national apocalypse.  Why didn't they resist?  To save a dozen hostages.  Only 2 hostages survived with their chosen path.

Of course, much of this happens on the fringe of the main story which follows Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) stalking about the ruins of the White House and, Die Hard style, killing off the terrorists.  That part was a lot of fun with guns, knives, and fisticuffs galore.

Again, the very premise of the movie is ludicrous.  Such an attack could not have hoped to succeed.  The enemy aircraft would not have been able to dispatch the US interceptors and the Secret Service agents at the White House would not have stood on the lawn - like sitting ducks - armed only with pistols.  But if it did happen this way, the President would be impeached when it came to light that he ordered the release of codes and that he broke protocol to allow the terrorists into his bunker.  General Clegg was in a hard situation with the civilian chain-of-command broken and might have felt an assault on the White House wasn't his decision to make (if only the president had said "attack" instead of "don't negotiate").  Even so, he would likely loose his job in the aftermath.  Speaker Trumbull was Acting President.  He did not act in the interest of the country but in the interest of a dozen hostages in the president's bunker.  He does not deserve a leadership position.  I guess that part didn't make it into the movie.  Maybe in the sequel.

Willful Blindness, Literally!

I read the most unusual headline:

Woman Fulfills Lifelong Wish To Be Blind, Now Happier Than Ever

This I have to read.  It turns out that Jewel Shuping has long thought she was meant to be blind and finally set about making herself so.  The woman had Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), which is usually associated with people who want to amputate limbs.  I say had because she seems to have 'cured' herself by actually becoming blind.  How did she become blind?  The story tells us.

In 2006, Shuping found a psychologist who was willing to help her become blind. The psychologist began putting numbing drops in her eyes, followed by a couple of drops of drain cleaner.

 

Amazingly, the story doesn't discuss criminal charges against this psychologist, the revocation of a license to practice psychology, question this person's ethics, or anything along those lines.  No, nothing more is said about the psychologist.

 

“I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth,  When there’s nobody around you who feels the same way, you start to think that you’re crazy. But I don’t think I’m crazy, I just have a disorder.”

 

Yes, she is crazy and the psychologist assisted her in her craziness.  It is a disorder, right?

 

If you want to be blind, poke your eyes, pour Drano on your eyes, or whatever, but the idea of a medical practitioner assisting in this endeavor really troubles me.  What happened to First, do no harm?  This is the same reason I am opposed to doctor-assisted suicide.  You aren't all that eager to die if you need someone present to assist.

 

If all that wasn't bad enough, the tone of the story is positive.  Look at the headline!  The reporter is all-in on the goal of blindness.  The only disapproval comes in the off-handed line that Shuping's mother and sister are no longer on speaking terms with her.  Can you believe that she has such an unsupportive family?  What does it say about American culture that the story was covered this way?

Government is the Most Dangerous Mass Murderer

Yet another crazy has gone on a shooting spree in a gun free zone and there are immediately calls for gun control.  Yes, gun control has done wonders for Chicago, New York, and Washington DC.  Let's bring that same gun murder rate to the rest of the country.  The Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to bear arms because the people have a right to defend themselves.  That right was denied to certain groups in the 20th century and it didn't turn out well.

In 1911, the Ottoman Empire banned guns.  A few years later, a million and a half Armenians were murdered.  The Soviet Union banned guns in 1929.  The following decade, millions of Ukrainian Kulaks were murdered through mass starvation.  Dissident Russians found themselves sent to Siberian gulags.  In 1938, Germany banned guns.  Shortly thereafter, millions of Jews were shipped off to death camps.  Where the Jews managed to have weapons, there were uprisings, the most famous of which was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.  China had banned guns in the 1930s, just in time for the Japanese invasion.  Oddly, the ban was still in effect after the war and during the rule of Mao Zedong.  Up to 50 million Chinese were killed during Mao's Cultural Revolution.  Cambodia instituted total gun control in 1956.  When Pol Pot seized power two decades later, he exterminated 2 million unarmed Cambodians, a quarter of the country's population.  Cuba, North Korea, and Iran do not allow private citizens to have guns.

 

This is not to say that gun control automatically leads to mass murder by the government.  Both the United Kingdom and Japan have very strict gun control but it is unlikely that a government will arise in either that would murder its citizens.  But if one did, the people would be helpless to resist.  And that is why we have the 2nd Amendment.  Yes, there are costs to such liberal gun laws.  These costs are only made worse by gun free zones.  The way to stop a bad guy with a gun is for a good guy with a gun to arrive on scene.  All those law-abiding citizens are necessarily disarmed while law is no impediment to the shooter.

 

Today's government might want to take your gun for what it views as good and rational reason.  It will do you no harm and in fact only have your best interest at heart.  However, tomorrow's government - perhaps 20 years from now - might look upon you as a nuisance that has no means to resist its will.

Foreign Policy Collapse

As a world power, the United States has vanished.  The Obama Presidency has marched the country off a cliff.  There are no successes, only degrees of failure.

From Tunisia to Iran, there is a string of foreign policy disasters, many of which can be laid on the front runner for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.  Libya is a mess and Secretary Clinton proudly proclaimed, "We came, we saw, he died."  Looking at it now, one has to agree that we were better off with Gadaffi.  Iran, who was still having weekly 'Death to America' rallies throughout the negotiations on the 'Nuclear Deal,' is having sanctions lifted and assets unfrozen in exchange for... nothing.  Nope, the only thing we get out of it is a piece of paper that says we have a deal.  It might win a Nobel Peace Prize for John Kerry.  With Russian planes now stationed in Syria and warships in its harbors, Assad is certain to survive.  Russia commenced bombing but didn't target ISIS.  No, they bombed the rebels that we are supporting, the ones that were fighting Assad.  All that 'red line' and 'wrong side of history' talk amounts to nothing.  Egypt?  Military dictatorship not unlike that of Mubarik but much less friendly to the US.  Yemen?  Only a few months after Obama declared it a model for US foreign policy, it collapsed.  Afghanistan?  We are only still there because Obama had called it the 'right war' so that he could fustigate Bush about the wrong war in Iraq.

 

China is on the rise both in Asia and Latin America.  As it is building a military at a rapid rate, the US has weakened itself economically and militarily in relation.  Japan is sufficiently alarmed that it is altering the rules for its Self Defense Force.  The American shield that Japan relied upon for the last 60 years no longer inspires the confidence it once did.

 

Europe is at threat of being squeezed by an ascendant Russia.  Russia already controls the majority of natural gas that goes to Europe.  With its moves in the Middle East (Syria, Iran, Iraq) combined with its own considerable petroleum reserves, it may eventually have a chokehold on European energy.  That the US is barred from exporting oil only exacerbates the problem.  Russia has already annexed portions of Georgia and Ukraine and is pushing for more.  Right out the gate, Obama has encouraged such adventurism on Putin's part by nixing the missile defense deal we had with Poland and the Czech Republic.  Hillary Clinton's childish reset button showed them how unserious we were.  Then Obama moved into full surrender mode with his announcement that he would be 'more flexible' after the 2012 election.  We are seeing just how flexible.

 

Not resting on these failures, Obama pushed on to surrender to Cuba.  Yes, after more than 50 years, we finally recognized the Castro brothers.  No demands on human rights were made or return of property in order to gain diplomatic recognition.  Fidel can now die knowing that he brought America to heel.

 

Is it possible that the policy makers in Washington are this incompetent?  Can such a dramatic and overwhelming collapse be an accident or did we finally elect the Manchurian Candidate?  That sounds like tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff to me but the evidence is damning.  Of course, Obama did tell us that he didn't like America as the sole superpower and declared that he was a 'citizen of the world' when he was running for President of the United States.  Maybe we should have taken him on his word.